America’s Most Flamboyant Private Eye and the 8,000-Mile Manhunt

He was softer-spoken than one might expect a private investigator to be, speaking in measured sentences in a voice on the higher end of the register. Photos by Justin Hamel

Donald Weber was startled to be suddenly confronted by two men from El Paso at his girlfriend’s apartment in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Chiang Mai is a large city in the northwestern part of the country, an energetic mix of markets, shops and packed thoroughfares, a place where people can easily disappear into the anonymity of bustling urbanity.

It was early January 1991, and Weber, at the time 30, had been in the country for about four months. With a thin frame and a long face that made him look a bit like Kevin Bacon, he’d made every effort to stay unnoticed among the mass of people going about their lives. Weber had stayed at hostels, where he slipped the proprietors some cash to not record his real name, and he was now living with his girlfriend, a Thai college student named Tsom, and her little dog Lychee. His name wasn’t on the lease or even the mailbox, and it was alarming that these men had tracked him down all the way from Texas.

Illustrations by Guang Lim

Tsom was indeed waiting for something, as she’d already spoken to the men earlier in the day. They told her that they were old friends of Weber’s and had traveled more than 8,000 miles to surprise him for his birthday. It had taken a bit of convincing for her to warm up to them, especially since one of the men had two shiny silver hooks in place of his hands, but they were friendly and she told them her boyfriend was expected back in a little while. Tsom waited in the background for shouts of “Surprise!” after Weber opened the door, but there was only intense silence.

Weber assessed his visitors. One man, in his late 50s, was shorter than average, with sparkling eyes. He was wearing a somewhat out-of-fashion leisure suit, but Weber could tell his clothes were quite expensive. At the end of each sleeve was a curved, articulated hook, capable of opening and closing like a pincer. Weber’s eyes snapped back up and met the man’s gaze.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“We need to talk,” the man said. “We need to talk about Lynda.”

Weber glanced back at his perplexed girlfriend and stepped out into the hallway, lightly closing the door behind him. The men deliberately crowded his space. “Well, go ahead and talk,” he said.

Weber looked at the other man. He was taller, in his early 20s, and regarded Weber with a piercing look.

“I don’t know where she is,” Weber said.

The older man reached into his pocket and produced a card with his hook. It read:

He was a private detective and chief of the firm, he said, then introduced the younger man as his son, Jay III. Weber didn’t stop to appreciate the irony that the last name of the man with hooks for hands was Armes.

Weber also didn’t appreciate that Armes had been in the business for more than 30 years at this point and was said to be one of the best private eyes in the world. He had pursued suspects all over the globe, and he looked at Weber with the kind of practiced calm that can only come with such experience.

Armes noticed that the door had been cracked open and Tsom was surreptitiously trying to listen. Conscious of the tension, he suggested that the trio go elsewhere to talk, somewhere where she wouldn’t hear what they had to say. Armes suggested the Orchid Hotel, where he and his son were saying.

Jay J. Armes (left) with Jay III (center) and his bodyguard outside The Investigators’ headquarters near downtown El Paso.

Drums of self-preservation pounded in Weber’s brain. It would probably be best to flee, but at the same time he was desperate to know what their appearance truly meant. He said he’d go with them to the hotel if they promised to bring him right back. They agreed and walked out of the building and over to Armes’s waiting car. A tough-looking Thai man grunted at them from behind the wheel and drove them to the hotel.

Unbeknownst to Weber, as they drove away two more Thai men working for Armes made their way back up to Tsom’s door. There was another knock, and when she answered, the men apologized for the disturbance.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” one of them said. “Those Americans weren’t Donald’s friends. Your boyfriend was involved with another girl and she disappeared. Nobody knows where she is.” He showed her a picture of a young Thai woman named Lynda Singshinsuk. Like Tsom herself, she was pretty, with an open and trusting expression.

The men strongly suggested that Tsom not let Donald back into the apartment when he returned. In their experience, they said, there was no telling what a cornered man might do.

Tsom stood in the doorway holding The Investigators’ card. Lychee looked up at her quizzically, but Tsom didn’t know what to make of this either.

The car weaved through the sardine-dense street packed with cars, buses, motorcycles, and a seemingly unending amount of tuk-tuks, finally approaching the regal hotel where The Investigators were staying. Armes opened the door for Weber and followed him inside. They grabbed a table in the restaurant, where they sat surrounded by tourists and locals alike. Weber sat down and looked at the detectives impassively. They asked if he wanted anything to eat, to which he tentatively said yes.

Weber, who a few years earlier had graduated from law school and passed the bar exam in New Jersey, knew what it must have taken to locate him, and he acknowledged that he was impressed they’d tracked him down. After they’d ordered, he asked the obvious question: How had they found him?

“I’m good at what I do,” said Armes simply. He was softer-spoken than one might expect a private investigator to be, speaking in measured sentences in a voice on the higher end of the register. Still, his straightforward demeanor gave off authority.

“I have a case to solve and you’re the key,” Armes told him. “I had to locate you so that you could fill us in on the details that we need to solve it.”

Jay III picked up from there. He emphasized that they weren’t with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency or the U.S. Marshals, and they weren’t connected to the Thai government. They were private eyes from El Paso who simply needed to know where Weber’s ex-girlfriend Lynda Singshinsuk was.

They’d been hired by Lynda’s parents to find her, a few months after she’d gone missing. Weber had left the U.S. while the search was underway, making him a pretty obvious person of interest. But they didn’t care about his guilt, Jay III said. They hadn’t tracked him down to prosecute him; they just wanted to find Lynda’s body so that her parents could move forward with a wrongful death lawsuit against the university in Chicago from which she’d disappeared.

Weber looked at them. It was an improbable story, and Armes certainly didn’t look like any private investigator he’d ever heard of. But one thing was for sure: He couldn’t take his eyes off the gleaming silver hooks on the table in front of him.

Twelve-year-old Jay J. Armes. (Photo courtesy Jay J. Armes)

Armes had blown his hands off playing with explosives when he was a kid, and his prostheses could apply pressure three times that of the human hand. He was adept at everything from answering phones to firing weapons with them, and these tools even gave him seemingly superhuman crime-fighting abilities, like punching through windows and reaching into flames unharmed, adding to the lore surrounding him.

During his six decades in the business, Armes had investigated kidnappings, murders and extortion schemes, and traveled all over the world in pursuit of his quarry, a modern iteration of the unorthodox lawmen dating back to El Paso’s early days as a rough-and-tumble frontier town. (Early “Hell Paso” was said to be so awash with cowboy violence that Wyatt Earp, the hero of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, quit his post after a few days because the city was too dangerous.)

One of The Investigators’ most famous cases was the recovery of Marlon Brando’s son Christian from a rural encampment in Mexico where he’d been taken by friends of his mother in 1972. Armes had also tracked down missing show dogs and recovered invaluable jewels in Italy by wooing the young socialite who’d stolen them. At the height of The Investigators’ success, Armes said they’d employed a network of spies and on-call agents around the world that helped the firm with their work.

Cover of Armes’ autobiography. (Image courtesy Jay J. Armes)

Armes readily plays up his standing in this crime-fighting tradition; his flair for self-promotion earned him minor celebrity as a larger-than-life crime fighter in the 1970s. He appeared on TV shows and in countless articles, and his autobiography was published by MacMillan in 1976. There was a Jay J. Armes action figure complete with hook hands that could be exchanged for other crime-fighting gadgets. Armes is an irascible hard worker and very confident in his own judgment, but he has also been accused of getting lost in his own celebrity and inflating the magnitude and danger of his work. But he has always maintained that he is the real deal, and if you don’t like his methods, you are free to kiss his 100 percent guaranteed results goodbye.

“My dad marches to the beat of his own drum, and that gets under a lot of people’s skin. But that’s what makes him unique,” Jay III says. “He is tenacious and controversial. He’s like a force of nature. It’s tough to stop him once he gets started on anything.”

Weber didn’t know this history, but sitting there across from the two detectives, he could pick up on the intensity of their life experience.

He swallowed. “I don’t know anything about where Lynda went. I’m not quite sure what more I can tell you.”

Armes and his son nodded. They adjusted themselves in their chairs and settled in for a long conversation. It was the beginning of a showdown, a desperate yet measured gambit on behalf of a woman who had tragically gone missing more than eight months before, on the other side of the world. Armes was convinced Weber knew exactly what had happened. Bringing forth the truth was simply a matter of navigating a complex game of cat and mouse in a country where they had no jurisdiction, no authority and few allies. But that was his forte, and Jay J. Armes was proud to be on the case.

Armes and his son, Jay III, during a trip to Thailand for a case.

April 16, 1990. Rapeeparn Singshinsuk felt something was amiss when she hadn’t heard from her daughter, Lynda, for over a day. Lynda, 24 at the time, was in medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was generally great about staying in touch. Her mother’s concerns deepened the next day when Lynda’s friends reported that she hadn’t shown up for class and wasn’t answering her door or any phone calls.

Lynda was from Robinson, Illinois, a town of 7,000 people about 250 miles south of Chicago, where her father, Sompong, was a radiologist. Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Thailand when Lynda was a little girl, and Lynda had wanted to be a doctor for as long as anyone could remember. Somewhat quiet, she came out of her shell in medical school and was known to be a dedicated student who thrived in the company of her intelligent fellow students.

It was completely unlike Lynda to fall off the radar. She was responsible and courteous and simply liked talking with her family. The last time anyone had verifiably seen her was the night before, when a friend recalled her eating a salad in the dorm cafeteria. Lynda’s friends and family soon alerted the police that she was nowhere to be found.

The police initially suggested that Lynda had taken off voluntarily, as there was little evidence that she had been abducted from her room in Abbott Hall.

The days turned into weeks and months, and neither the local police nor the FBI were able to unearth any information about her whereabouts. Some small spots of blood had been found on the floor of her dorm room, but there was no way to determine whether the blood was from something sinister or from the routine nosebleeds Lynda was known to have. In fact, there was no way to tell if the blood was even hers, as the sample was so small that the blood type couldn’t be matched conclusively. Suicide was a possibility, but the divers who had been searching the frigid waters of Lake Michigan near the university were skeptical that she’d drowned, since her body never resurfaced.

The situation looked bad, but none of the family’s fears could be confirmed. The disappearance was all the more agonizing because one man stood out as a likely suspect, but there wasn’t any evidence to connect him to the crime: Lynda’s ex-boyfriend Donald Weber, a trim, polite young man who had recently worked for an accounting firm in New York but was now living with his parents again in Robinson.

Lynda and Donald had begun dating in 1984 when they were both undergrads at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They were both from Robinson — Weber’s mother ran the travel agency that the Singshinsuks used to fly back to Thailand, and his father owned the real estate where the family built their home. Both families were fairly well-off and expected a lot of their children — one of Weber’s brothers was a neurosurgeon, another was a fighter pilot. Lynda and Donald continued their relationship long-distance when he went to New York to attend law school at Fordham University. Things seemed to be going well, and in 1987 Weber flew to Thailand with Lynda and her mother to meet their extended family.

In 1988, Weber returned to New York to take a job with a prestigious accounting firm. The rigors of a long-distance relationship were difficult on the couple, and it was sometimes hard to maintain their enthusiasm for each other. Weber ultimately got fired from his job at the firm and moved back to the Chicago area. In the interim, Lynda had begun a friendship with a classmate that eventually led to mutual feelings of attraction. Caught between the familiar comforts of a man she’d known for years and the allure of someone new, Lynda wasn’t quite sure what to do. But Weber became obsessed with winning Lynda back. He bombarded her with letters and phone calls, and at one point he poured his cologne all over Lynda’s bed so that his scent would be present if she and her new boyfriend slept in the bed.

Two months later, Lynda disappeared.

In their effort to find out where she’d gone, her parents swallowed their extreme distaste and paid Weber a visit at his parents’ home. He swore he hadn’t seen her. He’d been out at a restaurant with his parents the night she’d gone missing, he explained, and had been with them all evening. He promised he would keep them apprised of anything he heard.

Before long, however, Weber left for Thailand, a country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. The family’s suspicion deepened immensely, but as there was no body, there was officially no murder, and there wasn’t anything that tied him to the disappearance.

On Christmas Day 1990, a little over eight months after Lynda had disappeared, the Singshinsuks got a difficult phone call. It was Donald Weber, and he claimed to know where Lynda’s body was. He didn’t say he was responsible for her disappearance, but he did say that he would reveal her whereabouts for $50,000. Lynda’s parents took in the grim message, bile rising in their hearts. He said he was calling from Thailand, and it was unclear what he was implying — did he find out something in Thailand, or was he saying that he knew where she was in the U.S.?

An Armes collectible action figure still in its box.

Even with Weber’s unsettling phone call, there was little that could be done by U.S. authorities, and the Chicago police were still suggesting that Lynda might have run away voluntarily. Frustrated with the lack of progress, the Singshinsuks reached out to The Investigators, the private eyes from El Paso, whom a friend had read about in a magazine. The Investigators were said to be one of the best firms in the world, and founder and lead detective Jay J. Armes gave a unique promise when taking on any case: He 100 percent guaranteed results. Soon thereafter, The Investigators flew to Illinois to meet Lynda’s family and learn everything they could about the case.

The Investigators’ headquarters is still in the same place it has been since Armes founded the business in 1960, on Montana Avenue not far from downtown El Paso. The mission-style building is surrounded by homes, restaurants and offices, and though it stands out as a bright-white cross between an adobe home and fortress, it is the enormous billboard out front that belies the service inside. One side has a photo of Jay J. Armes peering through some blinds, a .38 revolver held aloft in one of his hooks and a grimace on his face, and the other side features him and his son engaging in spy activities.

Armes, his son, Jay III, and his bodyguard at The Investigators’ headquarters.

Going through the front gate and into the office, the first impression is that of a dentist’s office. A waiting room with magazines and couches sits across from the reception area, with the radio playing at a background volume from speakers in the ceiling. Looking closer, however, the scope of the detective’s legend becomes more apparent. A large photo of Armes with Dick Cheney and George W. Bush is in the waiting room, while a collage entitled “Superheroes since the 1970s” hangs behind the receptionist, featuring Armes alongside heroes such as Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker. A room down the corridor has tables and shelves filled with gadgets and tools, a workspace that would make M from the James Bond films proud, while at the end is a locked door that leads to Armes’s lair-like office upstairs.

To get to his office, visitors can ascend 12 feet in an elevator or go up a spiral staircase; either way, the path leads through a collection of stuffed exotic animals that used to live on the family property in El Paso’s Lower Valley. The elevator opens to a room with dark wood paneling and long, low couches. A mannequin of Armes sits on the couch facing the elevator, providing a momentary diversion for intruders if Armes needs it. To the left is Armes’s desk, a massive piece of furniture in front of a huge map of the United States and surrounded by monitors with the feed from his security cameras as well as clocks showing the times in all different parts of the world. Christian tchotchkes adorn his desk and blown-up autopsy photos sit on an easel in front of him. All in all, the effect is like walking onto the set of a spy movie from the 1960s.

Armes with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney during Bush’s first inauguration.Photo by Photo courtesy Jay J. Armes

On a recent afternoon, Armes, now 88, sat behind his desk speaking on the phone with clients in English and Spanish, clad in a pastel jumpsuit embroidered with the Jay J. Armes logo, two J’s forming a pistol. Armes hangs up the phone, expertly positions a pen in an open hook and takes notes on a sheet of paper atop a file folder bulging with documents. Once he’s finished with his business, he stands up and extends a hook to shake unselfconsciously.

Another call comes in. Armes yells into the phone at a client who is at a bank trying to withdraw the funds to pay off a kidnapping ransom. Armes suspects that the kidnapping is related to cartel activity across the border in Ciudad Juárez. He and his son go to El Paso’s sister city on assignment somewhat regularly, investigating other kidnappings and extortion attempts. He speaks with the person on the other end gruffly, counseling them that everything will be totally fine if they simply do as he says.

Armes estimates that his firm has investigated around 5,000 cases over the past 60 years. The work can become fairly routine — indeed, the bread and butter for any private eye is keeping tabs on unfaithful spouses, Jay III says — but his work has taken him to far-flung locales and each case gives him the chance to learn something new. They have undertaken investigations in England, Thailand, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Myanmar (when it was still known as Burma), Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Germany, Haiti, Belarus, Russia and all over Mexico.

Some countries allow outside investigators to do their work, but in some cases they have to straight-up lie about their reasons for visiting the country. “My dad borrowed Bibles and hymnals from the church to disguise himself as a missionary to get into Chad because they weren’t letting Westerners in for any other reasons,” Jay III says. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the country or world, you can hire us and we’ll work for you.”

Armes initially wanted to be an actor and moved to Hollywood to do so, but he didn’t like the way of life, with the excessive drinking, pot-smoking and relentless smog. He considered going into law but felt he’d be more effective being directly involved in tracking down bad guys, so he obtained the licensure necessary to become a Texas private eye.

Armes proudly boasts that his life revolves around being a detective. He doesn’t have many friends, he isn’t social, and he admits that he wasn’t the most attentive dad. He doesn’t drink alcohol or coffee, is indifferent toward food, sleeps little, and claims he can go long stretches without water. “That’s how you train your body,” he says.

Jay III, now 53, is the assistant chief investigator and managing partner of the firm and also runs Brandon Enterprises, a company based out of the same office that sells spy gear, body armor and firearms. Jay III (there is no “Jay Jr.” — it’s complicated, they said) is more straitlaced than his dad, more like a no-nonsense investigator who would fit in well on the set of Law & Order. The elder Armes says he wanted his son to be an attorney or a doctor, but Jay III had been helping him with investigations since he was in middle school and had his sights set on being a private eye.

“Literally, some of my earliest memories are going on surveillance with my dad, 4, 5, 6 years old in the back of the car,” Jay III says.

“He said, ‘I want to be an investigator, and I want to be better than you,’” Armes recalls. “I said, ‘Son, if you think you can do better, I’ll let you stay on.’”

Jay III went on his first big mission when he was 13, donning the tailor-made uniform of a Greek boarding school so that he could sneak in to rescue the son of a prominent magnate there, against the son’s will. In high school, Jay III was the official crime scene photographer for his father’s outfit, which entailed him getting up close and personal with deceased victims and creepy crime scenes, taking shots of the wounds and any lint or blood or whatever clue might help in solving the case.

By the time he was in college, Jay III was a seasoned private eye who had seen more than his fair share of strange crimes and seedy locations. He was home on a break when his dad was contacted by the Singshinsuks, and he flew with him to meet the beleaguered family.

Like most things in life, good detective work doesn’t come cheap, and The Investigators have a reputation for being a high-end operation. The family agreed to pay around $30,000 to the detectives to find Lynda, and not long after that they began their search for Donald Weber in Thailand, pounding the pavement in a country where they didn’t speak the language and had no official jurisdiction whatsoever.

Back in the restaurant at the Orchid Hotel, Armes agreed to tell Weber how they’d tracked him down, in order to get the conversation started.

The Investigators had learned that Weber was in Chiang Mai after accessing immigration records and tracing collect calls he’d made to his family and Lynda’s, who by this point had started recording the calls. They’d found a local bank account registered to Weber with $126 in it, but nobody at the bank had seen Weber in weeks.

Weber couldn’t be found in any of the nicer hotels either, so the investigators began looking at cheaper guesthouses. They had their first big break when they learned that Weber had happened to leave some suitcases behind at the Rasha Guest House. The proprietor accepted a few dollars in exchange for letting them look inside, and they’d found photos of Lynda but no evidence of where she’d gone. The innkeeper suggested they try a local market, where they eventually spoke with a young woman selling animals and pet supplies who recognized the American. She told them that Weber had recently bought a dog and that she had recommended a veterinarian to him and his girlfriend, Tsom. The Investigators went to the vet and managed to extract Tsom’s address, where they went to surprise Weber for his birthday.

Weber’s expression changed slightly as they told him all this; he was obviously impressed with their work. But he was still skeptical. It just didn’t add up. He wasn’t convinced that they weren’t feds or part of some other government branch that could spirit him back to Chicago — especially when they admitted that they’d found Weber’s notes for his plan to extort money from Lynda’s family, which were in the suitcase. In those pre-internet days, it wasn’t like he could just look Armes up. The trio circled around the question for the entire day, with Armes and his son insisting that they were working strictly in the interest of the wrongful death lawsuit against Northwestern University.

As they were talking, a tape recorder hidden on the table under a folded newspaper loudly clicked as it reached the end of its cassette. Weber’s eyes widened. His hand shot out, but Jay III slapped it away. “Thai people don’t like guns,” Armes said, and Weber withdrew his hand.

The hint of a gun signaled the end of the conversation. Weber was visibly exhausted and excused himself to go back to his apartment, saying they could continue the conversation tomorrow. Armes wasn’t at all surprised when Weber returned to the hotel a little while later and began yelling at them for wrecking his relationship — Tsom, scared by the earlier visit, wouldn’t let him back in. Don’t worry, The Investigators said, they’d gotten him a hotel room, and they suggested that he go upstairs and relax.

As it happened, Armes had a copy of his 1976 autobiography, Jay J. Armes, Investigator, with him. “Read it,” Armes said. Once Weber was assured that they were who they said they were, they could work on a way forward that would benefit everybody. With that, the trio disbanded and Weber went upstairs. He got to work reading the book, while an associate of The Investigators kept an eye on the room, making sure Weber didn’t try to make a break for it.

Armes was born Julian Jay Armas on August 12, 1932, and grew up in Ysleta, a working-class neighborhood in El Paso’s Lower Valley. He was one of eight children (five of which survived) born to Beatriz and Pedro Armas, a butcher in a local supermarket. Julian was an athletic, hard-working boy, and it was innocent boyhood mischief that led to his accident. On May 11, 1946, Julian and a friend were out exploring and came across a box of railroad torpedoes, small signaling devices effectively similar to dynamite. His friend dared him to pick some up and rub them together. Julian was blown backward by a sudden explosion, and when he came to, he saw raw stumps where his hands had once been. He was rushed to the hospital, and the remains of his hands were amputated just above the wrist.

“He didn’t cry or say anything much about the pain. He took it like a soldier,” Pedro Armas told the El Paso Times shortly after the accident. “In the hospital, he just looked at me and said, ‘I can almost feel my fingers and hands, Dad. It doesn’t seem like they have been cut off.’”

The doctors told young Julian he would need six months to heal before he could start using the apparatuses that would take the place of his hands. He said that was unacceptable and that he wanted to start right away. The hooks operate like bike brakes, with tension applied to open and close them via a cable anchored to muscles in his arm. Getting used to the hooks caused horrendous pain and he sometimes felt dismayed at the extreme clumsiness that came with his new appendages. One day in school, he looked down as he was writing on the blackboard and saw that he’d dripped a pool of blood onto the floor.

Slowly but surely he mastered the use of the hooks and became adept at writing, dialing phones, and doing other day-to-day activities. He lettered in numerous sports in high school, trained in martial arts, and, when he decided to become a private eye, learned to fire many different kinds of guns, which were adapted for use with his hooks. He opened The Investigators in 1960 and quickly worked to make a name for himself as Jay Julian Armes. (He legally changed his name in 1977.) He had two daughters with his first wife and then two sons and a daughter with his second wife, Linda Chew, whom he married in 1966 and is still married to.

A photo of Armes with his wife after he was elected to the El Paso City Council.

As the prestige of The Investigators grew, Armes became known for his ostentatious displays of celebrity, cruising around low-key El Paso in his chauffeured, bulletproof limousine and keeping a menagerie of exotic animals on his substantial estate. He was a staple in the local press, where he bragged about the many capers he’d solved and the movies and TV series in development based on his life. Having been born to a poor family and suffering a terrible injury as a child, it made sense that Armes would play up the success of his larger-than-life persona, and others were eager to help craft his legend.

In December 1975, a bomb exploded at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Police had no leads in the case, and an anonymous individual contracted Armes to investigate the bombing. It eventually came to light that a lawyer for Ideal Toy Corp., the company that produced the Jay J. Armes action figure, had hired him to solve the real-life bombing in a way that would conveniently coincide with the release of the toy.

Being a private eye has given Armes a flair for deception, a tool he can use to his advantage, since his investigations are not constrained by the boundaries theoretically informing normal police work. Armes is a religious man who at one point tithed 10 percent of his income to the El Paso church he attended, and he has said that any deception he undertakes has an ethical justification — in this case, bringing to justice a murderer and giving peace to the Singshinsuk family. But over the years, Armes has blurred the lines between fact and fiction so significantly that, in addition to bending the truth in pursuit of criminals, it has become difficult to distinguish between the myths and realities of his own life.

In the 1970s, at the height of Armes’s celebrity, there were a handful of articles that seemingly went out of their way to deflate the investigator’s legend. The articles alleged that, among other bent truths, Armes didn’t pay well, that the venerated waterfall on his property was merely a trough, that he didn’t have a pilot’s license, that he wasn’t an Interpol agent, and, alarmingly, that his armored limousine wasn’t actually bulletproof. “It scared me because all this time I’d been driving down the street, sticking my tongue out at people saying, ‘Yeah, shoot me. I’m Jay Armes’ bodyguard and you can’t get me. You could drop a bomb on this car and it wouldn’t hurt it,’” Armes’s former bodyguard Joe Breedlove told the San Diego Reader in 1978.

An especially incisive article titled “Is Jay J. Armes for real?” was published in Texas Monthly in January 1976, in which author Gary Cartwright essentially portrays Armes as a fraud and outlines with evident relish the numerous holes in the Armes story, including additional fairly major untruths like Armes not having a criminology degree from New York University. Armes was so upset by the direction of Cartwright’s reporting that the magazine’s then-publisher Mike Levy hid indoors until the issue was printed in order to avoid process servers.

Armes recovering from a gunshot wound after being shot during a kidnapping case in San Francisco, 1980s.

Once the issue hit the newsstands, Armes arranged an interview with a reporter from the El Paso Post-Herald to refute the charges in the article. He presented people who were quoted in the article but who said that Cartwright had taken their words out of context or made things up entirely. Armes practically spits when he talks about the experience, claiming it was a hatchet job orchestrated by the opposition to undermine his run for sheriff. Despite what Armes says is consistent interest in profiling him, he refuses to have anything to do with Texas Monthly to the present day. (For the magazine’s part, Cartwright was a celebrated writer with an award-winning career as a journalist. “We stand by our story,” Levy told The Washington Post in 1981.)

Armes has been sued numerous times, and in 1987 he was put on five-year probation by the Texas Board of Private Investigators and Private Security Agencies on account of complaints made against him by clients (including a complaint that Armes chased a subject at such high speeds that her car’s engine exploded). But Armes maintains that due to the sensitive and dangerous nature of his profession, it is understandable that emotions are heightened when things don’t work out exactly as his clients had hoped. “Even General Motors [gets complaints]. In 25 years, when people are not satisfied with the way things come out, they want their money back, and when you know you have done something, why should you?” Armes told the Chicago Tribune during the Singshinsuk investigation. Even Cartwright conceded that Armes did have the chops of a real private eye and that his work on cases typically obtained successful results.

Armes and The Investigators soldiered on through the criticism and were able to continue their detective work relatively unabated. Armes’s ambitions eventually extended to the realm of politics, and he decided to run for El Paso County sheriff in 1976 and again in 1984 as a write-in candidate. Armes ran as an outsider and promised to whip into shape a department that he characterized as lazy and ineffective. He promised to end police corruption and implement physical fitness requirements for officers. One campaign flier had a picture of Armes alongside John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., with the slogan “They had a dream … so do I.”

Armes didn’t win the sheriff seat, but by the time he took the Singshinsuk case, he was more than a year into his first term as an El Paso city councilor. He again relied on his outsider status and his go-get-’em attitude, which appealed to many people in the elderly Hispanic demographic of the district where he’d grown up, who felt that their concerns weren’t adequately represented in City Hall.

Armes would be reelected for another term, and his four years as a councilman were, to borrow the word frequently used in newspaper reports, “colorful.” Among other misadventures, Armes called a fellow council member a cockroach, spent the entire year’s postal budget on one mailing to his constituents, and at one point was accidentally responsible for the evacuation of City Hall, when an alarm clock that looked like a cartoon bomb freaked out the janitor cleaning his office. His fellow city councilors were said to “scream in frustration” when dealing with him.

“I’m not a politician,” Armes told the El Paso Times in 1993. “I have to embarrass [other council members] into voting the right way. That may not be the right way to do it, but let me tell you, I’ve gotten results.”

Indeed, despite the indelicacies of his tenure, Armes did have a reputation for getting things done.

“With Mr. Armes, I feel much more protected,” said one constituent after voicing a problem with a noisy neighbor. “He’s better than the police. He’s like a man of steel. Just look at his hooks.”

All the while, of course, Armes was continuing his work as a private eye and actively getting to the bottom of cases all around the world.

The breadth of Armes’s life and career was a lot to take in, but Donald Weber was a fast reader and got the full account of the Armes story overnight. Back in the restaurant the next morning, the standoff continued. Jay III reiterated what they’d been saying all along — it was strictly about the lawsuit.

The book had convinced Weber that they were private eyes, but this also meant they had no legal authority so far from home. Indeed, Weber wasn’t even a wanted man, as there were no charges pending against him back in the U.S.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he said.

Armes suddenly pounded his hooks on the table. “All right, dammit, that’s it.” They told Weber they knew he had no money and that his passport was about to expire. Plus, with his girlfriend having kicked him out, he was now basically homeless. Thailand may not have had an extradition treaty with the U.S., but it likely didn’t want to be supporting any freeloaders, he said. On cue, Jay III said he was going to call the local police and got up and walked down a hallway to use the phone in the lobby.

Armes sitting at his office next to a mannequin of himself.

“This is your last chance,” Armes said. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, and I thought you were smarter than this. Just remember, you brought this on yourself.”

Jay III didn’t go to use the phone and didn’t have any intention of calling the police. Instead, he stood out of view and watched Weber squirm. He returned to the table 10 minutes later and said that the police would be there soon.

Weber looked like he might make a run for it, but instead said he needed to go to the bathroom and quickly walked away. Jay III stood outside the stall as Weber audibly had diarrhea, a common response to extreme stress. This development was reported to Armes, who was elated — they had literally scared him shitless. “I know how crude this sounds,” Armes later wrote in his report of the case, “but there’s just no other way to describe it.”

Ultimately, Weber realized that he had to hedge his bets and accept that The Investigators were who they said they were — bounty hunters who only needed the body for lawsuit purposes. He broached a hypothetical trade: information about Lynda’s whereabouts in exchange for getting him out of his current jam.

Armes took it a step further: If he told them about Lynda, they would help him renew his passport, advance him some of the expected proceeds from the wrongful death lawsuit, and leave him be in Thailand. Weber nodded and sighed.

“Great,” Armes said.

Weber then asked for a piece of paper and began drawing a map of where Lynda’s body was buried.

The father and son resisted the urge to look at each other in amazement. They’d been confident that they could eventually get him to crack, but they were not expecting so brazen an admission. Armes asked his son to call the police back and tell them they were no longer needed.

Armes, his bodyguard and Jay III next to some of the taxidermied animals at his office.

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Weber said his path to homicidal action began when he strained his back doing manual labor. His mother had given him some painkillers, which he said had knocked him out. He slept fitfully and thought obsessively about Lynda. He’d heard she was going to take a trip to Thailand with her new boyfriend, and this had put him into a melancholy daze. When he woke up, he was convinced that he needed to kill her.

He got up and went out to eat with his parents, who were completely unaware what was brewing in his brain. When his parents turned in for the evening, he took his mother’s car and drove to Lynda’s dorm in downtown Chicago. He was dressed in black and carried with him a backpack containing rope, tape and a pistol.

Recalling an article he’d read in Field & Stream, along the way Weber stopped at a convenience store and bought two cans of soda, which he drained and filled with fiberglass he’d brought with him to make a silencer. He parked in the quiet lot in front of the dorm, feeling the heft of the gun. Then he put the gun in the bag, walked into the building, and took the elevator nine floors up to her room.

Lynda was clad in pajamas and was surprised to see him. She tentatively invited him inside, thinking it was best to appease him and then get him to leave. Weber stared at her. She stared back uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, but I can’t live with what you’ve done,” Weber said. He pulled out the pistol and shot her six times.

Weber found a sleeping bag in Lynda’s room. He stuffed Lynda’s body inside and then put her in a clothes hamper. He carried the hamper down a flight of stairs and got into the elevator with another student, who remarked on the late-night laundry duties. Weber contemplated killing her too, but the conversation ended without any suspicion toward the bundle, and Weber dragged the hamper out to his car. A security officer drove by but apparently didn’t notice that the basket was unusually heavy.

From there, Weber drove back to Robinson and buried the hamper under some car parts in a local landfill. He had taken a ring and some other personal effects from Lynda’s room, and he stopped at a cemetery to burn some of them. Then he went home, parked the car, and went to sleep. He woke up and had breakfast with his family, and Lynda was reported missing the next day.

Weber said that he got worried that the body could be easily discovered and decided to move it a little while later. He dug up the bundle and put it in his car and drove across the country to Las Vegas, where he pawned some of Lynda’s jewelry. Next, he drove to the Coconino National Forest in northern Arizona, a place he’d gone camping with his parents when he was younger. He followed a winding access road as far as he could take it and stopped at a remote clearing. There, he dug a hole and deposited Lynda’s remains. The wind rustled the trees and the sun shone down on him, and he didn’t sense that any prying eyes had seen what he’d done. Not long after that, he flew to Thailand, where he once again expected to commit suicide out of guilt and because of how badly he’d fucked up his life.

“I didn’t believe I had done it,” Weber later said. “The world had ended as far as I was concerned.”

Saying aloud for the first time everything that had transpired that grim April night, Weber looked deflated and sat back in his chair. Looking at the map, they saw he’d drawn an overhead view of the site that included trees, obscure paths and topography. He noted the convoluted route to get there and handed the map over to Armes. They should be able to find Lynda’s remains with a metal detector because she was wearing a metal belt buckle when he buried her, he said. She’d also be wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

The meeting drew to a close. The Investigators gave Weber some money for a place to stay and went back to the United States. True to their word, they left Weber in Thailand and didn’t alert the Thai police. Once they’d found Lynda, they told him, they would help him renew his passport, just as they’d promised.

“We’ll be in touch,” Armes said.

Soon after they got back to the United States, The Investigators went to the location deep in the Arizona forest that Weber had indicated and were surprised at how accurate the map was. Random bits of topography corresponded to what he’d drawn, lessening the chance they’d been sent on a wild goose chase.

However, the task that awaited them revealed the unglamorous side of being a private investigator. It’s not all walking down shadowy streets and taking nips from a flask — in reality, there’s a lot of uncomfortable grunt work. In this case, searching for Lynda’s remains entailed walking around in the freezing weather with a metal detector and digging extensively wherever the detector indicated a hit. As it turned out, a railroad had once gone through the area and digging hole after hole yielded only a large pile of railroad spikes. It would be very difficult to find a metal belt buckle among all the scraps of iron.

They realized that they had to reenlist Weber’s help. They got back in touch with him in Chiang Mai and explained that they hadn’t been able to find Lynda due to the presence of the railroad spikes — they needed him to come to Arizona and show them precisely where she’d been buried.

They got to talking and negotiated the parameters of the updated trade: Weber would provide information about Lynda’s whereabouts in exchange for safe and quick passage in and out of the U.S. to renew his passport. Armes said that they would not only buy him a ticket back to the U.S. but also would fly him to and from the crime scene in their own private plane, with the authorities none the wiser. In fact, Armes reiterated, he didn’t trust the feds or the regular authorities — local police were often Keystone Cops and the FBI was an old boys’ club that followed its own agenda.

Of course, this was complete nonsense, as they had no intention of letting Weber go free after they found where Lynda was buried. “We never had any intentions of giving in to any of his demands,” Armes says. “Bargaining with a killer is like dealing with the Devil. I just won’t do it.”

Ultimately, Weber was sufficiently convinced by the apparent genuineness of their offer (but also appreciative of Armes’s warning that he would “be on Weber’s ass closer than his underwear” for the rest of his life if he tried to hide again), and he agreed to fly back and facilitate the recovery of Lynda’s body, contingent of course on the assured anonymity of his arrival. They would all get what they wanted, and nobody would have to know.

“We made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Armes has often said about the case.

On January 26, 1991, The Investigators drove down a barely navigable path through the Coconino National Forest with Weber in the back seat. He looked out the window nervously, trying to spot anyone who might be hidden among the trees. It was a surreal experience, like stepping firsthand into an old memory. The route had been circuitous and prolonged — more of Weber’s precautions to make sure they weren’t being followed.

Getting to this point had come together exactly as planned. Weber had flown from Thailand to Los Angeles, then with The Investigators on to El Paso. From there, the group took the private jet to Flagstaff and drove to the national forest. Alongside Armes and Weber were some men documenting the dig with video cameras, ostensibly for insurance purposes. Weber was initially angry about the cameras, but by the time they’d started driving he’d stopped paying them much mind and just wanted to get the recovery over with and take off back to Asia. Eventually, the vehicle came to the spot in the clearing where Weber said Lynda was buried. Weber got out of the car and was mildly relieved to see that the snow was undisturbed, a good indication that nobody was there waiting for them. Still, Weber was more on edge than ever, and he looked around nervously as he walked them to the grim location.

The group began to dig.

Even to seasoned private eyes who had seen a lot, it was still gasp-inducing to see a foot protruding from the dirt. They gingerly uncovered more of the body, and saw that she was wearing shorts with a metal belt buckle, just as Weber had said. Armes couldn’t believe it. Weber had been under no obligation to reveal anything because they truly didn’t have any hard evidence to demonstrate he was guilty. Armes looked over at Weber, who seemed to know what he was thinking: He couldn’t believe he’d put himself in such a compromising situation. Even the spaces between the trees seemed to be watching him. What the fuck was he doing there?

The group got back in the car and retraced their route away from the burial site. Weber watched the clearing recede and sat low in his seat. About 800 yards down the road, the trees around the car came alive. Agents from the FBI and the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office surrounded the vehicle and pointed their rifles at those inside. A few agents ran up to the passenger side, pulled one of the cameramen out through the window, and threw him on the ground. When they realized they had the wrong person, they went back to the car and yanked Weber out, then handcuffed him as he lay facedown in the dirt and snow.

As it turned out, Armes had alerted the FBI and local law enforcement that he would be bringing Weber to that area after Weber’s flight had been arranged. Armes had initially received a noncommittal response about putting some agents on the ground, but the FBI eventually confirmed that they would be watching for his private plane when it arrived in the area. When word came that Armes had Weber in tow and would actually be bringing him to the burial site, the agents moved out and got into position. They hadn’t left any tracks in the clearing because they had climbed the opposite side of the mountain.

Lynda’s identity was confirmed through dental records, and the Singshinsuk family was finally able to bury their daughter. A funeral ceremony was held for Lynda at a Buddhist temple in Chicago in early February 1991, and a scholarship was established in her name at Northwestern University. “The chances she was alive were one in a million, but we still hoped,” Sompong Singshinsuk told the Chicago Tribune not long after Lynda was found. “I said it was foul play in the beginning. I knew that.” Weber was officially charged with murder, robbery and concealing a homicide.

It was hard for Weber’s friends to believe that he was responsible for Lynda’s death. He hadn’t ever even been in a fistfight. “Don was a gentleman’s gentleman,” one college friend said at the time. “He was the kind of guy most ladies fall for. He wasn’t crude or crass, and he was always sensitive to the feelings of other people. But he was someone who wanted to set the agenda.”

A year later in Chicago, wearing a blue jumpsuit with epaulettes, Armes testified at Weber’s pretrial hearing. He recounted the circumstances of Weber’s capture, referring to Weber as “Charles Manson,” owing to the thick beard he’d grown in an effort to prove he wasn’t in his right mind, a quip that elicited laughs from the gathered officials. Weber shook his head once in response to something Armes said but otherwise stayed quiet.

Weber’s lawyer, a public defender, argued that Weber had become temporarily deranged when Lynda wanted to move on from him. He was full of despair at what he’d done, and according to an account in the Chicago Tribune, Weber had told a police officer that he was glad he’d gotten captured, as it put an end to the agonizing uncertainty of life on the run. But Weber also argued that he was coerced into confessing by The Investigators and a group of four hired Thai agents who loomed nearby during their conversation, and that someone in the group had had a gun trained on him for much of the interrogation.

Given the abundance of evidence against Weber — including his confession and hand-drawn map — prosecutors would almost certainly be seeking the death penalty. In fact, Weber was so distraught about what he’d done that at one point he offered to plead guilty in exchange for the death penalty, although official procedures made that trade impossible. The Singshinsuk family ultimately decided to accept a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence in order to avoid a lengthy trial. Armes claimed some credit for convincing the family that this way Weber actually had it worse.

“If we put him to death, he’ll just go to sleep like a little baby,” Armes says. “But if we let him live and give him 60 years, we’ll have him suffer more.”

Weber was ultimately sentenced to 75 years in prison — 70 years for the murder and five more for concealing a homicidal death. Weber, who declined to share his side of the story for this article, is currently incarcerated at the Graham Correctional Center in south-central Illinois and will be eligible for parole in 2027 when he is 66.

On November 18, 2017, a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Rogelio Martinez radioed that he was going to investigate an unknown disturbance near a culvert in the rural expanse of Culberson County, 120 miles east of El Paso. The next morning, Martinez was found at that the bottom of the culvert, gravely injured, alongside another agent who’d suffered some broken bones. Martinez eventually died of his injuries, and although the FBI conducted dozens of interviews and an extensive investigation, the agency concluded that the cause of death could not be determined. Some people close to the agent were unimpressed with this conclusion and suspected that foul play was involved, and they hired Armes to see what he could find out about that night.

Armes contends that the fall wasn’t far enough to kill anyone and that the injuries Martinez suffered aren’t consistent with those of a fall victim. He suspects foul play and is currently investigating this possibility, one more of the hundreds of cases The Investigators have taken on since the Singshinsuk investigation, including the (possibly faked) kidnapping of a Mexican finance minister, the mysterious death of a Levi’s executive in Hong Kong, and a caper in which Armes and Jay III were detained in Juárez for threatening a Mexican national whom they said was secretly filming the coupon production facility where they’d been hired to provide security.

Linda, Armes’ wife, with one of Armes’ lions.

As he nears his 10th decade of life, Armes often asks his wife why the Lord still has him here. Every time he expects that the resolution of a case will satisfy the itch to investigate, he finds he is still compelled to take on more cases. “The Lord gives everybody a gift. The Lord has given me a gift to go after a case and solve it,” Armes says. “You can come into my office and hire me for the most intricate case in the world. A case that the FBI cannot solve, the police department can’t solve, the sheriff’s department can’t solve. I like to solve those cases.”

Armes has also run for office a few times since his tenure as a city councilor in the early 1990s. His bid for a city council seat in 1999 ended with a lawsuit and countersuit between him, the winning candidate and a judge over alleged intimidation at a polling place. Two years later, a fight broke out among supporters of Armes and another candidate during yet another council bid. After that, Armes put his political ambitions behind him and focused only on the thing he loves most: private investigating.

Armes at the entrance of his 12-acre estate.

The Singshinsuk case “was an affirmation on how well we work together,” Jay III says of his partnership with his dad. “The satisfaction that I got out of that case personally was huge. It’s one of those things that … you don’t realize what you’re doing until after the fact and have a chance to sit back and actually look at everything that happened … and you think, ‘Wow, that’s pretty crazy.’”

The elder Armes is at the same time boastful and modest when reflecting on the Weber caper. Still, he feels that the Singshinsuk case, for all its intrigue and psychological back-and-forth, was not particularly unique or difficult to solve, considering all that he’s seen in his career. But there was satisfaction in providing the forlorn family with a definitive answer — and an affirmation of the legend he has built for himself and The Investigators.

After more than six decades in the business, Armes maintains a single-minded dedication to his work.

“I’m not trying to break records or prove anything,” Armes says. “I’m just trying to get everything out of life that it can possibly produce. The more I draw on myself, the more I find I have left.”