Private investigations for law firms and private clients.
Fraud tracing, locates, due diligence, and surveillance. Licensed in Virginia.
Inquiries accepted from law firms, corporate counsel, family offices, and qualified private clients.
Notice of confidentiality. Beale Investigations does not disclose client identity, matter details, or work product to any third party without written authorization.
Clients
Litigation counsel
Fraud, digital-asset theft, defamation, and asset recovery.
Family offices and private clients
Extortion, smear campaigns, and counterparty vetting.
Investors and boards
Due diligence on people, partners, and companies.
Services
Process
Consult
Define scope and budget.
Collect
Open-source, public-record, and field collection.
Corroborate
Each finding marked confirmed, corroborated, or uncertain.
Preserve
Hash, timestamp, and log captures.
Deliver
Written report. Available to testify.
About
Laura C. SmithPrincipal Investigator
Laura is Research Director of Khthon, a nonprofit that identifies mass graves and documents war crimes in more than 30 countries. She leads its analytical operations, combining open-source, satellite, and human intelligence into findings that meet strict verification standards.
She is also founder and CEO of Kairos Forensics, which builds cryptographic software for evidence integrity and chain of custody.
Her earlier work spans government security contracting and the technology startup sector. She holds a B.S. in Intelligence Analysis from James Madison University.
Virginia DCJS private investigator license no. 99-1009646
Beale Cipher No. 2, describing where the treasure was buried.
The Beale Papers, published in Lynchburg in 1885, contain three ciphers said to locate gold, silver, and jewels buried in Bedford County, Virginia, in the 1820s. One was decoded using the Declaration of Independence. Two remain unsolved.
For more than a century, the ciphers have drawn a particular kind of person: two brothers who gave decades to them, codebreakers who fed them into some of the first computers, and hunters who crossed Bedford County with survey maps and land deeds, testing every theory against a hillside, a creek bed, or a property line. They exhausted the record, proved what they could on the ground, and stayed with it long after the trail went cold. Beale Investigations brings that same discipline to every case.
Open a case
Do not include privileged details. Laura will reply directly.