Program Pays for Private Eye to Locate Kids

As any Child Protective Services caseworker can tell you, the first step in helping endangered children is to find them.

Many low-income families with CPS files move nomadically from relatives' homes to apartments to rent houses. Locating them can require the skills of a private investigator.

And often that's whom caseworkers turn to for help.

Under a program funded by United Way of Tarrant County, a licensed private investigator has tracked down more than 300 families that seemed to have vanished from the Earth.

Dan Rather’s Conspiracy Theory

Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against his old employers, and it is based on a set of astonishing allegations that are sure to bring what became known as “Rathergate” back into the news.

In the suit, Rather alleges that he was forced to apologize for the Bush story as part of a conspiracy by top CBS management to ensure that no further damaging revelations about the president’s time in the Texas Air National Guard would become public. Rather also alleges that CBS hired a private investigator to re-report the original story — after Rather threatened to hire his own private eye to do the same thing — and that the investigator found the story to be accurate, only to have his findings suppressed by CBS as part of an effort to curry favor with the Bush White House. Finally, Rather alleges that CBS fired him over the story the day after Bush was reelected, despite his later claims that his departure was separate from the Bush story.

Eye Spy

Listen to Andrew Faller describe his life as a private eye and you'll realize it's not exactly Miami Vice. Yes, private eyes round up bail jumpers, repossess cars and provide security to VIPs, but a lot of the time they are watching or reading.

Watching the store clerk suspected of pocketing proceeds. Reading the criminal record of a job applicant. Watching the employee chop wood while "nursing" a worker's comp injury.

"It's not like on TV," said Faller, who lives in Meredith and became a private investigator about four years ago after retiring as the police chief in Center Harbor. "There is lots of downtime."

Death's Puzzle Unsolved

The last time Lucy Carman saw her daughter, the 21-year-old was sitting on the concrete steps in front of her Church Street home, talking to a bicyclist.

Next thing she knew, the daughter named after her was gone.

Two weeks later, on Sept. 15, 1987, family members found young Lucy Carman's body face down in a channel of the nearby Hockanum River. Police treated the case as a homicide, canvassing dozens of neighbors and doing more than 70 interviews. They gathered weather data, subpoenaed medical records and took aerial photographs, chronicling all the information in a case file more than 300 pages long.

Bruce Nease became interested in the case after he joined the detective bureau. In 2002, he did a flurry of interviews, some with people police had never spoken to but, again, nothing panned out. Nease has since retired, but is working on the case as a private investigator for Tritec Investigations Inc. of Portland.

Schools Enforcing Boundaries 'Illegal' Students Told to Leave

With the new school year under way, superintendent Michael Silsby hopes all 3,984 students of the Wallenpaupack Area School District are legally enrolled.

He and the district take some extra effort to be sure.

For the past two years, the district has employed a private investigator to verify complaints of illegally enrolled students. Such students do not attend school in the district they reside in.

Tories Urged to Fix Spy Scandal

Pressure is piling on Premier Ed Stelmach to overhaul the province's powerful energy regulator after a report found the agency breached privacy rules when it hired detectives to spy on power-line opponents in central Alberta.

A privacy commissioner probe released Thursday found investigators working for the Energy and Utilities Board improperly collected the personal information of Rimbey-area protesters. The findings ignited calls for radical changes at the energy watchdog.

The Liberals demanded a public inquiry into government use of private investigators, and called for Energy Minister Mel Knight to be fired -- after pointing to a new case where the EUB hired a P.I. for a hearing in Redwater on an oil upgrader last spring.

Ex-restaurant Owner Becomes Pistol-toting Private Investigator

Terri Russell is a pistol-packing private eye and a grandmother of six.

She’s the owner of Russell Investigations, an all-woman, licensed private investigation firm based out of her home in a wooded, rural area near Lake City.

Taking on the Gigolos and Cons

Like many people who live and work in Marin County, Anaquad Cobe feels himself relax every time he drives across the Golden Gate Bridge, taking in the green hills, the ragged shores and the sense that he's left the city and its worries behind him.

But Cobe knows that sense of security is an illusion. As a private investigator for more than 30 years, Cobe spends his days and nights hunting the hustlers, gigolos and con artists who see Marin County as a gold mine.

6 Exciting Job Ideas for the Adventurous

You don't have to be an extreme skier or a motocross rider to get paid for pumping adrenaline. In fact, six of the fastest growing careers in America require candidates who love to put themselves in extreme conditions to get their jobs done. Each one of these careers has been rated by government analysts as growing as fast as or faster than the average career over the next decade. While spies handle justice on a global scale and detectives close cases locally, private investigators dig for information that can help settle civil lawsuits. Instead of uncovering clues for mysterious clients, most private investigators scour parking lots and pawn shops for stolen property. Other specialists uncover insurance fraud, locate child support deadbeats, and plug corporate information leaks.

Filmmaker Seeks to Withdraw Guilty Plea

Almost 17 months after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about hiring indicted Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano, film director John McTiernan on Monday sought to withdraw his plea on grounds that the government's case relied on inadmissible evidence.

The surprise move surfaced during the scheduled sentencing of the 56-year-old director, whose film credits include "Die Hard" and "Predator."

His effort dovetails with attempts by Pellicano and his co-defendants to derail the government's wiretapping and conspiracy case by attacking the tactics and credibility of its five-year investigation.

Search For Missing Foster Child to Gain New Momentum

The search for a missing three-year-old Las Vegas child may soon gain new momentum. The court-appointed Guardian ad Litem for Everlyse Cabrera plans to hire a private investigator to find the girl.

Everlyse Cabrera went missing from her foster home more than a year ago.

Foster parents Vilma and Manny Carrascal claim the child must have walked out the front door in the middle of the night. Everlyse was two years old at the time of her disappearance.

Kathryn Chandler: 1916-2007

Kathryn Chandler, who learned to shoot when she was just 6 years old, was among the first women in Chicago to get a private investigator license, which she used while working for her dad in the 1930s as they shadowed mob figures and cheating husbands.