One of the most frustrating cases I ever worked as a juvenile investigator involved a man named S-. The case began when the Target store in Plano called in a shoplifter. The responding officer took the shoplifter into custody and determined that she was 16 years old. An NCIC search revealed that she was a runaway. It was a weekend and being on call, I responded to the store.
In the store office, Judy (not her real name) told me she was working with S-, who she said was waiting for her in the parking lot. I radioed officers in the area and they located him in the parking lot. In the meantime, she was telling me how she had been with him for a couple of weeks. She had been shoplifting while he waited in the car at stores all over North Texas. She also told me about a briefcase full of blank birth certificates, college transcripts and degrees, marriage certificates, car titles, insurance papers, and other documents that allowed them to keep shifting identities.
I instructed the officers to take S- into custody while I obtained a search warrant for the car to recover the briefcase. I wrote out an affidavit and called the City Judge, who met me at the police station. He read over the affidavit, found that it met the requirements for probable cause, and issued the search warrant.
In the car we found the briefcase exactly as Judy described it. It was packed with a multitude of blank birth certificates from different cities, blank high school diplomas, blank documents from different colleges and universities, and everything else she had described. Shockingly, most contained embossed stamps, official looking signatures, etc. There were also numerous identification documents filled in with fictitious names.
Also in the car was a camera. Judy had mentioned nude photos, so I obtained a second search warrant to seize and process the film. Sure enough, there were the photos she had described — nude photographs of her. Child pornography.
When I contacted her at the county juvenile facility, she no longer looked like a 16-year-old, but more like a hardened, streetwise woman in her thirties. I had contacted her parents, who advised they could not control her and to keep her in the system. Her father was himself a federal law enforcement agent!
I wrote my reports and filed everything with the County Attorney. The next day, a prosecutor called to say the whole case was going away and I would have to return everything to S-. I was aghast. The copy of the arrest warrant in all my paperwork did not bear the judge’s signature.
I searched frantically but could not find a signed arrest warrant. I went to the judge’s office and he, too, failed to find a signed copy. There had only been one copy of the warrant when I took the affidavit to him and we both remembered him signing the warrant, but the evidence belied our memories.
I called the County Attorney back and argued that possession of the briefcase full of blank and forged documents was itself illegal and even if the case was not prosecutable, I should not have to return it. In the end, however, I was forced to return not only the briefcase and papers in it, but also the camera, film, and photographs.
All I could hope for was that next time S- got caught, it would stick. And thereafter, I always double-checked to make certain the judge had signed everything he was supposed to!