RoughRider Investigations

10/13/2026

10/12/2026

ROUGHRIDER INVESTIGATIONS is getting ready to ride again.

After years away, I’m in the process of reopening my investigative firm and returning to a profession that has been a part of my life for nearly 40 years.

This has never just been a job to me. Investigative work is my passion. It takes persistence, sharp instincts, attention to detail, and the determination to keep digging when others have given up.

I believe in the old-school values of hard work, grit, and getting to the truth. A little of that rough rider spirit goes a long way. You don't back down from a challenge, you don't quit when the trail gets rough, and you don't stop until you've followed the evidence where it leads.

I've spent nearly four decades doing this work, and I'm not ready to hang up my spurs just yet.

The trail is calling, and RoughRider Investigations is preparing to ride again.

More to come.

10/04/2026

THE CASE OF THE UNKNOWN WANDERER

Some cases don't go cold.

They just sit there.

Waiting.

Back in 1982, a man walked into a church in Idaho. Nobody knew who he was. He carried no identification and gave investigators a name that turned out to be fake. In his pockets were nearly $1,900 in cash, almost 30 keys, a distinctive bolo tie and a collection of other clues that, at the time, led detectives nowhere.

The man became known as the “Unknown Wanderer.”

Then he died.

For more than four decades, that was where the case sat.

But detectives aren't particularly good at letting a mystery stay dead.

In 2019, investigators reopened the case. Advances in forensic science eventually gave them something detectives in 1982 simply didn't have: modern DNA and genealogical techniques.

The Unknown Wanderer was finally identified as Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski.

And that's where this old cold case takes a strange turn.

Investigators discovered evidence suggesting Betkouski may have had a connection to one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, in which seven people died after taking capsules laced with cyanide.

Among the evidence were photographs, a hand-drawn map of Chicago and a bottle containing homemade cyanide.

But here's where a good investigator knows better than to jump to conclusions.

Authorities have not established that Betkouski committed the Tylenol murders, and investigators have not been able to place him in Chicago when the poisonings occurred.

So, after 43 years, we still don't have the whole story.

But we have something investigators love almost as much as an answer:

A new lead.

That's the thing about cold cases.

Evidence doesn't always disappear.

Sometimes it just waits for technology to catch up with it.

And somewhere in a box, a database, an old photograph or a forgotten file, there may still be one piece of the puzzle sitting there, waiting for somebody to take another look.

Case closed?

Not quite.

Case reopened.

And that's when the real detective work begins.

10/02/2026

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Grisham made these remarks during a press conference following her issuance of a controversial emergency public health order.

The order temporarily suspended open and concealed fi***rm carry rights in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County.

When a reporter pressed her on whether the gun suspension violated her oath to uphold the Constitution, the governor responded with:

"If there's an emergency and I've declared an emergency for a temporary amount of time, I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute. There are restrictions on free speech, there are restrictions on my freedoms."

06/29/2020

Founded by Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders was a nickname given to the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, one of three such regiments raised in 1898 for the Spanish–American War and the only one to see combat.

01/29/2020

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt -

01/20/2020

If you are traveling with a gun, you need to be careful in New York. The prosecuting attorney wants to make an example of you.