A Free OSINT Lesson: Operation "Find Vase"
How kickin' it old school can unearth new insights
Alright, this one is pretty cool. It’s cool because so much of the OSINT stuff on the internet is about coding, web scraping, and building little tools to search for phone numbers or faces. And that stuff matters, sure, but sometimes, doing it old school… that’s when the fire in your investigation belly comes alive.
It’s early February. Our company, Permanent Record Research, has a client working on a large-scale project. There are tons of moving parts and people. Law enforcement involved. And it all goes back a couple of decades. Long story short, it’s a doozy. Now, I have to change some details here for confidentiality reasons, but the overall events remain pretty much the same. You know how it goes.
I get a message from Justin Seitz on our little in-house messenger system, “Hey homie. I got an update. You got time to find a vase?”
A vase. A special little vase that was stolen from the home during a homicide. The vase holds a massive key to unlocking who actually committed said crime, but it vanished. The criminal case was eventually brought before the court. A person went to prison, but the question remains decades later, “Why did the police never investigate the circumstances of the vase?”
The vase has a paper trail. They knew where it was, who had it, and who bought it after it was stolen. This was a major clue. Unlocking the vase's secret would unlock aspects of this case that could totally overturn it. And now, in 2024, the vase is missing—lost to the fire of time.
“A vase?” I replied. It was maybe 8:30 AM, and I hadn’t had my two shots of espresso and Coke Zero yet.
“THE vase. The missing vase.”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
A second later, it hit me. It was the type of text you send without thinking. That brief moment of "Huh?" followed by, "Oh yeah!"
"Oh shit! From the *** case? It's probably long gone, man…"
Then Justin sent a message that would send me on a journey. Like some Cambellian Hero off to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. One of those texts that pushes you to seek out glory. A DM so powerful, it would have launched a thousand ships.
"But MJ… what if it isn't?"
I know, it's way less epic when you aren't in the moment. But, for some reason, perhaps moved by the muses or the fates of OSINT, I rose out of my chair. I stood before my whiteboard and dramatically wrote under my "To Do" section - Find vase
We had some details about the vase from the client. I had photos, a very small paper trail of ownership, and the name of an individual who was in possession of the vase several weeks after the crime.
To quickly sum it up, during a homicide over a decade ago, the vase was stolen from the home of the victim. It was expensive and extremely rare.
During the initial investigation, the police were notified that an individual was in possession of the vase. However, whether it was incompetence, ignorance, or apathy (probably all three), there was a simple mix-up. A mix-up that would have been avoided if a police officer had simply gone to physically see the vase with their own eyes and matched it to the photo in their possession. Instead of taking the ten-minute drive, they made a phone call and concluded that this was a similar vase, but not the vase. It was merely a coincidence.
Now, I can't get into specifics as to how this mistake occurred. But it was an error, accidentally or purposefully made, on a sale document. The type of vase was mixed up on the paperwork with the artist who created it. A clerical error is now reaching through time and space to impact the lives of many people.
I digress.
Our client needed to know who had interacted with the vase during the police investigation.
Now, a couple weeks after the crime, the vase was sold to an antique store. The antique store employee who made the clerical error on the sale document doesn't remember the vase. The antique store owner says that they were contacted by law enforcement about it, they can't recall if the police came to see it or not, and they don't remember what happened to it. They also won't divulge sales records, if they exist at all, or discuss it. These were dead ends.
"Did you find it yet?" Justin asked about a week later.
I had phone calls with the client, got read into the situation and research surrounding the vase, and did some preliminary searching on the internet to get a handle on what type of vase this was.
In short, it was from a well-known artist (in the pottery/vase world, not in culture), and part of a limited series (it had a couple of siblings). There is little out there about the artist or the vases themselves. Even on forums where the artist's name is mentioned, the vases themselves don't really pop up. I even found the artist's phone number and called it. I spoke to his wife. He died in 2012. She didn't remember the vase.
"No, Justin."
Two weeks had passed, and my 'To Do' list was still haunted by "Find Vase." I steadily checked off the other items, but that stupid vase still laughed at me.
I realized that trying to find the vase was a waste of time. It might be in a basement two states away, stowed in the back of someone's garage, or in a landfill. The conditions set by the client did not allow me to start posting pictures of it online or to make any loud noise in the online vase community. Public attention was not part of the plan—not yet, anyway.
I had to focus on the people.
The person from the antique store who acquired the vase made a clerical error, and doesn't recall anything about it.
The owner of the shop ain't sayin' shit.
The name of the person who sold the vase to the store; the client already knew about it and had them locked down (whole other story).
Think MJ. Think.
Then it hit me. What about other employees? Surely, the store had more than one worker. I mean, the vase was probably handled by others, maybe sold by someone else, cleaned, checked, and researched to establish a purchase price. Someone might know something.
So all I needed to do was find any and all former employees of the "X Antique Shop" located in "Large City, USA" in a timeframe that hovered around the late nineties—an era where a common quote was, "They have the internet on computers now."
I started doing every search under the sun for the antique store on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You name it. No one, apart from the owner, was associated. I started looking through their acquaintances, posts, and friends lists and realized this was quickly becoming a wild goose chase/needle in a haystack situation. Shit.
“MmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmJAAAAAY! How’s it going bud? Any luck on that vase? You’ll find it.” It was Justin. Another week had gone by.
“It’s gone… this is a waste of time.” I was running low on fuel. The Coke Zero pumping through my veins was causing bouts of rage and depression.
"Well, chip away a bit more, take a break… walk away… come back. If it's gone, it's gone."
“Vases are dumb,” I replied. “I hope they all go missing and break. I will steal every vase ever and smash them.”
“That would be awesome. I can imagine the newspaper headline,” Justin replied. “Crazy Man Tries to Find Missing Vase By Smashing All Other Vases.”
And then it happened. I heard them. Those Muses, or perhaps Fates, all investigators and OSINT practitioners quietly worship in the solitude of their homes or offices. They were whispering to me, calling me back into the past, to something older. A world before web scraping and Python code, before the breaches that populate the Dark Web, before social media. They knew that what I was searching for rested in something much older and much more real.
“Holy shit balls…”
A quick Google search led me to every newspaper archive in the city the vase was from. I opened up multiple archives and started typing in the name of the vase, the artist who made it, the type of vase… nothing. Damn.
Then, I typed in the name of the antique shop and the owner.
Articles from the mid-nineties about the owner and the shop started to pop up. One article was even written around the same time as the criminal case. There were four in total.
I began scanning the articles. The journalists—who I could all kiss right now—had interviews with some of the store's employees. There were old black-and-white photos of them. One employee even cracked a joke in the article, saying, "When you come into our store, don't ask, 'What's new?'" Oh, fuck off…
I found three people who worked at the store, all unknown to the client, who would have at least been in the same room as the vase.
“Justin… JUSTIN! You beautiful fucking bastard! MWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!”
Looking in archived newspapers had always been more of a concept than a practice for me. I've done it before, but always for a person. But this wasn't a person—it was a thing, a long-gone thing…
With their names in hand, it became short work to track them down. One passed away fairly recently, but we still had two. I sent all their details off to the client.
A few days later, the client sent me an email. They called them. The employees we found gave us the names of a few others who worked there. I tracked them down, too, and sent their information to the client.
We now had five. That eventually led to seven.
Seven people who may know where that vase went next.
Who would have thought that some old newspaper articles would open all this up? The client is doing their side of the job now. Phone calls are being made. Interviews are happenings. Meetings are set up in small coffee shops to chat about whatever they can recall from all those years ago.
For now, I've pivoted to other aspects of this project, tasked with other findings that need digging, but "Find Vase" still haunts my whiteboard.