May 31, 2021 • 19 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
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
(00:28):
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 foreign paper. But sometimes
doing a job is less about your hard qualifications and
more about the bigger ideas that drive you. Now that
(00:49):
you know that we're talking to a real p I 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 p I. 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
(01:12):
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 p I
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
(01:33):
she might be a kindergarten teacher. You wouldn't look at
her and think she's a p I, 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
(01:54):
cops shows on TV. The 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
(02:16):
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,
(02:37):
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, um, locating missing people. Now
(02:58):
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. Well, I was
asking Kitty questions. I was surprised by how much goes
(03:20):
into being a p I that you'd never know without
talking to one. But some of the time, just like
on TV, Katy ends up in a courtroom in front
of a jury, presenting the facts and making her case.
Do you like picking a courtroom? 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
(03:42):
performing the Kitty Hailey who is the investigator? I mean
sometimes on my Grandma and you know, I sit on
the floor with a couple of grandkids and I play
games and I made them cookies and do all the
things that grandma's do, But when I'm in a courtroom,
I have control. Long before she was dominating courtrooms and
(04:07):
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 were Jewish, so we
went to synagogue every Friday night together. I don't think
(04:30):
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 an equity.
And I think if I had not been an investigator,
(04:50):
I probably would have end 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
a look at them. I need to be a part
of the solution, not accorded 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 Camden, New Jersey. It was
a predominantly black school during the Civil Rights movement, and
(05:13):
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.
I put the help them to put them anifescially together.
And the problem was that I did during school time,
during on school copying machines. So yeah, I shouldn't have
(05:35):
done that maybe. Unsurprisingly, this is when she had encountered
with a police captain who ended up becoming her husband.
He was branching off from the force to start his
own p I 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
(05:56):
over because it's what I really wanted to do. So
that's only four years old. Kitty Haley was a p I,
but it definitely wasn't glamorous, you know, we were we
have a small agency initially, and it was really 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
(06:21):
from each other, messy stuff. My kids went to college
because I did domestic work. I mean, God was cheating people.
It was wonderful. Infidelity pays the bills. Yeah, absolutely, the
stereotypical stuff people think of when you're a p I,
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
(06:43):
nights and weeks and um 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 threw the kids in the back of the
car with a blanket and I go out. We can
all stood on surveillance together. I read the books. I
tell them stories as we were driving, you know, hook
(07:06):
them in with seatbelts and give them things to play with,
and every once in a while I go, Okay, guys,
hang on, mom's gotta 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
(07:26):
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 Nose Jobs. Get to know Express find your location
(07:50):
at express pros dot com or on the Express Jobs app.
Now back to on the job. Despite the dick life
of starting a p I 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
(08:10):
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
(08:31):
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 evidences. She says, you also have
(08:53):
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 overlook 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
(09:15):
explain it to an attorney, then you might as well
never have done the work. Basically, you might do seventy
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
(09:35):
skills they don't tell you about on law and order
s Vu. 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 this is oh,
this is great, but you're if you're working for yourself,
you've got to do all of that or good work
for somebody else, which you can do. Kitty says. There
(09:59):
are so many respects 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 bit of
(10:20):
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,
(10:41):
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
Katie got involved, only to later find out that without
their nice clothing, they were members of the Hell's Angels
who were involved in a dispute with a rival gang.
(11:01):
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 identify themselves as the FBI and wanted
to know what I was doing in the house. That
(11:23):
was not something that a twenty four year old should
have to go through. It was scary. Do they 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, 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
(11:44):
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 kind
of don't feel comfortable doing. Yeah, but I'm not them.
(12:05):
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 going to find X, Y
and Z. The prosecution investigator and the defense investigator part
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
Kitty saying he suspected his wife was cheating on him
every day when he went to work. He wanted her
to find out. It 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,
(13:12):
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 out of hand, sleep with
somebody else's, says them. So no, I'm not the people
(13:37):
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.
(13:58):
Kitty has a deep respect for impact her work has,
good or bad, which is why over the last many
years she has 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
(14:18):
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 p I sounds
like a cool job, and Kitty says it is. But
on the flip side, there are times when you are
(14:41):
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 w fitness to
their horror and I need to record it. I need
(15:04):
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 a meaning and gravitas.
And that's that comes from respect. Talking with Kitty reminded
(15:24):
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.
(15:48):
That's always stuck with me because I feel like so
many of us right off what we can do for
because we don't have the education for it, or we
didn't grow up around it, or we don't look the
are 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,
(16:10):
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 the case and
(16:32):
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 could say his name because
(16:56):
he is now free. It's jim Dennis. He was wrongfully
incarcerated almost twenty years ago. Jimmy Dennis is an R
and B musician in Philadelphia, and when he was twenty one,
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 eighteen years later I
(17:18):
was sitting in a coffee shop and I got a
telephone call and a voice said, Mrs 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 said in that coffee shop
and cried like a baby. It was so wonderful to
(17:45):
know that work I had done for eighteen 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 for hole again, but at least she was
able to live a life outside of the four walls
(18:05):
of an eight by ten, which he was in for
eighteen years. You know that was humbling. So yeah, I
love what I do. It's not easy. It's hard work.
It's long hours, and it's so freaking satisfying. It's great,
(18:26):
and I'm going to do it until i can't stand
up anymore. For On the Job, I'm Modus Gray. To
learn more about Kitty and her work, go to Kitty
Haley dot com. Thanks for listening to On the Job,
(18:53):
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. The season of
On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were
written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer
is Sandy Smallens. 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 I Heart
(19:13):
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 discovering your life's work. Audiation
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
(00:28):
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 foreign paper. But sometimes
doing a job is less about your hard qualifications and
more about the bigger ideas that drive you. Now that
(00:49):
you know that we're talking to a real p I 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 p I. 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
(01:12):
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 p I
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
(01:33):
she might be a kindergarten teacher. You wouldn't look at
her and think she's a p I, 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
(01:54):
cops shows on TV. The 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
(02:16):
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,
(02:37):
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, um, locating missing people. Now
(02:58):
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. Well, I was
asking Kitty questions. I was surprised by how much goes
(03:20):
into being a p I that you'd never know without
talking to one. But some of the time, just like
on TV, Katy ends up in a courtroom in front
of a jury, presenting the facts and making her case.
Do you like picking a courtroom? 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
(03:42):
performing the Kitty Hailey who is the investigator? I mean
sometimes on my Grandma and you know, I sit on
the floor with a couple of grandkids and I play
games and I made them cookies and do all the
things that grandma's do, But when I'm in a courtroom,
I have control. Long before she was dominating courtrooms and
(04:07):
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 were Jewish, so we
went to synagogue every Friday night together. I don't think
(04:30):
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 an equity.
And I think if I had not been an investigator,
(04:50):
I probably would have end 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
a look at them. I need to be a part
of the solution, not accorded 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 Camden, New Jersey. It was
a predominantly black school during the Civil Rights movement, and
(05:13):
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.
I put the help them to put them anifescially together.
And the problem was that I did during school time,
during on school copying machines. So yeah, I shouldn't have
(05:35):
done that maybe. Unsurprisingly, this is when she had encountered
with a police captain who ended up becoming her husband.
He was branching off from the force to start his
own p I 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
(05:56):
over because it's what I really wanted to do. So
that's only four years old. Kitty Haley was a p I,
but it definitely wasn't glamorous, you know, we were we
have a small agency initially, and it was really 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
(06:21):
from each other, messy stuff. My kids went to college
because I did domestic work. I mean, God was cheating people.
It was wonderful. Infidelity pays the bills. Yeah, absolutely, the
stereotypical stuff people think of when you're a p I,
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
(06:43):
nights and weeks and um 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 threw the kids in the back of the
car with a blanket and I go out. We can
all stood on surveillance together. I read the books. I
tell them stories as we were driving, you know, hook
(07:06):
them in with seatbelts and give them things to play with,
and every once in a while I go, Okay, guys,
hang on, mom's gotta 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
(07:26):
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 Nose Jobs. Get to know Express find your location
(07:50):
at express pros dot com or on the Express Jobs app.
Now back to on the job. Despite the dick life
of starting a p I 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
(08:10):
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
(08:31):
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 evidences. She says, you also have
(08:53):
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 overlook 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
(09:15):
explain it to an attorney, then you might as well
never have done the work. Basically, you might do seventy
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
(09:35):
skills they don't tell you about on law and order
s Vu. 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 this is oh,
this is great, but you're if you're working for yourself,
you've got to do all of that or good work
for somebody else, which you can do. Kitty says. There
(09:59):
are so many respects 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 bit of
(10:20):
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,
(10:41):
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
Katie got involved, only to later find out that without
their nice clothing, they were members of the Hell's Angels
who were involved in a dispute with a rival gang.
(11:01):
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 identify themselves as the FBI and wanted
to know what I was doing in the house. That
(11:23):
was not something that a twenty four year old should
have to go through. It was scary. Do they 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, 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
(11:44):
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 kind
of don't feel comfortable doing. Yeah, but I'm not them.
(12:05):
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 going to find X, Y
and Z. The prosecution investigator and the defense investigator part
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
Kitty saying he suspected his wife was cheating on him
every day when he went to work. He wanted her
to find out. It 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,
(13:12):
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 out of hand, sleep with
somebody else's, says them. So no, I'm not the people
(13:37):
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.
(13:58):
Kitty has a deep respect for impact her work has,
good or bad, which is why over the last many
years she has 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
(14:18):
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 p I sounds
like a cool job, and Kitty says it is. But
on the flip side, there are times when you are
(14:41):
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 w fitness to
their horror and I need to record it. I need
(15:04):
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 a meaning and gravitas.
And that's that comes from respect. Talking with Kitty reminded
(15:24):
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.
(15:48):
That's always stuck with me because I feel like so
many of us right off what we can do for
because we don't have the education for it, or we
didn't grow up around it, or we don't look the
are 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,
(16:10):
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 the case and
(16:32):
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 could say his name because
(16:56):
he is now free. It's jim Dennis. He was wrongfully
incarcerated almost twenty years ago. Jimmy Dennis is an R
and B musician in Philadelphia, and when he was twenty one,
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 eighteen years later I
(17:18):
was sitting in a coffee shop and I got a
telephone call and a voice said, Mrs 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 said in that coffee shop
and cried like a baby. It was so wonderful to
(17:45):
know that work I had done for eighteen 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 for hole again, but at least she was
able to live a life outside of the four walls
(18:05):
of an eight by ten, which he was in for
eighteen years. You know that was humbling. So yeah, I
love what I do. It's not easy. It's hard work.
It's long hours, and it's so freaking satisfying. It's great,
(18:26):
and I'm going to do it until i can't stand
up anymore. For On the Job, I'm Modus Gray. To
learn more about Kitty and her work, go to Kitty
Haley dot com. Thanks for listening to On the Job,
(18:53):
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. The season of
On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were
written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer
is Sandy Smallens. 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 I Heart
(19:13):
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 discovering your life's work. Audiation
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