Volunteers needed to search for Nicole Hoar’s remains

By CARY CASTAGNA, Sun Media

It could prove to be a massive break in the mysterious disappearance of a Red Deer woman on B.C.’s infamous Highway of Tears.

Ray Michalko, a Vancouver-based private investigator probing the baffling missing-persons case of Nicole Hoar, is turning his attention to an area of mostly bush just south of Highway 16 and west of Prince George.

“I’ve got three independent sources of information that are pointing to that direction,” Michalko, 59, told Sun Media Sunday.

Among the clues he will be looking for, Michalko hopes to find “clothing and human remains.”

The former Manitoba and North Vancouver RCMP officer said he will be focusing on a roughly two-square-kilometre area along Norman Lake Road, about 43 km west of Prince George.

But he can’t do it all himself.

Michalko is asking for volunteers interested in helping him search the out-of-the-way location.

“It’s far too big for me to consider doing it myself,” he said, adding he has already secured about half a dozen volunteers since scouting the area two weeks ago.

Michalko has also contacted the RCMP and Prince George Search and Rescue, but he isn’t expecting any help from those agencies.

While there are some residents living in cottages in the general area he plans to search, Michalko said there is next to no pedestrian traffic.

The search is slated to start at 9 a.m. local time on May 12.

Michalko is asking volunteers to meet him at the junction of Highway 16 and Norman Lake Road.

“Each volunteer should come equipped with drinking water, lunch, an object that can be used to prod the ground and greenery – such as a ski pole – and rain gear if necessary, as there is no shelter or other facilities available and the search will occur rain or shine,” he said.

Hoar’s parents couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday on the surprise development.

“This is a tough thing for the family involved,” Michalko said, admitting the search could come up empty.

“It’s a needle in a haystack. But just because of the information I’ve got, I’m compelled to look.”

Hoar was 25 years old when she vanished June 21, 2002, while hitchhiking on Highway 16 from Prince George to Smithers to visit her sister. She had been working in B.C. as a tree planter.

The highway, now known as the Highway of Tears, has been a Bermuda Triangle for hitchhikers.

Nine women have been murdered or have disappeared since 1990 from communities that dot the largely remote corridor that stretches almost 750 km from Prince George to Prince Rupert.

Hoar is the only non-native woman of the nine.

cary.castagna@sunmedia.ca

The rise in multi-million pound settlements means it’s boom time for those who are paid to dig the dirt. Patrick Collinson reports

Saturday April 28, 2007
The Guardian

Meet the men who can find out pretty much anything about anybody. Paul Hawkes and Martin Tomlins-Young run one of Britain’s leading private investigation agencies – and business is booming.

A report by accountants Grant Thornton this week found that private investigators were hired during half the divorce proceedings in Britain last year, with wives (and it’s predominantly women) willing to pay upwards of £200 an hour to prove their husband is a love rat. And as multi-million pound divorce settlements become more common, it is private eyes who take on the job of uncovering where the cash has been stashed.

The duo work out of a suitably anonymous building in Notting Hill, west London, directing teams of surveillance agents who, for a fee starting at £55 per agent per hour, will trail cheating husbands and wives to bars and restaurants, video secret liaisons and make covert recordings using the latest devices hidden anywhere from tie-pins and handbags to personal organisers and CD players.

The bad news for suspicious wives is that if you think your partner is playing away, you’re almost certainly right.

“In my 30 years of private investigation, there has been only one case where the client was wrong and there wasn’t any evidence of infidelity by the man. And I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of investigations,” says Hawkes, founder of Research Associates, also known as AAPM Investigations.

But people only call when they are “at the end of their tether”, says Hawkes, so the pair often play more agony aunt than Magnum PI.

“We’re not counsellors, but we do approach everything with a high degree of sensitivity. Some investigators are a lot more naive. They find the evidence, then get on the phone to the client and say ‘hooray, we’ve got ‘em’. But it’s not a hooray. It means their marriage is in deep trouble,” says Tomlins-Young.

The initial meeting with a client can be emotional. “Typically, people come from a relationship where everything was once fine and dandy. But then odd things start happening, discrepancies here and there, and new patterns of behaviour start to emerge. Your partner is suddenly not available at certain times, or they go to places where they can’t be contacted or leave their phone turned off. Each thing is not that important, but it all starts to add up.

“The biggest giveaway is when they change the way they use their mobile phone. Suddenly it never leaves their sight – because they don’t want you to see messages and the numbers called. They even take it into the bathroom with them. That’s a dead giveaway,” said Tomlins-Young.

Each surveillance operation is different. Some can take weeks and involve as many as 12 agents, and cost £20,000 or more. A minimum of two agents are assigned to each case.

“They are mostly ex-army or ex Customs & Excise. They know how to stick like glue to someone just 50 yards away.” The suspect adulterer is tailed from their office, usually on a motorbike, but the company also has a covert black cab.

“We take footage of couples at dinner. Often we’ll be sitting right next to them in a restaurant, videoing and recording. We’re on the lookout for certain types of body language. A kiss isn’t enough. That could be explained away as platonic. But it’s much more difficult to explain away holding hands under the table.”

But the agents will only go so far. “We never go into people’s bedrooms. It just doesn’t happen that we catch people ‘on the job’, so to speak.”

Breaking into personal property, hacking into personal computers and obtaining bank details is, of course, illegal. Research Associates is keen to stress that it has good relationships with police and adheres strictly to the Data Protection Act.

“We work in conjunction with accountants. If the computer is shared marital property, we can take a copy of the hard drive and search for evidence.

“We find that husbands (and wives) will try to hide their assets in the most convoluted ways. Sometimes it’s as simple as following someone to a branch of Western Union to see if they’re transferring money abroad. But more often it’s about finding property they don’t own up to.

Surprisingly, not all relationships fall apart when the evidence is presented. “When people sit down and talk about the dynamics of their relationship, they are horrified about what they are about to lose. It’s alluring to have an affair with someone which never involves the washing up or the mortgage. But the reality is very different, and when faced with the loss of all that ‘mundane’ stuff in their life, it all starts to look beautiful again.”

But Tomlins-Young adds: “It’s not uncommon to have women come to us after their husband has admitted to an affair, to check that it’s not still going on.”

Around 65% of Research Associates’ clients are female and 35% male. One thing that marks out male clients is that they are often interested only in obtaining the contact details of their wife’s lover. A quick call to his wife then follows, clobbering the relationship before it goes further.

Hawkes says some of his male clients are members of Families Need Fathers, and his job involves tracing children and addresses. But he always asks if there is a restraining order and will go ahead only when the instructions come via a solicitor.

Most clients are wealthy rather than famous. But one day Quentin Tarantino called. Their first reaction was that it was a bogus call, but it wasn’t. “He wanted us to trace a woman he’d met at the Cannes film festival. It didn’t take us long.”

· Research Associates are on 020 7854 9000 or go to investigationservices.co.uk. For the Association of British Investigators go to theabi.org.uk.

Honey, I stung your husband

An attractive woman passes you in a bar, accidentally spilling her drink on your suit. She apologises profusely, offering to buy you a beer. You strike up a conversation, and find yourself getting on rather well. But it’s not an innocent encounter – you’ve been snared in the “honeytrap”.

Arabella Mazzuki runs minx007.com, a detective agency that specialises in entrapment. Suspicious wives and girlfriends pay her team (prices start at £50) to ambush their partners and check out their fidelity. While her burly minder sits nearby (taking covert photos and recordings) the honeytrapper slips in a series of questions. Are you married? Can I have your mobile phone number? Do you want to come back to my place?

Clients include a woman living in Australia who wants to check up on her partner in Britain.

“The men never admit they’re married. A stroke of the leg here, batting eyelids there, is all it takes,” says Ms Mazzuki. There are limits, however. “We’re regularly asked to go on stag nights, but we refuse. I tell the client that if you can’t trust him, why are you marrying him?”

The “damsel in distress” trick is another ploy used by minx007. You have a flat tyre outside the target’s home, and seek his help. Your hands get all greasy – so you have to nip into his bathroom. Cue search for any evidence of another woman.

“I know a lot of people look down their noses at us, saying we’re lower than escorts. But our clients are always relieved to find the evidence,” says Ms Mazzuki.

p.collinson@guardian.co.uk

The Coral Gables Police Department has a searchable database of vehicle accident reports and incident reports. Search accident, arrest or incident events by location, name, report number or date. A sortable list is returned with date, type of contact, location and whether an report image is available. Report images are available for accidents and incidents but not arrests. But arrests at a particular location may have been proceeded by an incident involving the same subject, for which a report image would be online. Name of contacted individuals are listed. See image example.

By CLAUDIA ROWE
P-I REPORTER

The day may come when running background checks on a roommate or romantic partner will be as common as getting an annual physical.

Related content

- UW killer had been living in U.S. illegally since 1996

- 17-year-old boy was a 30-year-old female criminal

Several private investigators in Seattle – reflecting on two recent cases in which women were killed by romantic partners who turned out to be disguising shady pasts – find it difficult to believe that such searches aren’t common practice already.

“If you’re involved in a relationship that’s going to affect your whole life, what could be of greater value?” asked Linda Montgomery, a private investigator in Ballard who believes that even people who are dating should be willing to share credit reports.

On Monday, a man known to police as Jonathan Rowan shot to death his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Griego, in her office at the University of Washington. He then killed himself. Investigators say Rowan had two passports under different names and three aliases.

Last Thursday, a Gig Harbor man known to friends as John Williams shot to death Turid Bentley, the woman he lived with, in another murder-suicide. After searching the couple’s home, police discovered that Williams was in fact John Branden, who was wanted in Oregon for kidnapping, raping and trying to kill a girlfriend in 1999.

And over the weekend, police arrested a 30-year-old woman, Lorelei Corpuz, who had passed herself off as a 17-year-old boy named Mark and persuaded an Everett couple to let her live in their home, where she sexually abused their 14-year-old daughter.

In all three cases, the victims were clueless about their partners’ true identities. Friends and family members were also taken in by the hoaxes.

Though experts have access to databases that average citizens do not, there are measures that anyone can take to collect helpful information – or at least confirm the veracity of what they’ve been told.

“I think it should become acceptable for people to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to check you out.’ It needs to be a thing like going to a doctor for a checkup,” Montgomery said.

“My daughter met her husband on Match.com, and the first thing we did was background him.”

Most of Montgomery’s clients are corporate employers – for a private citizen, her $500 fee is often too steep – but there are basic searches that even those with limited means can run.

“There are a bazillion public resources out there. It’s just a matter of knowing how to use them,” said Roger Dunn, a private investigator and former King County detective. State, federal and municipal courts in most jurisdictions put their records online, as does the King County Recorder’s Office.

Public filings can indicate if a person has owned a home – say, with someone of the opposite sex whom they’ve never mentioned, Dunn pointed out. “For free,” he added, “someone could find out a lot about a person online if he took the time to do it.”

For beginners, the investigator first advises a simple Google search, putting quotation marks around the subject’s name.

“If the person’s an ax murderer, there might be a newspaper article about them from their past,” Dunn said.

Secondly, he suggests searching court filings in the states or counties where your subject has lived. This can turn up domestic violence assaults and other criminal charges, as well as divorces.

“It’s all out there,” Dunn said. “It’s all available.”

This assumes that a person has been truthful about providing a correct, searchable name and birth date. So to investigators, turning up nothing at all sounds more warning bells. Almost everyone leaves some sort of paper – or electronic – trail.

But if an Internet search provides nothing, common sense can reap volumes, Montgomery said. Listen to what people tell you, she advised. Make a mental note and check it out.

“If someone says they work at wherever, pick up the phone and call them there,” she said. “If they say, ‘I’ve got a mother in so-and-so place,’ look up her address.”

Above all, follow your hunches. Several years ago, she recalled, a father from out of state called, concerned about the man his daughter was dating. It was just a gut feeling, she said. After a court check, Montgomery found out about the man’s divorce. In his file, she discovered allegations of domestic violence and learned his first wife had disappeared mysteriously.

“He wasn’t charged with murder, but after we found the divorce records and spoke with family members, it became clear that this woman hadn’t just ‘disappeared’ like he was telling everyone,” Montgomery said. “That father got on a plane, met his daughter here and told her all the things we had found. She flew off with him and left that guy immediately.”

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/

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