They Ran, Hid, and Lied—We Served Them Anyway

In this episode, we break down some of the wildest service of process stories we’ve experienced in the field. From people hiding in plain sight to running, denying, and doing everything possible to avoid being served—we’ve seen it all.

We talk about the tactics, the close calls, and what it actually takes to get papers served when someone really doesn’t want to be found. If you’ve ever wondered what happens behind the scenes in real-world process serving, this episode pulls back the curtain.

Real stories. Real situations. No fluff.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you're not ready, then no.

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Juice, I'm ready. Are you ready? I've been ready. We're recording now. We had sound issues, Juice.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Technical difficulties. You know what? I'm just gonna drink. That's that's your oh well. At least it's not a white claw. I'm just gonna drink a white claw.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

The gay people drink white claws. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Yeah, my nephew does. Is he gay? Well, he was a marine, so oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Well, it's not gay if you're underway. Yeah, exactly. Is that how they say it?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

We've had a lot of marines underway lately. Yes. I like it. They haven't done anything really, though. They're just kind of hanging out. Well, let's hurry up and wait. You never know. Cargyl, what's it called? Cargyland? Yeah. That may be East New Jersey before we know it. You know, it could be. Change the name of it. But I don't know. The Iranian strikes. I know we got some pushback saying that um we shouldn't have got involved in wars. That's we didn't start this.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

That's been going on since I was a child. So this this when they took the I remember when they took the hostages. Yeah. How about the Beirut Body? Yeah. And then we kept going. So they brought it on themselves. It's been ongoing and everything. But now we have a president with some testicles and a backbone and ain't gonna put up with it anymore. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I don't know, man. I I think it's way over to you. That's just my opinion. And if you don't like it, bye. I don't care. Do you? Yeah, oh, I agree with you. Yeah. Nobody cares. But yeah, you know, today we got a good one. We've talked about it before, but it's the process serving, service of process. Oh, yeah. You know, I get a lot of people that say, hey, I want to learn about private investigations. So private investigations on their own are pretty boring. Yeah. You're on the computer, sitting in your car, looking for people we can't find them. It can be frustrating, but there's not a lot of action there. No. Yeah. Now, process service is where the action is. Process service is funny sometimes. You get killed doing it too. I mean, yeah, it's possible. Out knocking on doors in the middle of the night, all that stuff like that. But you had a story you wanted to tell me. Tell me what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Yeah, so I had an attorney friend of mine call me. I'm not gonna say where, because I don't know what's going on with this, but called me up and asked me if I want to do some process serving. I said, Yeah, sure, I'll stop by the office. So I go by the office and he's there with his client. She wants a process service completed on Christmas Day. Ha!

SPEAKER_00 2:29

That's gonna cost you.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, well, it cost her, but she caught her husband having an affair with her sister. Nice. So she had all kinds of pictures. I guess she had set up surveillance on her own in the house. Okay, and had photos and video and everything else, but she wanted it done at Christmas because she was having a family gathering and she wanted it delivered like it was a big Christmas gift. Right. Well, she put all the photos, made duplicates for her mother, her father, her sister, her father-in-law, her mother-in-law. She gave them all a packet of her sister and her husband. Doing the mattress, doing the mattress mambo? Yes. Can we say that on YouTube? I assume so. It's not bad, but so yeah. So she had it all set up. The divorce papers are gonna be in there, and they all had, and it was gonna be done up like a Christmas gift, big Christmas gift.

unknown 3:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

And I delivered it Christmas morning. He just dropped it off and got out of there. Hey, are you so and so? Well, yeah. I said, Well, Merry Christmas, here you go. You go ho ho ho. And uh yeah, yeah, and he was all excited. I and you could see all his family and her family, they were having a huge Christmas day that day. Watching the Cowboys they were watching something, but they were watching him open that box at some point, and they all had a packet in there. Nice, they all found out right then and there she wants a divorce, why and who it was with. How much did you charge her for that? I didn't charge her anything for it because it was hysterical. Okay, all right. How much server?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

I served one on Thanksgiving before.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yeah, it they're pricey. I just thought it was hysterical, and I thought, yeah, I'll do that.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Right. I did one on Thanksgiving for like 300 bucks one time. Yeah. So they paid it. So yeah, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

That Christmas Day, I could have probably said $2,000, and that lady would have said, okay. Is she rich?

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Probably is now.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Her husband's very well-to-do.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Well, I'll probably know him.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

He had he had money.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Do I know him? No. Okay. Okay. Well, I had the Indian lady one. Have you ever heard this one? I think it was a brief mention, but yeah, go ahead. It's one you know where Flat Rock is, right? Of course. I mean, you're talking I'm minutes from Flat Rock. Well, there's a lot of dead bugs over there. I had the exterminator come by, so he got them, didn't he? He got them. I need to vacuum that up. They are dead. It worked. It worked. Anyways, Flat Rock is remote. I mean, there's no phone service. There's like a little store there. It's close to where you live.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah, it's right down the road within a couple of minutes.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Where you live is like a metrop metropolitan area compared to Flat Rock.

unknown 5:12

Right?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, okay. We have a store. Yeah, a store. Anyways, I went to the up there to somebody and said, Hey, I need you to serve these documents. And they the lawyer just gave them to me. They didn't know anything. But it was about an arson case. And this woman apparently had solved this. She was a witness to this burning down of this trailer, like an insurance type thing. I don't know if she was going out with a guy or what. But anyway, I had to find her server so she could come testify. So I went up to the, I went to this address in the middle of a field, right? I said, okay. And there's a store there, a little gray store. Now I remember this, yeah. Bunch of, there's a bunch of old men in there drinking coffee and eating Snickers and stuff. And I said, Hey, do you know this woman? They started laughing. I said, Man, this ain't this can't be good at all. So they said, Yeah, if you go up here about a mile, go down the power line cut through the field about another mile down there, and you'll see her tent off to the right. I said, Okay. And then they said, You can't miss her. I said, Okay. So here I go, be bopping down through there. I was back when I had my little Hyundai, the little four-door. Oh, yeah. It wasn't made for off-road. And I go beboping down through there. And you can see the trailer on the right when I turned where it'd been burnt. Right. And I go down through there, and sure enough, there's a tent. And this woman comes out dressed in full Indian regalia, except she had on sneakers. Nice. She didn't have moccasins on, but she had the head thing, the headdress thing with a little feather. The I don't know what you call these things, the leather deerskin leather skin jacket and pants and everything. Very nice lady and took the stuff. I said, What do you do out here? She goes, I just live with nature. Buckskins. Buckskins, that's what it is. She was had something on the grill. She had a little grill there. She was cooking up something. Simplicity. But anyway, I thought that was odd juice. Yeah. You got any more?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah. Some of them, I've had some that they open that door, and I'm not a very big person. And there's been some guys that have opened that door, women that have opened that door, that I'm sitting there looking at them. I'm like, oh, this is gonna go south.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

You know, I'm bad about carrying a pistol. I rarely I I'll carry one to church just because they said and when I'm not doing investigations half the time, I don't have a pistol at all. Yeah, I'm like, whatever, because I'm lazy and it it's uncomfortable in my car. Yeah. I usually have one all the time except for like work.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah. Well, you can't carry one in that building. Well, no, not in that building, but and then when I come down here, I don't really carry one. But if I go get something to eat somewhere or we're going out somewhere, I have a gun with me.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

But anyway, serving documents though, I always had a pistol. Oh yeah. Because you get threatened, you get people trying to run you over, all kinds of things. A funny one I did, we had this guy over towards Holly Pond that way, the other way, right? Yeah, and he would not come to the door. Big old, he was a gigantic fat guy, about 600 pounds.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Yeah, I remember this one.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

And couldn't give him come to the door. So I went there one night about 11. He came to the door, stepped out, naked as a jaybird, soaked in sweat. Huh. I said, Hey, are you such and such? And he wouldn't say nothing about a picture of him. I knew who it was. So I just stuck it to him on his and walked off. And I was like, Oh, that was cool. I'm a cool guy. And I drove off. I got down the road, was organizing my paperwork, and I gave him the wrong documents. Oh, you had to go back and be cool again. And he was standing there, and I said, with his naked as a jaybird, and I said, Hey, these are the real ones. He goes, just throw them in the artist. Okay. So I just threw them in the art. Wow. But he showed up to court, so anyway. Wow. We had a lot, we've had a lot of around here, a lot of process servers that try to lie, say they serve somebody and they really didn't. Yeah. Um, that's an issue. You can get in trouble for it. I haven't seen anybody be punished for it, but I know it's a thing. Yeah, but what's the big deal? Just do your job. We take pictures of it now. Yeah. Or a video video.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Well, you've always had us do that.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Yeah, just in case because I've had them come back before saying they didn't serve me.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Yeah, and they're time stamped and everything else.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

So yeah. It's a I don't I rarely do process serving anymore. I got one law firm that I'll we do them for, but I still do it to help some of them out. I'll do it. They'll send me three or four a month, you know. Yeah. At one point we were doing like 130, 150 sometimes a month. You can stay busy doing process serving. It's just it's low dollar stuff. You know, it doesn't pay well. And unless you got a huge volume, it's not really worth it. And then when you get huge volume, you gotta have administrative staff to handle it because it's admin heavy. You know, big time, yeah. You got people across geographic areas trying to get stuff notared. Sometimes you gotta get them notarized, sometimes you gotta get signatures, you gotta go turn them in and all that stuff. But it can be fun though. Oh, yeah. The well see, some of it could be aggravating though.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Oh god, it can be it ain't like the ones you you show up at the house 10, 12 times, you know they're in there, you can hear the dogs bark and they won't answer it, and then you just say, Okay, I'll go to your place of employment.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Right. And sometimes place of employment can be pains in the butt. Yep. I had one pulled up here and I lost it.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I've caught one at the bar. Had to catch up with her while she was at the bar enjoying herself.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Oh, yeah. So I've had them at the bar too. So the guy was like, Hey, my wife will be at the bar on like a Tuesday night. And it I got there at like six, and she was wasted already. Oh, yeah. I was like, good lord.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Oh, yeah. And they get mad. Well, we're playing for beers. I don't really care.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

She wanted me to come hang out. I was like, no, yeah, I'm going home. We're good. I'm going to eat dinner.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

I got a family. I'm going home to sit with my dog. I don't hang out and drink, so neither do I. But uh I don't go to bars anymore. Too much trouble here.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Now, here's a story about it says a civil process server, Drexel Mack, and police officer Cody Allen were fatally shot on February 29th, 29, 2024 in Independence, Missouri while serving an eviction notice. You ever done those? Oh yeah. They're a little more testy.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Yeah, they're not so happy.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Because all you what you do is you post it, right? You have to tape it to the door. And I've been sitting there taping it to the door and they come out and they try to rip it off. I said, You can rip it off. I'm videoing the whole thing, you know, because uh they're interfering with a legal order when they do that. They are, yeah. It's a little different than just handling a document. So the sheriff gets to deal with them. I don't, yeah, I never did deal with, I was like, hey, this is between you and the sheriff and the courts, it's not nothing to do with me.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

You know, the last one I did, the lady was actually sitting on her porch having coffee. I was like, Oh, I don't go ahead, put it up. We knew it was coming. The eviction? Yeah. I'm like, okay. She's like, yeah, it's fine. Tape it, staple it, nail it, whatever. She's getting ready to move anyways, right? I was like, okay, yeah, we're out of here Friday. We don't care. Really? And we're not paying them what we owe them either. I wonder why. I'm like, okay, don't.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

So Alabama's pretty landlord-friendly. Oh, yeah. But I understand there's other states where it's they're not.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Like California and squatters. Yeah. This is not much to do with process serving, but there's a story in close to Los Angeles with this guy. He's uh he owns several rental properties, and the people were squatting, they wouldn't move out. So he just went and re he said I'm doing renovations and removed all the windows and doors. Right. And they got out pretty quick. I guess it was hot.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

There's people here that have I know that have squatters in their rentals, and it took them forever to get them out because you can't just kick them out.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Right. You can't kill them. So no. I mean you could. It's kind of illegal. Then he'd get in trouble.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

You'd have to go hang out with Bubba. Yeah, I don't want to hang out with Bubba. You don't like Bubba? I'm too pretty to be in jail. Get a you don't have you get too pretty of a face, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. So we've had them where they try to dodge, they won't come to the door. You see the TV on, they get up and look out the window to you and all this stuff. I've done it where we put them in a pizza box. So they were delivering free pizzas with the Domino's hat on. Oh yeah. You ever done those? Nope. Not with a free pizza. Huh. We actually I've actually bought a pizza and gave it to them, but it had documents when they opened the thing up. So they were served. I've had people try to run over me. Oh, lady, a girl did.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

It's like, hey, I need to give you these documents standing in front of the car. Yeah. She was like gonna run over me.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

And I got out of the way. But anyway, yeah. I didn't shoot her.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

There's people don't understand it. We're just a messenger. We're just dropping it off. You can go argue in front of the judge against the attorney, the landlord, whoever.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

You ever had them cuss you out? Oh yeah. All the time. You tell when they they say you tell that lawyer blankety blank this, and I'm like, nah, I'm just going, I'm just wanting to go get a Gatorade man or whatever. Nah, I'm I'm dude. I just want to hit lunch. Yeah, that's all. I had I was listening to a good book in my car. I'm gonna get back to my book. But yeah, it's a it can be testy, and I don't like doing it, but I do do it for a law firm we do stuff for. Yeah. That's how I got started. That's how you start as a PI though. Yeah, you go knock on loggers' doors, hey, let me serve some docs. A lot of those. They'll give them to you because they're usually cheap because you don't know how to price your stuff yet. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

There have been some we served. Where's that one? So I I gave I processed served, but I also uh delivered some divorce papers before. Her husband was upset because she was working her job and she was hardly ever home. I had to go to her place of employment to deliver them.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

And it was a strip joint.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Nice. Okay. Yeah, not really. Was it with the dirt floor? Was it like the Toby's home of nine up pretty women and one ugly one?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

So Toby's would have been considered upscale.

unknown 14:37

All right.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Compared to this.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Toby's was a dump when I first got there. Oh, it was a dump. Had like partial dirt floor and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Oh yeah. Toby's was the same when I got there.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Look like a chicken coop that converted into a bar. Yeah. So but it's still there, though. Do they clean it up at all? I haven't been up there in 20 something.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

I have to ask my nephew. He he still lives up there in Wilmington.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

See a Marine? Yeah, he was. Okay. Hey, I've got something might get him to you can text to him to see if he knows somebody. Okay. All right. Yeah. See if he knows them. Anyways, I won't get into it right now. It'd be a good story if he says it. It's her. So yeah, I'll have to find out. I'll shoot it over to you when we get done. Yeah, Toby. So you served a woman in the where was this place? In here? No, I was in Florida. Florida's got some interesting places down there. It was not good. You know, they call us rednecks here in Alabama. North Florida. Oh. I love North Florida. I like it. I love it. Especially the prison system there. It's you got some flatlanders, I guess you'd call them there, right? Yeah. There's some special people down there.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah. You escort, you transport prisoners around the state when I work for the state. And uh we took one into a North Florida prison, and there was a blonde female blonde sergeant standing there waiting on him to come in and got out of the van and gave her the paperwork and everything. And the next thing I I noticed, she just spit the biggest wad of tobacco juice out. I was like, oh my god. She's like, You better get that boy out of that van. And it was on. She rubbed him up a little bit. Oh God, she was so country with him.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yeah, it's pretty rough. You know, people think of Tampa in Miami, but no, it's it's not North Florida. No, it's special. Um, yeah, North Florida's awesome. We get into some backwood stuff here too, though, when you uh deliver and you're like, how do people live in this shack? Yeah, you ever seen that before? And they come up with the last one you sent me on.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Oh, yeah, that's funny. That was way out there. Was that on the river?

SPEAKER_00 16:41

No. Okay. You did one on the river where it's like you're like, there's nothing there, and they're like, Yeah, there is. I'm like, no, there's not. Yeah, yeah, that was one of them.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

That was pretty, yeah. That was like a little tiny home or something, right? I don't even know if it was considered a tiny home. Right. I don't know what it was. It it was like a garden shed.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

But they had a porch on it, yeah. The porch cost more than the shed. Yeah. So there's, you know, these I've delivered did evictions at these, you know, you buy these outbuildings you can put in your house or in your yard or whatever. Well, people buy them and they put plumbing in there. Yeah, they don't pay for them. And I put eviction notices on there where they're gonna come pick them up. So they'll just drive off, come put it on the flatbed and drive off with it if they don't make their payments. So they don't care because it's not a fixed to the land. Nope. And they can pick it up and take off with it. It's like a car kind of, right? Yeah, but uh we've had somewhere they want us to help them find cars. Uh yeah, I wouldn't call it repoing. The repo guy would call them later. They have the tow truck and stuff. So we found one where the lady gave me the key because her son, he was 20-something, a dirtbag kid, right? He wouldn't give her car back. And so he said, she said, here's a key. He works up here. What's such and such? Just take the car. And I said, Okay. So I get in the car and he comes running out. I had the doors locked, and he was trying to kick the windows in. I just sneezed out of there and got it. Got her car back. But wow. Yeah, it was in it was funny. But we had a repo guy get shot here in Huntsville here a while back. You remember that? Yeah, yeah, I remember that. So I worked a case, the guy that did the shooting. I did a custody case where he was the subject. Oh, nice. You know, it's like they're trying to say, oh, it's self-defense, blah, blah, blah. There's some issues going on there. Yeah. All right. It's not just stand your ground there. He had some stuff going on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

It just depends on how the news wants to spin it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

The truth will come out in court. I don't need to have trial yet or not.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

But there's always three sides to a story. There's my side, there's your side, and somewhere in the middle's the truth.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Right. That's what the judge does, right? Yeah. Big jury, whatever. So all right, juice players. Our process service stuff. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah, that was there's some funny ones. We'll have to think of some more.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Yeah. There's so many because sometimes you'll do six or seven a day. So it's mostly the Christmas one was hysterical, though. Most are nothing. You just they just take them, you leave. They don't even talk to you. So are they like drop them off right there or whatever? Yeah, okay. Most of them are expecting it. So before we get off, though, it's weird that we are still stuck in a system where it has to be physically handed off to them.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Yeah, why are we doing that? You don't have to do it all the time. There's one I did for an attorney that we went out there several times and know the people are in there, we know they're living in the place, they're not answering the door. So it was a tape it to the door so many times, and then he was still able to. And I'm not the attorney, I don't know. That's an eviction, right? Yeah, they they get it so many times, stuck to the door, and then hey, we had so many attempts. You were avoiding us, get out, you're done.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Sheriff comes in, yeah, helps move no help. They provide security basically while you move the stuff out. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, man. It's kind of a antiquated system, in my opinion. We got email and I mean there's ways you can do it. I mean, you can do certified mail, but nobody puts that green card back in the mail anymore. So that's all forgotten. Yeah, it's all forgotten. Um, I just think it's antiquated. That in Alabama, you just get random people that are over the age of 19, then they can serve documents.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Yeah, which to me that's crazy. In Georgia to do that, you have to have a little bit of common sense and in Georgia you have to go through uh training per county. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

You're like an officer of the court or whatever. So Tennessee, there's not much there. You can go serve there. Mississippi.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

No, it's it's here you don't have to go through on any of that.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

You just gotta be eight nineteen or eighteen, whatever it says. I haven't been that young in a long time, so I never paid attention to that. Remember back then. You just can't be part of the you can't your name came in it cannot be on those papers. Right. So you can't be part of the action. So all right. Well, I'm gonna get off your juice. We'll be back with another episode here in a little bit. All right. All right, bye. Bye.