Slain Father Had Hired Private Investigator

Durban man Johan Lotter, fearing for his life and those of his wife and children, had hired private investigators after receiving death threats in the week leading up to his murder.

Lotter, 53, and his wife, Magdelena, 52, were slain at their Thames Drive, Westville, home at the weekend.

Their children, Hardus and Nicolette, appeared alongside Mathew Naidoo, Nicolette's boyfriend, on two charges of murder in the Pinetown magistrate's court on Wednesday.

Lotter had been strangled, and his wife died of stab wounds.

Private investigator Brad Nathanson said Lotter had approached him last week after receiving several SMSs and a letter threatening his life.

The Internet - A Private Eye's Best Friend

For private investigator Steven Rambam, the Internet is his most valuable tool in helping to find missing persons, cheating husbands, and your competitor's dirty secrets.

But while the intelligence business is booming, individuals are losing the battle to protect their privacy with every blog post, Google Web search, and online photo, Rambam, director of the Pallorium investigative agency, said in a keynote session late on Saturday at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference.

"Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it," he told CNET News after the session. "The genie is out of the bottle. Data doesn't stay in one location. It migrates to hundreds of places."

Information that he used to have to search for or dig up in far away places is now available at his fingertips. All types of information is being digitized, older stuff is being scanned and put online and it's all being aggregated into uber-databases that are being sold to marketers, government agencies, and anyone else who can pay, he said.

Private Eye in Exorcism Case Recorded Over 700 Hours of Surveillance Footage

THE man who tailed Madam Amutha Valli Krishnan for more than four months took the stand yesterday and said that, on most days, she looked normal.

Madam Valli is claiming in a lawsuit that she was traumatised by an alleged exorcism at Novena Church in 2004. Among other things, she says she is fearful of going out and being alone.

But private investigator Gilbert Mathews De Silva and his team, who followed her for more than four months last year, got footage of her doing just that.

His firm, SecureGuard Security Services, was hired by lawyer Tito Isaac, who is representing a priest named in the lawsuit.

In all, the investigators got more than 700 hours of footage. It came from hand-held camcorders and closed-circuit television cameras mounted opposite her Ang Mo Kio flat.

Excerpts of the footage were shown in court to Madam Valli's two psychiatrists as lawyers for the defendants tried to prove that she was exaggerating her condition.

Family Found: Sisters Reunited In South Korea Thanks to Private Investigator

Wanda King's life in the United States has been a good one.

But as a child in North Korea, she lived under communism and saw the effects of war. She remembers seeing red skies after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and her mother warning, "Don't you go outside! You're going to be sick." As American bombs fell on her own country during the Korean War, she and her family fled south with hundreds of other refugees to escape the fighting. They ate insects and slept in rice paddies to survive.

"I don't have a happy life when I was young," she said. "I have a hard life."

Although conditions improved after the war, she was still living in poverty in 1962 when she met Ben King, a young soldier from Davie County. He fell in love with her, and he vowed not to leave South Korea without her.

She was 23 when she married him and left her family behind in Seoul. She built her own family in a new country.

Her children grew up with plenty of food and without fear of bombs falling in the night. King, now 68, watched with pride as they married and started forming their own families.

Despite all that she had, King ­mourned what she had lost.

College Hires Private Investigator to Investigate Mock Newspaper

Cambridge College has hired a former FBI agent to find the authors of an anonymous, widely circulated mock newspaper that condemned the chancellor and suggested the college is on the verge of closing.

The newspaper, called the "Cambridge College Chronicle," featured a sharply worded critique of college leadership and personal attacks against Chancellor Eileen Brown, who has led the college since its former president was fired in January after college officials found evidence of alleged financial misdeeds.

Davis to Hire Investigator After Grand Jury Report

Davis city leaders have hired an independent investigator to examine the Yolo County Grand Jury's allegations of fire department misconduct.

The grand jury released its report June 30, detailing the investigation prompted by citizen complaints. Primary complaints were that the department has inconsistent promotion practices, a hostile work environment caused by a too-close relationship between fire Chief Rose Conroy and the firefighters' union and misuse of sleeping facilities by drunk off-duty firefighters.

Cove Rock Estate "Burglar Ring" Bust

Four men, including a Pakistani shop owner, were yesterday arrested during a raid in Orange Grove and in the East London CBD.

The arrests were the culmination of six months of investigations into a spate of burglaries at homes in Cove Rock Estate.

The suspects, aged 19 to 21, pointed out to police a cellphone shop in North Street where they said they sold cellphones and laptops allegedly stolen from homes.

One of the suspects told a private investigator who had tracked them down how he had got into the investigator’s house and stolen a laptop, cellphones and PlayStation games.

Investigator Specializes in Blood-Spray Analysis

The spray of blood means more to Les Guttmann than it does to most of us.

The lone investigator of the Fruita Police Department’s force of about 15 officers has never really gotten an answer to the question of when the small city of nearly 6,500 last investigated a homicide.

But if a murder did occur on Guttmann’s turf, the former Los Angeles patrol officer might get a try at solving it by calling on his expertise in blood-spatter forensics.