Private investigator says being a mum helped her expose lies

When Marissa was younger and tried to conceal a bad school mark from her detective mum, Sharon found out and showed her the New York penal code. This ensured she knew that lying and concealing can have serious consequences.

‘I think it scared her to death,’ she recalls. 

Sharon first recognised her detective instincts when she was 12 years old. 

Faced with a bully who had written a nasty note and broken a vinyl record of hers, she became set on exposing the bully to teachers. 

Inspired by fictional detectives Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes, she used handwriting to catch the bully. By comparing the handwriting on fellow pupils’ homework with that on the note, she soon had her suspect. 

Eventually, the bully admitted their crime and Sharon was well on her way to becoming a private investigator. 

‘To lie to me, you’d better be prepared to be caught, as I will always try to figure it out,’ she says.

When Sharon graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in engineering in 1992, she was expected to join the family fishing and seafood business. 

But Sharon wanted to forge her own path and joined multinational technology corporation IBM in 1995 as a consultant. 

It was there that she realised she could blend her skills in coding and investigations to suss out potential new employees.

‘On the projects I was on, there were several people who had not told the truth on their resumes,’ she notes. ‘Back then the checks weren’t as rigorous as they are now.

‘People had put down degrees that they had never taken and qualifications that they never had.’

Throwing herself into background checking work, she learned how to research and navigate through public data which was readily available.

Quickly she became an essential part of the process, assisting the company all over the world, using a code which sifted and analysed credit header information. 

‘I wanted to know more about the person, or I couldn’t be sure they weren’t lying to me,’ she explains. 

‘I absolutely love research, figuring things out and problem solving. I like challenges and tend to dig in if something interests me. It’s how I’ve always been. What attracted me to computers early on was the problem solving aspect.’

Sharon says her private investigation methods are ‘far creepier’ than those often depicted on TV and film screens. 

‘Private investigating is much creepier in real life, as I don’t have to leave the house,’ she says. 

‘I mostly work on allowing people to tell me what they want to tell me first. And I’ll try to see if they are being honest.”

While Sharon’s work has led to some nasty threats being made, nothing fazes her after 27 years in the job. 

And by working in a male-dominated industry, Sharon says she has always pushed to break down bias and barriers.

This experience of feeling ‘lost’ in offices surrounded by men has been used as inspiration for her first novel, The Healing, published this week.