By now Valentine’s Day has come and gone and you likely heard stories on “private investigators’ busiest time of the year for infidelity cases.” Hogwash and bunkum. The P.I.s getting busy with cheating cases on Valentine’s Day is in the same league with the falsehood of Super Bowl Sunday having the most cases of domestic violence.
Eighty percent of the work load at our firm involves sleuthing for lawyers and for businesses–straight-forward meat-and-potatoes stuff. Perhaps my least favorite question at cocktail parties when I let down my guard and tell people what I do is: “So, you do cheating spouse stuff. Like ‘Cheaters’?”
I don’t much care for boyfriend-girlfriend surveillance-type cases. We screen our clients pretty carefully to weed out stalkers and freaks. But we do handle family law and domestic surveillance assignments. If it’s boyfriend-girlfriend situation and not much is at stake I would advise the potential client to just have some trust, or if it’s going badly just break it off and onto the next fish in the sea.
However, I do sympathize for what is a common scenario for our domestic clients. The most common customer is a professional woman about 40 to 55 years old looking at a divorce or involved in a child custody case. Some want ammo for court in child custody matters but others just want to see who has replaced them. If the husband had some honor and told the truth sooner we would not have these clients. What thanks is this for a woman who has raised the kids, likely held a job too and kept the household together?
This is not to say that it’s only men who cheat. Three out of five of our last cheating cases involved married women. The husbands had suspicions and acted on them after intercepting e-mails. (We never engage in touching another person’s email, phones, etc., all illegal acts.)
We catch the cheats with patience and stealth. Clients ask “how long does it take?” and we honestly cannot tell them as to do so would imply us having a crystal ball or other magical powers. The best analogy I have is that doing surveillance is like hunting or fishing: you might have to cast your line over and over, day after day to land one. I have gone out on someone six or seven times before they bolted for the cheating side of town.
And I have seen it all: There was the Australian businessman who we caught in San Francisco with a hooker after his wife became suspicious when she saw some of his Viagra pills were missing. There was the “case of the jealous blind man” who thought his wife was in porn 40 years ago and who thought he was not the biological father of his daughter. (“No” to the porn rumor and “yes” to him being the father.) I have had several cases where men fell for women and gave them cars, hiring us to find and repo the cars but then relenting and giving the cars back. My first domestic was in 1994, capturing images of an illicit kiss on this stuff called “film.”
And for the record, December and May or June tend to be busiest for domestic investigations.
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