Meet Rachele’ Davis: a longtime colleague and friend, occasional contributor to Pursuit Magazine, and now, the author of a course for PI Education called “Finding Birth Parents for Adoptees, Donor-Conceived, and NPEs.” Rachele’ has a really interesting niche: She helps reunite birth families. Her clients are adoptees looking for biological parents or siblings, and sometimes, parents looking for the children they gave up for adoption. That process can be an emotional roller coaster for everybody involved. It requires diplomacy, ethics, and compassion to handle all that as an investigator. In this episode, Rachele’ and one of her former clients talk about what it’s like to find out where you came from after wondering for your whole life, and what it’s like to escort a person through that process. Get the course: Finding Birth Parents for Adoptees, Donor-Conceived, and NPEs

1986, Northern Ireland. A British spy is found dead by a desolate country lane — murdered by the IRA. Decades later, his killing set in motion the largest murder investigation ever in Britain and provoked painful national soul-searching about what spies should be allowed to to while serving their countries. Join Hal and his guest, author and journalist Henry Hemming, to talk about Hemming’s gripping new nonfiction spy thriller, FOUR SHOTS IN THE NIGHT: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland. Buy it: https://henryhemming.com/books/four-s…

What’s attorney-client privilege and work product? When should you deliver written vs. oral reports? Should you document all witness interviews? What information is discoverable? Join Hal Humphreys and John Nardizzi with their guest, defense attorney Jennifer Sunderland, as they talk about what private investigators need to know about rules of professional conduct when they work with attorneys.

Boston area attorney and investigator John Nardizzi recaps a recent Innocence Network conference he attended and chats with Hal about the risks and rewards of innocence investigations.

The Innocence Network Conference: https://innocencenetwork.org

Hal Humphreys (“The Beard”) and John Nardizzi (“The Dome”) co-host The Sound of Pursuit podcast (almost) each week.

Avi Klein is a private investigator in Oakland, California with a law degree from USC. He’s also a former investigative journalist in Washington D.C. who covered the finance, defense, and national security industries. Klein is now managing partner of The Klein Group, a firm that specializes in litigation support, due diligence for investors, locating heirs, and defending contested wills.

Check out Klein’s LinkedIn feed: He shares great information about due diligence, background investigations, and skip tracing. In one post, he writes about what he calls “real locates”—assignments to find people who are tough to trace, like the unhoused, recent college grads, or people who change addresses a lot. “A real locate puts the investigative professional to the proof,” he writes. “You need a Swiss army knife full of tools for each circumstance.”

I love that phrase. It captures the investigator’s skill set perfectly. In the webinar, Avi Klein and I will talk about some tools that should be in a PI’s Swiss army knife. —Hal Humphreys