Back to Blog Home
Private Investigators in the News:
Posted December 18
PI Helps Family Find Daughter Taken By Internet Friend
CIRCLEVILLE, Ohio -- A Cleveland private investigator helped the family of a 16-year-old girl reunite after the girl was kidnapped by someone she met on the Internet, the Cleveland Pain Dealer reported earlier this week.
Investigator Paul Baeppler received a phone call earlier this year from a woman who said in a thick Polish accent that her niece had left her home on the southern coast of New York's Long Island in September with a man from Ohio whom she met online. The girl's parents had filed a missing person report in Suffolk County. Detectives exhausted their leads.
Then, a little more than a month ago, the girl called home. She spoke quietly as though afraid someone nearby would hear, then abruptly said she had to go and hung up. Using the phone number from the caller ID, the authorities tried to track the girl, but again hit dead ends.
The aunt knew an attorney who knew a second attorney who had referred her to Baeppler. Could he help?
Baeppler quoted the aunt his rates: $150 an hour for database searching, $100 an hour plus expenses for field work. She said she would have to check her niece's parents and call him back.
Baeppler comes from a police family. His father, Gregory Michael Baeppler, is a former Cleveland police commander and now the safety director in Parma. The son is a Cleveland police sergeant with 16 years on the job. He moonlights as an investigator for Integrity Investigations, which he founded in 2004.
Most of Baeppler's cases involve finding witnesses for attorneys or proving fraud for insurance companies. He had worked only one previous missing person case, and that five was years ago.
Baeppler feared the New York girl would suffer long-term harm or that she could have been sold into sexual slavery, as has happened in other cases. And then there was the possibility that she was dead.
When he worked the previous case, his daughters had been too young for him to relate. Now they were 7 and 9 years old, and he worried, especially about the Internet.
A week passed, then the aunt called back. Baeppler was on the case.
-more-
