|
Corporate gumshoes
It seemed a simple crime: An armed robbery near Philadelphia
turned sour when the robber killed a fast food restaurant
employee so she couldn’t identify him. At least,
that’s what police concluded more than 15 years
ago. But it’s not what really happened.
The
true story came out years later when the dead woman’s
family sued the restaurant for endangering her. Preparing
its defense, the restaurant company hired The Academy
Group, a Manassas company that deploys former FBI agents
with forensic expertise to help solve crimes. Their
quest? To determine if the murder was indeed to cover
up the robbery or if it was staged. If they could prove
killer and the victim knew each other, the restaurant
might be off the hook.
One
of the Academy Group investigators, a former FBI agent
and company founder named Roger Depue, had a hunch that
the crime was really one of passion. “It was a
brutal murder with four modes of death,” Depue
recalls. “The victim had been beaten, stabbed,
strangled and asphyxiated. He had stabbed her in the
neck and throat so viciously that the knife blade lodged
between the fourth and fifth vertebrae and could not
be pulled out.”
All
of that seemed excessive if the crime had been, in fact,
a happenstance robbery. Supporting their thesis with
photographic evidence, Depue and his partner, Ken Baker,
broke the case by zeroing in on another suspect, the
victim’s fiancee, who eventually confessed to the
crime.
The
Academy Group has been cracking cases like this for
corporate customers since 1989, when Depue started the
company with other retirees from such security agencies
as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service. They specialize
in “solving behavioral problems,” and like
all good private investigators, they keep their investigations
confidential. “We won’t talk about active
cases — whether we are involved in them or not
– and we won’t name any of our clients,”
says Martin Rehberg, the company’s chief operating
officer. The company has 10 employees, and it does not
disclose its annual revenues. But Rehberg says the company
has done work for 40 percent of the top 50 corporations
in the United States.
The
company also provides expert testimony, security training
and advice on everything from executive protection to
liability issues. They help companies identify threats
noting that most of them stem from problems in the workplace,
not from the outside. Troublesome employees should be
allowed to leave with dignity, but executives should
assess his or her potential for violent behavior. That’s
where The Academy Group’s profilers earn their
money, Depue says. “We’ve been in this business
for 13 years, and we’ve never had a situation where
we said someone was dangerous who wasn’t, and –
knock on wood – we’ve never had someone who
we said wouldn’t be violent who was.”
—
Karl Rhodes
Return
to Virginia Business - December 2002
|
|
