The goal of this e-newsletter is to provide you with critical information that will help you prevail in your business affairs wherever fact finding is an essential component. We will share what we have learned in our 30+ years as professional investigators and intelligence analysts.

tracings@traceinvestigations.com.

 

Sincerely,

Several years ago, Trace Investigations was retained to conduct a fact-finding investigation on behalf of a young man charged with attacking a sleeping man and mutilating him. Our client, a well-known criminal defense attorney, was appointed to act as defense counsel.

Brian Bennett was an angry young man, the kind who carried an argument or grudge to the extreme. His extremes usually ended in violence. His wife of two years had discovered that the hard way, when he knocked her out during one of their frequent arguments. She left him the next day and with the help of her family and a good attorney, she had him arrested and obtained a divorce. Bennett served a stint in prison and managed to stay out of trouble after his release. For a while. He was never one to let a grudge go unanswered, and when he heard that his ex-wife was living with her new boyfriend, he saw a chance to have his revenge, in an unusual and perverse way.

 

By Don C. Johnson, CLI

He is remembered well by many and missed to this day. I was honored to know him and to work closely with him on a number of cases over the years.

Attorney F. Thomas "Tom" Schornhorst passed away last year in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was an adjunct professor of law at the University of Mississippi. Tom was a Professor of Law Emeritus at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law. He retired from IU in 1998 but continued to work in Indiana as a court appointed criminal defense attorney. Our first case together was several years ago, in the early 1990s, on a federal habeas corpus petition for a defendant on Indiana's death row, Keith Canaan, convicted for murdering a young woman in her apartment in Evansville. Tom's petition, in essence, argued not only that the defendant had ineffective assistance of counsel but that the jury which convicted him heard testimony about the defendant's prior criminal history, which should have been excluded. Tom got involved after all state appeals were denied. The original trial was ten years earlier and Tom asked that I locate the original twelve jurors and interview them. Tom wanted to know whether or not the jurors would have sentenced the defendant to death had they not known about his criminal history. There was no actual innocence issue that could be considered. I was able to locate... Read More