The television character Felicity isn’t the only college student who can fit in a second life between classes. When she’s not hitting the books, private investigator and college junior Paula Washow, 51, is hitting the streets. Or being hit, for that matter. Washow’s non-scripted, action-packed story includes the best of times–locating runaway children and missing heirs–and the worst of times–being left for dead in 1980 on a dark Milwaukee street in the aftermath of a professional hit. “I would not recommend this business to anyone,” says Washow, a mother of two and grandmother of four. “Why do you think I’m going to college?”
Washow, who works in Milwaukee, offers some background notes that might help answer her own question.
While in her 20s, at the urging of a friend, she traded the secure and relatively mundane life of a legal secretary for that of a gumshoe.
“I had young children and I needed a job with flexibility,” she recalls. “I did not want to do door-to-door sales. My mother did that and there was no separate home life. The phone was always ringing. I wanted a job that would give me a professional life and a private life.”
So as other ’70s moms seeking flexibility signed on as Tupperware and Avon representatives, Washow opened the door to a wild and woolly world few of us will ever know. “At the time I got in, females accounted for less than 1 percent of private investigators,” she says.
A few years later, in 1988, she bought out her employer to become president and owner of Alpha Omega Security, today one of the largest security firms in the Midwest. (The company has 35 employees — primarily ex-cops and criminal justice students — and is retained by clients worldwide, including those in Austria, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Iran.)
Washow’s days and nights were spent debugging telephones, making undercover narcotics purchases, conducting counter-industrial espionage, tracing birth parents, tracking unfaithful spouses and more. In short, if you’ve read it in a hard-boiled detective novel, Washow’s packed it into her 24 years as a private eye.
Recently, she helped Jennifer Caulfield (not her real name), a New Jersey social worker, locate her birth mother and blood relatives, all living in Janesville, Wis.
Caulfield’s birth mother “had placed a letter in the adoption file saying she did want to see me. But the adoption agency wouldn’t allow it.”
Washow set Caulfield on the track of having the State of Wisconsin overturn the agency’s decision while she did the physical footwork of finding the mother, who was 16 and unmarried at the time Caulfield was born.
“It all came together at the same time,” Caulfield says. She has since spent time with her biological grandparents, who have embraced her adoptive parents and told her about her birth mother.
“The great thing about Paula is that she’s not just a P.I.,” says Caulfield. “She gets in touch with people’s feelings and makes sure everything is OK on both sides.”
Washow’s business venture has won national recognition. In 1995, she was one of five U.S. recipients of the Enterprise Award recognizing successful women-owned businesses. The criteria for the award, which is co-sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Association and Avon Products Inc., include overcoming extreme financial and life challenges.
Proud of her achievements, Washow is vague about her personal past. The few phrases that she does allow–“extreme personal adversity,” “rural poverty America”–suggest hard-boiled fodder.
“I didn’t have a Beaver Cleaver family,” says Washow, the older of two children.
“When you come from a lower socioeconomic background, you have the goal of surviving,” Washow says. “I learned victimization and caregiving at an early age. I learned survival skills and brought them to the urban jungle. But I wanted to go beyond surviving to thriving — I wanted to do more for other people. My female side, in addition to my personal background, is responsible for me wanting to give back to my community and clients. I feel a personal responsibility to my clients.”
Her calling, she says, is unsolved crimes, and she often represents rape victims and parents of missing children.
“I’m in business to help victims get closure and results,” she says. “By the time clients come to me, they’re in the worst, highly charged emotional state. Through life, I’ve learned to be an emotional support for families. And while I bring this into my work, that’s not why I’ve been hired. In order to be an effective investigator, I need to put my efforts into the investigation. So I help clients get on track to emotional recovery.”
In fact, Washow won’t take on a client until he or she signs an agreement to undergo professional counseling.
“I get the name of that support person, and I do check on them,” she says.
Washow has succeeded financially in a business that is not always kind to those who choose it.
“A lot of people get involved in private investigation, especially ex-cops,” says John Johnson, chief of police in Muskego, Wis., who works with Washow on a security committee for the Wisconsin Chief of Police Association.
“Not a lot of people make a good dollar in the long run,” he notes. “It’s a tough business to succeed in financially. She’s got to be given credit because it’s hard for ladies to get into this business, especially in the era that Paula did.”
Over the years, Washow has filed the gritty details of hundreds of cases in her memory. Someday, she plans to rearrange them into a novel or two. Among her more colorful cases: locating the birth mother of a Vogue model and busting a counterfeit T-shirt ring for a popular rock star.
The endings, as fictional as they might sound, spring from real-life tragedy. Missing children turn up dead. A supervisor suffers a heart attack when told that his key employee was a workplace thief and drug dealer.
But there are happy endings too. One of her favorite cases involved a well-known California-based artist who wanted to locate his 5th-grade teacher, a nun who had dramatically influenced his future career.
“I found her in two weeks,” Washow says. “She was married and living in Chicago.”
Her active files are slowly closing, however. Washow is a full-time student at Alverno College, a small Catholic institution in Milwaukee, where she is studying behavioral science (with an art minor) with the goal of becoming an industrial psychologist. An art minor?
“Eclecticism is the heart of me,” says Washow, who enjoys making paper and pottery. “In my work, you have to be open-minded to a variety of possibilities. Some (perpetrators) come from all the right families, golf at all the right country clubs, live in the right neighborhoods and have the right skin color.”
Without ever turning down a prosecution case (she does not do defense work), Washow says she will end her career with a 98 percent overall success rate. And if she never searches for another missing person again, there’s one certainty. She will never have to go searching for conversation topics. “I’ve never heard any complaints about being boring.”
