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ON THE JOB: Real-life detective’s work isn't as exciting as that of fictional counterparts By Dan Sewell The Associated Press WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. He grabs the just-delivered stack of newspapers and rustles through them, scanning each page from top to bottom before flipping onward. Suddenly, his eyebrows dart up and he taps the paper with his index finger: “Look at that!” On the page in question sits a photo of a massive traffic jam caused by a boat sliding off a trailer. On that day, thousands of com muters were annoyed; on this day, some four months later, Patrick J. McKenna, private investigator, is jubilant. His job, as he sees it, for $100 an hour, is “to help people get out of jams.” And his client — a young professional man, charged with lewd-and-lascivious conduct — is in a much worse jam than the one that delayed those commuters. Up front, McKenna gets the of ficial story — what his client has been charged with, all the details authorities have collected. Then he looks for contradictions. “Usually, when you start out, it looks really bad,” he explains. “Then the more you find out, the picture starts changing.” And the best way to change the picture is to find an alibi. Take the newspaper traffic pho to. It will prove that his client could not have driven from his downtown office to a suburban neighborhood in time to have exposed himself to his accuser. Only one problem. As he gives one more look to the paper, ordered from the public library, he realizes it’s dated the SAME DAY as the offense meaning the traffic tieup occurred the day before. “I thought I was going to look like a genius there,” McKenna says ruefully, quickly folding up the pa pers and pushing them to the side. He’s looked like a genius be fore. Once, McKenna was working THE McKENNA FILE: By The Associated Press The file on Patrick James McKen na, private investigator. Born: Sept. 16, 1948, East Chica go, Ind. Personal: Oldest of 10 children; father and grandfather were labor or ganizers. Divorced father of daughter, 18, and son, 12; legal guardian for two severely retarded young women. Education: Bachelor's in adminis trative justice from Southern Illinois University, master's in corrections from Chicago State University, on behalf of a man charged with an especially brutal rape. The man had a record, the evidence seemed stacked high against him, and he had little money to spend for a de fense. McKenna came up with pivotal evidence by driving down busy U.S. and balancing a video camera aimed to show both the speedome ter and the highway as the time flashed on the tape. At the end of the trip, McKenna had proof that his man did not have the time to make the trip from a place where witnesses saw him to the place where the tape occurred. An iron-clad alibi. The verdict: Not guilty. So when the traffic tieup photo didn’t work out, McKenna wasn’t worried: “I’ve got plenty of tricks left.” “Patience and persistence,”’ he says, repeating softly, “patience and persistence.” In 13 years as a private eye, Pat McKenna has helped plenty of peo ple in trouble, including some you may have heard of. William Kennedy Smith, for one. O.J. Simpson, for another. Those cases helped establish the garrulous, salty-tongued ex-Marine as a top real-life practitioner of the usually secretive, often romanti cized, trade. McKenna, wrote Joseph Bosco in his Simpson trial book, “looks, talks and lives a life close to rivaling the great P.Ls of fiction.” “A lot of what I do is mun dane,”” McKenna says. He searches Military: Two years Marines, one as combat squad leader in Vietnam. Job History: bartender, probation Officer, public defender's investigator, sentencing consultant. Prized Possessions: Memorabilia about his family, the Marines and the Simpson case, including London tabloid story headlined “The Private Eye Who Divided America.” Quote: “Vietnam gave me a whole different perspective on life. Live for the day. Grab all the action you can every day.” records, reads files, sits through stakeouts. Nevertheless, his job has taken him to jungle airstrips in South America, banks in Switzerland, beaches in the Caribbean and deep into the underside of Palm Beach society while working with such at torneys as F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran and Roy Black. For nearly two years, often 18 hours a day, he lived the Simpson case — as Bailey says, “checking out every road under every stone.” “A good lawyer will always have a good investigator,” says Bai ley, who called on McKenna soon after the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Gold man. Sure, investigators are still called upon to serve as gumshoes for criminal cases, or spies for jeal ous spouses. But these days, they also are hired in white-collar cases. They can sniff out information faster and cheaper than lawyers who pursue documents and deposi tions. Bailey, who started out as a pri vate investigator four decades ago, says there’s no substitute for going out and knocking on doors, finding “and eyeballing” the witnesses and evidence, McKenna, say attorneys he’s worked with, combines the best of old and new — he’s well-educated, with a master’s degree in correc tions from Chicago — State University, and conversant enough with computers to at least know what information is available. Attorneys say the 48-year-old “Patience and persistence ... A lot of what I do is mundane.” Patrick J. McKenna, Florida private investigator former probation officer and pre sentencing investigator also has crucial intangibles. He's fearless and relentless. He usually shuns electronic surveillance devices used by colleagues — “Inspector Gad gets,” he’s dubbed them — and doesn’t carry a weapon. He spends much of his time on the phone, working sources, kibitz ing, trading notes with law-enforcement —_ acquaintances, chasing tips. Earthy, witty and animated, but with a soothing politeness and friendliness, McKenna “just has a way of putting people at ease,”’ Mi ami attorney Stephen Bronis says. He blends in. “And,” Bailey adds with a chuckle, “he’s got a lot of Irish charm.” It was McKenna who unearthed a key break in the Simpson murder trial — discovery of tapes in which detective Mark Fuhrman used racist language and bragged of rogue ac tivities. Luck, he says — “but it was hard-working luck.” When he worked for Black at the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, McKenna immersed himself in the Palm Beach bar scene, prob ing deep into the background of Smith’s accuser, finding contradic tions in her story. Simpson was different. A native of southside Chicago, McKenna initially was dispatched there to re trace Simpson’s steps — literally timing and counting the number of paces from his hotel room to the ice machine, for example — after his flight from Los Angeles the night of the murders. Over the next two weeks, McKenna, sometimes posing as a reporter and thrusting a tape recorder into a detective’s face, monitored the police investigation while lining up “demeanor witness es” who would testify that Simpson’s behavior didn’t seem un usual Then, he joined two other veter an P.L.s in Los Angeles working for the defense. His role included more than 50 visits to the murder scene, literally giving his blood for a de fense forensic test of how quickly blood would dry on the glove found there and, mainly, chasing leads. There were leads from kooks. There were leads from witness wannabes. There were false leads, he suspects, from allies of the po lice and prosecution. But many leads initially seemed legitimate and, as McKenna re flects, “in this business, you never know. He shot pool with a Stephen Seagal lookalike whose inside in formation turned out to be idle gossip about prosecutor Marcia Clark, drank beer in a biker bar with a former girlfriend of Fuhrman, and flew to Wichita, Kan., to grab ciga rette butts out of the garbage can of a woman who claimed to have been smoking a cigarette at the scene the night of the murders. Then, among the stack of phone messages he waded through in July 1995 was one from a man who told him of a woman named Laura who had interviews with Fuhrman — on tape. Rumors of such tapes had been circulating, but McKenna’s tip was greeted skeptically by Simpson lawyers, who'd seen so many leads collapse. He doggedly pursued it, leading to aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinney in North Carolina. The result: The tapes that blast ed Fuhrman’s credibility McKenna, who did consulting work for Simpson's new defense team in the civil trial, still insists Simpson is innocent. But the bot tom line to his job, McKenna says, is that “I ain’t the one to do the judging.” Most of Patrick J. McKenna’s work doesn’t make headlines. But then, that’s a P.I.’s life So, McKenna finds the biologi cal mother of a man adopted as an infant He tails a New York woman during her Florida vacation to satis fy her husband that she’s keeping her pledge to stay away from alco hol. He tracks a wealthy English family’s globe-trotting heir on be half of a client who wants to sue him for giving her the AIDS virus. He tries to find the hit-and-run driver who killed a client’s daugh ter He makes the rounds of South Florida strip clubs, carrying a snap shot of a woman who accuses a client of raping her after picking her up in one. He’s been finding witnesses to undermine her credibility Blending easily among the other middle-aged men who are the club’s chief patrons, McKenna chats up dancers and waitresses. He gets no apparent leads, but mentally files names and other information. Someday, they might be useful. “It’s a tough job, isn’t it?” he says, draining his beer while watch ing a show. “But in this business, you never know.” EDITOR'S NOTE — Dan Sewell is the AP’s Southeast regional reporter, based in Atlanta.
Newspaper Details
Centralia Chronicle
Centralia, Washington, US
Thu, Mar 13, 1997
Page 24
Full Page
Clipped by
Lael H.
USA 25 Jun 2026
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