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​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, VPNs, my personal story and the police academy. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. Welcome to episode number 30 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. 30 weeks. Man, that's a long time to stick with this. I'm glad I'm having fun. I hope you guys are as well. I want to thank Gold Shield patron, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, Kate Wagner, Rebecca Jackson, and Marco Carocari.

Your support keeps the lights on in the bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/30. And if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon.

​My first question this week comes from Ros Guggi. Ros writes, "My killer hides behind VPN when sending messages to a newspaper, so they aren't able to track where they come from. And he trips up, I think by sending a message from his phone. It's a new phone. So I say he hasn't set up VPN on it. Can you set up VPN on the phone? Or is it easier for police to trace where a phone message comes from?" Great question Ros. For listeners unfamiliar with VPNs, VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. To understand how a VPN works, we need to start with a basic understanding of how we connect to the internet. Whether you're connected via an ethernet cable from your cable modem to your desktop or Wi-Fi to your laptop or using an app on your cell phone, the device you're using has an IP address, and IP stands for Internet Protocol address.

So this address is a series of two or three digit numbers separated by decimal points. And those numbers all range anywhere between zero and 255. So an IP address might look something like 199.34.228.79. So if you send an email or visit a website using a regular old internet connection, the recipient of the email or that website host will be able to see what your IP address is. For an email, your IP address will be listed in the header. Now many of you are thinking what's a header? That's something that you can turn on to make visible using your email program, but it's definitely there for any email that's sent or received. So if you go into your email program and turn on headers, you will see what I'm talking about.

So for a website, the web host logs the IP addresses of every connection that's made to the website. So email and websites are going to see your IP Address. Equally as important, it's possible for anyone in that chain between your computer or phone and the email recipient or the website that you're visiting can potentially see what you're sending or receiving. And this is because your connection is unencrypted. This can become an issue if you're using a public Wi-Fi access point, like in the gate area of an airport while you're waiting for a flight or in a coffee shop. And hackers can use your unencrypted connection to the Wi-Fi to get access to things like your Facebook username and password.

Anyway, getting back to the IP address thing, your IP address is linked to the internet service provider you're connected to. So if a kidnapper sends an email ransom letter, I as the detective can look at the sender's...                                                                                   Continue reading...

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​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, therapist confidentiality, Gladys R. Questionnaires and police versus medical examiners. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is episode number 29 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters, write professional quality crime related fiction. I want to thank Gold Shield Patron, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club Patreon, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, and Kate Wagner. Your support definitely keeps the lights on in the bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and checking out their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes by going to writersdetective.com/29 and if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micropayments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/Patreon P. A. T. R. E. O. N.

​This week's first question comes from Julia Derek and you can find her at juliaderek.com and the link for that will be in the show notes at writersdetective.com/29. Julia writes, "If a child is victimized and also the only witness to a big crime, how would the police approach this? This is the scenario in my current thriller, I have a therapist who's working with the child rehabbing the major PTSD the child has suffered while being part of a sex trafficking ring producing child pornos while also fishing for information about the sex ring for the cops to help their investigation. Will the therapist be allowed to share what she or he learns in the sessions with the child, with the child's parent? The child is 11. I'm thinking yes, but I could be wrong. Thanks, Julia". Thank you so much for your question, Julia.

The police will often use a trained forensic psychologists to conduct the interviews of children that have been victimized and these sessions however are video recorded with the specific intention of using that session as evidence. So this kind of interview would likely have been done shortly after learning of the victimization as part of the initial police investigation. But based on your question, Julia, it sounds like this part of the story would actually be after that initial report to the police in start of the investigation. So where the child is now receiving ongoing therapy as part of the healing process. So to answer your question about the legality of sharing the therapists or of the therapist's sharing what she learns with the parent, I turn to psychologist Dr. Vanessa Holtgrave for help with answering this. You might remember Dr. Holtgrave from episode 15 of this podcast and if you haven't listened to my interview with her, be sure to check that out. It's episode 15 in the back list.

So this is what Dr. Holtgrave had to say, and it's quite long, but it's really informative. "Child is victimized and also the only witness to a major crime. Does the crime involved the child or was the crime independent of the child's victimization? Was the perpetrator or perpetrators already apprehended or will this information aid in the apprehension of the perpetrators?...                                                    Continue reading...

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​​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, diamond jubilee, grand juries and cultural diversity.

I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. This is episode number 28 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear mom, happy birthday to you. The number one fan of this podcast is none other than my mother. She's celebrating her diamond jubilee, let's call it, this Tuesday. I wanted to not only publicly embarrass myself through singing but I wanted to wish you, mom, a very happy birthday. Thank you for listening and thank you for your undying support. I could not have asked for a more loving and supportive mom. I love you and happy birthday.

Speaking of thank yous, I want to thank gold shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and coffee club patrons, Joan Raymond, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, and Kate Wagner. Your support keeps the lights on in the bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at WritersDetective.com/28. Now if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit WritersDetective.com/Patreon.                                                                                                                                                                                         

In 1962, Noah Weinstein and William J. Shaw wrote, "A grand jury is a short lived representative, non political body of citizens functioning without hope of personal aggrandizement. It comes from the citizens at large and soon disappears into its anonymity without individual recognition or personal reward." Today, we're talking about grand juries. Now in the United States, a federal grand jury consists of 16 to 23 people and it's an important tool that allows prosecutors to issue subpoenas that require people to produce documents and other evidence and subpoenas can also be used to compel people to testify under oath before a grand jury.

There are also grand juries at the county level in many states, so those grand juries investigate state crimes, not federal ones, and those are made up of either 11, 19, or 23 people, depending on the population of the county, or at least that's the way it works in California. For criminal law, grand juries are tools used as part of criminal procedure to bring an indictment against a defendant. Now this might be surprising to some of you listening outside of the United States as grand juries have been abolished or are rarely used throughout the rest of the English speaking world.

Now if you're a fan of true crime or have been following the Mueller investigation, you have undoubtedly heard the term indictment before. It's important to understand that indictment or being indicted means that the criminal...                                                           Continue reading...

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, APB mailing list, human trafficking and Children of the Night. I'm Adam Richardson, and this the Writer's Detective Bureau. This is episode 27 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. If you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you. It allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon.

I want to thank Gold Shield patron, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, and Kate Wagner. Your support definitely keeps the lights on in the Bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/27.

By the time you listen to this episode, you should have received the January APB email from me if you've joined my mailing list in the past. One major change to the APB email for 2019 is that it's now a monthly newsletter. Now that I'm producing podcast episodes every week, I'm having to budget my time a little bit differently. What's in the APB? Well, throughout the month, I squirrel away links and resources that I think your writing will benefit from, and then save them for this monthly email. Think of them as your very own curated list of resources for crime fiction writing. For the January APB, there were over 20 links to various free resources. Since this is the start of a new year, and several hundred new members have joined the mailing list over the last six months, I included some of the greatest hits from previous APBs and mixed them in with a bunch of new content.

If you would like to be included in the monthly APB email, which is full of curated links for crime fiction writers, go to writersdetective.com/mailinglist or visit any page on the Writer's Detective website, actually, and there will be a banner there for you to join.

January is or was, by the time you're listening to this, human trafficking prevention month. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about HT from both an awareness perspective and a storytelling perspective. Now, this can be a tough topic to listen to. There's going to be some profanity, but I'll try not to be overly graphic. Now, that said, please treat this as a trigger warning, and take that into account before continuing to listen to the rest of this episode. If cozy mysteries are your thing, this may not be the episode for you.

Human trafficking or HT as we abbreviate it, obviously, takes many forms around the world. While this is an international problem, I can almost guarantee that it is happening locally right now in your community. The most common form of human trafficking that we see domestically here in the United States and in our neighborhoods is pimping. You have made the terms pimping and pandering as legal terms, which are commonly referenced with regard to prostitution investigations. Let's start with what each of these mean...      Continue reading...