THE INVESTIGATOR : Private Eye Provided Police With Key Clues : Former Newport Beach officer Lee M. Roberts said his team was able to crack the case because it could ‘play hunches’ and spend more time on it than overworked police could.

A private investigator who was on the first security team to enter Kuwait after the Gulf War and among the first Westerners to ever peer into KGB files from the former Soviet Union provided crucial information that led to Stuart Tay’s body and the arrests of five youths.

“We have the ability to play hunches, and the biggest thing we have is the time to be meticulous and tedious,” Lee M. Roberts said to explain why his team of investigators cracked the case before law enforcement officials. “We’re able to be more attentive, and we’re willing to be more innovative.”

Roberts, 44, is a former Newport Beach police officer who for the last decade has run a Santa Ana-based firm whose clients include McDonnell Douglas, Xerox and Kraft Foods.

In 1989 he helped Western Digital Corp. track down a crime ring that allegedly stole millions of dollars worth of computer chips, and he has done investigations into international terrorism and insurance fraud.

But as he sat in his Santa Ana office, dwarfed by a wall full of framed certificates of recognition and prize pieces from his international collection of police regalia, Roberts explained the satisfaction of cases like this one, in which a frightened family comes to him for help.

“The most interesting cases are the ones that involve people, when you’ve got a lot of personalities and a lot of circumstances and something to figure out,” Roberts said as he chain-smoked and guzzled Pepsi through an interview Tuesday evening.

“I was really touched by the Tays,” he said. He even gave the family a discount from his usual $65-an-hour rate. Concerned that police investigators could not give their son’s disappearance enough attention, the Tay family hired Roberts about 24 hours after their son failed to come home for dinner on New Year’s Eve.

The call came across Roberts’ pager while he and his wife were seeing “Forever Young” at a local movie theater. Since then, he said, he has gotten only about a dozen hours sleep.

Roberts began his investigation by interviewing Tay’s parents and thoroughly searching the teenager’s room, wading through stacks of personal letters and piecing together receipts and canceled checks that indicated the youth had done some dealing in computers.

While police were suspicious that the 17-year-old might have just run away, Roberts approached the case assuming that there had been foul play.

“They were firmly convinced from the outset that there had to be something tragic going on for him not to have called,” Roberts said of his employers. “I was very touched by those people and their convictions that something was wrong.”

Since that evening, Roberts’ firm has had as many as 15 people working on the Tay case, providing round-the-clock surveillance of the family, interviewing at least 100 people and searching--in dumpsters, open fields and on the sides of roads--for clues that might lead to the missing youth, alive or dead.

“I felt very strongly that this boy had been victimized and that somebody needed to help him if he could be helped, and that if not, somebody needed to find him so the family could grieve,” Roberts said. “We’ve got a boy that’s been missing, and we’ve got information that it’s a homicide--if that’s not enough to drive you crazy if it’s your kid, then I don’t know what is.”

On Sunday evening about 9 another call came over the pager: two of Tay’s friends had told investigators they knew someone who knew someone who had witnessed the murder.

By Monday morning, Orange police officers, with Roberts and his aides at their side, were arresting that witness, one of five teen-agers who would be arrested by the end of the day. One of the suspects also led the group to the Buena Park home where Tay’s body was recovered.

“If this thing was still being handled as a runaway we would not be where we are today,” Roberts said, praising the police officers for cooperating with his independent team of investigators and following up all the tips they provided.

“If someone makes an allegation, we are more likely to run that allegation down to the starting point to affirm or negate. Most of the time law enforcement does not have that luxury.”