When my investigative career began, I was stumped before I ever got going. I had just spent several years helping women in coercive relationships in conservative churches (a niche activity, but an important one). That work had wound itself to a natural end, and I was looking for what was next.
During those years, I had relearned about myself what I knew from the beginning – that I am prolifically curious, tenacious, and inquisitive – and in fact, in the advocacy context, my snooping had simply outed and exhausted itself. I was supposed to be receptive and supportive, and here I was always digging up dirt instead.
So it was a natural next step to look into becoming a private investigator. The great problem and the great advantage to that bright idea were the same, namely, my location in the gorgeous state of Idaho. This is not Illinois or Ohio or any of the half dozen states easterners automatically think I am referring to when I mention where I live. This is the Gem State – mountainous and beautiful, nearing the end of the route Lewis and Clark once paddled westward, and split in the North by a strip of incredibly fertile agricultural land known as the Palouse. In some of the creekbeds here you can find whole swaths of garnet dust that have drifted down from mine tailings upstream; in my back yard I have pavers flecked with actual gold, that were pulled out of an abandoned gold mine not too far from where I live.
In Idaho, there used to be a Private Investigator Licensure available from the state, but at some point in the past the state let that go – possibly concluding that in an environment dominated by 2A enthusiasts and libertarians, it was pointless to regulate an industry that already had a vague reputation for bypassing and circumventing the law. At the time I was trying to get into the business, there was plenty of business to get into, but In Idaho there certainly wasn’t much definition to its borders. I called the then President of the sole Idaho association for investigators to ask how I should begin. “However you want,” he said, though not in so many words. “You could hang out your shingle and start tomorrow.”
While this was good news in one sense, it was bad news for the side of me that wanted credentials. I joined the association, obviously, but there were no internships available within driving distance of my small university town in the Panhandle of Idaho. Even if there had been, I’d have been commuting for years to fulfill any kind of hourly requirement for certification. Frustrated, I resorted to pestering the association members who had reached out to me in welcome. One kind soul (we’ll call him Chris) answered my phone calls with relative consistency, and was rewarded with a thriving symbiotic relationship, in which I asked him all sorts of stupid questions, and he patiently spent probably way too much of his time answering them.
Besides this sole personal resource, I had found a legal investigation course I could take online, and I had also launched my normal approach to things – which is to say, I was deep diving into every single piece of information I could find about how to become a private investigator.