Episode Transcript
Story Samurai (00:00)
So I'm Haley. I privately investigate missing persons cases, especially. I'm a medium. And so I'm kind of changing the narrative of how private investigations work for missing persons cases. I'm taking a huge initiative towards how we can work better within our justice system to fix issues within that and other things. And so that's what I do. OK, so.
I think the audience needs a moment to adjust from everything else they've heard from this show, but let's take it a step by step. And I apologize. I've got a little bit of a respiratory thing. So I've got a lozenger to help me not cough, but let's take this one bite at a time. I agree. Private investigator. What kind of jobs do you take? Who would traditionally come to you? Of course, you know, maintain privacy, but try tell us a story to the level that you can without giving any kind of private information.
So I do everything kind of across the board from custody battle investigations, divorce investigations, cheating spouses. But my specialty is your cold case, missing persons cases. Those cases where you run into the complex ones, typically there's police corruption or the police don't have the training needed to be able to investigate at the time and just haven't had the resources.
I actually just got contacted yesterday to find somebody's birth parents. They were adopted when they were born and they want to find their parents. And so everything across the board is what I do.
OK, let me drill into this. So cold case. What does that mean? So a cold case is a missing persons case that's older than five years old. Prior to a prior to that five year mark, somebody goes missing and for the FBI to get involved or things like that where it's just your typical adult goes missing and the police don't have the resources, they have to ask for those people to come in.
Once you hit that five year market opens the doorway for a whole lot more options within being able to have like FBI choose to come in and investigate. There's also the factors of time being a factor and finding people and being a little bit harder. But that's what I like about it. It's what I enjoy about what I do is being able to bring people closure after so long.
So, okay, so this is terrible, but from TV, I know that finding missing people after a certain amount of time is more difficult. Tell us the truth. What's the reality behind this and what lies have TV told us? I guess it depends on what you base it off of. When you look at shows like Dateline and stuff like that, you run into this simple issue of how dramatized a lot of it is and they leave out the
hours of investigative work that goes into it. When I first started my first case, I spent three months, day in, day out, I mean, countless hours through the night, investigating just to get a basis. With social media, especially nowadays, things get kind of crazy. There's conspiracy theories per se for cases even, and they can get a little out of hand.
when you run into like a rural town in the Midwest, it's a small town and everybody knows small towns talk and gossip. And so trying to find any factual information is going to be hard. So you have to seek out those people that really do know and we're really there. I've had a lot of luck, thankfully, in just looking in places people wouldn't think to look and finding that. But TV, unless you're watching something that's not a documentary, they're all pretty...
on point with what they're giving out there. I think that there's the nitty gritty of it that is never going to get shown on shows like Dateline, but I think it should be shown for those that would like to see it. Right. That's amazing. I mean, you know, you know, I watch a lot of shows and since I have a science background, I'm like, you know, that's bullshit. So I'm very skeptical about, you know, what people show on TV. And yet many of these shows have advisors that have consultants.
to make sure that the science and the fact and the operations behind what are on these shows to a certain degree are correct. So it looks like, at least in these cases, these consultants are doing a somewhat good job and they're being listened to. So that's good news. So what's the cutoff? We said that it takes five years before these additional options come into play. But when does it become incredibly hard to pursue a missing persons case as opposed to when's the right time and easy time, quote unquote, if there even is a thing to do it? Right.
Well, I mean, the right time would be to prevent these situations, but that's not going to happen overnight. I don't think that the world will ever be rid of that. There's people who go missing because they want to disappear. I've had a case where he simply just took off and everybody was freaking out for weeks and then they found him. And he was like, no, I just I wanted to go take off and do my thing. I.
As soon as somebody goes missing, I think that it's important to get the word out there and get in touch with the people who have that resource available. For me, it's a little bit different. I would say after probably that 10 -year mark is going to be where you're running into the issues of now you're a decade later and...
Even a year later, it's hard to be able to go to somebody that maybe would have saw something and say, Hey, do you remember this and have them remember it? but let alone a decade that's next to impossible unless somebody has a very, very good memory. And we're running into the issues nowadays where people aren't remembering things because everything is so automated. So there's an aspect of human memory here. Is there an aspect of physical evidence that kind of disappears? Talk to us about the physical evidence, but then also.
You know, on the other hand with social media and videos and everything, is it a little easier nowadays? Yes, I think so. I would say, honestly, when you look at the social media aspect, you never know per se somebody went to, so since I'm out in the Midwest, somebody went to a rodeo and that night disappeared. There's going to be 300 plus people at that rodeo who are going to have photos who are going to have videos. You might be able to see something in one of those videos.
and it really just takes diving into it all and looking into it all. Social media can connect you with people that you would have never guessed would maybe have some valuable information. And so that's where that lies with social media. As for the forensics of things, I'm not a forensic tech. I'm not super delved into forensics. I'm currently going to school for my bachelor's of criminal justice on the way to law school.
And I haven't taken my forensics class yet. And so I haven't had to worry too much about the timeframes for when things are gonna happen, for when physical evidence is gonna work anymore. I do know from years of studying, the difference is within certain things that like DNA evidence will always be there if it's there. There's a 30 year old frame.
case where there's a man that's been sitting in prison for 30 years for murders he didn't commit and there's DNA evidence that they just recently uncovered never got brought into trial and it still has the DNA on it. And so that's one of those where I don't understand it to its complete complexities. I was a math kid, not a science kid. So.
I mean, but that's amazing, right? I mean, this whole concept and again, keep me honest here because my knowledge comes off TV. But the progress of technology is allowing us to do more and sometimes even open up these cold cases. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And you know, it's just like within like when you look at eyewitnesses, eyewitness testimony, pulling somebody from a lineup like with a rape case, those are not going to.
be 100 % valid all the time. So you have to have the tangible physical DNA evidence. There's dozens and dozens and dozens of people every single year in the United States that get exonerated after spending decades in prison because somebody thought that they were this person or somebody didn't do a good job investigating. And I think that comes with a lack of funding and a lack of resources for training and a lack of standard that we hold for our investigators. As...
And I'm not saying that all investigators are bad and aren't doing their jobs by any means. But I think that there should be a standard that we need to uphold and not just do a training once every few years. This is so true in so many industries. I mean, you know, everybody obviously does their best and they get trained by, you know, the best person they had available to them. And, you know, but not everybody is equal. And
I think you're right. There's something about standardization and bringing the best knowledge, the best practices, the best tools and democratizing that. So it's, you know, I don't, I wouldn't blame anyone. I have a huge respect to everybody of service, but not everybody of service is empowered with the best tools and best knowledge. And I think it's really about giving them more empowerment and also the public, right? So this, this isn't only about you alluded to this at the beginning. It's not only about the people of service.
It's also about the public. Tell us what the public can do. We have Amber Alerts, but what can we really do to make a difference? So the public, it's funny. That's actually how I got started on working missing persons cases. So Chance Engelbert went missing July 6th, 2019 from Gary, Nebraska. That was my first case that I started working and I'm currently working on. Because of the public, there's a couple of different pages on Facebook that are private pages.
where people can talk about their theories and talk about these things. Now this is rural Nebraska. You don't have a huge population. I mean, what one city out in California has for their whole city, you have in the whole state. These are people that talk to their neighbors. You can catch everybody on Sunday after church at the local diner having a cup of coffee, talking. And so having that public aspect to it is huge.
Now, then you run into the problem of an understaffed for something of that magnitude. Like police force that you can, they'll get a hundred tips in a day right out the gate. And you don't know what you need to follow, what you need to not follow. And I think that's something where police forces should be able to, you know, outsource within like private investigators and have a group of people throughout the country where.
They're able to look at those tips and they're able to dig into that. And I feel like it's so stigmatized where the police force, you know, is the police force and they're not going to do that. Yeah. Search and rush search and rescue will come out. Emergency services will come out. These big corporations and big foundations that they have, they'll come out. But even like, gosh, what are they? I can't think of the name of them right now. And that's adventures with a purpose. That's who I was thinking of.
They go out and they'll find, you know, they'll find vehicles that went missing with these people decades and decades and decades ago, perfectly preserved in the water except for the rest and be able to find these missing people. And it's beautiful to see that I am so inspired by what those guys do. And it's just something where I think that there needs to be almost like a network of where everybody can talk about these things because you don't have that.
option. And now with social media, you can maybe find these people. But getting in contact as a private investigator isn't the easiest getting in contact as a civilian isn't even the easiest. What is contributing to that difficulty of your work when it comes to talking to people and asking questions? I mean, I can imagine that give us the first hand scoop. I mean, so cost of travel is insane.
cost of gas, cost of plane tickets. That's insane. And for me, I don't charge my families. I don't charge my loved ones. So that funding has to come from somewhere. Now, if they want to contribute to it, by all means, please do. But any traveling that I've done for any of my cases, I brand GoFundMe is for. To be able to afford the travel, and I'm still contributing a few hundred dollars out of pocket. I think that one of the biggest issues when you get there is...
you have it kind of set how you want to go about it, but you're going to run into the issue where people aren't expecting you to show up and ask questions. And in cases where somebody has been missing for 10 years from a tiny little rural town, you start asking questions and me, like I'm a female and going into a situation like that, you know, on my own is never a safe situation because of the world that we live in today. And that's...
hardest part because you can't call the police force and say hey you know can we work together on this it's very rare that you're able to find that and it's so disheartening as a private investigator i would love more than anything to be able to work with these police forces and say hey this is what i do like i i don't care why it is that you're not being able to find these people on your own i want to help and let's work together on this and i really hope that that's able to change one day honestly
And when you come and you're talking to basically the community and you're asking questions, they always just jump on and they're always helpful. Or is there any barriers? I think that people have a lot of speculation. Like I said, I deal with a lot of the complex cases, the cases where you have dozens of different things and dozens of stories going on and people who aren't talking. I'm fortunate enough that with
being a medium and having that other aspect to it and kind of integrating the two things that nobody's really integrated before. Some people have, but a lot of the people who have tried are not proving that they're able to do this. And so people are skeptical and that's the issue I run into. I don't know about other private investigators out there, but for me being a medium and basing myself on my intuitive insight, my guidance, my channels, the things that I'm getting,
from the other side as well as the tangible evidence in front of me and being able to follow along with my tangible evidence with what I'm getting channel wise and put those two together and line them up and say, okay, I know this, I know this, this is irrefutable. And putting that all together can be a little difficult. It's worked to my advantage though too. I've been able to interview a few people that nobody else had gotten to interview in years of somebody being missing because I was like, you know.
I get it, you don't want to talk to just whoever, you don't want stuff to go out on social media. What if we did a terror ring? What if we sat down and you could see for yourself that I'm not here to create an issue for you, like total privacy for you. I will give you an insight into what I do. So you can see that I'm really just trying to help find these people. And it's worked out wonders for me. It's brought wonders for cases for me. That's amazing. You know, I, I'm a big believer that magic is just science we don't understand.
And I don't know if it's offensive to call mediums magic or not, but this concept of that there's a lot of stuff we don't know. I am a true skeptic. I'm a very hardcore science math person, but I acknowledge that there are limits to my own knowledge and there are limits to the knowledge of science. And in fact, I teach my children that science is the art of figuring out what is wrong and what we don't know. It's not the art of saying, this is what we know and it's correct.
Sorry, the gift from this respiratory virus, it's the gift that keeps on giving. If I'm not sucking these lozenges and with tea, I just can't talk. Are you doing herbal tea? I am. I've got an herbal tea and this is like the Coca -Cola thing. It's all very helpful. And I don't have the virus anymore, but this is just the lung damage that I've sustained. Yeah, I know a bunch of people that have just some respiratory infection going on.
And so no, it could be a gift from COVID or the vaccine or who knows, right? The doctors, the science is out, right? They're figuring it out right now. We no longer call it the flu or a simple cold is basically where we're at. Right. Right. Right. It's it's yeah, it is what it is. Right. So, I mean, this is this is just amazing. And I didn't want to a lot of times I'll stop my my, you know, like, wait, hold on. But.
I wanted to let you get through that, but I was on the edge of my seat to stop you and say, well, hold on. What do you mean you don't ask for money? Let's let's do that now. Yeah, I know. I asked myself that constantly. But when I first started this, I mean, I had no investigative background. I was just somebody that felt compelled that I needed to do a terror reading for a case that I followed since the day somebody I've known in life went missing.
And it just happened overnight. And that's this magic that you talk about. It's I mean, that's it. It's kind of how that thing happens. I mean, with how we got connected through alliances, alliances happened to me and I don't even understand how, you know, I blame it on the higher power for sure. But I guess for me, it didn't feel right to charge. It still doesn't. It's something that.
I think growing up in South Dakota, waving, I drive. And every time I drive past somebody, now granted in Sioux Falls I don't, in bigger cities I don't, but when I'm driving on the highway and I see somebody, it's a wave and a smile. When I walk up my stairs and a neighbor's outside, it's a wave and a smile. That's the beautiful thing about South Dakota and why so many people love it out here is because of our hospitality and just neighborly ways of being, I guess you could say. And so for me, it just didn't feel right. You know, I'm...
want to be able to provide that closure for somebody and provide that relief for somebody. And if my gifts are going to be the ones doing that, that's amazing. Now, getting the funding to do that at the time, mind you, I just turned 21 when I started this. Yeah, I just turned 21. And so so last year, basically. Yeah, but it'll be two years this December. And so. I was I was giving you a compliment. You have 23 now. I'll be 23 in December.
You are young to be in this type of business. my God. Yeah, I am there and I found my life passion doing it. I have no doubt. Okay, hold on. Let me stop you this one. Okay. So, so look, you've got to make a living somehow. Is there, is there like when you find like what's the, is it just the go fund me's or once you find the person, the families, are they very generous? Like, I mean, you can't just do this for free forever. I agree.
And so that's why I offer like my mediumship services. I do tarot readings. I do astrological chart readings. I do chakra cleansing, opening activations. I do distance energy healings. I do, you know, I do all of that. And then on top of that, any other investigations that aren't for missing persons or for an Amber alert, those are charged. There are charges for those. I'm not gonna jump into just any investigation for free.
missing persons is a little bit different for me and I don't know why is I don't know exactly why it was yet. I think it's just no I I get it I get it. I have been very lucky to not have you know that kind of issue impacting personally but without getting too political a lot of my friends are in that situation right now but that's all I'll say on the topic.
So as I said, I'm a skeptic, but when you tell me that you're using quote unquote unexplained science in conjunction with a very, very serious activity, and you're not taking money in order to do that, it lowers my barriers. I wouldn't say it makes me a believer, but it makes me very curious is what I would say. So go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say, like, if you really want to ever explore into
just kind of where like how energy works. When you're talking in a spiritual magical essence, like I'm more than happy to it's as simple as we ground ourselves. I ask if I can come in and I can just give you a little push of my energy and you'll be able to feel that energy come in and it's unexplainable by science. You can't explain how you're where you're at and I'm across, you know, the country or the world or wherever I am.
and you're getting this energy from somebody and it's able to do what it's able to do. That's why I do the distance energy healings. It's honestly something I don't think that where our cognitive line sits to where we just can't go any higher for a cognitive understanding unless you are somebody that's just got the blood of that where you've grown up with that.
It's really hard to understand. I would agree that it's genetic. I would agree that people who have special abilities that they themselves maybe can't explain. I think it is genetic and I think it is special abilities. I think it's just magic that's unexplained. And I think there are some explanations that we can give such as superhuman intuitiveness, right? The ability to catch on to...
you know, maybe a facial expression or maybe a thing or maybe combine information on somebody's background or words or combination or just things that we can't really understand as a science yet. And that gives you maybe tips. So that's the way as a, you know, as a, as a non, you know, as a non -believer, right, as a skeptic, that's the way I explain these phenomenal abilities that, you know, no, this person is gifted, gifted in a way. And, you know, I see this, I see this on my daughter. How, how do you explain my, like my son?
He is incredibly intelligent, math, sciences. Everybody loves my daughter. Every day she gets three to four calls to come and do a play date, to come over. And she's 10. Like how does a 10 year old become super extraordinarily social? There's some gift that she has that allows her to execute flawlessly what hordes of salespeople wish they could do, right? And she's 10 and she's like the best.
She doesn't use it to sell, but I mean, I look at her and she's the best salesperson I've ever seen in the world. And she didn't get that from me or my wife. So, no, I joke. My wife is amazing. People love her. But I think it is. It's something in the, I think it is something in the blood. I truly do believe that. Let me, let me go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say like, and in matters of that, there's, and this is just a little like off topic. And so I just want it like,
throw this in there because I just had a conversation about this yesterday. You see a lot of addicts and alcoholics, especially in the United States, who have these spiritual capabilities. And because it's so profound and there's such a negative stigma, when I say the word medium, you immediately think that I'm going to sit in front of a crowd and throw out a letter until somebody makes a facial expression. And there's such a negative stigma around it that there's not a whole
you know, now with social media, now that, you know, it's 2024, in the last three years, there's been this huge, like, opening up to understanding, and more people kind of talking about it and wanting to know about it, wanting to talk about it, be like, hey, me too. But before that, you'd run into the issues of you wouldn't have anybody where you could really talk to about that, and people would tell you you're crazy. I don't want to know the amount of people that have gone to like,
a hospital or a psychiatrist to say what is wrong with me because I don't understand this. I don't have the resources to understand this. And they've said, you're having psychosis episodes. You need to go to a loony bin. And they really weren't loony or they didn't need to get put on medication. They just needed somebody to walk them through what it was. Because when you get a channel, it's it could be registered as a schizophrenic thing because you're audibly hearing something when you get premonitions and things like that. Or like the vivid dreams, lucid dreaming, they would.
classify that as schizophrenic. And, and we know, we know that people that have had different impacts to their brains can suddenly develop incredible miraculous. So putting that line in the sand and saying you're ill, you're not ill. I mean, that's borderline, you know, I don't want to get religious, but I think that's not the work of men and yet doctors need to do that. Right. That's their so commonly the, the
place where you put the line in the sand is you say, well, are you hurting yourself or others? Exactly. Right. That's where, but it's such a fine line, isn't it? It's kind of, I don't want to use the word crazy in this topic, but it is crazy. It's crazy that as human beings, we need to make decisions that are, and it's not just doctors, right? It's social caseworkers. It's just across the board. It's bankers. Like everybody's making these decisions, impacting the people around them based on all kinds of stuff, right? Yeah.
But yeah, I just wanted to throw that in there. No, I think it's fine. So look, there's going to be a time where we understand more and it's happening all the time. And, you know, in a hundred years time or 50 or whatever, we're going to be like, yeah, we thought those people were crazy, but actually they had, you know, whatever. And, you know, they were gifted in a way that we did not understand. And then, yeah, some of them were crazy and some of them were charlatans, but there was a significant percent or maybe, you know, non -
you know, non -small percent that had an innate ability to see the patterns that we didn't think were possible to see. So I think that is a possibility. But so I'll be a skeptic because anybody who says, I can do magic, give me your money, I'm going to be like, show me your magic, then I'll give you your money, right? But, you know, so let me change the topic. And I promise that we'll get to the hard questions. So.
Child Human Trafficking.
Tell me a little bit about, let's not dive into the hard stuff just yet, but tell me a little bit about what's happening from your perspective. We talked a little bit about Amber Alerts. We talked about the families. We talked about the community around. Yeah. No, I'm glad. What do we need to know as a community and what have you experienced through your environment? So out here in South Dakota, in the seventies, we have two active juvenile missing persons cases. Eighty is one.
In the 2000 to 2010, one. We didn't get anything from 2010. And I think it might have been before 2010. I think it was 2009. But it wasn't until 2016 that we had another kid that's still actively missing. And those were only two. 2019, two. 2020, three. 2021, three. Now this is where I'm horrified.
what I'm about to show you. I have just this little tiny piece of paper, right? 11 kids from 2022.
And then you go to 2023. So like, my little paper, here's my 2022.
2023 -16. Fills up the rest of my page. We are halfway through 2024. We aren't even done with 2024. And there is 72 active missing persons cases for only juveniles. I'm not talking just missing persons in general. This is ridiculous. I mean, if we did the math and I know you were a math kid, that's exponential growth. Yeah. And it's terrifying to see that. And that's just in South Dakota.
If you look at like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Statistics from 2023, overall, there was 70 kids that went missing. All but those, what did I say, 16? 16 kids in 2023 had been either found or had come home. And what I noticed in...
the like in the times and the dates and things in this year that things are happening. You've got multiple people on the same day going missing, typically of the same gender from the same area. But a lot of them are in their teens. And so a lot of the time, and as much as I like hate saying this, but a lot of the time I think people feel like these kids are just running away or are.
you know, staying with friends because that's something you run into in South Dakota. I mean, I moved out at 13. Yeah, I mean, but it's not all of them, right? So even if even if that accounts for some, yeah, there's a percentage and I'm sure we can calculate that percentage and predict that that percentage might apply forward. It's not all of them. No. And there's nobody talking about it. I have seen, I think, three things over the last six months about kids that had like went missing. And one of them, he ended up his kid.
left a party and had driven into a little lake. One of them had fallen into the river just yesterday and he was part of the colony outside of Huron. So it was just a tiny little Amish community basically and one of the kids fell in the river while playing and all of these other kids and we're not even including anybody from the tribe. I mean there's a few kids on there that are from the tribe but like how many of these kids are going missing that aren't getting reported because
There's no way for anybody on the tribes to really report it unless it gets reported from the BIA. And so it's terrifying to me. It's sickening to me, not knowing what is going on. And now we're not even talking about it. This is something I just did, not even, I did it not last night, but the night before and sat down and I was like, what is going on here? Like, this isn't okay.
So let's break this down. What can the parents do? What can the government do? What can the community do? Parents, seriously, I wish that there was a way for apps like Snapchat, apps like Facebook, things like that, to not, to like have to have a verification through an ID, like a physical ID, if you are under 18, to get any of those apps.
But you have apps like Kik, you have apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, where all of these kids are posting all these things. And when everything that we're seeing out in the world is all of these half naked women. I mean, if you go into the kids section, 95 % of the kids clothes, especially for little girls, is crop tops. And it's what? What? I just put my foot down on that yesterday with my wife and she didn't necessarily agree with me.
I mean, she bought it and I was like, no, this is not happening. Yeah, I couldn't imagine like, and that's something where I don't think that, you know, parents who haven't experienced any sort of traumatic event like that and didn't experience a whole lot of trauma in their life ever, I'm finding are usually the parents that don't. Well, she grew up with bombs exploding around her, so she said she should.
I'm more or less mean in the domestic violence, sexual abuse situations. Those kinds of situations, then I see a lot more of the awareness for it, but we're not talking about it enough. We're not putting enough of it. We might talk about it here and there, but we're not putting an initiative to change it. We're not doing anything to change it. Is that part of the community issue? Yes. The awareness and the taboo, which is actually leading to our own ignorance? Yeah.
I have keyed the term. Anybody can start a revolution if you're willing to be the one they burn at the stake. Anybody can start a revolution if you're willing to be the one that's going to stand up and say, we need to talk about this. We need to do something about this. This isn't right. And that goes anywhere from the laws to talking about what we're doing with these apps. You know, they're talking about this big TikTok ban. And it's all because TikTok shop is exploding and they don't like that.
Why aren't we talking about putting an age restriction on things? Why aren't we talking about putting things in place to where we're focusing on these child abductions that are going on everywhere? Sex trafficking isn't at an all time high right now. That's crazy. I think we both know the answer to that is because money talks, shit walks. And this is all about money. It's not about communities.
Yeah. But I think you're right. I think there's something incredibly important in what you're saying. And keep me honest here. You're saying that communities have the ability to make a change. Yeah. If they just understand that taboo is a challenge, yes. But if we don't talk about this, if we don't bring awareness, if we don't think about what's going to need to change, nothing's going to change and money is going to keep moving things as opposed to community. Exactly. You know,
To get the injustice out of criminal justice, we have to stand for justice. There's a lot of people that don't understand how laws work. I was one of those people for a long time. And then I needed to file a protection order against my abusive ex and wasn't in the county I reside in because I had fled my home in fear. And I found out you can't file in the state of South Dakota in a different county. So what did I do?
I went and looked at the laws and I studied them for a minute and I said, okay, this is where this crosses with this. This isn't right. Why would I not be able to, if this is a national standard where pretty much every other state you can. And so I contacted a legislator. I literally just looked at my list of legislators on the South Dakota Code of Laws website and I picked one that lives in my general area and I called him and I said, hi, this is my name.
This is the situation I just ran into and you're the first step in getting this changed because God forbid a mother and her child can't get a protection order against some psycho X and he kills them. Or his or her daughter. Yeah. Or she goes crazy on him one night and stabs him and a kid sees that and then grows up to be a serial killer, you know?
