Chronologic Order

t

















In an earlier post entitled "Guessing Games" (7/25/10), I mentioned what was going on at around the same time as the ads shown there. Now I'm posting a sampling of information and documentation presented in chronologic order that you can plug the ads into and also use to understand some of the events that led up to my hiring private investigator Ed Hodges at the end of June 2003.

As you look at these, keep in mind that we have two title companies here: one run by the city attorney, and the other run by a law partner of my ex-husband's divorce lawyer. You should also be aware that the county judge was a classmate of my former brother-in-law's and that the property to the south of mine consists of a very steep hill that is unsuitable for building on.

By the middle of June 2003, I had a tax appraisal protest hearing coming up and had been unable to force my ex-husband to provide me with the agricultural use documentation from past years I needed or to get him to remove his exotic animals from my property (which I'd been forced to feed because he wouldn't). There had also been numerous serious and frightening incidents that I haven't gone into much here. We'd had CONSTANT problems with people trespassing, partying, leaving trash and drug paraphernalia, etc. on my property, and the police wouldn't do anything--in fact, one of the people blatantly trespassing was the local police chief, my ex-husband's close friend. City employees had cleared out a house the city had bought that bordered both my property and the rent house where my ex-husband had been living and dumped a large amount of trash (including furniture and appliances) on my property; when I called the police, the responding officer just laughed and then started asking me over and over again about what I intended to do with my property. Late one night when I let my dog out, he scared off an athletic-looking Caucasion man who'd been tampering with our phone line at the point where it entered our house.

It was at this point that I discussed my situation with a man in my Bible study class at church who was ex-military and someome I considered a friend. He told me he sometimes worked as a private investigator for a man named Ed Hodges from Arlington, and he suggested I hire Ed to help me with some of my problems. I told him to have Hodges call me, we talked on the phone, and I decided to hire him.

Hodges helped me retain my ag. exemption, but he also immediately began trying to get me to sign a trust document that gave him full control of my property. When I refused to do this, he forged my name on the document he'd been trying to get me to sign. The county clerk's office then filed this document at the courthouse even though it wasn't properly notarized, and they faxed a copy of it to an unknown location.

Dating Problems

First of all, it's not what you think.

About a year after I'd discovered private investigator Ed Hodges had forged my name on a fraudulent trust document that gave him and a lawyer friend of his total control of my house and land, I suddenly received the bill shown here and another from his friend the lawyer that was equally ridiculous. Of course all of the charges listed were completely fabricated, had never been discussed with me or previously billed to me, and were not even for anything either man had actually ever done.

Most outrageous of all was the fact that some of the charges were from periods of time when I hadn't even known Ed Hodges! He first called me on the evening of June 25th, 2003 to talk to me about why I should hire him, and I did not know who he was before this and certainly had not previously had any business dealings with him. And as you can also see here, I didn't sign a contract of any kind with Hodges until 6/26/03. (The posted document is a page from the investigation contract I signed with Hodges. It also happens to be the page that contains the DPS violations discussed in an earlier post here entitled "Addresses" from 9/15/09.) The fraudulent trust document in question is dated 12/31/03, which is even later.

Seems to me if you're going to try to con someone out of money, you'd want to make sure you didn't try to charge them for work done at a time when they didn't even know who you were--unless you were so unafraid of being prosecuted or successfully sued that you and your associates considered it humorous to submit something like this.

I received this bill at a time when I'd spent many months searching desperately and unsuccessfully for proper legal representation despite having contacted all of the state and national legal assistance organizations I knew of. It was because of that, having received such a ridiculous set of documents from Hodges and co., and some other things that were equally alarming that I decided to take the fraudulent trust document to the professional document examiner whose findings are posted here under "She Said".

Immediately after I received this, I also sent a copy of it to DPS Investigator Taft Green of Dallas, who'd been assigned to look into my complaints against Hodges and others. Trooper Green called me back and said he agreed with me that the bills were ridiculous--but he never had any charges filed against Hodges or his attorney associate.

Birds Of A Feather

Over the years, I gradually began noticing more and more references to birds with regard to the case of myself and my children. At first I thought it was coincidental, but now I'm not so sure. I'll let you decide for yourself.

The first private investigator I hired, Ed Hodges, ran a company called Peregrine International that had a falcon's head as its logo. It was this company I hired Hodges under. He never told me he had a separate investigation company called Pegasus; I only knew Pegasus as his email address. (Hodges only directed me to his own company website and never explained about the Texas DPS-PSB website, where I would have learned about the second company--and the fact that he, his investigators, and Peregrine weren't properly licensed.)

A woman who worked for Hodges named Sandy used "piasabird" as her email address in her dealings with me. She was the woman who shocked me by telling me outright that her Middle Eastern-sounding last name was the result of an arranged marriage for purposes of immigration fraud. (In fact, at the time, I thought she was joking.) She was also the woman who called me out of the blue one night and tried her best to persuade me to go on a free cruise with her--and got mad when I turned her down. She is also the woman who gave me information about the suspicious death of her own sister in another state, both by email and on the phone.

Many of the long (often cross-country) driving trips of my father and step-mother and their friends supposedly revolve around bird-watching activities. They make these trips regularly, and while on them, they meet up with other "birders", often in Florida or near the Canadian or Mexican borders.

Some of the harassment directed at my kids and me over the years has involved loud, obnoxious bird noises of various kinds. Often when my children and I get undressed, someone broadcasts amplified owl hoots outside our windows. Different bird sounds are also broadcast when we are outside or trying to sleep, and these noises are usually far too loud to be natural. For a long time, someone at the local grocery store would broadcast loud jungle bird (or ape) noises outside the front of the store as I walked across the parking lot to go in or out. People often drive by us, lean out the windows of their vehicles, and make these sorts of noises at us. [No doubt my posting this will result in a new round of this behavior!]

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who has a ranch here and is very wealthy, owns a private investment company called Falcon Seaboard Company. As detailed previously in this blog, I was once harassed on I-10 by someone in a large, bright red SUV that had a custom lt. governor's license plate, and when this vehicle finally sped off, its place tailgating me was immediately taken by my ex-husband and his wife in one of their many pickup trucks.

Dewhurst has refused repeated requests from various watchdog agencies to provide documentation and information regarding his personal financial, real estate, and corporate dealings as required under open records laws. He also refuses to publicly explain certain secretive trips he's made to Washington, D.C. and elsewhere on taxpayer time. Dewhurst once worked for the CIA in Bolivia; coincidentally, my nephew did a summer internship in Bolivia a few years ago.

There's one final bird-related piece of information you need to know. The Spanish word for falcon is used by Mexican narco-traffickers as a term for a drug lookout or scout.

Pages

The history behind the fraudulent trust document that is discussed so often in this blog is explained in the post at the very beginning of this blog entitled "My Story" (posted 6/18/09). Because this clearly manipulated document features so prominently in our continuing situation, I've decided to discuss it in more detail, which I'll be doing in this and the next few posts here in the hope of finally finding a lawyer who will actually help us instead of trying to cheat us.

This document was filed by the county despite not being properly notarized (see "The Legal Situation", posted 6/23/10). The document that was filed is very different from a document I signed, and my initials were forged on all the pages except the one containing my signature, which was retained and was on clearly different paper. An accurate description of the document in the form of an excerpt from the report written by a professional document examiner I hired is posted at "She Said" (9/16/09).

Other descriptions of the document in question with highly variable degrees of accuracy are posted here at "They Said". The descriptions by the former FBI and DEA agents are fairly accurate, but the letter from their document expert friend is not at all correct. The letter from Ed Hodges' first document expert, the ex-Secret Service agent, that is posted at "He Said" (9/17/09) contains totally false information. Ditto for the letter from Hodges' second expert, posted under "I Was Told He Said" (9/18/09). False statements from some of the attorneys who conned me with regard to the document are also posted at "They Said" and "She Said".

Here I am posting copies of each of the five different versions of just the first page of the fraudulent document (with personal stuff removed) that I've obtained. I will explain each by the number I've put on it at the top left.

1) This is a copy of the first page of a draft of a trust document that was faxed to me by private investigator Ed Hodges on 12/18/03. As explained in "My Story", Hodges called me before faxing this document to tell me he was sending it. He also pressured me to sign it quickly. When I read it, I discovered it gave him and his attorney-friend total control of my house and property. Even though I'm not a lawyer and have little knowledge of legal affairs, I still was able to realize there were many problems with the document Ed had faxed. I made some notes in pencil on the document about some of these problems, and I told Hodges I couldn't sign it and why. Although I didn't notice it at the time, I later discovered Hodges and his attorney friend had already signed this draft document. The former DEA agent I later hired as a p.i. and then had to fire insisted I give him my original of this document that has my penciled notes about the changes on it, and he refuses to return it to me.

2) After being very heavily pressured and frightened by various incidents (that I realize now were staged), I did sign a completely different document Hodges provided me with that had all the changes and safeguards I'd insisted on. I followed Hodges' carefully written instructions (which I'm not posting for now, although they're extremely interesting in light of all that has occurred) about what to do and how to send the document back to him. He then told me he'd filed the document I'd signed and would provide me with a copy. I received the copy this page is from by regular mail sometime in the middle of January 2004. At that point, I still trusted Hodges and happened to be extremely busy at the time, so I filed the document away without looking at it. Notice that this page is the same as the first copy--and most definitely NOT the document I signed (which I'd have realized if I'd looked at it more carefully). Also notice how light the printing is on this version of the page, which is evidence of copying. My document examiner provided strong scientific evidence of my initials having been forged on this and all of the other pages except the page with my signature, which I know for a fact to be true (because I'm positive this isn't the document I signed).

3) Along with the document returned to me as explained in #2, this extra copy of page 1 with a filing number was also enclosed. This copy also has my initials forged by someone on it. It also has markings at the top indicating it was faxed to someone by the county. Later, after I realized I'd been defrauded, I went to the courthouse and asked who it had been faxed to, but of course they wouldn't tell me.

4) After I discovered the fraud, the former DEA agent I was employing at the time as a private investigator instructed me to go to the courthouse and "obtain a copy of everything they had on file" under the fraudulent trust. However, when I did this, I was only given a few pages of some sort of deeds that had completely different filing numbers. I went home, called the investigator, and told him the courthouse had refused to give me what I'd asked for. He told me to go back, give them the filing number, and insist of getting a copy of everything on file under it. When I did this, they gave me a copy of the document whose first page is shown here. By this time, I knew enough to realize what was on file was indeed the original document I'd refused to sign with my initials forged on it. I also noticed that the signatures of Hodges and his lawyer-friend looked exactly like the ones that were on the draft document faxed to me earlier (#1, the one I refused to sign).

5) Immediately after I received the report from the document examiner I'd hired (see "She Said", 9/16/09) stating the trust document on file was fraudulent and manipulated, Ed Hodges filed a lawsuit against me and my children alleging we owed him and his lawyer-friend large sums of money for clearly fraudulent "trust duties" (some of which were from time periods when I hadn't even known them!) and property taxes Hodges claimed he'd paid on my property--even though I'd paid all of the taxes myself and had all the receipts and cancelled checks for them! (My kids and I quickly filed a counter suit.) This final copy of the first page of the fraudulent trust document is from the initial paperwork Hodges filed with the court as part of the lawsuit. Although I've removed them for posting as before, the initials that are supposed to be mine are again clear forgeries. In this copy of the document, each page has double lines down the entire right side. This is something I've seen on official documents from law enforcement agencies, and I believe it may be related to the fact that Hodges was using the former Secret Service agent of "He Said" (9/17/09) as his expert witness at the time. (This expert suddenly quit shortly after I discovered potential ties between him, the local real estate market, and my ex-husband. Since then, he has harassed me.) Finally, notice that there is faint handwriting at the top of this page. I will be discussing this later.

These are the documents numerous lawyers and even a retired judge have tried to use to extort money and property from me repeatedly. The local tax appraisal board has used this document to try and conceal enormous increases in my tax appraisals, the illegal changing of ownership names and addresses on my house and land (which at one point were illegally listed under my ex-husband's office address as documented earlier here), and other blatantly illegal acts. They continue to refuse to admit the fraud or make any corrections, and they continue to list ownership of my house and property under Ed Hodges' address. Without proper legal representation or help from law enforcement, I haven't been able to force them to stop committing criminal fraud, and by my latest tax appraisal statements, the fraud is actively continuing as a result.

Some (but not all, by any means) of this fraud is summarized here in "How To Steal Property In Four Easy Steps". I wrote this shortly after my last property tax protest hearing during which, among other things, the county's tape recorder that was supposed to be officially recording the proceedings was instead quietly playing music; when this was pointed out to the appraiser in charge, he simply switched it off and proceeded with the hearing. (At least this time he didn't have an enormous black eye as an official at one of my previous hearings had. That guy had looked like he'd been in a fight, and it was very disconcerting, to say the least.)

Another Jimmy Brown?

There certainly are a lot of people named Jimmy Brown involved in our case. (If you haven't done so already, please read "My Story" at the very beginning of this blog.)

My ex-husband made some comments about this at the end of my 11/24/09 posting here entitled "What's The Buzz?" about one or more of these people. Here I'm providing a page from the Texas DPS-PSB website that gives information on licensed private investigators in the state of Texas. How coincidental is it that a person with the name of Jimmy Brown just happened to be licensed under one of Ed Hodges' companies?

I think this Jimmy Brown is probably the same person who used to work as a security guard at our local hospital and was a very close associate of my ex-husband's--so close that for at least a couple of years he was at my ex-husband's home virtually every time my children went over there for visitation. He even went on vacations to the aforementioned waterfront house in British Colombia, Canada with my ex-husband and my children.

If this Jimmy Brown and that Jimmy Brown are the same Jimmy Brown, then this Jimmy Brown died very suddenly on the same day that my youngest child and I saw a city ambulance parked along the street directly in front of my ex-husband's office around 7 A.M., and this Jimmy Brown provided a link between my ex-husband and Ed Hodges. My kids are still extremely upset and frightened over Mr. Brown's sudden demise. Oh, and Ed Hodges is also now deceased.

Hodges Statements

Here are some sample excerpts from emails I received from private investigator Ed Hodges in 2004 that document some of the things he was telling me. (See "My Story" at the beginning of this blog.)

There are a couple of additional things you should be aware of. Notice that Hodges used "Pegasus" for his email address, which also happens to be the well-known symbol of Louisville, KY where my father and step-mother live (see "My Story" and "Check Connections"). Also, I have learned that "falco", or falcon, is Mexican narco-slang for a drug lookout; Hodges' p.i. company was called Peregrine International.

Questions and Answers

Question: What do the following people all have in common?

A law school professor and expert on constitutional and military law and evidence who taught a course on efforts to control domestic criminal activity and international terrorism with Supreme Court Justice Alito overseas last summer

Two brigadier generals (different service branches)

The officer-in-charge of the CENTCOM Intelligence Support Center--New Orleans

A Secret Service agent who works at the White House

A State Department employee

A retired federal Air Force judge who now serves as a local J.P. and attends the same legal conferences in Hawaii that cost former Judge Karl Prohl his job recently

Numerous current students and graduates of the various U.S. military academies

Answer: They are all from local "insider" families in the same small county in Central Texas (see earlier post entitled "Outside, Looking Inside"), and they are just a few examples. [The CENTCOM officer happens to be related to p.i. Ed Hodges of our case, by the way.]

Question: Is this important?

Answer: You betcha'!

Revoked

I am posting these documents in response to a series of comments my ex-husband made on 1/18/2010 underneath my "Right On Schedule" blogposting below regarding the late Ed Hodges, one of the private investigators who defrauded me and committed other criminal acts against me. These are official documents from the Texas Department of Public Safety (TX DPS) that prove Ed Hodges lost his p.i. license as a result of formal complaints I filed with them against him. (I am the client referred to in the documents.)

There are some important things to note here. The TX DPS never notified me that Ed Hodges' licenses had been revoked; I discovered this fact accidentally when I did some internet checking on 12/27/06 and came across the page from the DPS website shown here. When I still had not received any notification from the DPS a few months later, I filed an open records request asking for copies of all documents related to my complaints. An official with the DPS told me I had to send my request for these documents plus a postal money order for the copying costs by certified mail, but when I did this, the USPS and the DPS both tried to tell me my letter had been lost. Then when I received the green receipt card back in the mail, I noticed certain irregularities on it. When I started looking into these, I suddenly got a call from the DPS saying they'd fax me the documents. This "Order of Revocation" was one of the documents I received in the fax from the DPS. I was shocked that I'd never been notified about how my complaint had been resolved, and I was even more shocked by serious problems I found in many of the other documents I was sent in the same fax concerning other private investigators I'd also filed serious and well-documented complaints against.

As far as I know, Ed Hodges was the only p.i. ever disciplined in any way by the DPS in my case, and he was never investigated or charged with any criminal wrongdoing, even though he and others clearly committed multiple serious criminal acts. [See many of my earlier postings here.] I'm fairly sure that even Hodges was only disciplined after I'd contacted numerous major consumer rights organizations, crime victim advocates, and media representatives about what had been done to us.

My ex-'s 1/18/2010 comments about Hodges not only make no sense in light of what I have extensive documented proof of; they don't even agree with some of my ex-'s other comments in which he makes fun of me for having been victimized by Hodges and others. I have been told by several locals that Ed Hodges was actually related to my former father-in-law's law partner and that Hodges was also related to a local woman who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and serves as officer-in-charge of the CENTROM Intelligence Support Center--New Orleans in support of Counter-Terrorism Targeting and Analysis.

Addresses

This is a page from my 2003 contract with private investigator Ed Hodges. Aside from the fact that he wasn't properly licensed with the State of Texas at the time, it contains other licensing violations as well.
I wonder who these addresses belonged to in June 2003?

Impersonation

When I first hired private investigator Ed Hodges of Arlington, TX in 2003, he insisted I turn over certain items to him because he said they were important pieces of evidence that he needed to examine and turn over to law enforcement. He was very specific about what items he wanted, so I made this list of the items he asked for while talking with him on the phone. A short time later, a man who said he worked for Hodges and had just driven down from Dallas called and asked me to meet him at the Dairy Queen at the I-10/Comfort exit and bring the items with me, plus the hard drive from our family computer (which had recently crashed). I did as he asked, and as I helped him transfer the items to his vehicle (a red car), he told me he was a security guard hired by Hodges to bring the evidence safely to Dallas. I asked him to sign my list as a receipt for the items he was taking from me, and as you can see, he signed and dated it and even marked the time on it in his own handwriting.
After I confronted Hodges in January of 2005 and subsequently fired him, I discovered this man WASN'T either a licensed private security guard or a licensed private investigator, after I was finally told about the correct TX Department of Public Safety (DPS) website and looked him up. [Hodges had given me incorrect information about this because, as I also later discovered, he wasn't properly licensed either--and had used a phony license number on one document.] I also discovered that this man probably was from Kerrville, not Dallas, even though I had invoices with travel charges for him from Dallas, and that he had worn improper attire for a security guard in this state when I met with him.
I filed formal complaints against both men (and several others also involved in our case) with the DPS's Private Security Bureau (PSB), the agency that licenses private investigators and private security guards in Texas, and I provided them with this document and others containing proof of serious violations. However, despite the signature of this document alone proving this guy impersonated a licensed private security guard, the PSB/DPS absolutely refused to prosecute or discipline this man in any way, even after I made repeated complaints.
So much for protecting the public!--I can only conclude that the licensing process for private investigators and private security guards in Texas is worthless. I'll be glad to provide additional information and documentation to anyone who requests it.