Timely Reporting and When NOT to Lie!

"So how is your kidnapping case coming along?”

It was a typical midweek morning in north-central Mexico as my Deputy Director, and I rolled into the restaurant parking lot at 9:00 AM sharp to meet and have breakfast with the regional Federal Police Commander. For more than a year, I had been working on developing our professional relationship and endeavoring to build a functional level of mutual trust through small talk, collaboration, and the exchange of information. Thus, a morning breakfast venue represented an ideal setting to informally strengthen our relationship with the Police Commander. My patience and sustained efforts were beginning to pay off…

At the time, I had been living in and working out of Monclova, Coahuila for about four years while serving as Director of Security for a major US-based manufacturing company that had at that time, approximately 9,000 Mexico-based employees, five manufacturing facilities, and a supply chain that encompassed the entirety of Mexico. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of not putting any trust into and avoiding contact with Municipal, State and Federal Police, I believed it was vitally important to meet regularly and develop functional yet professional relationships with host nation authorities, including law enforcement. There were several reasons for my line of thinking, but I will refrain from explaining these in this Blog. Let me just say for now, that my Special Forces military background conditioned me to think, assess, and view things rather “unconventionally,” especially while living in or operating out of a foreign country.

After greeting the Federal Police Commander and his small contingent, we sat down to exchange pleasantries, enjoy breakfast together, talk about our families and other topics of relatively little importance. Well into an hour of eating and sharing small talk with our police friends, the Commander abruptly asked me, “So how is your kidnapping case coming along?” In an instant it felt as though I had just been hit with a left hook and the surprised look coming from my Deputy confirmed my fears that we had just been blindsided. More importantly though, we now had a topic of significant importance to immediately exploit!

My first and audible response was, “What kidnapping?” The Police Commander and his colleagues were somewhat taken aback that we were not aware of the incident but politely gave us a brief explanation of what was unfolding. Apparently, the wife of an employee went missing the day prior and her husband (employee) reported this occurrence to the police. Unfortunately, not enough time had passed for the police to begin searching for the missing person but instead advised the husband to notify the “American” (me) if he desired an immediate reaction. More than 15 hours had passed since the husband filed an initial report with the police, but I had never been approached nor advised of this incident until now. After receiving basic information through an exchange of conversation, I thanked the Police Commander and we quickly headed back to our Security Operations Center, which was located on one of our nearby manufacturing facilities. In addition to basic incident information, we had the name of the victim and the name of her husband/employee. Not a good way to begin crisis management because this incident occurred the day prior, a fact that bothered me because we got a very late start in a type of scenario where mere seconds could mean the difference between a successful recovery or a catastrophic outcome.

How important is timely reporting?

To our surprise, we quickly learned that the victim’s husband was at work, on the premises, so we called him into my office for questioning. The husband claimed that his wife never returned from her workplace and that he had no idea where his wife could be. According to the husband, there were no telephonic communications from his wife, no forewarning, nothing. In short, the husband claimed that he had no idea where his missing wife could be and offered no explanation as to why she didn’t come home the previous evening. When asked why he was at work and not out searching for his wife or collaborating with the police, the response we received was disturbing. The employee, who was an accountant, claimed to be preoccupied with the administrative tasks of completing monthly financial reports. “What?” I quickly replied!

As the interview continued, I asked the husband why he didn’t immediately report the incident to our Security office and his response was that he reported the incident “yesterday evening” to his supervisor.  Oddly, his supervisor didn’t report the incident to us either. Coincidently, we had the supervisor waiting outside of my office and I made a mental note to address that comment shortly. The more questions we asked, the more perplexed and angered I became because we had a missing person on our hands, were only beginning to respond and very late in the incident, the victim’s husband appeared to be evasive and holding back information with his responses, and the supervisor waiting outside of my office didn’t appear to care. Grrrr…

When NOT to lie.

After several additional questions, I asked one that was very personal in nature and specifically requested the husband answer truthfully. I asked if he knew or suspected that his wife was involved in an extramarital affair, to which he replied, “No! Definitely not!” I suspected otherwise but needed to quickly generate an active response, so I refrained from continuing with this line of questioning. In fact, I thanked the husband for his time and dismissed him from my office. Once gone from my office, I gave instructions to key operations center personnel, who in turn formally began generating our response. Within minutes our Center began actively working to locate a reported missing person and simultaneously entering information into an incident logbook.

An unfortunate ending.

I will not bore you with the details of how we managed to locate the missing wife, but it did take us almost 7 hours to do so. We found her, deceased, and abandoned at the end of a long, winding dirt road where it emptied into a remote, desert-like open field behind our city’s airport. A victim of homicide, she had apparently been walking side by side with her murderer when shot at very close range, through the side of her torso and slightly below the ribcage. Whomever shot her did not let her fall to the ground, rather, the murderer apparently eased the victim down and even took time to lay a handkerchief over the victim’s face, as to cover her eyes. I am not a capital crimes investigator but could clearly assess that whoever murdered this young woman, likely knew her.

My assessment was indeed correct as it did not take long for homicide investigators to locate the murderer. What I learned in the aftermath was, the deceased was indeed involved in a romantic affair with her killer and the husband was fully aware! Also, the attending coroner later assessed that we had discovered the victim within 2-6 hours of her murder.

In summary.

In managing many incidents over a matter of years, one will certainly experience their fair share of successes and failures. Yes, I had previously experienced catastrophic results upon completion of incident management, but this case really bothered me. It bothered me because we were notified very late into the incident, the victim’s husband had lied to me, thereby slowing down our response efforts, and worst, the husband knew who his wife’s lover was but elected not to tell me.

To this day I am convinced that we could have saved this young woman’s life, even after such a long delay in having received notification of her disappearance, if the husband would have told me the truth and provided me with the name of his wife’s lover. Turns out, the murderer was a State Police Officer, and it would have been very easy to contact him directly, long before he made the grave decision to end his married lover’s life. An unfortunate end to incident management and so, because of the reasons stated above, this case, continues to haunt me because as responders, we did everything right but were ourselves the victims of lies and deceit.

If you would like to learn more about incident or crisis management, please contact us and we will be more than pleased to share our experience and knowledge with you! Also, if you are interested in acquiring our assistance to strengthen your corporate travel policies and procedures or simply to look at your existing travel programs, please do not hesitate to contact us. If you are interested in working with us, we will commit to assisting you with developing strategies aimed at preventing incidents from occurring. Likewise, should preventative efforts fail, we will bend over backwards to work with you for the purpose of saving lives.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I certainly appreciate your interest and support!