COLUMN ONE : The Public Turns to Private Eyes : More families are hiring their own detectives to help beleaguered police crack cases. Critics fear the trend favors those who can afford to pay.

Eighteen hours after Orange County honor student Stuart Tay disappeared, the case was broken--not by police, but by a private investigator hired by Tay’s family.

His parents had called the Orange police when their son did not return home after running an errand on New Year’s Eve in 1992. But the department could not spare officers for a missing person’s search without evidence of foul play.

So the family hired Lee Roberts, a Santa Ana investigator, who put seven people on the case. They interviewed neighbors and visited Tay’s friends. They combed through the family’s trash for clues and set up a 24-hour-a-day phone line for tips. Finally, the call came: One of Tay’s high school classmates knew someone who knew someone who had witnessed his murder. The call led to the arrest last year of five teen-agers, who were planning a burglary and feared Tay would betray them.

As law enforcement agencies grow overburdened and understaffed, more people are hiring their own detectives to pick up where the police leave off.

At one time, police resented private investigators poaching on their cases. Some still do. But many harried police detectives now welcome the assistance. Private detectives have gained credibility recently because a number of firms have cracked complex cases. Now some police departments actually refer industrial crime cases to them.

When Lt. Vince Howard headed the Anaheim police narcotics unit in the 1970s, he often sent detectives undercover when companies complained about employee drug use and thefts. But as the city’s crime rate grew, he could no longer spare the officers. By the late 1980s, he had begun giving companies a list of private investigators with undercover experience.

“We’ve used these private investigators like informants and coordinated the cases with them,” Howard said. “When they’ve finished their investigations, we’ve taken their reports to the D.A., filed complaints, got warrants and made arrests.”

Swamped by violent crime, police simply do not have the time to thoroughly look into every case. Police detectives throughout California handle two and three times the number of cases per month that they did 15 years ago. And fewer cases--whether they are home burglaries, street robberies or homicides--are being solved.

As a result, affluent crime victims such as the Tay family are hiring their own investigators. This is a troubling trend, law enforcement experts say, creating a two-class system, with criminal investigations evolving into just another free-market commodity. Those who can afford it have the option of paying for extensive, comprehensive investigations. Those who cannot must rely on an overburdened public system.

Private detectives traditionally have specialized in limited types of investigations, mainly surveillance of cheating spouses and workers who falsely claim they were injured on the job. But now investigators are handling myriad complex criminal cases for individual clients and major corporations.

The number of licensed investigators in the state--about 7,400--has tripled in the past 15 years.

Private detective firms are hiring more former police officers, who are better trained, more professional and have a better rapport with law enforcement than the average private detective of 20 years ago. In the past, many with a law enforcement background were not interested in private detective work, said Tom Elliot, president of the California Assn. of Licensed Investigators.

“Some of the jobs used to be kind of seedy,” he said. “A guy who had spent 25 years in law enforcement didn’t want to go snooping around in the bushes taking pictures. But today we’re attracting better people because we do such a wide range of investigations.”

While an increasing number of ex-officers are planning to become investigators when they retire, some find they cannot make the transition from public to private work.

“Some ex-cops are lost without their badge,” said Santa Ana private detective William St. Onge, a retired Compton police detective. “These guys are used to going in heavy-handed and demanding information. That ain’t going to work out on the street. I see ex-cops doing that and I know they’re not going to last long in this business.”

The public today is more willing to challenge conclusions of law enforcement, which also has contributed to his profession’s new direction, said Logan Clarke, a longtime Hollywood private detective. People, he said, no longer assume that the police are infallible.

Clients are coming to Clarke with cases “a private investigator only dreamed about doing in the past,” he said. It was once an unwritten law, he said, that high- profile cases such as homicides “were police cases--period.” But not any more. After 12-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted from her Petaluma home last year, her parents hired a San Francisco private detective to help, even though law enforcement officials launched a massive investigation.

What was a Hollywood myth for so long--the hard-boiled private eye taking a retainer on a high-profile murder--is becoming a reality.

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After police found Stuart Tay’s body in a shallow grave behind a Buena Park home and arrested five suspects, Lee Roberts was not convinced the case was closed.

Roberts, a retired Newport Beach police detective, continued looking into the possibility that others knew of the killing and helped the suspects destroy evidence.

Orange police said the suspects were planning to burglarize the home of a computer salesman who knew Tay. The young men suspected that Tay was planning to turn them in, police said, so they beat him with baseball bats, forced him to drink rubbing alcohol and sealed his nose and mouth with duct tape.

The family was satisfied with the police investigation, which led to the five arrests. Two suspects have pleaded guilty, two were convicted of first-degree murder and are awaiting sentencing, and one was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Roberts, who chain-smoked cigarettes and downed countless cans of Pepsi in his office while discussing the case, believes there is more to it.

“I’ll give credit where credit is due--Roberts got the lead that led police to the body,” said Edward Djang, the Tays’ attorney, who had recommended they hire Roberts. “But after that the family did not appreciate him continuing to speculate about the case with the media.”

Those who hire private detectives have the power not only to direct investigations but to terminate them. And that’s what the Tay family decided to do after the suspects were arrested.

While homicides are the glamour assignments, most private detectives still spend their days investigating industrial theft, insurance fraud, phony workers’ compensation claims and other crimes that police have little time to thoroughly pursue. Los Angeles has only 2.3 officers for every 1,000 residents--the fewest police per capita of the nation’s 10 largest cities--and LAPD detectives have among the heaviest caseloads in the country.

At the department’s Van Nuys division burglary detail, the caseload for the four detectives has more than doubled in the past decade to about 600 a month. As a result, the detectives are forced to handle about 70% of cases by phone, said Detective Bob Singhaus. And because there is so much emphasis on violent crime, he said, detectives are being pulled out of burglary units, putting even more pressure on those left behind.

Singhaus recently filed an embezzlement case with the district attorney that was put together by private investigator Cary Krebs, who is with the Northridge firm Discreet Intervention. The suspect, a former bookkeeper for an auto body shop, was about to move to the Northwest and the owners of the company felt they had to move fast. They hired Krebs, a retired LAPD detective. He solved the case within a month and the suspect was taken into custody.

“We could have solved that case--it just would have taken us a lot longer,” Singhaus said. “We don’t have the time to do polygraph tests on employees and set up surveillance cameras on every commercial theft. We’ve got way too many cases coming in.”

The woman was backing her car out of the driveway when there was a tremendous explosion under the hood. Police found a pipe bomb, but determined it was devised to scare, not to injure. Two weeks after the incident, investigator Richard Smith of the R. J. Frasco Agency in Burbank was hired by the woman’s sister, who was worried about her safety. The family was frantic and felt police were not giving the investigation enough attention.

Smith’s investigators put the woman, who lived at the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, under surveillance and discovered that a former neighbor was stalking her. They videotaped him following her and placing notes and objects on her car. They suspected he had obtained the pipe through his brother, a plumber. There is now a warrant out for the stalker’s arrest.

Crimes such as stalking, assault in the workplace and industrial espionage once were extremely rare. Now these and many other types of wrongdoing are on the rise and private detectives are taking over the investigations--if the victims can afford to pay.

“It’s unfair now and it’s getting more unfair all the time,” said Gerald Erenberg, director of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police. “If you’ve got the money, you can pay for an investigation, decide how many investigators will work the case and for how long. If you don’t, you’ll rely on detectives who are running from one case to the next, to the next. . . .”

Unfortunately, law enforcement experts say, this two-class system presages the future as cities continue to cut budgets. The swelling demand for private detectives--who charge an average of $50 an hour for most cases--mirrors the growth in the private security industry. A record number of security guards have been patrolling neighborhoods and malls throughout the state for the past few years. They have filled the vacuum left as law enforcement agencies, deluged with emergency calls, have been forced to cut back routine patrols. The reliance on private investigators, law enforcement experts say, simply represents the next step in the move toward the privatization of security.

The qualifications for guards are minimal. But private investigators must pass a 100-question examination, covering a wide range of legal issues, and work in the field for about three years before they are licensed. Still, law enforcement experts warn that consumers should make a point to investigate their investigators before paying a retainer.

Last year there were 350 complaints filed against California investigators, ranging from billing for work that was not done to working without a license. Private detective associations advise that all clients talk to their investigator in person, not just over the telephone, check his references, make sure he has a license and ask for a written report every few days that details all work done.

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A wholesale food company discovered through internal audits that more than $300,000 worth of inventory had been stolen in the past year. The company, based in an industrial area of Los Angeles County, contacted local law enforcement officials, but they could not spare the officers to send undercover.

So the owners hired Allen Cardoza, who heads West Shield Investigations in Huntington Beach. Two of his investigators posed as new employees--one on the day shift and the other on the night shift. They soon spotted warehousemen loading extra shipments on trucks. Cardoza assigned other investigators to follow the trucks, and they discovered that the drivers were selling the extra inventory to small markets and restaurants and pocketing the money.

“We were able to put people in the warehouse, follow the trucks, shoot video of the illegal activity . . . all the things that law enforcement simply don’t have the time to do anymore on a case this size,” Cardoza said. “But they were more than happy to take the case we’d put together. And they busted the suspects at the company, on payday, as a deterrent to the other employees.”

While an increasing number of individuals are hiring private investigators, the bulk of their work still comes from industry. Many large corporations in Southern California are now turning first to private investigators instead of police detectives, law enforcement experts said.

But spending thousands of dollars a week for an extensive investigation does not always ensure complete success.

Raquel Lowery was dissatisfied with the sheriff’s investigation after her brother was shot to death in his Lakewood residence last year. She thought detectives did not have the time to thoroughly investigate every aspect of the case.

So she hired Santa Ana investigator Roberts because there were some leads she wanted followed up. A woman who lived across the street said she had seen a man rush out of the brother’s apartment the day of the slaying. The two sheriff’s detectives--who are now retired, along with the lieutenant who supervised the case--told Lowery the woman refused to be interviewed. But Roberts’ associate persuaded the woman to cooperate, and she worked with an artist to create a composite of the suspect. Roberts circulated posters with the composite, offering a $10,000 reward put up by the sister for information leading to the killer.

The investigator chased leads about six months. After spending $7,000, Lowery decided to call off the investigation because she felt it had hit a plateau. The investigator had been at a disadvantage, she said, because she hired him several months after the killing.

The case remains open. But at least Lowery had the satisfaction, she said, of knowing she did everything possible to find her brother’s killer.