The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 5: Not Your Everyday P.I.

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

If Kitty Hailey didn't exist, some enterprising author would have conjured her up. A well put-together woman of a certain age, she resembles a hip kindergarten teacher - a fact which has served her well in her actual occupation; she's a private investigator. Using the skills she's honed over decades of investigative work, Kitty has risen to a position of prominence in her field, evolving from the typical "cheating spouse" assignments to doing trial work that has had positive, life-changing impact for the folks she's worked with. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is On the Job, a podcast about finding your life's work. On the Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season, we're bringing you stories of folks following their passion to carve their own career path. For this episode, we look at a pretty non-traditional career path, being a private investigator. It's a complicated line of work that comes with a lot of assumptions being made about it,

and maybe something a lot of people don't feel like they're cut out for in paper. But sometimes, doing a job is less about your hard qualifications and more about the bigger ideas that drive you. Now that you know that we're talking to a real PI today, You probably have some idea in your head of what that means. So let's get that out of the way. Okay. So what do people say to you when they hear you're a PI?

The first thing is that everyone goes, wow, that must be exciting. Well, I've been doing this for almost a half a century. And I don't think exciting is the word that I would use anymore. Maybe at one time, but not anymore. This is Kitty. Kitty Haley. I am a professional investigator, sometimes called a PI or a private investigator, and I am old enough to know better.

Kitty works and lives in Philadelphia. She's got fiery red hair. She's put together. Kind of looks like she might be a kindergarten teacher. You wouldn't look at her and think she's a PI, which is also what people say to her when they find out what she does. And then they start to tell me how they would be a good investigator. And they tell me either how they located their long-lost second cousin, or they

found their husband cheating and they watch all the cop shows on TV. Thing is, Kitty is pretty much the opposite of what you'd see on a cop show. She's been an investigator in many forms, but currently, most of what she does is investigate the police in cases where someone is wrongfully convicted or an officer abuses their authority. So, no, I'm not a police investigator. All right, so you've done a lot of different things in your career, but boiled down, what is it that you do? I gather information.

Period. That's what I do. I don't censor it. I don't editorialize it. I am a fact finder. However, the facts that I find are about some very interesting and unusual situations. Right now, Kitty is a criminal investigator. But for a while, she was what was called a full-service investigator, which means she did a little bit of everything. Domestic people. cheating, locating missing people.

Now, she does civil rights work, investigating cases similar to George Floyd's, where there's been an incident with the police. My other clients are incarcerated, and they may not be guilty. So it's an interesting mixture of work, but primarily I do civil rights and post-conviction work. While I was asking kitty questions,

I was surprised by how much goes into being a PI, that you'd never know without talking to one. But some of the time, just like on TV, Kitty ends up in a courtroom in front of a jury presenting the facts and making her case. Do you like being in a courtroom? I love it. It's the best time because I think we're all different people at different times. I'm not pretending, but I am performing. I'm performing the Kitty Haley, who is the investigator. I mean, sometimes I'm a grandmom and, you know, I sit on the floor with a couple of grandkids and I play games and I make them cookie. and do all the things the grandmoms do.

But when I'm in a courtroom, I have control. Long before she was dominating courtrooms and swaying juries, young Kitty Haley grew up a pretty straight-laced, brainy kid. I was a young geek. I read a lot of books. I mean, Nancy Drew was my best friend for the longest time. So maybe that was part of it. I don't know.

She had a brother and a sister. They were a tight family unit, had dinner every night with mom and dad. We're Jewish, so we went to synagogue every Friday night together. I don't think any of us ever got in trouble once in our entire lives. Even so, growing up in a non-Jewish neighborhood, she saw a lot of prejudice against her family. There were places she couldn't go, things she couldn't do. So I knew what it was like to be an outcast. I knew what it was like to have inequity.

And I think if I had not been an investigator, I probably would have ended up in some sort of social work at some point in time because the inequities of the world are so great and I can't stand to look at them. I need to be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem. In high school, she was great at art, so she went to school for it. And afterwards, she got a job teaching art at a high school in Can Do, New Jersey. It was a predominantly black school during the civil rights movement, and Kitty was asked to leave the school system after being blamed for causing an uprising against the school system. I didn't. I didn't stop it.

Apparently, she just helped the students with their manifesto. Yeah, I think that was my problem. help them to put their manifesto together. And the problem was that I did it on school time during school copy machines. So, yeah, I shouldn't have done that. Maybe unsurprisingly, this is when she had an encounter with a police captain who ended up becoming her husband.

He was branching off from the force to start his own PI firm. And she started to help out while she got another teaching job at Rutgers. And I worked as a teacher counselor for a couple of years doing investigative work part-time and then eventually just transitioned over because it's what I really wanted to do. So at 24 years old, Kitty Haley was a PI, but it definitely wasn't glamorous. You know, we had a small agency initially,

and it was really difficult because it was just my husband enough. They took whatever work they could get, which was mostly domestic work, people cheating, abuse cases, custody issues, families stealing from each other, messy stuff. My kids went to college because I did domestic work. I mean, God bless cheating people.

It was wonderful. Infidelity pays the bills. Yeah, absolutely. The stereotypical stuff people think of when you're a PI, sneaking around, following people, looking in their windows to see when the light goes on or off. Yeah, I've done all that stuff. I sat on surveillance for days and nights and weeks, and I used to bring my kids on surveillance when they were little. Sometimes they'd be so busy that her husband would be working right through bedtime when Kitty had to go do her surveillance work.

So, she'd throw the kids in the back of the car with a blanket. And I'd go out and we'd all sit on surveillance together. I read them books. I tell them stories as we were driving. I, you know, hook them in with seatbelts and give them things to play with. And every once in a while I go, okay, guys, hang on. Mama's got to go. You did what we had to do.

We'll get back to our story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a callback. You need a job. Express employment professionals can help. We'll connect you to the right company.

We're committed to your success and never charge a fee to find you a job. Express knows jobs. Get to know Express. Find your location at expresspros.com or on the Express Jobs app. Now, back to On the Job. Despite the hectic, life of starting a PI firm, Kitty was hooked. I loved the excitement, the adventure, and it was creative in its own way.

Also, having a background in art made me capable of observing things that other people didn't see. She picked up on details. She could recreate rooms that she was invited into during theft investigations, and a client might be able to point out the thing that they said was stolen from them. This is one of the many skills that's helped Kitty stay in the game as long as she has. What makes someone good at what you do? Wow.

I always tell people who are interested in my field. They have to be able to do several things really well. They have to be able to think. You have to be able to think and analyze. You have to be able to observe and put your own personal prejudices out of the way while you're observing what happened or what the evidence is. She says you also have to know a lot about the law and how the court system works so that you know what constitutes evidence. Evidence is really important because everything you do has to be admissible in a court of law or you can't do it.

One of the most overlooked skills, she says, writing. You've got to be able to put together a good report. If you can't write what you did to explain it to an attorney, then you might as well never have done the work. Basically, you might do 70 hours worth of surveillance and finding information, computer research and interviewing people, and all you can give to an attorney is a five-page report. So it's like a master class in essay writing. Sounds like there's a lot of skills they don't tell you about a law and order SVU. Yes, so you have to be able to deal with people, communicate well,

and know how to build so that you can keep your job. That's the whole thing. It's a business. People forget that. They think, oh, this is great. But if you're working for yourself, you've got to do all of that. Or go to work for somebody else. Which you can do.

Kitty says there are so many aspects of the work. You can always try it all out and figure out what you'd like to specialize in. Especially in the age of social media, you could be a techie. You could work online investigations. There's a ton of different ways to go about it. That's not what I'd like to do. It's not my comfort zone. Put me in front of somebody and I will interview them until I get every list of information out of them.

And that I do well. Kitty says in the beginning, she was saying yes to any job that came her way. She had to. That can get you in trouble. There was a nice couple who came to see us. They had just come from a funeral, actually. And so they were well-dressed, and she wanted us to find her missing children. The woman's ex-husband had taken the kids.

It's not uncommon in these cases. So Kitty got involved, only to later find out that without their nice clothing, they were members of the Hells Angels, who were involved in a dispute with a rival gang. We were right in the middle of it. And I was stupid. I didn't know anything about this. It was my first introduction to anything criminal. I only learned about it when I left their house and four big black SUVs pulled me off to the side of the road and four people identified themselves as the FBI and wanted to know what I was doing in the house.

That was not something that a 24-year-old should have to go through. It was scary. Did it make you second guess? Oh, my God. Like, what am I doing? No, it may be learned to be more careful about who my clients are, or at least to know what was really expected of me. Because my clients right now, some of them are guilty as hell, you know, some of them are innocent. But you don't know until you investigate it.

So I need to, I've learned to investigate my clients as well as to investigate what they want me to investigate. Do you ever do jobs for people that you try? kind of don't feel comfortable doing? Yeah, but I'm not them. I'm still doing my job. So take any case where there's a prosecutor and a defendant, whether she's hired by the defense or the prosecution, her job doesn't change. So if there was a bullet, we're going to find a bullet.

If you have a witness who says she saw X, Y, and Z, both investigators are going to find X, Y, and Z. The prosecution investigator and the defense investigator are both going to find the same information because the facts don't change. I'm not supporting a person. I'm finding out facts. Still, she knows that what she does has a huge impact on people's lives. When I ask if she's okay with that, she tells me about a case where a guy called Kitty saying he suspected his wife was cheating on him every day when he went to work. He wanted her to find out. Turns out his wife was with the neighbor next door.

Kitty had the evidence and testified in their court hearing. The following morning, I'm in my office and I get a phone call. And it's the woman who I testified against. And she says to me, how can you sleep with yourself doing the ugly work that you do, spying on people, peering in windows. How do you sleep with yourself? And I remember saying to her, I don't. I don't sleep with myself. I speak with my husband. You, on the other hand, sleep with somebody else's husband.

So, no, I'm not the people I'm working for or against. I'm still me with my own ethics and my own morals. But if in the process, I help somebody make a life decision that will change the course of their life or allow them to make an informed decision, then I've done a good job. Kitty has a deep respect for the impact her work has, good or bad, which is why over the last many years, she's become a nationally recognized investigative ethicist. She literally wrote the book on ethical standards for being an investigator, and she tours the country giving lectures on how to do this job in a responsible way. Recently, she was doing a session with a pretty elite group of investigators.

And somebody asked me the question, how do you show empathy? And it just blew me for a loop. And I said, I don't. I feel it. Being a PI sounds like a cool job. And Kitty says it is. But on the flip side, there are times when you are talking to a person on the worst day of their life. People who have lost a loved one or were a victim of a crime.

People scared for their life. And if you don't appreciate that, then maybe you shouldn't be doing this job. You've got to understand that everyone has been traumatized in some way. And I'm a witness to their heart. And I need to record it. I need to be able to elicit the information from them so that I can take their statements so that when I present it in court, it has meaning and gravitas. And that comes from respect.

Talking with Kitty reminded me of something pretty amazing I heard the famous therapist and author Esther Perel say on a podcast once when she was talking about our relationship. to our jobs. She said, next time you're at dinner with new friends or at a party, and you're about to ask the routine question, what do you do for a living? Instead, ask, what would you do if you weren't doing the job you do now? That's always stuck with me. Because I feel like so many of us write off what we can do for work because we don't have the education for it, or we didn't grow up around it, or we don't look the part. But sometimes what qualifies you for a job is your deepest beliefs, the thing that gets you up in the morning. Kitty still looks like a high school art

teacher, but her desire led her to being one of the most respected investigators in her industry, that desire she had as a young nerdy outcast to be part of the solution rather than the problem. I asked her if she still felt that way about her work. Oh my, every day. You know, we work so hard on a case and don't always see the end of it. Sometimes all the information goes to an attorney and you never know what happened. Wow. I didn't even think of that. That's some very delayed satisfaction, if any at all.

Yeah. Okay. So I worked with a gentleman from Philadelphia. I can say his name because he is now free. It's Jimmy Dennis. He was wrongfully incarcerated almost 20 years ago. Jimmy Dennis is an R&B musician in Philadelphia, and when he was 21, he was wrongfully convicted of our murder. No physical evidence, no weapon, no DNA, and he was put on death row.

Kitty worked on his case. And 18 years later, I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I got a telephone call. And a voice said, Miss Kitty, I just want to thank you. And I said, who is this? He said, this is Jimmy Dennis. I'm on my way home from prison. And I sat in that coffee shop and cried like a baby. It was so wonderful to know that work I had done for 18 years

had finally resulted in someone going home to a family. A baby he had never held a child he had not seen. You know, it was somebody whose life was able to be not put whole again, but at least he was able to live a life outside of the four walls of an 8 by 10 cell, which he was in for 18 years. You know, that was, that's humbling. So, yeah, I love what I do. It's not easy.

It's hard work. It's long hours, and it's so friggin' satisfying. It's great. And I'm going to do it until I can't stand up anymore. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. To learn more about Kitty and her work, go to kittyhailey.com. Thanks for listening to On The Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professional.

This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about

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just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside, and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimpleSafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplysafe.com slash bones. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Service opens doors. And at American military university, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who's served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward.

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