Who is Sidney Black?

In one month, Sidney Black Investigations will celebrate it's third anniversary. I am proud of the milestone, but even more proud that by then, we will have closed our two-hundredth case (and counting). That is two-hundred people, families, and small businesses that have trusted our assistance through their most challenging and sensitive situations.

Like it says in the copy posted here, on our website, and the various social media pages we neglect to maintain, we represent an anomaly in the Private Investigation industry. We make a point of operating at the cutting-edge of OSINT investigative tools and techniques, but the point is not only to offer a top-tier service, at the highest professional and legal standard, but to do so as affordably and accessibly as possible. Everyone should have access to a professional and authoritative determination of the truth.

Many agencies, public and private, are already using OSINT to investigate their most consequential and complicated cases. There are free to use tools that will accomplish incredible feats of fact finding, like telling you the exact day and time a photograph was taken, using historical weather data, and the direction of the sun. Questions that used to be impossible or impractical to answer can now be found sitting at a desk. In other words, questions that used to be too expensive, or logistically complicated to answer can now be found affordably and conveniently from a desk. That means that a missing person, the identity behind harassing correspondence, a second opinion on a ruling made by the authorities; these investigative services are no longer reserved only for people that can pay hundreds of dollars an hour. Private investigators in general are useful to more people, because they can answer a much broader array of questions than anyone could ten years ago - provided they are taking full advantage of what's possible via OSINT.

Starting today, Sidney Black Investigations will be posting here twice a month. 'Blog' is an awful word (it sounds like the word for a thing you'd find clogging a bathtub drain), but who are we to fight with language? There are two blog-typical things you will not find here, however. We will not use AI to write anything that appears on here (or anywhere on our website), and we promise; content will not be guided by promotional considerations. We want you to hire us if you need a P.I., obviously, but that's not what this is about. Entries will go back and forth, between writing on a general subject of interest in private investigation, with a focus on emergent issues we see in our work. Our next general interest entry will be the entry after next, about the invisible power of the role played by social-engineering in the success of online scams. It is an unacknowledged crime, the psychological and emotional attack on victims that is what makes these scams work.

The other sequence of posts will be a case log, each entry sharing the particulars of one of our cases (with client permission, and identifying details changed). Each post will tell the true story of an investigation, what we found, and how we found it. We will start with a first entry to the Case Log, by sharing the story of Robyn McCall, one year to the day since her passing in Chatham, Ontario. Her death was an apparent suicide; documents from the scene show a designation of "suicide" was made from the outset. However, any sudden death, no matter the apparent cause, is supposed to be accompanied by an investigation to ensure this to be fact. The official investigation into Robyn's death was closed, but not finished, leaving questions of legitimate concern to family and friends without the answers they deserve. We conducted an investigation on behalf of the family after the official investigation found "no further reason to investigate". We found that inquiries into the timing and circumstances surrounding her death were either not done, or left substantially incomplete. The facts that were left unexamined, and witnesses left uninterviewed, cast serious doubt on every assumption that was made to justify closing the case.

Before we get into details from the police report in the first entry to our case log, we encourage you to listen to our conversation about the case with Tim Farmer and Chris St. Germaine, on The OSINT Output.