Sometimes private detectives get hired for the most unusual cases … and this is one of the most interesting we’ve heard about for a long time. What makes it so fascinating is that the private investigators in this case already knew pretty well everything about the sad situation. Back in 1997 Mark Blackburn, a blackjack dealer, died in a strange accident – he’d been making a home-made explosive device to blow tree roots out of the ground on a plot of desert he owned, but the device went off in the back of his car, killing him. The police, alerted to an abandoned car in the Arizona desert, found his body and brought it back to town. But now his children, Michael and Lalani, are on a very strange quest indeed – to bring home the Datsun B310 in which he died. They were separated from their parents very young, then from each other, but Michael always hunted for his family, eventually paying a private investigator who found his sister within a few days, then his mother, his grandmother and a half-brother. Because that’s what private detective agencies do.
Then the story got interesting. Learning the details of their father’s death, Michael and Lalani wanted to bring back the vehicle in which he’d died and which had been sitting in the desert for 21 years. But nobody knew exactly where it was. Another private detective was able to use specialist investigative databases to identify the approximate areas and then buy satellite time (yes, we can do that!) to pinpoint the car. Now, with the help of The Wrenching Network, 25,000 professional technicians who help others with exactly this kind of project, they are going to bring the car back home.
Private investigators and family heartache
Last year the family of an elderly man in the USA sued his nursing home after footage of abuse was caught on a hidden camera. Increasingly people are calling private detectives in to conduct due diligence on care homes where their elderly or vulnerable relatives are staying. Private investigators will not only look at the treatment being given to a named individual but also the overall condition of the home for example looking at bed sheets, tidiness of rooms, responsiveness of both staff and residents and many other details in which the true nature of daily care in the home can be found. They can also do background checks both on staff and on the business operating the home to provide peace of mind to those who fear that their family member could be at risk of neglect or ill-treatment.