ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, June 19, 1996 TAG: 9606190024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/STAFF WRITER
SHE IS A WOMAN ON THE EDGE of middle age, on the edge of a divorce. Her husband believes she is seeing a lover on her lunch break.
He has hired Robert Crabtree to prove it - and Crabtree has let a reporter come along.
For more than half an hour now we have been parked outside a downtown parking garage. We are close to giving up. But at last, as a nearby church tower clock edges toward 12:30 p.m., the woman's all-terrain vehicle noses out of the garage and into traffic.
We slip away from the curb and fall in behind. ...
She is a woman on the edge of middle age, on the edge of a divorce. Her husband believes she is seeing a lover on her lunch break.
He has hired Robert Crabtree to prove it - and Crabtree has let a reporter come along.
For more than half an hour now we have been parked outside a downtown parking garage. We are close to giving up. But at last, as a nearby church tower clock edges toward 12:30 p.m., the woman's all-terrain vehicle noses out of the garage and into traffic.
We slip away from the curb and fall in behind. ...
Worried about that lipstick on the collar? Those hang-up calls? Those long hours at the office?
You're not the only one.
Private investigator Robert Crabtree is but one soldier in a virtual army, one armed not with weapons - many private investigators do not even carry guns - but telephoto lenses.
The yellow pages in the Roanoke telephone directory lists no fewer than than 20 businesses under the heading of "investigators." Otherwise known as gumshoes, beagles, dicks, Sherlocks, flatfoots.
Private eyes.
A private eye will follow anyone for you, if you have the money. Your lover. Your boss. Your kids.
Virginia's stalking law prohibits following anyone with the intent to do harm - but it doesn't prohibit an investigator from following them for money.
Of course, few people would spend $25 an hour to learn where the boss goes during lunch hour.
But people have their spouses tailed every day - often when the marriage already is slouching toward divorce.
Of course, private eyes do more than spy on cheating hearts.
They serve subpoenas. Track down missing persons. Document child abuse and insurance fraud, debunk disability claims. They investigate office theft. They often interview potential witnesses for the defense in a criminal case, or otherwise assist in building a legal case.
Nowadays, however, times being what they are, much of their business comes from love gone bad.
Their importance in divorce cases may be overrated. Local lawyer Jeff Rudd said adultery is nearly impossible to prove in court - because to do so you must prove not only that it occurred, but that it caused the breakup of the marriage.
Still, proof of unsavory habits or behavior can be useful when it comes time to divide up property or determine custody arrangements and visitation rights, lawyers say.
Rudd said some 10 percent to 20 percent of his divorce cases involve private investigators.
He also said some people will have their spouse tailed out of little more than "vindictiveness" - then use the information only to drag out already painful court proceedings.
Indeed, sometimes the hiring of a private investigator to document infidelity only bewilders Rudd. "It's not like they're going to be put in jail," he said of the erring spouse or lover. "It's not like they're committing a crime."
And yet, who really understands a lover's heart?
The reasons for hiring a private investigator may have little to do with divorce, or even the thirst for revenge.
Crabtree tells the story of a woman who hired him once to follow her husband. He followed the husband and a lady friend straight to a motel.
End of job?
Hardly. The woman called him again afterward. She had forgiven her husband. But just to be sure ... ?
Crabtree tailed the man again, and found him with the lady friend a second time.
He told the wife.
"She couldn't believe it," Crabtree recalled. This time she hired a lawyer - but then relented, forgiving the scoundrel one more time.
The next time, it was a friend of the woman's who called Crabtree to say the guy was still running around.
Crabtree called his client and relayed the information. She hired him one more time - with the same result.
Crabtree doesn't know how it all ended.
He knows this: When people suspect a spouse of committing adultery, they usually are right
Either way, Crabtree doesn't lose any sleep about it.
"Nothing I do is personal. I am just a tool retained by a client. Look at me as being a hired camera man.
"I just record the facts."
So who are these guys?
Answer: Anybody. Nor are they all guys. Crabtree, a Roanoke native who also has worked as a private investigator in California, said a number of private eyes are women - including one of his own assistants.
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice licenses private eyes - there are some 3,500 statewide, said a department spokesman, Leon Baker Jr. - but the requirements are few enough. You must go through 60 hours of training at a licensed training center. You must submit to a national background check based on your fingerprints. Convicted felons who apply for licenses are typically denied, said Baker, though such cases can end up in court.
Once in business, the investigator has to obey the law, Baker said (a requirement that seems to be suspended for private eyes with their own television shows). In the real world, this means no breaking and entering, no trespassing, no invasion of privacy.
A private eye may not impersonate a police officer, or a member of the clergy. A private eye may not represent himself as working for an existing company. A private eye can lie through his teeth - they often do - but he or she had better lie all the way: He or she can claim to be a delivery person for the Moonbeam Overnight Intergalactic Delivery Service, for example - but not for UPS.
Is there money in it?
Baker merely points to the number of people - some of whom get as much as $50 an hour for their services - who are doing it. "If you are able to get a few cases, you can make some money," Baker said.
Crabtree does all right.
He is a big man, crowding 50, comfortably built. He majored in art photography in college back in San Francisco, and sometimes did surveillance in those days to pay the rent.
Later, married and living back in Roanoke - his wife, Amanda, runs the Meals on Wheels program here - Crabtree was doing video production work when he answered an ad on the Internet for an investigator with an intensive video background.
He quickly found out that the money was much better for investigative work. He hasn't looked back.
Crabtree, whose company, RAC Investigations, has been in business here for two years, works 60 to 80 hours a week, and is opening a second office in Florida.
He dislikes the perception of private eyes as creatures of the darkness - "shadowy, in the night, crawling around. That is not true at all."
Though it must be said he often works at night, hunkered down in the back of his van, hidden by a curtain that hangs behind the front seats. If he is not crawling, exactly, he is certainly in shadows.
When Crabtree goes to work, he takes with him a camera with a foot-long telephoto lens, a video camera and monitor, a tape recorder - for verbally documenting place and time, to be transcribed later - and a cellular phone.
He also takes two guns - a 9 mm Ruger and a .32 caliber Colt. Strictly for self-defense, he said.
"I really wouldn't want to shoot anyone," Crabtree said. "And I wouldn't want them shooting at me. Mainly, you can say that my gun is the camera."
Private eyes spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting for someone to arrive, to leave, to misbehave. To - for the love of Pete - do something. Though Crabtree insists the image of hard-drinking, womanizing private eyes is hogwash, they tend to know the night life well enough - having tailed a few too many couples to the local night spots.
By now, Crabtree even knows the most popular motels for daylight trysts. That would be any of several to the north of town just off Interstate 81.
He hasn't a clue why.
Though he wonders sometimes what the desk clerks think.
There comes a point where suspicion and guilt collide, and a person being followed begins to wonder: "Am I being followed?"
"The Twilight Zone," Crabtree calls it - and perhaps the woman is feeling it as he speaks. We are following her down Franklin Road, in a pretty part of Old Southwest lined with trees and old stone churches.
People who suspect that they are being followed will vary their speed, giving the car more gas, then slowing down, Crabtree said. "They can't decide if they want to turn right or turn left. I usually back off the surveillance at that point. I don't want to blow it."
So far this woman had only acted like someone on her lunch break, in a hurry. We follow her beneath the U.S. 220 overpass, past the Ramada Inn, and up the hill toward Towers Shopping Center.
Crabtree has seldom been caught, and never seriously threatened - at least by human beings. He has, while attempting to serve subpoenas, been menaced by dogs, he says.
The woman turns into the shopping parking lot. After visiting a drive-through automated teller machine, she parks and goes inside. We park, and wait.
Perhaps half an hour later, she emerges, facing us. I get my first good look at her, although from 20 or 30 yards away. She looks to be in her late 30s. She is carrying a shopping bag and carryout food.
She is quite alone.
She drives away, and we do not follow. Crabtree does not seem disappointed. He has, after all, done his job.
Meanwhile, there are other spouses, other cases. His day is far from over.
He has work to do.
LENGTH: Long : 190 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. "Nothing I do is personal," saysby CNBprivate investigator Robert Crabtree. "I am just a tool retained by
a client." color.