On Q Professional Investigations

A man says he fathered twins “without his knowledge, much less his consent” when a fertility clinic got his sperm from a woman who claimed to be his wife and used it to impregnate her in 2007.

Joe Pressil, of New York state, sued Houston-based Omni-Med Laboratories and Advanced Fertility CTR-Texas in Harris County Court.

Pressil does not describe how the woman got his sperm without his consent or knowledge, but apparently does not contest that it was indeed his sperm.

“Plaintiff, Joe Pressil (‘Pressil’), suffered mental and economic injuries when defendants obtained his sperm without his consent or knowledge and in vitro fertilized a woman purporting to be his wife when she, in fact, was not,” the complaint states.

Pressil says that in February 2011 he found a receipt from Omni-Med for the cryopreservation of a sperm sample. The complaint does not state where he found the 3-to-4-year-old receipt.

“Pressil was listed as the ‘patient’ on the receipt even though he had never been to Omni-Med nor ever sought treatment for male infertility,” the complaint states. “Pressil immediately called Omni-Med and was referred to Advanced Fertility, the clinic who ordered the cryopreservation. Likewise, Pressil had never been a patient at Advanced Fertility.”

Pressil says he called Advanced Fertility immediately and was told they could not talk discuss details on the phone, so he went to their clinic.

“Advanced Fertility told Pressil they obtained his sperm sample from a woman purporting to be his wife, even though Pressil was not married, and in 2007 performed in vitro fertilization which resulted in the birth of twins. Advanced Fertility impregnated the woman with Pressil’s sperm without his knowledge, much less his consent.

“Advanced Fertility’s website ‘strongly encourages’ both partners to take part in an initial consultation, though Pressil was never consulted. Pressil first discovered his children were born through in vitro fertilization in February of 2011.”

Pressil says Omni-Med to this day is keeping a sample of his sperm without his consent.

“Due to the unexpected birth of his children caused by defendants, Pressil suffered severe mental anguish and incurred economic harm due to substantial child support payments,” he says.

He seeks damages from Omni-Med and Advanced Fertility for negligence, conversion (of his sperm), conspiracy and violations of the Texas Theft Liability Act.

He is represented by Jason Gibson. Read more

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SALT LAKE CITY — A private investigator says he has tracked down a homeless Utah man and delivered some good news: He’s inherited a lot of money.

David Lundberg said he found Max Melitzer pushing a shopping cart filled with personal possessions in a Salt Lake City park Saturday afternoon.

Lundberg declined to disclose how much money Melitzer will be receiving, but said the man’s brother who died of cancer last year left him a “significant” amount in his will.

“He’ll no longer be living on the street or in abandoned storage sheds,” he told The Associated Press. “He’ll be able to have a normal life, and be able to have a home, provide for himself, and purchase clothing, food and health care.”

The story about Lundberg’s two-month search for Lundberg has been reported by the Deseret News and KSL of Salt Lake City.

Lundberg said he was hired by the family’s New York law firm to locate Melitzer, and some family members plan to meet Melitzer next week in Salt Lake City. He declined to identify them.

Melitzer’s family wishes to remain private, and lawyers are deferring questions to Lundberg.

The investigator said he broke the news to Melitzer while they were sitting on a bench at Pioneer Park. While Lundberg said he didn’t tell Melitzer how much money he was inheriting, the man was excited.

“He’s still in shock. This came out of nowhere,” Lundberg said. “He’s a really mellow guy in his 60s, very sweet and more articulate than I thought for a man in his position.”

Melitzer has been homeless for years and last had mail correspondence with his family in September. But when family members gave him a number to phone, he never called.

Don Hill, house manager at the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake, told Lundberg on Friday that he had seen Melitzer near the facility two days earlier.

Hill said he has known the homeless man for four years, and Melitzer stayed at places like the Rescue Mission when he’s not roaming between Salt Lake City and Ogden.

“During the summer, I’d imagine, once in a while he’ll stay out nights — outside,” Hill told the Deseret News.

Earlier this month, a police officer found Melitzer sleeping in a car in an Ogden salvage yard.

Lundberg said Melitzer was taken Saturday to an undisclosed location in Salt Lake City and doesn’t want to talk to the media right now. But Lundberg said he would talk to family members about possibly holding a news conference next week.

The investigator said he found Melitzer with the help of a tip. He received about 60 or 70 such calls after news about his search went out Friday.

“Someone called today (Saturday) and said they saw him at Pioneer Park. I thought it was another crazy tip, but sure enough, there he was,” Lundberg said.

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Police inquisitors, detectives, and interrogators have long been taught that one method of getting to the truth is to have the subject recount events in reverse order. The theory appears sound: people like to fill in the blanks in a story with constructs, thoughts or images that did not actually happen, to make a tale run smoother. Remove the linear nature of storytelling and the tendency to confabulate should decrease. The theory is so sound, in fact, that police forces in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, and Spain, to name a few, have been using reverse recall as a matter of policy for years.

I attended a seminar on interviewing where the speaker actually said that this method of interrogation was the most useful way to elicit a truthful statement from an interviewee. “They don’t have the time or the creativity to make things up in reverse-recall,” my instructor said.

Well, as with many a fine theory, when put to scientific rigor, it falls short.

A brief story in September 2, 2011 issue of The Economist details a study by Lancaster University which basically debunks this theory. The researchers showed a short film depicting a cell phone robbery. Two days later the subjects of the test were separated into three groups: 1 – recall the events freely then in reverse order, 2 – recall the robbery in reverse order first then freely, 3 – (control group) recall the events freely both times.

The researchers found that the control group recalled the events correctly 48.7 percent of the time. The group that began with reverse-recall and then recounted the story freely scored 42.2 percent accuracy. The group that started with free recall then reverse-recall scored a pathetic 38.7 percent. I think it’s important to note that eyewitness testimony has already been proven to be less than reliable on several occasions. Seriously, none of the groups achieved even 50% correct recall.

The most interesting finding, however, was that the number of mistakes made among the three groups was roughly the same, but the group that recalled events in reverse order first, actually made up (pure confabulation) recollections 600% more often than the control group.

The majority of the confabulations were observed during the reverse recall portion of the exam. This flies directly in the face of what I’ve been taught in seminars and classes about interview and interrogation.

Why people, people who have no reason whatsoever to lie, make up events when using reverse-recall is a mystery. The Economist says that this study, “…does, however, point out the dangers of taking even logically plausible ideas on trust, rather than testing them.”

Those of you who testify as expert witnesses in court proceedings might want to check out the study here. It could come in handy one day.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Police say an FBI cadaver dog reacted to the scent of a dead person inside the Kansas City home where a baby girl disappeared nearly three weeks ago, and investigators discovered soil in the backyard that had been “recently disturbed or overturned,” according to a released court document.

The affidavit, released Friday after being filed earlier this week in support of a search warrant targeting the family’s home, also stated that the girl’s mother, Deborah Bradley, “made the statement she did not initially look for her baby behind the house because she `was afraid of what she might find.’”

Those details and others in the affidavit, publicly released for the first time Friday, led to a daylong search Wednesday of the family’s home, where the parents say then-10-month-old Lisa Irwin must have been snatched in the middle of the night as the mother and two other boys slept. Bradley and the baby’s father, Jeremy Irwin, reported the girl missing on Oct. 4 and have denied any role in the disappearance while insisting police have pointed the finger at them.

The affidavit stated that an FBI cadaver dog taken into the house Monday indicated a “positive `hit’ for the scent of a deceased human in an area of the floor of Bradley’s bedroom near the bed.”

The FBI dogs, which often are used at both disaster and crime scenes, are trained “specially to recognize the scent of decaying, decomposing human flesh,” retired FBI special agent Jeff Lanza said Friday.

“That can be the scent of an actual body decomposing, or residual scents after the body is no longer there,” Lanza said.

Dr. Edward David, a deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maine and co-author of the “Cadaver Dog Handbook,” said that when a body is left in one spot for several hours, cells are left behind. They continue to decompose and create an odor, giving the dog scents to detect.

He said that while trained dogs may fail to detect the smell of human decomposition about 30 percent of the time, they generally don’t alert when nothing is there. One exception is when human waste is present.

Joe Tacopina, a New York lawyer hired by a benefactor he has not identified to represent Bradley and Irwin, said the dog could have detected “a dirty diaper or 10 other non-human-remains items.”

But granting that cadaver dogs are trained chiefly to detect decomposing flesh, “There’s really no scenario where this baby, God forbid she was dead, would have decomposed in that short a period of time,” Tacopina told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday night.

The court document also indicated police felt they needed handheld digging tools after an investigator noticed dirt in a garden area behind the home appeared to have been “recently disturbed or overturned.” During Wednesday’s search, investigators could be seen digging behind a shed in the backyard. Among other revelations in the affidavit:

— Officers searched all rooms in the house and the basement after being called to the home Oct. 4. Officers sought evidence but because the parents said the baby had been abducted, the only areas extensively processed for DNA and fingerprints were the baby’s bedroom and possible entry points.

— The parents had told police that three cell phones were missing. The affidavit said a phone had since been found in a desk drawer, but that phone wasn’t one of those reported missing. The missing phones haven’t been found.

— Interviews with people involved in the case revealed “conflicting information for clear direction in the investigation.”

Another document released Friday revealed some of what police recovered from the home during Wednesday’s search: a comforter and blanket, some clothes, rolls of tape and a tape dispenser. The family’s local lawyer, Cynthia Short, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on the documents, and police declined to discuss what they found.

But before the affidavit was released, a statement issued by Short’s office insisted the parents had no role in the disappearance and disputed claims that the parents aren’t cooperating with police. The statement said the parents have consented to “unfettered access” to their property and allowed police to take hair and other samples.

“They have taken all calls from detectives, and answered questions posed again and again,” the statement read. “In the initial hours of the investigation, they tolerated accusations, volunteered to take polygraph examinations; continued to work with detectives even after the interviews turned into pointed accusations.”

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Authorities in Kansas City conducted another search Tuesday for a 10-month-old girl who went missing more than a week ago in a suspected kidnapping.

The latest search effort was focused on an abandoned home about a half mile from Lisa Irwin’s home, and included an inspection of a well in the backyard of the property, Kansas City fire officials told CNN.

The search did not yield any evidence, police said. Authorities had previously combed a nearby landfill and creek.

Lisa was last seen around 10:30 p.m. October 3, asleep in her crib, police said. Authorities were called to the home about 4 a.m. October 4.

“It appears the suspect entered/exited through a bedroom window,” authorities said in a statement. “Evidence at the scene leads police to believe the child has been abducted.”

Lisa’s father, Jeremy Irwin, told reporters that he discovered the girl was missing when he got home from work. “The front door was unlocked,” he said last week. “Most of the lights were on in the house, and the window in front was open — all very unusual.”

Three cell phones were also reported missing at the home, according to police Capt. Steve Young.

Police had expressed frustration recently after Lisa’s parents had stopped cooperating with investigators, Young said. However, a family spokeswoman for Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin attributed the frustration to “miscommunication,” and a subsequent meeting with the parents was held Saturday.

Police, who were joined in their search effort by federal authorities last week, have said they have no suspects or solid leads in Lisa’s disappearance.

Lisa is described as 30 inches tall with blue eyes and blond hair, police said. She weighs between 26 and 30 pounds and was last seen wearing purple shorts and a purple shirt with white kittens on it.

The missing girl has two bottom teeth, a small bug bite under her left ear and a “beauty mark” on her right outer thigh. She had a cold with a cough, police said.

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Five law enforcement officers were among 70 people in Arkansas charged in a federal drug-trafficking crackdown that also involved public corruption charges, authorities said Tuesday.

The five officers took bribes to look the other way while crimes were being committed, authorities said.

Investigators are continuing to look at other law agencies for criminal misconduct, authorities said.

On Tuesday, 800 federal and local authorities arrested 51 of the 70 people, officials said. Five others were already in custody, and the remaining 14 defendants are considered fugitives, authorities said. The Arkansas National Guard was also involved in making the arrests, authorities said.

One agent was shot while serving warrants, and he is hospitalized with injuries that are not life-threatening, authorities said.

The law enforcement figures named in indictments are Helena-West Helena Police Department officer Herman Eaton, 46; Helena-West Helena officer Robert “Bam Bam” Rogers, 35; Helena-West Helena Sgt. Marlene Kalb, 48; Marvell police officer Robert Wahls, 42; and former Phllips County Deputy Sheriff Winston Dean Jackson, 44, who’s now a Helena-West Helena police officer, according to court records and a prosecutors’ statement.

Their attorneys couldn’t be immediately determined or reached for comment.

A two-year investigation, called Operation Delta Blues, focused on public corruption, cocaine and crack cocaine trafficking, and money laundering in the Helena-West Helena and Marianna, Arkansas, areas, authorities said. Investigators used 16 court-authorized wiretaps in their investigation, officials said.

“Today’s indictments and arrests are merely the beginning. We believe there are more cases of corruption, and we intend to press forward with our investigation to weed out those who would sacrifice their oath and violate the public’s trust,” said Valerie Parlave, special agent in charge of the Little Rock field office for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Several of those indicted today are no strangers to law enforcement. Many have been charged in state court with some of the serious class (of) felonies, including murder,” Parlave continued. “Yet they remain free today. As our investigation moves forward, we continue to find instances where these violent felonies were never completely prosecuted and some of the most serious charges were dropped.”

Added U.S. Attorney Christopher R. Thyer of the Eastern District of Arkansas, “Our commitment to eradicating drug trafficking and violent crime has never been stronger.

“When these two elements are mixed with law enforcement corruption, it can make for the perfect storm in a community. It can paralyze honest law enforcement action, silence witnesses, and erode public confidence in our system of justice,” Thyer said in a written statement.

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There is rarely a case made in the popular media about the good things PIs do. There are rarely stories like the recent case handled by Mark Feegel, of Feegel & Associates Investigative Solutions, a private investigator out of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Feegel has been in this business for more than 25 years. While attending college in Atlanta, where he was considering pursuing a career in law, he took a job as a runner for a local law firm.

“Which convinced me, no way, I don’t want to do that. I took the position of, ‘I don’t want to be married to the many problems each civil suit might bring on for years on end,’” Feegel said. “It’s very stressful.”

So instead he took a job as an insurance adjuster in 1985 and diligently worked as an investigator in that field until finally starting his own private investigation agency in 1994. Feegel said that when he started his agency the majority of cases he took were insurance defense cases, because that was familiar territory for him.

“Since then it’s been encompassing all types of investigations: Insurance defense, plaintiff work, mortgage fraud, criminal background, criminal investigation, criminal law, and some marital type things.”

But this recent case didn’t really fit into any of those categories…

Feegel said he was contacted by a man on the recommendation of a local law firm. This man, who we will call “Henry” because the court case has yet to be completely resolved, was fostering two young boys, three and four years old, and wished to adopt them. The children were placed into foster care by the state after their daycare center reported evidence of abuse.

“The kids would go to daycare with feces in their hair, reeking of urine. Just disgusting,” Feegel said. He added that they had lived for a time in a storage facility with their mother, and “her apartment that she’s been evicted from was inspected by the county. Roach infested, maggots.”

Henry wanted Feegel to find out if the children’s mother was still seeing her abusive boyfriend. She was seeking to regain custody of her children and told the court that she had cut ties with him as part of her bid to get her children back.

“And [the foster parents] didn’t believe it, but they were ready to accept whatever the truth is,” Feegel said. “He gave me the case, and didn’t tell me much about the boyfriend, just wanted to know if they ever got together.”

It didn’t take long for Feegel to confirm the foster parents’ suspicions.

“One day. Immediately,” Feegel said. “I set up down the street from her mobile home, and I followed her. She went to this guy’s mobile home and picked him up, and they went to lunch. Labor Day weekend they were partying together. So, there’s no question they’re definitely together.”

Feegel presented the evidence to the foster parents. It was then that Henry dropped the bomb.

“After I told them I have them on video, they’re definitely together, it’s documented and proven. He started telling me about the abusive boyfriend and that he’s a drug addict. I ran his background and he is definitely a drug dealer. Battery, assault, all this crazy stuff,” Feegel said. “Then he told me that the two-year-old, when he was one, received a fractured skull from this guy. He was arrested for it. And the four-year-old, who was three at the time, he slammed into a refrigerator. When I heard that I just went, ‘you know what? Your bill is zero. Let’s get these kids safe.’”

Feegel said that his bill would have been about $1,500 under normal circumstances.

“When it came down to billing time I’m thinking, ‘Why would I take money out of this guy’s wallet and get paid for saving these kids when that money can go to these kids and they can eat and be happy?’” Feegel said. “You know they’ve got a lot of responsibility having two kids. I don’t know if they have any more than that but they’re doing the right thing. At that point money isn’t always as important as doing the right thing.”

Feegel said that the children are being well taken care of by their foster family and, though no custody decision has been made, he has high hopes for the outcome and the betterment of the lives of these two beautiful foster children.

“The kids are going to church, they’re clean, they’re fed, they’re happy,” Feegel said. “Henry just sent me a picture of the kids at his father’s farm where they’re petting a pony. Showing that they’re happy and everything’s good.”

There’s no denying that a lot of what a private investigator does revolves around the question of money; whether it’s an insurance company trying to keep insurance claim proceeds from being paid to a fraudster, a spouse trying to catch a cheater so they can get a larger settlement out of the resulting divorce, or just getting paid for an investigative job well-done. However this assignment was different. The couple who hired Mark Feegel wasn’t looking for a payday… and, in the end, neither was Mark.

This wasn’t a case about money; it was about the welfare of two innocent children. For Feegel his reward was helping those kids, and he feels that says something about the PI profession that the public often fails to recognize:

“This is something that people should understand. We help people too,” Feegel said.

NamUs.gov exceeds a combined 15,000 missing and unidentified persons cases — user number surpasses 10,000

Last month the number of cases in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System’s (NamUs.gov) two databases reached a combined total of more than 15,000 and the number of registered users has grown to 10,000. To date, NamUs is credited with resolving 120 of the missing and unidentified person cases in its databases. What’s most impressive about these numbers is that this has all happened in a little more than two years.

The exponential growth of NamUs since its launch in January 2009 illustrates the true potential of this system. In 2009, the number of missing person cases in the system doubled, and last year they nearly tripled. This continued growth is critical because with more cases in the system, more cases can be solved and more families can get the resolutions they have been seeking for so long.

NamUs is a national repository for information about missing and unidentified persons. The public may register to search and report information in the missing person database and may search, but not add, information about unidentified persons. Law enforcement officers, coroners, and medical examiners and other professionals may register to search and report information to the missing person database and the unidentified persons database.

More than two-thirds of the 10,000 registered NamUs users are members of the general public. The balance are death investigation professionals such as coroners, medical examiners and law enforcement officers. The missing persons database contains 7,557 entries and the unidentified persons database has 7,938 records.

Two cases illustrate how NamUs can aid investigators

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It all started with a joke…

“All investigations seem to lead to pornography,” quipped Ryan Hubbs, a senior manager for Matson, Driscoll & Damico, Forensic Accountants, chatting with a group of colleagues at an ACFE conference a few years ago.

Hubbs had spotted an odd pattern. Time after time, as he investigated claims of contractor fraud or embezzlement, he’d uncover a little something on the side, such as additional accusations of bullying or harassment or, most frequently, pornography downloaded onto an accused employee’s computer.

His joke struck a nerve. “We started talking about it,” he recalls, “and everybody else said, ‘You know, I’ve had some cases where after we did the forensic analysis, we found the guy was also investigated for sexual harassment.’” That’s when Hubbs started to wonder whether what he was seeing was mere coincidence, or correlation.

“The correlation is somewhere between zero and a hundred percent,” Hubbs jokes, admitting that he’s no social scientist. Plenty of people, he contends, have glanced at a sexy photo or two online without ever going on to commit fraud. He’s reluctant to draw any absolute conclusions about correlation or causality.

But as a professional fraud examiner, he is a keen observer of human behavior. And in his fascinating lecture at the San Diego ACFE conference in June, he shared those observations and posed a question to fellow investigators: What if we could search out fraudsters by zeroing in on employees who download porn or have been reported for bullying or harassing co-workers? Is there a strong enough correlation between outright fraud and other “deviant” behaviors to use those behaviors as markers?

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WEBSTER, N.H. — Investigators say offering up a cash reward is the next logical step in a case like the disappearance of Celina Cass, because so many days have gone by with no information leading to her recovery.“One of the things we are looking at is every single possibility that is out there to get someone to give up information is crucial,” said Don Nason, a former law enforcement officer who now runs an investigative center for missing children and cold cases. Nason says that a cash reward can often times produce vital information.“The next step here giving some money out and seeing if anyone is going to come forward. Someone who otherwise wouldn’t come forward without the money,” said Nason.

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