Featured Image Credit: Caters
Topics: Life, Real Life, Sex and Relationships
Jess Hardiman
A female private investigator has revealed how she catches people’s partners cheating, and how it all began after she was mugged at knifepoint.
Ali Marsh, 56, was previously a support worker for adults with learning disabilities, but her career path took a total change when she was mugged – prompting her to pursue a job involving criminal psychology.
Marsh, who lives in the Cotswolds, said: "I chased him down the road, and to be honest, that's the last time I was robbed.
"That got me into psychology. I wanted to work out why people would think that they can do that.
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"So I went on to study criminal psychology, forensic psychology and profiling and private investigation."
As this wasn’t enough to qualify Marsh to work as a private investigator, she went on to join a network of investigators, adding: “Within that network, you have to complete their training."
This saw her take on jobs from tracking down lost pets, people who owe money to exposing cheaters.
Marsh, who charges £70 an hour as a private investigator, continued: "You can put a tracker on someone's car.
"I don't put a tracker on a car, because to be honest, I take so long getting back up. They'd probably seen me in the mirror.
"I have someone who does that for me.
"And then there's surveillance.
"If someone comes to me there, I think they kind of know that there is something. It's just a gut feeling.
"Basically, it's surveillance. That's the only tell that you can get if they are behaving or not."
Marsh said she’s seen an overwhelming number of people approach her to look into their partner’s fidelity, with access to tools that many of us don’t have – including a secret database that helps her ‘delve a little deeper’ than we could on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram.
When asked about her most shocking case, she said a man had contacted her in a bid to get an engagement ring back from his ex-fiancée.
She revealed: "He wanted the engagement ring back. He just sounded a bit off, so I refused him.
"A week later, the police contacted me. He wanted me to find her so he could kill her."
Thankfully, Marsh’s job isn’t always quite as dramatic, having had some heartwarming successes such as someone trying to track down his missing father.
"I was contacted by someone whose grandson wanted to find out who his father was,” she said.
"He hadn't met him. She gave me an address that was like 10 years old. So I just backtracked addresses. That's the only way that you can kind of do it - put their name and all their details and luckily, I did find him.
"The little boy got to meet his dad for the first time."
Marsh has even helped helped to reunite lost dogs with their heartbroken owners, saying: "There's quite a high rate of dog-napping in the Cotswolds.
"A woman's dog was dog-napped from her garden. I managed to track it down from some people who were trying to sell dogs. I went through it like that.
"She had to pay £400 to get the dog back, but you know, you would if your dog was dog-napped."