Becoming a Private Investigator (Masters at Work) by Howie Kahn

Author:Howie Kahn [Kahn, Howie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Deep into Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center—a sprawling glass-topped ecosystem with waterfalls, a couple dozen restaurants, its own indoor riverboat and thousands of guests illuminated by thousands more hanging twinkle lights—Sheila Wysocki has taken her seat on CrimeCon’s Podcast Row.

CrimeCon, launched in 2017 at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis, brings together all facets of true crime entertainment and crime solving, from justice-seeking, televised ratings machines like Nancy Grace to authors of novels and memoirs to podcasters who host shows like Martinis & Murder and Wine & Crime with collective listenership climbing into the millions. Wysocki’s booth is just across the way from the one with the producers of Atlanta Monster and Up and Vanished, a podcast that used journalism to ultimately help solve a murder.

The 2018 edition of CrimeCon is three times the size of its predecessor, and People magazine listed the three-day gathering in early May, along with 60 Minutes and the Grand Canyon, as one of their “Top Hundred Reasons to Love America.” You can buy a CrimeCon T-shirt for $25 or a sweatshirt for $45. The CrimeCon corkscrew costs ten bucks.

Attendees, mostly women, fill cavernous conference rooms for discussions with ex-FBI agents or ex–Manson family members. They can hear a career prosecutor discuss what it’s like to choose juries for death penalty cases. There are workshops on identifying serial perpetrators and liars. Attendees have traveled from all fifty states and six countries, paying as much as $1,000 per person for a platinum badge with line-skipping privileges and one-on-one sit-down meetings with the crime solver of their choice. Base-level tickets sell at the door for $179.

Amid the unavoidable commercialism of the enterprise, Wysocki is hoping to use her platform here to help find out what happened to the children of two families who have hired her to investigate their deaths.

The podcast that landed Wysocki on Podcast Row, like her investigation agency, is called Without Warning and will focus on the July 2015 death of Lauren Agee, a twenty-year-old Ball State criminal justice student who was found floating, facedown, in Center Hill Lake, a man-made body of water in central Tennessee. The lake branches into dozens of hollows and creeks over its sprawl of nearly thirty square miles. On a map, it looks like an unsightly and unmanageable outburst of varicose veins.

Agee had attended Wakefest there, a weekend-long wakeboarding festival, with a group of friends; she never made it home. Her mother and stepfather, Sherry and Michael Smith, hired Wysocki not long after local police closed the case, having decided that Lauren died as the result of an accidental fall off a cliff. Wysocki decided to launch a podcast to further her investigation, which has been ongoing since early 2016. Maybe, she thought, if she went as public as possible with her findings thus far, the rest of the evidence needed to go to trial, or uncover the truth, would finally surface.

Crowdsourcing a case is an unconventional approach among PIs. The chance of inundating the investigation with false-information increases significantly.

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