If you're an avid fan of Sherlock, Murder She Wrote, true crime, or really any famous capers, than it's likely you've daydreamed about the fascinating cases you'd solve as a real life detective.
While a lot of private investigative work centers around affairs and interpersonal surveillance that can be wrapped up using the internet, there are still plenty of on-the-job stories that could merit their own movie scripts.
In a handful of popularReddit threads, private investigators and detectives shared some of their most memorable cases (without breaking their NDAs), and I would watch any of these on the big screen.
1. straight_edge_PI trailed a guy with a steady Walmart game.
I've been a P.I. for about 3 years - mostly for disability fraud, no cheating wives or anything. Coolest/strangest thing I observed was a low level criminal (who was supposed to be disabled), who would spend all day going from Walmart to Walmart.
In each Walmart, he would fill the shopping cart full to the brim with energy drinks (Monster I think), walk briskly out the door without paying, throw them in his trunk, and take off like a bat out of hell.
At the end of the day he sold a trunk-load of energy drinks to a corner store and I video taped him walking out with a wad of cash.
Definitely not as exciting as the movies, but it was a fun day for me.
2. davevr has a litany of stories.
Ah, finally something I can share!
A few years back I accidently became the owner of a detective agency. I intended to just be an investment partner, but the owner and actual PI died shortly after I made my investment and lo - I now owned an detective agency.
After quickly getting the various legal licenses, etc., I just started taking cases. The entirety of what I knew about how to be a PI was from various TV shows, movies, and books. For cases, I would just rely on random people whose life has become so bad that they decide calling a PI is the next logical step. Much later I learned that normal PIs never take these so-called "domestic" cases because they are always a huge mess. Real PIs get almost all of the work from lawyers and hire off-duty cops to do all of the leg work. As a result, I had a TON of crazy cases. Several TV seasons worth. Here are a few classics:
Guy calls me to help catch his neighbor who is knocking over his trashcans at night. We set up a small night vision camera to catch the guy. Watch the video the next day - it is the wind. The client freaks out, says that his neighbor could have had an invisibility field or could have been moving too fast (like the Flash) to show up on camera. Wants to pay us thousands of dollars to rent a heat-seeking camera or one that can shoot thousands of frames per second... Turns out lots of crazy people call PIs to investigate the TV controlling them, alien abduction, etc.
Seventh Day Adventist lady in an abusive relationship who wants to divorce her husband but apparently needs the husband's permission, which he won't give her. So she wants us to hire a prostitute to seduce him, get it on video, and then mail that to the church leaders to show the marriage is broken.
Criminal who is serving 20 years in jail for hiring a hit man (who happened to be an undercover cop) to kill his friend. In prison he came into some money and hired us to prove he was innocent. His plan to do this was to have us tell his friend that he better recant his testimony or else our client would use his new money to hire a hitman to kill him "for real this time." This criminal genius told us this plan on a recorded phone call from jail.
Get hired by a wife to see if her husband is sleeping with his secretary. We follow them, recording them going into his single-bed hotel room at 10:20pm after a nice dinner and leaving together the next morning at 8am. She says it proves nothing, that they could have just been working late...
Guy calls to ask for Paddy, my late partner. We tell him he is dead. Conversation that follows goes like this: Bob: Dead? Tell him its Bob. Davevr: Bob - Paddy is dead. B: sure, ok, whatever. Who's this? D: This is Dave. How can I help you? B: Dave huh? Dave... yeah, Dave, I think Paddy mentioned you. D: I doubt it, but go ahead. How can we help? B: I was just calling to make sure the thing is still on for Friday? D: What thing? B: The thing, you know... D: I don't know, Bob. What? B: Well yeah, I know you don't "know", but is it on? D: Bob, I have no idea what you are talking about. B: Ok, I get it. Of course you don't know. But - all I'm saying is, we're good, right? D: We are not good Bob. I don't know what you are talking about. B: Of course. Got it. No idea. Great. Friday? D: Bob, Paddy is dead so whatever you think is happening on Friday is not happening. Understand? B: Perfectly. Tell him I will see him then.
Different call, also asking for Paddy. Conversation goes like this:
Guy: I was told to ask for Paddy.
Davevr: Paddy's dead. This is Dave, how can I help?
G: Hmm, I was told to ask for Paddy.
D: You did that, I told you he was dead, so can I help or not?
G: Well, OK. I need to disappear.
D: What do you mean, disappear? Like, from your girlfriend or from the Feds? (I literally had no idea what he meant)
G: Really disappear. Like, dead.
D: I don't know what movies you have watched, but there is no way to disappear unless you have a ton of money and a body. (I made this line up on the spot btw just to shut the guy up).
G: I have 3 million in cash. Body is no problem. Can you help or not?
D: .... I can't talk about this on a cell phone. click
Never called back. Later found (from tracing the # that called me) it belong to a real estate investor who was being sued for millions in back taxes from the government who died in a private plane crash about a week after that call...
The list goes on and on...
In case you are wondering, I am no longer in this business and the business itself no longer exists.
3. VAofficer has seen far too many elderly people scammed.
Cases where older people get a phone call from the "IRS" and get tens of thousands of dollars on prepaid credit cards and read the numbers off the back to the guy on the phone with the Indian accent to pay their tax debt.
This happens a lot actually. It's just weird that otherwise intelligent people can be talked into doing stuff this dumb.
Please talk to your grandparents. Make sure they know this is a common scam and their are many, many variants of this scam. No reputable business or organization takes payments by I-tunes gift cards. Their grandchild did not get locked up in Mexico, they aren't overdue on their electric bill and their power is about to be shut off, the police don't have an old warrant that they'll dismiss for a small fee.
A lot of these victims are so sold on the lie, that store clerks will stop them in the middle of purchasing $3k in moneypak cards, TELL them that they are being scammed, and these victims will argue with them that they need to pay the guy on the phone.
4. philds2nuts has 5 years of cases under their belt.
P.I. for 5 year, I had a few exciting, not necessarily strange cases. One incident was of a coach who was sleeping with one of the female players. One of the players that was benched hired me to document the coach for sleeping with one of the starters on the team...They were careful with how they arranged their meetings, and took me a bit to document it, but ultimately got the information.
Fast forward a week later and the papers reporting the coach has resigned to work in the family business...fast forward another week later, the story broke with all the evidence I had collected (I was not named in the story as I had requested not to be.) Another case was my quickest (2 hours). Picked up surveillance after the subject had dinner with his wife at Applebee's, followed to a hospital parking garage and he went in to visit his mother. I stayed to monitor the vehicle, and another shows up.
The subject exited the hospital and jumped in the other vehicle...I then recorded him getting a bj. Case opened and closed in 2 hours (paid $1,000 retainer, was able to keep all $1,000 since retainers are non refundable I charged $60/hr and would've only made $120)....I have many many more stories....some funny, some really sad (I specialized in father's rights cases).
5. eli1323 had a very fascinating (and gruesome) case of one woman.
Currently studying Criminal behavior analysis.
A woman in her midlife, presumably between 45 to 50, was found dead behind a dumpster around a local bar in the middle of December.
She was wearing a skirt that was pulled up to her waist, and leggings that were pulled down, and torn in multiple spots. She also had abrasion around her buttocks, the heels, thigh, and wrists.
At first, the cops are thinking that they have a sexual abuse or a possible rape case on their hands.
However, certain things were not adding up. Even though it was mid December, that particular bar was fairly populated, and thus, someone should have reported at least hearing a woman in distress as the dumpster was near the parking lot of the bar.
Also, the abrasions on her buttocks were rather strange, as if someone had dragged her across the cement floor. Some state that it is possibly due to livor mortis ("marks" caused by settling of the blood).
After some investigation, they found no traces of physical proofs that suggested neither sexual abuse nor rape. No semen, saliva, or hair, was found.
Later it was revealed that due to loneliness of losing her husband and daughters (husband through divorce and daughters simply grew up and started their own lives), this woman went to the bar to meet potentially a new partner but have gotten carried away drinking.
Once outside in the freezing cold, she wants to take a leak and hides herself behind the dumpster. While doing so, she is slowly suffering from hypothermia due to the cold winter wind and lowered body temperature caused by the alcohol. She begins feeling hot (due to paradoxical undressing, caused by hypothermia), she presumably stripes off her jacket, and other pieces of clothing. At this point, the hypothermia is really getting to her and she begins slowly losing consciousness.
While laying on the freezing ground, skirt pulled up and leggings down, she begins convulsing which leaves abrasions on her body. Leaving behind a curious scene that appeared as if she had been taken advantage of.
6. RomanusAugustus had a case that sounded straight out of a videogame.
My personal favorite case was this one wherein a guy with a video-game esque last name (akin to Gannon) had a criminal record against him. The record indicated that he had been charged with cocaine usage and that he had reportedly snorted the cocaine out of a Hooker's a*s.
7. rommelsjackson worked with a guy whose subject died the first day of the case.
Not me personally, but I worked with a guy whose subject died on the first day of surveillance. Drug overdose. I'm sure the final report must have been legendary. "The claimant died."
8. Comrade11111 stumbled into something accidentally juicy.
Last year (I was 17) I pretended to be a private investigator just for fun and my neighbour gave me a tenner to go look for his missing cat, I guess he just wanted me to have some fun and I was just fooling around and I was pretty sure I wouldn't find anything.
But damn did I find something.
At the bottom of my street there was an old abandoned retirement home, closed a couple years after I moved in. I went there first and found a blood trail leading into the place, there wasn't a lot of blood but just enough that it could have been the cat's blood.
Case in point, the building was being used by some druggies that were hiding their operation, just some weed, meth and coke and a couple of guns. After seeing that I shat myself because I was only going in to the whole PI thing as a joke.
I anonymously tipped off the police who raided the place, apparently one of the guys accidently attacked the cat who started to wail loudly and he was scared people would come to investigate, he couldn't bring himself to kill the cat so he dragged it inside and forgot to clean the blood away.
It was one of the most thrilling, yet terrifying things that I had ever gotten myself into. But hey, at least the cat lived and my neighbour got her back!
9. hauntedbalaclava never has a boring day on the job.
I actually have something for this. I don't have my license but I work in a PI office. I'm the only administrative staff member. It's basically me and my Vietnam Vet boss in a Ron Swanson-April Ludgate kind of situation. A story he told me recently comes to mind.
He and his partner were once hired to sweep a house and look for any valuables. They agreed to the case before knowing the full extent of the damage to the home because the lawyers were willing to pay well and our caseload was small at the time.
The home was owned by a man who inherited a large fortune because his father had invested in a little movie that went on to become one of the biggest horror franchises of all time. The son never worked a day in his life. He had a big mansion out in the boonies. No one ever saw him or his wife because they spent all of their time inside.
The home was now empty because he went nuts and murdered his wife and their dog. He was serving life in prison and the family's estate needed the home cleared.
When my boss and his partner got in there they realized how bad it was. For years this guy and his wife had been shooting up drugs in the house. Every square inch of the mansion was covered in trash. After binging on drugs and alcohol the two would puke and then just cover the vomit with trash and leave it there. The same went for the dog shit and piss. This went on for years. In addition to the puke and animal waste there were needles littered through the trash. My boss had to buy hazmat suits to sweep the home and look for valuables. Apparently, there was a ton of diamond and gold jewelry just thrown right in with the filth.
At one point they found a table behind a door that was missed by the forensic crew completely covered in the wife's blood from where he had mutilated the body.
They also found an entire room full of a many thousand dollar kiln and ceramics supplies, all untouched. I guess the guy decided he wanted to become a master potter before quickly abandoning that pursuit to become a f*cking murderer.
They could only access the home through one exterior door that wasn't blocked. When they eventually walked around the exterior of the home they found that the guy had purchased himself a shark cage. As in, he decided he wanted to become a shark photographer, and ignoring the fact that he didn't live right on the ocean, BOUGHT a shark cage and stuck it in the yard. Eventually, people started to invade the grounds and steal stuff from the home and one day the shark cage just disappeared.
This is the first one that came to mind because it just escalated so much as he relayed the story to me. It's hard for me to tell a lot of these stories because of our confidentiality policy but if I think of any more I can tell I'll edit. My boss has other crazy stories from working private security for Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, and the Girls Gone Wild guy and we have a few instances of having to serve papers to crazy people. This job is never boring.
10. million_monkeys caught someone pretending to be a dead person.
I'm a paralegal who investigates backgrounds of witnesses for our cases. I found someone who was pretending to be someone else who died as a kid. My boss alerted the feds and they investigated and found out he had faked his death 20 years before to avoid a embezzlement trial. He got convicted for the false identity because he filed taxes in the fake name. Not sure about the original embezzlement charge.
He was a witness in a financial case involving the SEC, btw.
11. Antedelopean was a high school detective.
Not a professional pi but I did some investigating for fun during my senior year in high school, as i had literally half the school days worth of free time, had friends who weren't exactly on the same schedule, was always in want of pocket change, like everyone else, and had variable amounts of fucks to give. So from time to time I would be hired for my services, usually a 5 or 10er for some simple work, mostly just making sure bfs and gfs weren't having "fun" without each other, during times they were apart at school hours. But aside from that work, occasionally I did have some interesting actual detective like work.
In this case, I was actually hired by this really chill teacher, who taught comp sci, in order to try and catch a serial class cutter, in exchange for access to the comp lab, so I could chill and sh*t, and occasionally use, to probe social media for other cases. He wanted me to catch the cutter and bring him to the teach, because he really wanted the kid to come to class and learn and he really wanted to help the kid. Also he didn't want administration to catch the kid as that would just screw the kid over more. So I accepted the case.
First thing was first, I made sure to check in with some of his classmates, who actually saw him come to school. In exchange for some gum, they told me when he'd come in and the names of some kids he hung around. From that I drew a list of potential people to question, but soon found out the kids either belonged into one of two categories.
Category A involved mostly normal kids, who went to school and did their thing. From these kids, I kinda got the gist of mapping out the perp's normal schedule, had he chose to attend class. And from his schedule, I came up with a potential theory for the perp's motive. You see, this kid was a supposed overachiever, and was Korean.
This meant, he was probably pressured by his family to overachieve in all of his classes, and judging by his schedule, he was damn overloaded. He was only a sophomore, and yet, he was already taking calculus, and 2 ap courses. He was also overloaded on 5 classes, with his elective of comp sci. And for all I knew about the typical Asian household, he was also probably prepping for the sat's as well. Yeah, this kid was damn overworked.
In any case, on to category b. From this group, most of the kids here were known stoners, users mostly, who hung about at the park next door, smoking pot and just chilling. From this group, there were two people, I guess famous among the student population, for being dealers, who dealt usually in some cheap (but still works) weed, or more expensive edibles. I heard from kids, that the perp had been hanging around these two, trying to ask around, how these kids could be so chill in high school. After that meeting, the kids said he would meet the group more and more often. And after those few meetings, it seemed to correlate with the perp's started absences. So I went to talk to the two.
When I first met them, they were extremely tight lipped about not snitching out their clientele. Pretty admirable, if I do say so myself, but I had a job to do, and a perp to find. So I tried to convince them by appealing to both their compassion and their business interest. I told them about the perp, told them of his circumstances, and told them why I wanted to bring him in. I told them he needs actual help about his circumstances, and someone professional to talk to, not just a temporary escape. Keep in mind I was not this eloquent, I'm just retelling it as so, because we all like to glamor the proud moments of our past. I could tell this had some effect, though they wouldn't budge.
So I told them to cut me a deal, just this once, and said, in exchange for info about the perp, I would help keep lookout for a week, for them, when they dealt in the building. In any case, from the two, I found out where the perp regularly hung out, which was either out in the farthest edge of the park, near the forestry area, or near the school's boiler room.
I found the perp at the park. I knew he was there, because I could smell the pot in the air. Pot always smells like skunk, with a tinge of metal. When I spotted him, he was facing away just sitting there, looking at the trees, a rolled joint hanging out of his mouth. And when I knelt down next to him to talk, I could see his lifeless bloodshot eyes. So I just talked to him, while he listened, just sitting there, staring into the trees. I told him who I was, what I was doing here. No reaction.
I told him about the comp sci teach and how he wanted to help him. No reaction. I told him, there people worried about him. He cringed a bit, then resumed sitting. So I sat down, sighed, opened a bag of chips, and offered him some. He ate some. And for the rest of that morning I just chilled there with the perp, telling him it was okay to wait, but I needed to bring him back by the end of the day. I ended up inadvertently cutting some classes myself, that day, though it wasn't as important, as I was a senior, and really only showed up as a formality, anyway.
In any case, as he inadvertently sobered up, and came back to reality, he started weeping. I could tell from his demeanor, he was sick and tired of his life, but was too scared to say anything, as I knew from the Asian stereotypes, the kids were harshly disciplined from a young age. And as I took his hands to pick him up, I could tell he had no strength in him.
So I had to bring back this sad weeping lifeless sad sack, and had to carry him, shoulder to shoulder, out of the park, and into the school building. Luckily it was still during class times, so not a lot of people saw me carrying this weeping kid in. The security guard up front and passing aides were originally suspicious, but I managed to convince them, as I told them I was working a case for a teacher. And when they pressed further, I gave them a hand written note, signed by the comp sci teach, which had his number, in case people pressed.
Naturally, a security guard did press, and we had to wait at the entrance, while the comp sci teach was called in to pick us up. And when he showed up, the teach had a face of first, relief, but then sudden shock, as he looked at the kid's lifeless weeping face.
And so, he escorted us back to his office, as I continued having to drag the kid over. I explained to the teach everything I had investigated about the kid and his circumstances, especially with the potential abusive household, and his resulting escapism. And while I stood there explaining, the kid was just lifeless. In the end of the meeting, the teach called in both a guidance counselor, and the "school psychologist". And as I left to attend the only class I had left, I heard his parents were called in.
In any case, that was a case closed. But unfortunately the kid's life didn't really get much better. I heard from the teach, because of the loose definition of what constituted discipline and abuse in the household, they couldn't press charges against the family. And because the family found out about his apparent drug use, skipping class, and apparently wasting the kid's own time and future, the parents were very pissed off at the kid.
And so, afterwards, rather than getting help or getting better, the kid just kind of shut down as a person. Though he attended all of his classes and did all of his work, he made no friends, exhibited no apparent emotion, expressed no interest, achieved only what was necessary to pass, and always went straight home. It seems the teach, I and the system all failed him. That was probably one job which wasn't worth doing. The resulting room felt empty, as we would both lamented on this case, with guilt, if and when I showed up to the comp lab. So I didn't really hang out there, and just went to the library, with a vpn, for my needs.
In any case, a few years after I graduated, I tried to look the kid up, but found nothing. I tried to investigate, via people who knew him, but everyone didn't really know what happened to him. He made no friends, talked to no one, didn't even have an account on social media. He just kind of disappeared.