Private Investigator News and Information

Monday, October 17, 2005
By KIM RING
kring@repub.com

A 90-year-old Worcester man is lobbying for legislation that would
allow him to spend his twilight years working to solve a 13-year-old
murder and would open the door for private investigators to see files
from other unsolved homicides, including the Molly Anne Bish and Holly
Piirainen cases.

“It’s a great idea,” said her father, John J. Bish. “Maybe it needs to
be fine-tuned but the healthy discussion around this bill is good.”

But some district attorneys oppose the measure, saying it could force
them to show case files and physical evidence to investigators working
for homicide suspects.

“It conflicts with existing case law,” said Elizabeth Dunphy Farris,
Deputy First Assistant for Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth D.
Scheibel. “And it goes against public policy.”

Oscar Michaud had the bill, “An Act Authorizing Certain Investigators
to Conduct Murder Investigations,” filed by state Rep. John J.
Binienda, D-Worcester.

The bill would compel police and district attorneys to open their
files to licensed private investigators and military detectives who
are looking into a murder or disappearance that has gone unsolved for
five years or more.

The bill, aired on Beacon Hill during a hearing on April 20, is
currently pending in the Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee.

Families of some victims have applauded Michaud’s efforts.

“I’m 100 percent behind that. It should pass,” said Maureen Lemieux,
the grandmother of Holly Piirainen. “They tell us Holly’s case is not
cold. We tried it their way. Now let us try another way.”

Piirainen’s family is receiving free assistance through the Licensed
Private Detectives Association of Massachusetts and is working with
Private Investigator Bernice Gero of Slingerland & Gero Investigative
Services LLC in Northampton in an effort to find out who abducted and
killed the 10-year-old in August 1993.

The family of John Volungis Jr., a Worcester man stabbed to death in
his apartment in 1992 when he was 21, is also singing Michaud’s
praises. They’ve tried - and failed - to have files related to their
son’s case opened. Now Michaud, a retired Army veteran who served in
the criminal investigations division, said he wants to find out who
killed Volungis. The case has haunted him and he approached the family
a few years ago to offer assistance. Michaud said he cracked dozens of
cases from Normandy to Germany and will spend what time he has left on
a case closer to home.

“I’m very happy that Oscar’s pursuing this,” said John Volungis Sr.
“When this first happened, we thought it was just a matter of time
before it would be solved … what the police tell us is that it’s
still an open case, but come on, it’s been 13 years. Let us, as
individuals, spend the money if we want to hire an investigator.”

But while families support the bill, Farris and others are concerned
that the vague language it contains could create problems.

Current state law places responsibility for investigating homicides
and other cases in the hands of an elected district attorney, Farris
said. While private investigators work with police and district
attorneys on some investigations, whether that happens should be the
decision of the elected official, she said.

“There are no limitations whatsoever,” Farris said, adding that the
proposed law doesn’t restrict what a private investigator can do with
information obtained from the files.

Hampden District Attorney William M. Bennett also has concerns about
the bill and said he wouldn’t want to open up his files to inspection
by outside investigators.

“Maintaining the integrity of investigative files is more important
now than it ever has been,” Bennett said, adding that advances in DNA
and a fingerprint database are making it more likely that old cases
with well preserved evidence can be solved.

That has not been the case in the investigation of the 1972 death of
13-year-old altar boy Daniel Croteau, which is now being reviewed by
private investigator R.C. Stevens.

The Republican hired Stevens to review more than 2,000 pages of court
documents on the investigation that the newspaper successfully had
unimpounded. Stevens will also make inquiries into the Croteau murder
in the hopes of uncovering a new lead in the case that could be used
by law enforcement to solve the murder.

“It is important to safeguard the ability of law enforcement to bring
any case to trial,” said Stevens, adding that law enforcement’s
ability to protect the integrity of cases doesn’t have to be
compromised while sharing information.

“The relationship between licensed private investigators and law
enforcement doesn’t have to be adversarial as it often tends to be,”
Stevens said.

The bill says any evidence must be viewed or handled under supervision
of police or prosecutors.

If the bill were to pass, it would open the files in the Molly Bish
case. Bish vanished from her lifeguard post at Comins Pond in Warren
on June 27, 2000. Her remains were found a few miles away on a wooded
Palmer hillside in 2003.

The case, which has been in the hands of a Worcester County special
grand jury for more than a year, remains unsolved and her father hopes
that a bill like this might help not only this case, but others.

Since his daughter disappeared, Bish said he has learned a great deal
about missing children’s cases. He said private investigators have
access to databases not available to police and are sometimes able to
cull information from witnesses who might be intimidated by police.

Worcester District Attorney John J. Conte did not return calls seeking
comment on the legislation. The Bish and Volungis cases are in his
jurisdiction.

While some legislators, including state Rep. Anne M. Gobi, D-Spencer,
have spoken positively about the bill, others are waiting for guidance.

State Sen. Stephen M. Brewer, D-Barre, said he understands why the
victims’ families would support the measure. “They’re frustrated and
with good reason. They want resolution. They want closure,” Brewer
said. “But I would look with respect to the state police and the
district attorneys. If they do not agree with it, then I think what
you’ll have is a description of inertia.”

Phillip E. White Jr., Executive Director of the Licensed Private
Detectives Association of Massachusetts, said the bill would help
avoid duplicating the efforts of police and could cut costs for
victims who hire private investigators. “I love it,” White said of the
bill. “If it was mandated by law, wow, for paying cases it would sure
save the clients some money.”

White and a team of investigators are working for free on the case of
Jennifer Lynn Fay, a teenager who went missing from Brockton in 1989.
Other investigators taking part in the pro bono program to help
families of missing and murdered children would be helped greatly by
the passage of the bill, he said.

“Voters and constituents would be well served by a legislator who
passes that,” he said.

Rylee still faces charges of extortion, organized crime

By Jim Hannah
Enquirer staff writer

VERSAILLES, Ky. - A kickback scheme to pad his salary with tax dollars has landed a Northern Kentucky lawyer behind bars for a month.

Ken Rylee pleaded guilty in Woodford County on Monday to misdemeanor theft under an Alford plea, which means he maintained his innocence but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him.

The legal effect is the same as an ordinary guilty plea.

Rylee also agreed to surrender his license to practice law and pay a $646 fine.

In January, Rylee was representing one of the three defendants in a high-profile homicide case in central Kentucky when he was arrested on the misdemeanor theft charge.

Just days before opening statements were to begin in the homicide case, Versailles police charged Rylee with soliciting the theft of money from a state fund to pay investigators and experts for indigent defendants.

Investigators said they recorded Rylee asking a private investigator working on the homicide case to inflate the billable hours he reported to the state. The investigator was to pass along the extra money to Rylee.

He will not have to report to jail until Nov. 18. That gives officials time to decide whether he can serve his sentence at the Boone County jail. A judge denied several requests from Rylee for alternative sentences, including home incarceration.

This doesn’t end the legal troubles for Rylee, a former assistant prosecutor in Kenton County who has a private practice in Covington.

He is under indictment in Boone County on charges of theft by extortion and engaging in organized crime. The felonies are punishable by more than 20 years in prison.

Boone County sheriff’s deputies say Rylee approached a man accused of several counts of sexual abuse and asked for $300,000 to keep his client, the alleged victim, from testifying.

George Moore of Mount Sterling has been brought in as a special prosecutor in the case, and a special judge is expected to be named.

E-mail jhannah@enquirer.com

Detective - Charles Boyle uses old-fashioned skills to find stolen livestock and missing farm equipment
Sunday, October 09, 2005
LARRY BINGHAM

VALE — Detective Charles “Sherman” Boyle does what many private eyes do — stalks unfaithful spouses, repossesses goods and finds people who’d rather not be found. But that’s not the only investigative work that pays his bills.

He lives in Vale, an Eastern Oregon crossroads not far from the Idaho border. It’s a place where a 49-year-old Mormon with a handlebar mustache, a thirst for frontier justice and a steady horse can earn nearly half his living tracking down cattle rustlers and swiped farm equipment.

Rustlers may not get strung up anymore, but they still exist.

You’d be surprised, Boyle said, how many combines disappear and how many tractors seem to drive off by themselves.

He started Boyle’s Investigations Inc. in 2003 out of a doublewide mobile home at the end of a gravel road overlooking dairy pastures speckled with black cows. It’s a long way from Tualatin, where he grew up, and even farther from the Oregon Coast, where he worked for years as a police officer and a sheriff’s deputy. He moved east eight years ago, drawn to wide-open spaces and a good-paying job as a correctional officer with the state Department of Corrections.

Boyles, at 6 feet 2 inches and 270 pounds, is not the kind of man you’d want to encounter on a starry night with your neighbor’s cow in your trailer. He spent five years as a correctional officer before he was injured in a training exercise and retired.

His wife, Tracey, who drives a school bus in nearby Ontario, suggested they open a deli in town. Boyle, a father of four, tried the business for a while, but the rent was high, and he discovered he was better suited to serving subpoenas than sandwiches.

“I like digging into somebody’s past, somebody who screwed up, somebody who doesn’t need to be around the rest of us,” he said. “I think it’s outrageously cool.”

A lawyer friend suggested he become a private investigator. Boyle thought it over and became convinced if he went to the places where stoic ranchers and farmers went, if he laid low and offered his card at just the right time, he’d get his first case.

He was right. He was outside the Willow Creek sale barn the day it happened. A rancher sidled up to him. Five cows, five calves, the rancher said. Gone.

The rancher forked over a $260 retainer. The down payment is nearly triple what Boyle requires for other work, but livestock theft cases take more effort to get off the ground. It’s one thing to grab the video camera and park outside a bar to see who comes and goes with someone else’s wife. It’s another thing to saddle horses, ride into the high desert and log 12-hour days looking for hoof prints and avoiding rattlesnakes.

His first case took him into the Cottonwood Mountains. Out there, among sparsely populated outposts from pioneer days and sprawling ranches and dairies, more than a cow or two can go missing when a calf alone can fetch as much as $400 at auction.

Boyle, who has a sailor’s tongue and a take-no-nonsense demeanor, knew how to start that first case. “You ask about the brand. You count the head. You look for tracks.”

When that didn’t turn up anything, he saddled his sorrel mare, Red, and rode off to the Bureau of Land Management allotment where the rancher had last seen his cattle. He scanned the sagebrush, scouring the hard ground for clues. Every cow detective knows a goose-neck trailer hooked to a four-wheel drive truck is the fastest way to move a few cattle.

Boyle looked for holes that could have been made by panels that ranchers use to form temporary cattle chutes. He looked for dog prints and signs of commotion.

Sometimes, as Boyle has learned, it takes a different tack. “You ask the fellow ranchers and anyone who lives down the lane if they’ve seen any suspicious vehicles. You take a man out for a drink. You listen.”

Word on the street led him to a pasture where the cows and cattle were grazing. Boyle went up to the fellow. He recalls saying something like, “You got two choices. Either you take ‘em back, or I call the law, and they help you take ‘em back.”

Though he won’t say much more, the rustler soon saw things his way, Boyle said.

Sometimes, all it takes is those two little words: “the law.”

The Malheur County sheriff’s office investigated five cases of livestock theft last year, Sheriff Andrew Bentz said.

Boyle is not surprised by the low number. Many ranchers, he said, are reluctant to report their losses to authorities.

Ranchers are independent, as he sees it, and don’t necessarily want the law involved, especially when the guilty party turns out to be family or acquaintances. Which was the case of the missing 80 head Boyle traced to a rancher’s son. And the case of the two emu eggs en route to California.

In the past few years, Boyle has investigated the theft of cows, horses, emu eggs, bales of hay and “slick calves” swiped before they’ve been branded. The business, he said, has grown so much he hired a partner, Vaughan Day, an investigator based on the Idaho side of the Snake River.

Boyle doesn’t miss the deli one bit.

“I’m a bulldog,” he said. “If I run you into the ground, I say, ‘Good, cool.’ I want the property back. . . . I love putting people in jail.”

Nothing makes him happier than when an investigation ends and the cows come home.

Larry Bingham: 503-221-8262; larrybingham@news.oregonian.com

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

Broadcast: 05/10/2005
Former policeman questions case

Reporter: Peter McCutcheon

MAXINE McKEW: Well, turning now to the savage murder of 12-year-old Leanne Holland in Brisbane in 1991. It was one of the most brutal child killings in Australia’s criminal history. The young girl was battered to death and possibly tortured and sexually assaulted. The subsequent conviction and life imprisonment of Graham Stafford was something of a triumph for police forensic investigators, who ran a successful prosecution without any witnesses, without any murder weapon or apparent motive. But a former policeman has long been convinced that the authorities made a terrible mistake and he’s spent many years trying to get to the bottom of a case that some believe has parallels to that of the Chamberlain convictions. Peter McCutcheon reports.

GRAEME CROWLEY, FORMER PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR: It’s an interesting story. It’s an interesting, interesting whodunit and the best part is that it hasn’t been resolved, you know, that killer’s out there.

PETER McCUTCHEON: As a former policeman and private detective, Graeme Crowley has spent most of his adult life investigating crimes. But there’s one particular case he just can’t let go. He believes the wrong man has been convicted for the sadistic murder of a 12-year-old child.

GRAEME CROWLEY: I think there’s a flaw in the system, yeah. There’s a flaw in the system.

PROFESSOR PAUL WILSON, CRIMINOLOGIST, BOND UNIVERSITY: I think the only person who’s actually got it right is Graeme Crowley, and the reason he’s got it right is that he’s thoroughly investigated all the forensic evidence.

PETER McCUTCHEON: The body of 12-year-old Leanne Holland was found dumped in bushland in the outer western suburbs of Brisbane in 1991. She had been tortured and mutilated.

UNIDENTIFIED DETECTIVE, 1991: She was pretty badly assaulted around the head and upper body region.

PETER McCUTCHEON: Within days, police had made an arrest - the 28-year-old boyfriend of Leanne Holland’s sister, Graham Stuart Stafford, who lived in the Holland household. Police had a strong circumstantial and forensic case. They argued the tyre tracks discovered near the body matched those of Stafford’s car and traces of Leanne Holland’s blood and a maggot, similar to maggots on the corpse, were found in the car boot. A jury found Stafford guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

ERIC STAFFORD: The trial, to me, wasn’t satisfactory. It was a shambles, in a way, I think it was.

PETER McCUTCHEON: Graham Stafford’s parents Eric and Jean Stafford believed their son, who had no police record or sexual deviancy, was innocent. And in 1992 they hired a private detective, Graeme Crowley, to dig around.

JEAN STAFFORD: He said, “You know, I’m probably going to find things that won’t help you,” and he said, “I’ll still have to say it.” And I said, “That’s fine. If you can find proof he did it, that’s fine. At least we’ll know where we are.”

GRAEME COWLEY: Initially I thought the guy was right for it - who committed the murder - and it was just a case of going through the motions, making the inquiries they wanted done and reporting back to them.

PETER McCUTCHEON: But Graeme Crowley was surprised when he found he couldn’t match the tyres on Stafford’s car to those marks found at the crime scene, nor could he find any mention of a maggot in the police notes after the car boot was first searched. He also found mistakes in the estimated time of death, giving Stafford less opportunity to commit the crime. Can you remember first reaching the point when you thought Graham Stafford is probably innocent?

GRAEME COWLEY: No, I can’t. It took a long time. It took a long time. Years possibly.

PETER McCUTCHEON: The Queensland Court of Appeal re-examined the case in 1997 after Stafford lodged a petition for pardon with the State Governor using evidence gathered by Graeme Crowley. Stafford’s defence team had some surprise supporters, including Leo Freney, a leading forensic scientist with Queensland’s John Tonge Centre, who contested key parts of the prosecution’s case.

GRAEME COWLEY: And he concluded that the murder did not occur in the house where Stafford lived with the deceased, nor had the body ever been in the boot of Stafford as car. And that’s the first time Freney’s ever given evidence for the other side. He’s the Crown’s chief expert.

PETER McCUTCHEON: But by a 2-1 majority decision, the Court of Appeal dismissed the application on the grounds that there was still enough evidence for a jury to convict - and Stafford remains in jail.

JEAN STAFFORD: We were devastated and that really stopped us in our tracks. We thought, “Well, obviously there’s nothing we can do.”

PROFESSOR PAUL WILSON: The Court of Appeal took the position that these arguments could have been presented at the original trial. Well, they couldn’t - there weren’t the resources, there wasn’t the time to recheck the forensic evidence.

PETER McCUTCHEON: Criminologist Professor Paul Wilson from Bond University has co-authored a new book about the Stafford case with Graeme Crowley. He sees strong parallels between Graham Stafford and the Lindy Chamberlain murder cases with no apparent motive and no witnesses, relying purely on forensic evidence and circumstances.

PROFESSOR PAUL WILSON: I think miscarriages of justice occur with forensic evidence which is weak. I think it’s occurred in this case and it can occur in the future.

PETER McCUTCHEON: Queensland Police say they are unable to comment on the case as the matter has been dealt with by the courts, and at least one important person in this tragedy takes issue with Graeme Crowley and Paul Wilson. The murdered girl’s father, Terry Holland, has told the 7:30 Report he has absolutely no doubt that Graham Stafford is guilty. It’s been 13 years since you first took up this case. You’ve now got a book coming out. Do you ever think of just letting it go?

GRAEME COWLEY: Ah, I do reach that point, I’ve got to say. I do reach that point. But something else comes along and then, you know, it just keeps going along, yeah.

PETER McCUTCHEON: Graeme Crowley no longer works as a private detective. But he still has his theories as to who killed Leanne Holland, theories which for legal reasons he can’t go into detail. And although Stafford has had his day in court and lost, Graeme Crowley refuses to accept that should be the end of the matter.

GRAEME COWLEY: I’m not pushing the barrow that this guy is innocent. I’m pushing the barrow that the guilty party has not been brought to justice in this case. And that to me is a concern. Whoever has committed this murder is still out there, or may still be out there if he’s not in prison doing time for other offences, and he may kill again.

MAXINE McKEW: Peter McCutcheon with that report.

By Kevin Grasha
Lansing State Journal

ST. JOHNS - The man who said he is a bounty hunter and planned to launch
a new search for Ricky Holland was charged Wednesday with acting as a
private detective without a license, Clinton County Prosecutor Chuck
Sherman said.

Michael Wayne Wellman, 33, and his wife, Bobby Jo Wellman, 29, were in
the Clinton County Jail on Wednesday on bonds of $7,500 and $5,000,
respectively.

The DeWitt Township residents each face up to eight years in prison if
convicted of operating illegally as private investigators and of
conspiring to do so. Bobby Jo Wellman also faces two years if convicted
of possession of a controlled substance - Vicodin, Michigan State Police
Detective Lt. Jamie Corona said.

They could not be reached for comment because the jail does not accept
messages for inmates. They did not have an attorney listed.

State police began investigating the Wellmans after they announced the
search for the missing Williamston boy last week, Corona said.

In Michigan, a private detective who accepts money to conduct an
investigation must be licensed. Wellman portrayed himself as a private
investigator in a meeting with a detective, Corona said, and made
similar claims on his firm’s Web site.

Wellman had said that he and volunteers would start looking for the
missing Williamston boy Monday. It is unclear whether that happened.

None of the tips Wellman offered led to anything, Ingham County
sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Roy Holliday said. The department is treating
Ricky’s disappearance as a criminal matter.

MICHELLE MACHADO
Record Staff Writer
Published Friday, Sep 23, 2005

Private eye David Brey worked in law enforcement for 13 years before going into business for himself. He says that this is not a business for those short on patience.

STOCKTON CA — When David Brey became a licensed private investigator in April, his eyes were unclouded by the romanticized images of the nonpolice detective portrayed in literature and film.

After 13 years in law enforcement, Brey knew that most successful investigative work is produced through plodding perseverance.

But he also believed that in addition to putting one foot in front of the other, a successful gumshoe must know how to tap dance, creatively stepping around the roadblocks thrown up in the course of an investigation.

His home-based Stockton business, David Brey Investigations, provides background checks, domestic-dispute and worker’s-compensation investigations and surveillance services primarily in San Joaquin and Sacramento counties.

On Wednesday, Brey talked about his life and his work … in his own words:

Becoming his own boss
“I took a criminal-justice course at Delta and got into law enforcement from there.

“I was a reserve officer for local law enforcement for three years while I worked other jobs.

“My intention was to become a regular officer, but when I got picked up to get hired, they saw I was a diabetic. That was during the early 1980s, before the ADA, so I had to put that on the back burner.

“Years later, I graduated from Stanislaus State with a bachelor of arts in criminal justice and got hired with the county probation department.

“It was OK, but the caseload was horrendous. You have 300 to 500 people on your caseload, and you’re expected to keep track of all of them.

“The county had a narcotics task force, which used to be called CRACNET, where I got into investigations.

“I then applied to be a special agent with the state, where I worked for more than five years in the narcotics and gambling divisions.

“Gambling was too slow-paced, so I decided to become my own boss and do private investigating.

“I was in law enforcement for more than 13 years.”

Public vs. private
“I liked the excitement. They always say that 80 percent of police work is boring, but you’ve got that 20 percent that keeps you going.

“If you’re in investigations, doing surveillance, and you’re an impatient person, you’re not going to last long.

“You have to wait and wait.

“When you’re in law enforcement, you have seven or eight guys with you.

“Working by myself is a lot different. Even bathroom breaks are few and far between.

“A lot of people think that criminals are stupid. They are often very intelligent.

“They might not be book-smart, but street-smart.

“Some I’ve seen in court seem to know as much as their attorney.

“I always try to outthink and keep one step ahead of the person I’m going after.

“Private investigators can be armed. I’m not. With what I’m doing, there’s not a need for it.

“When you’re a cop, you can’t take off if something is happening.

“Now, if I think there’s a situation that’s going to be dangerous, I’ll just turn on my car ignition and take off.”

Background counts
“The California Department of Consumer Affairs’ Bureau of Security and Investigative Services regulates private investigators.

“They give you credit for having a bachelor’s degree and for investigative experience. For current or previous law enforcement officers, you need two years of investigative experience.

“Without investigative experience, it would be difficult to do surveillance or a public-records search.

“If a person wants to get started in this type of work, it helps to know people.

“I’ve been fortunate to know a few attorneys here in town and in Sacramento who shoot me some work, sometimes in worker’s-compensation fraud cases.”

Taking care of business
“Right now I’m working for a person in the city who thinks that a neighbor is running a business out of their residence.

“I asked if she had filed a complaint, but she said she’d rather get the goods on the person first. I can find out if the person has a license to conduct business from their home and can document their activities.

“I think it’s better to go in armed than with just a story.

Suspicious minds
“I also get a lot of calls where one spouse is cheating on the other or a situation with a boyfriend and girlfriend.

“I tell them that if their intuition is telling them that something isn’t right, then their assumption is probably correct.

“But they want to believe that they’re just imagining it, and they want proof that either something or nothing is going on.

“I always tell them that if I find out there is cheating, I don’t want them to cause the other person harm. I tell them it’s not worth it.

“I am wary of people who are trying to find an ex-girlfriend or an ex-wife because of the possibility of stalking. I ask questions.

“I think I’m a good judge of character, being in law enforcement for as long as I was. There’s always the possibility, though, that someone will give all the answers you want to hear.

“I try to stay away from becoming emotionally involved, but I do like to see people benefit from what I do.”

Contact reporter Michelle Machado at 209 943-8547 or mmachado@recordnet.com

Lynn-Marie Carty, a St. Petersburg private investigator who specializes in finding people and reuniting families, has worked with her national network of volunteers to put up a Web site helping people who have been separated by Hurricane Katrina.

The site - www.reunitelouisiana.com - will allow people to post messages about who they are looking for or to let others know they are safe.

“We just wanted to have a central location for everybody that’s trying to keep in touch with each other,” Carty said.

She said it’s clear from watching the news reports that communication is a problem. She said she hopes that the Red Cross or some other agency will provide computer access somewhere for refugees at some point so people can post to the Web site.

“We’re very fortunate this hurricane didn’t affect us, and we want to help the people in Louisiana the best way we know how,” Carty said.

She said the site would be up today, but it was already accessible Friday via a link from her Web site, www.ReunitePeople.com.

Mom, son lose power

Ruth Cascio, 62, and her 31-year-old son Christopher are living in a 1994 Lexus on the front lawn of their northwest Miami-Dade County home. They’re poor, and Christopher suffers from Crohn’s disease, which forces him to rely on a colostomy bag. Ruth, a retired police records supervisor, lives mostly off Social Security and works part time at a Marshall’s. The two try not to leave the car because Christopher is too uncomfortable without air conditioning.

Their power has been out for a week because of a fire in an electrical panel next to their power meter.

A Florida Power & Light Co. worker who visited Thursday said Ruth needed to hire an electrician and provided a phone number to tell FPL when the box was repaired.

Ruth’s bank account is overdrawn and her son can’t work because of his condition.

Christopher says he can stay with his father in Weston, but doesn’t really want to. He’s still feeling insecure because the bag was only installed in June, his mom said.

Full Story

Thursday, September 01, 2005
By Cassell Bryan-Low, The Wall Street Journal

One hot day in August 2003, Peter Fifka sat in a rental car in the Czech city of Brno. He was hunting “Benny,” a member of the notorious 29A computer-virus-writing group. Internet searches had turned up a photo of Benny and enough clues to his whereabouts that Mr. Fifka had narrowed down a likely address to a few streets.

Mr. Fifka says he was about to start asking neighbors if they knew the man in the photo when his quarry walked out of a nearby house. Mr. Fifka tailed Benny for the rest of the day, at one point following him into a shop, where he stood next to the suspected virus writer as he bought mineral water and bread.

Mr. Fifka soon tipped off the Czech police, who launched their own probe. Last November, the police raided Benny’s home and seized several computers and data-storage files. While he hasn’t been charged or arrested, the Czech police say Benny is being investigated in connection with several viruses, marking one of the first times the Czech Republic has tackled a virus-writing case.

Mr. Fifka isn’t a cop. He works for Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Safety Enforcement Team. Created in 2002, the group is part of the U.S. software giant’s intensifying efforts to combat cyber crime at a time when consumers and businesses are becoming increasingly frustrated with fraud and virus attacks on their personal computers, most of which use Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

As Internet crime proliferates, law enforcement is relying more on the private sector to help counter it. That’s because tracking cyber criminals requires a different set of skills than police have traditionally used. Compounding the challenge is the speed at which new online threats are morphing.

Microsoft brings huge resources and technical expertise to the table, ranging from decrypting files to analyzing computer code. Through its security team, including Mr. Fifka, the company collaborates with police world-wide. Last month, Microsoft worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and authorities in Morocco and Turkey to trace suspects behind the “Mytob” and “Zotob” worms, which recently disrupted computer networks. In less than two weeks, two people were arrested. Microsoft’s assistance “was essential,” says David Thomas, head of the FBI’s computer-intrusion section.

Microsoft’s cooperation with law enforcement is unusual. Companies are often reluctant to call in police to solve computer-related crimes, fearing business disruptions and bad publicity if computers are seized. Only about a third of U.S. cyber-crime cases are reported, says the FBI.

Some police departments are wary about Microsoft aggressively pushing its own agenda. Others criticize it for offering cash rewards, arguing that encourages individuals to report information to Microsoft rather than to police.

The Justice Department says the company doesn’t influence its investigations. Microsoft is not “driving law enforcement’s priorities,” says Christopher Painter, deputy chief of the department’s Computer Crime Section.

Microsoft’s efforts also haven’t stemmed the thousands of new viruses and worms that appear every year, even though arrests of virus writers have increased. In the past 12 months, Microsoft has made about 75 referrals to law enforcement around the world. It has also filed 243 civil actions related to Internet safety threats, such as spam. But Mr. Fifka acknowledges he is often two steps behind the hackers. “The reality is that people will always try to find new ways to commit crimes,” he says.

Microsoft has a lot at stake. It potentially stands to lose its reputation and millions of dollars if customers defect to alternative software suppliers. Security experts have criticized the company’s software as particularly vulnerable, and say Microsoft has focused on features at the expense of security.

Viruses caused businesses world-wide $17.8 billion in damages last year including the cost of repairing systems and lost business, estimates Irvine, Calif., research firm Computer Economics. Microsoft’s Windows, which dominates PCs with a more-than-95 percent market share, is the company’s biggest moneymaker and generated $12.2 billion in revenue for the 12 months ended June 30.

The company created a $5 million bounty fund in 2003 for tips that lead to arrests of virus writers. In July, the company said it would pay its first $250,000 reward to two informants who helped identify the author of a worm known as Sasser, which damaged computer networks world-wide last year. Microsoft is targeting virus writers and others who increasingly use malicious code for financial gain through identity theft, hawking counterfeit goods and other crimes.

Microsoft’s Enforcement Team employs 65 people world-wide, including former policemen, lawyers and paralegals. The group, which gets a seven-figure annual budget, has 25 investigators including Mr. Fifka.

Mr. Fifka, 44 years old, began his career as an analytical chemist in his native Slovakia, researching antibiotic drugs. He joined the Slovak national police’s forensic unit as a drug specialist in 1987. In 1995, he took a job with Interpol, the international police group based in Lyon, France, where he investigated drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Microsoft hired him in 2001 to combat software counterfeiting. Mr. Fifka’s role soon evolved into fighting hackers and virus writers who work with counterfeiters and spammers in Eastern Europe. The region is a cybercrime hotbed, experts say, because of a large pool of technical talent and a dearth of jobs.

Working from Microsoft’s Paris office, Mr. Fifka gathers intelligence on suspects and tries to lure them into the real world where police can nab them. He often trawls the Internet for clues to the identities of digital villains, mining discussion forums in different languages. It helps that he speaks six languages, including Russian and Hungarian. “Many people say it is easy to be anonymous” on the Internet, he says. “It’s not true.”

Many cyber criminals leave digital trails. Emails and Web sites typically carry a unique set of numbers, known as an Internet protocol address, which identifies each computer connected to the Internet. Publicly accessible databases can often provide details about the organization the number is assigned to — typically an Internet service provider, university or company. Police can then subpoena the organization for the name, address and other details of the person using that computer.

While Mr. Fifka’s investigations usually begin in cyberspace, he uses old-school gumshoe tactics to pinpoint a suspect’s physical location. He travels around Eastern Europe and Russia, sometimes working with private detectives. Armed with a laptop and a cellphone that rings to the theme tune of the Eddie Murphy movie “Beverly Hills Cop,” he says he spends about two-thirds of his time on the road.

Sometimes a lead comes from Microsoft’s headquarters, as was the case with Benny in mid-2003. At the time, Microsoft was fending off viruses with names like Slammer and SoBig. In Redmond, Wash., Microsoft’s security team was trying to identify virus writers associated with the new threats. After coming across a suspect with the alias Benny, they asked Mr. Fifka to find out more about him.

Over several weeks, Mr. Fifka scanned the Internet and tracked down online postings written by Benny that mentioned Brno, the Czech Republic’s second-largest city, and bars he frequented there. That helped Mr. Fifka pinpoint a likely neighborhood.

Mr. Fifka also found an article in Czech on the Internet by someone called Marek Strihavka, who had conducted an interview with a virus writer called Griyo, a member of the 29A group. Someone who had read the interview accused Mr. Strihavka of being Benny in some online feedback.

Mr. Fifka says he then found a Czech book written by Mr. Strihavka titled “Your security and anonymity on the Internet.” That cemented his suspicion that Mr. Strihavka and Benny were the same person. Mr. Fifka also found a photo of Mr. Strihavka online from a picture of attendees at an anti-virus conference.

Mr. Fifka flew to Brno in August 2003 and hired a private detective for backup. They rented a car with local license plates so as not to attract attention and drove to the neighborhood where they believed Mr. Strihavka lived. After spotting Mr. Strihavka and tailing him, Mr. Fifka told the Czech police about Benny’s identity and virus-writing activities.

Over the next year, the Czech police conducted their own probe. When Czech prosecutors ordered the raid of Mr. Strihavka’s house last year, they suspected him of having written the Slammer virus. A spokeswoman for the Czech police says that, after further investigation, Mr. Strihavka doesn’t appear to be the author of Slammer, but he is still being investigated in connection with other viruses.

Mr. Strihavka, 23, says via email that he didn’t write Slammer. He adds that he has left the 29A group, which is known in cyber-security circles for creating viruses. He admits writing code for other viruses but says he didn’t spread them.

Mr. Fifka says it’s too early to rule on the case but notes it shows Czech police are paying attention to cyber crime. Stanislav Kovarnik, a Czech policeman on the case, says it is among the country’s first investigations of virus writers.

Mr. Fifka says he often juggles 15 to 20 cases at a time. Some of his work involves educating authorities on new virus trends. In 2003, for example, he flew to the United Kingdom to teach police about a worm called Randex, which Scotland Yard and Microsoft suspected was being spread from England.

The Randex worm was part of a new family of viruses known as bots. A bot virus allows people to hijack thousands of far-flung computers and marshal them for a specific task, such as overrunning a Web site with traffic to disable it. The Randex worm was being used to send spam from numerous computers at once.

Mr. Fifka briefed U.K. police on how criminals in Russia and elsewhere used bots to make money, such as through hawking counterfeit goods with spam. He explained how bot-controlled networks of computers could be rented online from cyber criminals and what their going price was — between a few cents and $1 per machine.

After the suspected Randex worm writer and his computer was seized around January 2004, Microsoft flew technical experts to London to provide forensic expertise. Scotland Yard credits Microsoft with helping to convict a British and a Canadian teenager for releasing the worm. The Canadian teen received a six-month suspended sentence last November. A month later, the British teen got a nine-month suspended sentence, the equivalent of nine months of probation. British and Canadian police wouldn’t release their names because they are minors.

Mr. Fifka is also combating traditional crimes like software-counterfeiting, which are increasingly migrating to the Internet. In one of his cases last year, Microsoft was alerted by two German consumers that an outfit called SoftHome Trading International was selling suspicious copies of Windows on online auction site eBay Inc.

After some colleagues in Germany purchased the software and ascertained it was fake, Mr. Fifka was assigned to track down the counterfeiters. The envelopes in which the software was mailed and payment details of the transaction yielded clues: two Latvian names, a Latvian address and a German bank account. An eBay search showed Mr. Fifka the scale of the operation. SoftHome’s publicly accessible transaction history displayed at least 800 messages from customers giving feedback on their dealings with SoftHome.

Building on Mr. Fifka’s work, Microsoft and eBay provided information to help Latvian police trace the suspected counterfeiters. SoftHome, it turned out, had made more than 3,000 sales of counterfeit Microsoft software since 2001, according to people familiar with the matter. Selling counterfeit discs for between around $55 to $150, the operation earned some $250,000 from illicit sales, these people said.

In May, the Latvian police raided an apartment in Riga that they suspected was connected to SoftHome. They found more than 250 discs of real and counterfeit Microsoft software, as well as fake product manuals, packaging materials and holograms. Two men, identified as Aleksandrs R. and Jurijs V., were arrested. They are being detained but haven’t been charged. As is Latvian custom, authorities would only provide the first initials of the men’s last names.

Latvian police say counterfeiting is a criminal offense with penalties ranging from a $10,800 fine to two years in prison. SoftHome sales via eBay may have cost Microsoft as much as $1 million in lost revenue, the company says. Because sellers often meet customers through eBay but then conduct transactions outside of the Web site, counterfeit sales on eBay typically account for a fraction of the total, Microsoft says.

By L.C. Leach III
TRIBUNE-TIMES WRITER

Interested? Call 864.329.0530 or visit the Web site www.billmitchellpi.com.

Every time Bill Mitchell gets a call from a stranger, he expects to hear the words, I suspect. …

Sometimes the suspicion involves family law, accident fraud or insurance fraud.

But more than every other possibility put together, the I suspect calls have to do with cheating spouses.

Since becoming a private investigator in 1978, Mitchell has proven more than 2,000 cases of adultery all over the United States. In the last four years, he’s also written two books on the subject and appeared on “The Today Show” and “The Dr. Phil Show” to give advice and talk about his experiences.

Whether apparently simple or complicated, each adultery case carries the likelihood of turning volatile and perhaps violent.

“One thing about my business is that it’s dangerous,” said Mitchell, 52, who moved with his family to Simpsonville in 2004 from Upstate New York. “I’m dealing with people and emotions that are escalated … and I’ve had some life-threatening cases.”

Not to the point, however, to turn him away from the business. Ever since getting his first taste of detective work in the late 1960s, evidence and investigations have been in Mitchell’s blood.

“My father, William F. Mitchell, Sr., was a former FBI special agent,” Mitchell said. “He wound up leaving the bureau and opening his own investigative practice, and I came right up through the ranks.”

Once out of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmittsburg, Md., with a degree in psychology, Mitchell spent a couple of years in the mid-1970s refining his talents at Dektor Counterintelligence school in Alexandria, Va.

Barely had he started on his own when Mitchell found himself in a landmark case: helping the FBI crack the first major computer crime in 1976.

In the decades that followed, he and his partner-wife, Linda, helped track down missing heirs, recover stolen property, apprehend organized crime figures and reunite lost family members.

“Before we started our family, I used to work in the electronics industry,” Linda Mitchell said. “And that helps us in our surveillance work.”

Because many of the cases involved hours of surveillance and evidence gathering, Mitchell realized one day that his abilities and interest were taking him more and more into the realm of marital infidelity.

More than a few have gone to the extreme, such as these:

• Teflon man

A wife in New York, noticing her husband’s somewhat abnormal behavior, suspected he was cheating on her. It had happened once, 20 years before, and now, determined to resolve the issue this time before it could get too far, she asked him to go with her to marital counseling. He agreed.

Soon, Mitchell got a call from the wife. The husband, he was told, was now involved with the female therapist the wife hired to help them and wanted Mitchell to prove it. She had already told her husband her intention, but he, calling himself “Teflon man,” said no one would be able to prove anything.

“In the state of New York, if a therapist is involved in committing adultery, it’s a crime,” Mitchell said. “So it’s a criminal and a civil case because she’s not only breaking up a marriage, she should be libel for damages.”

He set up videotape surveillance and did investigative work for five months. Partial proof came of the man and the therapist in a hotel room and then alone in the man’s office when “at one point, Teflon man opens the blinds by accident.”

“On top of that, I got them at a restaurant in which she bought him dinner,” he said.

Though Mitchell’s proof paid off for the wife in court, it was upstaged by the irony: the husband wasn’t cheating the second time, the wife only thought he was.

“He was just acting weird and the wife thought he was having an affair,” Mitchell said. “But he wasn’t until they went to counseling and he got involved with the therapist.”

• Pull the trigger

Mitchell was employed by a client to get evidence that his wife was cheating. No irrefutable proof, however, could be obtained. After being told this, the man countered with another offer.

“He said, ‘I will give you $50,000 to kill my wife or to get it arranged.’”

When Mitchell declined, the man took it to another source but not the one he intended.

“He wound up hiring an undercover cop to kill his wife,” Mitchell said. “And he wound up getting busted by the state police because he did pay that money.”

• The day after 9/11

A woman employed Mitchell to prove adultery on her husband. He followed the husband and got him together with another woman, but “we couldn’t prove what we wanted to prove.”

“Here was a guy who was making several million dollars a year he had a huge business but he was strapping her, he was not giving her any money,” Mitchell said. “They had four children and she wound up having to get a waitressing job just to get some money.”

Eventually, enough of a case was made to take it to court, but at the critical moment everything stopped.

“That next day, Sept.12 the day after 9/11 she was going to court and get custody of the kids and was going to get a lot of money out of him,” Mitchell said. “She had come home the night before around 9:30 p.m. and her car was found in front of the property of this big estate.”

But the woman never turned up. The case ended up on America’s Most Wanted, but that too revealed nothing further. To this day, her body has never been found and Mitchell’s conjecture is that the husband had her killed and disposed of in a way that so far no one has been able to trace.

“So these cases, some of them have good conclusions, some of them don’t,” Mitchell said.

But his most recent book “The More You Know,” published in 2004, is an attempt to increase the number of “good conclusions.”

Too often during the initial interviews, Mitchell found that the suspecting spouse either didn’t understand or didn’t remember “maybe half of what I said.”

So he wrote the book to serve as a pre-contract instructional tool. Eight indications of adultery include defensive behavior, changes in affection and sexual activity, financial woes, communication problems, unexplained absences, the need to be alone, pattern and lifestyle changes and wardrobe renovation. Taking notice of these things before Mitchell ever gets a call goes a long way to helping him uncover the truth.

“I need them to be better clients,” he said. “I train them right up front because they can say the wrong things, they can do the wrong things.”

For example, if an investigator is deemed necessary, clients need to keep emotions and threats in check so as not to put their partner on the alert that they’re being watched.

“People think all I have to do is just snap a few pictures, but there’s a lot more to it,” Mitchell said. “In South Carolina, for instance, I have to prove two things when it comes to marital infidelity: I have to prove romantic intent, and I have to prove opportunity. And cases can take months before they’re ready for court.”

During that time, he said it can be hard for the suspecting spouse not to suddenly slip and utter a threat, or reveal what they’re up to, or worse.

“Adultery creates a lot of emotions,” he said. “There’s a lot of bitterness, there’s a lot of 9-1-1 calls, there’s a lot of issues involved with spousal abuse. And if I feel that the case is too dangerous, I just won’t take it.”

Lately, the danger has been giving way to just more secrecy with a little help from new Internet businesses that specialize in fostering adultery.

“There’s a whole new wave of infidelity that’s coming,” Mitchell said. “There are Web sites that will give alibis, cover up for you, match you up with someone and set up (the whole thing). One in particular, in Canada, has 425,000 members paying $55 a month to commit adultery. They give enough support and backing to make it really tough to catch someone.”

The dynamics of adultery also are changing.

Whereas half a century ago, men accounted for about 90 percent of all cheating cases, Mitchell’s own observations now put that figure at about 60 percent meaning that for every two cases he gets about a suspected cheating husband, he also one about a suspected cheating wife.

“The pendulum is starting to become more equal because of changing factors and dynamics,” he said. “You have Internet chat rooms, you have more women in the workplace with access and means, we have more mobility in our society, and there’s a frequency of contact now in which people can make it seem like it’s business.”

But regardless of the means and the efforts to stay hidden, adultery still carries one unchanging constant: two people together.

And no matter how well you can gamble as a cheater, Mitchell said suspecting spouses can always get the goods on their partners if they play the right way and employ the right professional.

“The analogy I make is ‘If your tooth hurts, you probably have a toothache,’” he said. “And the advantage is always with the house.”

Computer Forensics and Its Impact on Employment Litigation: Finding The “Smoking Gun”

Bill Gates predicted what IBM missed: that the currency of the computer revolution would not be mainframes but desktops (and now laptops, PDAs, and cell phones). Personal computing devices allow us to move information-even massive amounts of information-with just a few keystrokes or clicks of a mouse. For employers, this aspect of the Information Age presents the significant risk that a disgruntled or former employee will delete or pirate proprietary information.

Employees may also labor under the misconception-fueled by “personal” passwords and the sheer number of hours spent on a certain computer-that their work computer, and especially the information on it, are actually theirs and not their employer’s. Of course, few employees actually try to walk out the door on their last day with their employer’s computer under their arm, but some employees would not hesitate to e-mail files to themselves at their home e-mail address or burn to a disk valuable information that properly belongs to their employer.

Computer forensics is becoming a routine part of many employment cases. To cite a few recent examples handled by our firm: (1) After a key employee suddenly resigned, the employer hired a computer forensics company to search the hard drive of the employee’s work computer. The search uncovered in “unallocated space” (the place where files go when they are deleted) a business plan that described in detail how he was planning to compete with the employer once he left, including a detailed section on how the employer’s biggest client would become his own. (2) An executive tendered her resignation, promising to stay on for four days to “assist in the transition.” During this time, she deleted almost 3,000 files off the employer’s network and then proceeded to e-mail to her home e-mail account 19 megabytes of information (approximately 3,000 pages of documents). (3) A senior vice president resigned after 25 years with his employer. He immediately created a competitor. A computer forensics company scanned his work computer only to discover that a portion of the hard drive had been wiped clean with a program called “Evidence Eliminator.” The risk to employers is real.

Computer forensics companies are the private investigators of cyberspace. They can uncover everything from “deleted” files (which do not actually disappear from the computer but are simply moved out of the portion normally accessible) to Web surfing, from profiles to “metadata” (data about data), from e-mail histories to data movement (i.e., evidence about data being written or “burned” to disks). It is important to isolate and preserve the subject computer for the forensics expert. Turning the computer on and off or having a computer-savvy employee-even the company’s IT expert-poke around on the computer is counterproductive. Such amateur searches are as damaging to the integrity of the computer forensics investigation as having a company’s security guard muck around at a crime scene prior to the arrival of the criminal forensics experts.

A good computer forensics company will “image” the computer, which means they will take a bit-for-bit digital snapshot of the hard drive. This image has a digital fingerprint that will serve to authenticate the image in court, if necessary. Such careful techniques are essential for proving to the other side or to a court that information was not planted on the computer to frame an innocent employee.

The image can then be searched. Keywords in any document, from a Word file to an e-mail, can be found in seconds. Much of the expense of computer forensics comes when there are thousands of documents with certain keywords, each of which must be reviewed for relevance to the case. Privilege or privacy issues may arise for certain documents. There is a growing body of case law in which courts have tackled issues resulting from these sorts of computer forensic searches. Employers can help themselves now if they publish policies reminding employees that work computers, and all information on them, belong to the employer and may be reviewed at any time. Employers likely have similar policies for desks, lockers, and filing cabinets. It is important to provide policies regarding the use of the Internet, instant messaging, and e-mail to employees prior to a dispute.

Once a dispute arises, a former employee should be put on notice that he or she may not destroy or tamper with any electronic evidence. If there is evidence that the employee has moved information to his or her home computer, it may become necessary to obtain a court order permitting the employer’s forensics expert to search that computer. Moreover, paper production of documents may be inadequate in such cases. Printing documents to paper prevents a party from examining the electronic context in which those documents were saved and manipulated.

Practical Significance
In sum, parties in employment disputes must recall that almost all documents are now created, stored, altered, and sent electronically. In the Information Age, it is no longer adequate to think in terms of a paper trail.

Eric V. Hall is an associate in RJ&L’s Colorado Springs office, where he practices in the firm’s Religious Institutions and Labor and Employment Law Groups. Prior to joining RJ&L, Mr. Hall served the Honorable David M. Ebel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit as a law clerk. He can be reached at 719-386-3030 or by e-mail at ehall@rothgerber.com.