Acts of Violet(51)
While an accident or foul play aren’t impossible, at best they’re highly improbable. Common sense dictates Violet Volk went missing voluntarily. This is the most popular theory, and plenty of conjecture has been devoted to the why. Whether it was legal, financial, familial, or romantic troubles, the why has received plenty of scrutiny.
In this episode, I want to look at the how.
My guest today is John Arno, an esteemed lecturer, investigator, and privacy expert. He’s the founder of JPS, Inc., a company offering privacy and security services. JPS is also John’s personal nickname, a play on GPS, because of his remarkable track record locating people. Over the course of his career, which spans four decades, he’s helped find thousands of bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, runaways, insurance scammers, kidnapping victims, even celebrities.
Arno himself offers an additional service to a select clientele: using his unique expertise, he helps people disappear.
CAMERON FRANK: John, thank you for joining me. To begin, I’d love to know how you ended up doing what you do today.
JOHN ARNO: I started out in law enforcement but quickly decided I wanted to be my own boss. So I went the PI route. I didn’t care for the infidelity cases so much—I focused more on investigating insurance fraud and locating missing people. I also dabbled in bounty hunting but didn’t enjoy rounding up the criminals myself. I preferred skip tracing, so I stuck to that.
CAMERON FRANK: For those of us unfamiliar with the term, could you explain what skip tracing is?
JOHN ARNO: A skip tracer collects private information about an individual. Could be phone records, banking info, addresses, anything. Usually, this info is used to locate people, though unlike bounty hunting, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a criminal. Tabloids have used skip tracers to hunt down celebrities.
Anyway, a few years in, I had a case that changed everything. A guy hired me to track down his missing wife, and when I found her—took me three days—it turned out the sonofabitch was beating on her, and that’s why she took off. One look at this woman’s busted face and I knew there was no way in hell I was gonna tell her lowlife husband where to find her. But I couldn’t rely on the next guy who went looking for her to be as kind-hearted. I needed to make sure this woman covered her tracks so well, nobody’d ever go looking for her again. So I helped her fake her death. It worked. The husband bought it and stopped the search—dropped dead of a heart attack a year later. I hope he’s still rotting in hell.
That case got me thinking: lots of folks out there need to disappear. Maybe they’re in danger, maybe they’ve been let down by the legal system, or maybe they just want a fresh start. They might try to run off, but they won’t know how to do it right. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a guy like me will find them. Some of these people have the right to go missing and stay that way.
To be clear, I’m very selective when it comes to who I help disappear—I won’t help insurance fraudsters, money launderers, deadbeats, or any other type of criminals or parasites avoiding justice. I’ll gladly keep hunting those unsavory types.
CAMERON FRANK: Aside from the more unsavory types, are there many people out there looking to walk away from their lives and start over?
JOHN ARNO: You’d be surprised. Sadly, some feel like they have no choice. Not only domestic violence survivors, but also stalking victims, whistleblowers—there’s all kinds of circumstances that could make you feel unsafe. Not all go to the extreme of faking their death. Sometimes a new identity and a change of scenery is enough. Not all want to or need to give up their identities, either. I work with lottery winners looking to protect themselves from scammers and greedy family members. I get a ton of clients whose lives got blown up by something stupid they posted to social media, and now they can’t get a job or a date because googling them brings up the scandal. In those cases, it’s more about adjusting their digital footprint, erasing or smudging what we can while adding other footprints leading nowhere. That makes it possible for those folks to go on with their lives without being tormented because of something lucky or unlucky that happened to them, or because of a momentary lapse of judgment and a hypersensitive online environment. Cancel culture is a disease, but I can’t deny it’s been good for business.
CAMERON FRANK: To go back to something you said earlier, you mentioned helping tabloids track down celebrities.
JOHN ARNO: Not the work I’m proudest of, and I don’t do it anymore, but back then I figured anyone who plays the fame game relinquishes their right to privacy.
CAMERON FRANK: Did you ever help track down Violet Volk, before she disappeared?
JOHN ARNO: A number of times, when she was on the road. She was a strange one—most of the time, she was buddy-buddy with the paps and invited them to capture her every move. But once in a while, she’d go off the radar and become very difficult to locate. You know, I listened to the other episodes of your show, and it’s too bad her ex-husband never employed my services—he might’ve gotten some peace of mind.
CAMERON FRANK: How so?
JOHN ARNO: The times I went looking for her, I found nothing suspicious in her activities. Mostly it was international corporate gigs. Probably she wanted it private the way celebrities used to go to foreign countries to quietly shoot commercials while keeping their credibility with their domestic fan base. A few of the trips were to national parks, wildlife preserves. She liked to go hiking and camping on her own.