Petaluma Profile: Private eye Caroline Lowe

Soon after the Governor signed AB 2632 into law, Petaluma’s Caroline Lowe became one of the first people to use it to become a licensed private investigator (PI) in California.

Lowe spent over three decades as the investigative journalist covering the “crime beat” for the Minneapolis/St. Paul CBS affiliate WCCO, and after moving to Central California in 2011, was surprised to learn that this experience didn’t count towards the “documented 6,000 hours” requirement for a PI license in our state. So she joined with Francie Koehler, the legislative chair at the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI) to amend this requirement.

“I primarily obtained the license so I would have access to the private investigators databases,” Lowe explains. “An unexpected benefit was admission to the CALI conference training sessions to improve my skills digging up information and conducting interviews.”

Lowe moved to Minnesota immediately after college, with a desire to become a television journalist.

“But I hadn’t been trained as a journalist,” she admits, “so [the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” TV characters] Lou Grant and Mary Richards were my journalism teachers. I even lived by the house where they shot the program. I worked my way up by doing what the boss told me, and many of my growing pains and mistakes were visible to the TV audience.”

One of those mistakes wasn’t on camera.

“We were rushing out to film a story, when my boss asked me to pick up a magazine to take with us,” she recalls. “I figured he wanted something to read if things got slow, so I picked one up off the table. When we arrived, I discovered that he had meant a magazine of film to slap in the camera. I quickly went back to the studio and got the right thing.”

Prior to becoming a licensed PI, Lowe had the distinction of being the first WCCO TV news reporter to be visibly pregnant on the air.

“I tried dressing to disguise the bump, but it was visible in some shots, and the station got phone calls,” she says. “It eventually turned into a news story itself. When I got close to the delivery date, paramedics were off-camera ready to assist with the delivery … but my son waited until Saturday morning to be born.”

An award-winning TV journalist, Lowe achieved high-visibility for her work reporting on the disappearance and search for the Mason City, Iowa TV anchorwoman Jodi Huisentruit and the abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling - the crime which prompted establishing the Federal sex-offender-registry updated by “Megan’s Law,” and the “Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.”

The Jodi Huisentruit case remains unsolved, and although the disappearance happened in 1995, Lowe remains actively involved.

“I am part of a team of journalists and retired police officers called FindJodi.com, who remain committed to the search,” she says. “Prompted by the advertising signs placed by the Frances McDormand character in the movie ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,’ FindJodi.com placed several billboards with Jodi’s image in Mason City, Iowa, on what would have been her 50th birthday. These caught the attention of the producers at the CBS news magazine, ‘48-Hours,’ and they created a feature built upon shelved footage shot back in 1995. They added new information about the case and explored multiple leads and theories about the abduction, including never-before-seen footage of John Vansice, a self-described ‘friend of Jodi’s,’ who says he ‘was the last to see her alive.’”

Petalumans might have noticed a “48 Hours” news crew here last Fall, as they spent a day filming generic “establishment shots” with Lowe posting “Missing” posters at various locations around town.

“I used the photo from a newspaper clipping I keep by my desk,” Lowe tells us. “It has numerous thumb-tack holes at the top - one for each of the different workspaces where I have posted it.”

Lowe and her husband, Jack, moved to Petaluma just before the wildfires hit, and they quickly became involved in their new community.

“Jack volunteers with the iRIDES program, and I attended the Petaluma Police Citizen’s Academy and became a Community Policing Volunteer,” she says. “My mantra is asking, ‘What good are you going to do today? - Does it make a difference?’ I remain actively involved in finding Jodi, and I am relentless - some say obsessed - with a strong sense of getting answers and justice. Somebody knows something about where Jodi is to be found. Is it you?”

(Gil Mansergh can be contacted at gilmansergh@comcast.net)