“The last time a private eye solved a murder was never.” I was reminded of this quote the obit for Ed McBain in slate.com:
It’s a funny quote, and it resulted in some excellent novels – but is it true? I’m sure the overwhelming majority of murders are solved by law enforcement officials, but has no PI ever solved a murder that the police were unable to? I realize it doesn’t happen often, but “never” is a long time. Counterexamples welcome.
I’m thinking the problme will lie with how you define ‘solving a murder’. Ultimately only police and government legal staff can ‘solve’ murders because they are the only people who can initiate the prodedures that can get someone declared guilty of that crime.
Private invistigators in contrast set out to collect evidence that then has to be handed over to the police for the crime to be solved. The only way I can see that an investigator could claim to have solved a murder is if she got a recorded confession, and in many places secretly recording converstaions is illegal and inadmissable. In the real world it would be unusual for a guilty person to admit to a crime to a strabnger, much less one with a tape recorder, and private investigators can’t force people to sit still and be questioned. So it would be very hard for an investigator to solve murder in the strictest menaing of the phrase. No matter what they do the police will always be the ones who solve the crime.
I’m sure there are plenty of cases where someone has been charged by the police, and investigators hired by them have provided evidence that led to them walking free.
Jim McCloskey of Princeton NJ is the most famous amateur detective with multiple cases. His investigations have resulted in 25 innocent prisonewrs being freed.
In Gumshoe (a great read) College philosophy professor turned private detective Josiah Thompson solved an old murder in a manner that served as the plot for the Robert Downey, James Woods movie True Believers.
Yeah, I find it hard to believe that a PI (someone like TV’s Monk) doesn’t exist who had actually solved a murder. Sounds like someone is playing with words.
If someone looks at the clues and figures out the truth - that’s solving the case to me.
Dragging legalities and technicalities into this discussion is just being anal.
Yeah, but those pesky legalities just keep creeping in when you’re dealing with a law enforcement matter.
I spent two years working for a PI firm and was involved in the foundation of our state’s professional association for PIs. I can say that no PI I know nor none of the PIs that they know has ever been involved in a serious criminal case on the side of the prosecution. A few make their living doing defense work.
The firm I worked for would not touch a serious criminal case with a ten foot pole. Our agents were instructed to report criminal activity to the police and avoid getting involved beyond that. We worked to have a good relationship with law enforcement. We wouldn’t step on their toes and they were alright with us as we dealt with some things which they didn’t care to.
The main reason I would be willing believe that no PI ever solve a murder is very simple. Money. Who would pay for the time of an amateur investigator when several professionals are already on the case? There is simply no money to be made at playing detective. Where I worked the main revenue sources were insurance investigations (fake injury claims), domestic investigations (cheating spouses, cohabitations, child custody, etc.), process service and corporate investigations, in that order.
That said, I can think of a couple of cases where we WERE able to solve a crime.
One dude had a stolen wallet, a huge chip on his shoulder, and money to burn. The police can only do so much due to the sheer volume of this type of case. We were able to pick up where the police left off (with their permission, of course) and investigate the incident. We investigated places where the thief had used our client’s credit card and got a lead at a local fried chicken/burger joint. We interviewed the individual who had taken the thief’s order and he happened to remember the guy and provided a description and a vehicle description. From the security tape we got a visual ID of the thief. From there we were able to determine that the guy had a criminal history, and were able to track him down. He had been arrested on charges relating to Meth. The police questioned him about the wallet were able to locate it and return it to our client. Mystery solved.
Total cost: around $2000
Like I said, money to burn.
Other examples of crimes uncovered would be things like finding child porn on a computer that a suspicious spouse had hired a PI to search.
In addition to the economic and practical limitations noted (how many murder cases are there in which there is a willing client who would even be able to, much less willing to, pay what it would cost for a detective to duplicate/go beyond the police routine?), there are a couple of other problems.
First, as noted somewhere above, “solving” the crime implies getting a confession or conviction. How’s a private citizen going to do this? In the Nero Wolfe stories, Wolfe typically solves the crime through a series of mental conjectures, then summons all the suspects (who are always, conveniently, acquaintances of the deceased, rather than, say, itinerant carjackers or street people) to his house, confronts them with the evidence and (often using a psychological ploy based on a conjecture that he believes to be true, but can’t yet prove) goads the guilty party into confessing or otherwise revealing himself.
Well, in real life the guilty party has a lawyer who is not going to allow him to attend such a gathering, and guilty parties often maintain their denials in the face of overwhelming hard evidence against them, let alone a chain of logical but unsubstantiated guesswork presented by some P.I.
Wolfe also had the tacit if fractious cooperation of the police (they would grudgingly show up at his climactic denouements, albeit disclaiming official sponsorship). In real life, at least today, I’d think cops would be reluctant even to accept any evidence generated by a freelancing P.I., let alone place themselves in a position where they could be viewed as endorsing his acts. At least in the books, P.I.s are often effective because they are, um, willing to be more creative and less hidebound than the cops, which translates into not following all the silly procedural rules the cops do, if skipping this procedure can help them get to the truth. In the post-Warren-Court era, a competently-advised police force would need to be vary wary about accepting, let alone relying on or endorsing, evidence generated by a P.I. using some unknown magical methods – at best, it may be thrown out at trial as “fruit of the poison tree” if the P.I. obtained it by, e.g., housebreaking or other chicanery. At worst, accepting such evidence could be seen as sponsoring the P.I. or using him as a state agent in his “acting under color of law” such that any improper or abusive behavior of the P.I. could be imputed to the P.D. and form the basis for the suspect to assert tort liabilty against the police.
Without attribution, I seem to recall that on some of the cold cases that occasionally get detailed on the Discovery Channel, the families got fed up and hired PIs to do investigations after the police had given up. So it’s certainly plausible that a PI might get assigned to a cold case and come up with something.
And, while not directly apropos, it turns out that the famous serial murder H. H. Holmes (circa 1896) was only apprehended because insurance investigators got suspicious of some fraud and tracked him down.
Private investigators played a limited, yet important, role in the search for Chandra Levy.
Not the best cite, but enough to get the picture.
Private investigator Paul Ciolino, acting on information uncovered by Northwestern State University journalism students, obtained a murder confession on videotape that exonerated death row inmate Anthony Porter.
Is this true? I was under the impression that civilians were not bound to the same evidenciary laws as officers. Not saying they’d take hearsay at face value, but if a burgler finds a corpse in my garage and calls the law, I find it hard to believe I’d be able to skate away on it.
Any legal types want to clarify?
I was making a couple of related but distinct points.
Ultimately, it is only the prosecution that is “bound” in any way by the evidentiary laws regarding admissibility, and by the (supposed – i.e., the Warren Court decisions on these issues are controversial) search and seizure, self-incrimination, etc. privileges as articulated in case-law, civil rights laws, etc.
Part of my argument turned on the fact that, in any of these situations, if the police/prosecution adopted the “tainted” evidence, then they would need to fear that the “taint” of the private citizen’s bad behavior would be imputed to them as though he were a quasi-agent of the state, or “acting under color of law.”
Now, assuming the police/DA can convince the judge/jury that the P.I. was acting totally independently of the state, the state had not colluded, etc., etc. Would the burglar’s discovery of a body, or my privately-taped confession of the suspect (whom I happened to be beating with a flashlight), be admissible? An interesting question.
I suspect the answer is:
(1) it still might be excluded on “fruit of the poison tree” constitutional/quasi-constitutional grounds, on the theory that the state should not be able to take advantage ever of evidence obtained by tactics that the state itself would be forbidden to use (on the possibly-overreaching public policy argument that allowing such “privately obtained otherwise improper” evidence would inherently encourage the perverse result of the police trying to outsource their bad-acts to “private” proxies); or
(2) It would be excluded, not under Mapp or other explicit “constitutional” grounds that would apply had the “investigator” been a cop, but under general principles of unreliability, untrustworthy chain of custody, etc. (e.g., who knows whether the burglar moved the body, or put it there himself; e.g., the court takes judicial notice that confessions obtained by torture are inherently unreliable).
Generally speaking, you’re correct. A search or seizure conducted by a private citizen doesn’t implicate the Fourth Amendment. In Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465 (1921), the Court held that papers stolen from office safes that were blown open and a desk that was forced open could be presented by a grand jury by a government prosecutor because the search was conducted by private parties. While I was still in law school my dad had a case where a next door neighbor broke into the defendant’s house and stole a tape the defendant had made of himself, among other things, molesting his 11 year old stepdaughter. Clearly, this was the act of a potential brain surgeon.
However, the evidence may be excluded if a court finds that the private citizen was acting as the state’s agent, the rationale being that the police can’t get private citizens to do what they can’t do themselves. If the government “encourages, endorses, or participates” in the search, the private party will be deemed to be acting as the state’s agent. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Ass’n, 489 U.S. 602 (1989). When agency should and should not be found is a greyish area, but the argument is stronger that a private investigator is acting as an agent than the argument that the burglar is.
That reminded me that Errol Morris, in the process of directing The Thin Blue Line, collected enough evidence to prove that a convicted murderer was in fact innocent. And, as it happens, Morris once worked as a PI:
This has been a very interesting thread. Thanks.
I was referring to people being anal about what constitutes “solving” a case.
IMHO it means deducing what really happened/whodunnit given the facts/clues; not necessarily leading to a conviction.