Dead Men Tell No Tales

In her day job—which is often a night job—DiBenedetto is a licensed private investigator. She spends hours in her car trailing cheating spouses and “injured” workers, snapping photos, keeping logs, and gathering evidence to present in court.

“I have never, ever lost a case in court,” she says. “Probably because I always have ten million pieces of paper, with everything documented.”

Her PI work can require DiBenedetto to check courthouse records. She eventually expanded into genealogical and historic research.

While being a PI pays the bills, DiBenedetto finds it more gratifying to be what she calls “a history detective. It’s a lot like being a PI, but you don’t have to go to court and testify,” she says.

Maybe not, but she discovered that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century citizens generated just as much scandal—or what she calls “smut”—as those living in the twentieth and twenty-first.

She has uncovered murders, suicides, even sex scandals—such as the twice-widowed woman who married a third husband in 1835 only to discover he already had a wife in France. In 1836, her adult son, defending her honor, shot and wounded the bigamist while he was jailed in New Orleans.

“I’ve been on this quest my whole life,” says DiBenedetto, who grew up in Baton Rouge and often accompanied her father and great-aunt on genealogical expeditions to out-of-the-way libraries and courthouses. She tagged along on family-research trips when she was ten years old, not bothered in the least that the median age of the group was seventy. “I was a nerd,” she says. “I loved doing stuff like that.”

DiBenedetto, who these days favors low-cut tops, tight jeans, and snazzy hats, jokes that she’s spent most of her life in uniform. A Girl Scout for twelve years, she joined the marines right out of Tara High School. She was variously stationed in California, Florida, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Japan.

Every decade, DiBenedetto changed careers. After ten years in the marines, she became a police officer in California. In 1992, she returned to Baton Rouge and continued with police work. After ten years as a cop, and promotion to lieutenant, she became a licensed private investigator and hired on with a local firm because “the money was irresistible.” In 2002, when she moved to St. Amant, she began doing freelance investigative work.

“There’s so much work out there you don’t even have to advertise,” she says.

In 2002, her skills came in handy for a personal mission. A developer threatened to buy up property near her home on Lake Martin, which did not set well with DiBenedetto. “I’d lived all over the world in base housing,” she says. “This was the first home that was mine. It meant a lot to me—the American dream.

“I had just completed an extensive title search on my property,” she says. “I researched it back to 1834. My neighbors were impressed when I used my findings on the original Lake Martin land grant to stop the developer from turning the island across from our homes into a subdivision.” She presented her arguments before the Ascension Parish zoning board, which ruled against the developer.