Several new law enforcement-oriented dramas were added to the TV schedule for the 2002-03 viewing season. But if some of those new shows want to be accurate examples of “reality TV,” they’d be smart to confer with Lisa Purdy--because she can provide some good firsthand tips on how to track down and catch a crook.

Purdy, a loan technician with the Rural Business-Cooperative Service’s State Office in Yakima, Wash., had just driven into the USDA Service Center’s parking lot one morning, on her way to the office, when she noticed that the driver’s-side window of a colleague’s truck, parked in the lot, had been smashed. She walked over to inspect the damage--and then noticed that the trucks of two other colleagues were not in their normal parking spaces.

Since those three colleagues were attending a three-day training session in a nearby town, and since they had all traveled from the office to that site using government vehicles, Purdy became suspicious. “So I went to my desk, made a few phone calls to see if the missing trucks were merely not around or were actually missing,” she recounted. “To make a long story short, my office mates and I concluded that the trucks had been stolen--and that’s when I called the police, on behalf of my three colleagues, to report the thefts.”

That afternoon Purdy left the office for lunch and, while stopped at a stop sign a few blocks away, she saw a green truck that looked like the green truck which had been stolen. “As the truck passed me, I noticed that it had Idaho plates--and so did the missing green truck,” she said. “So, to me, it was pretty obvious that I was looking right at the stolen truck.”

Purdy followed that green truck--which turned into a local cemetery and parked. She then called 911 on her cell phone and explained the situation to a police dispatcher with the Yakima Police Department, who verified that the truck’s license plate number matched that of the stolen green truck. “The dispatcher asked me to keep an eye on it, and to follow it inconspicuously if it took off, since no police officers were available near that location to take over the surveillance,” she explained.

The stolen truck then went on the move again, but exited the cemetery before Purdy could see which way it had turned. “I called the dispatcher back, and she advised me to pick a direction and look for the truck,” she said. “So I drove back into the nearby residential area--and when I passed the back of the cemetery I spotted the second missing truck, a gray one, parked on the side of the road.”

Purdy called the dispatcher back again, provided details on her latest sighting, waited at the site of the second truck until a police officer arrived on the scene, and then drove to a local grocery store to continue her lunch plans.

“When I got there, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she recalled. “There, in that grocery store parking lot, was the stolen green truck I’d followed into the cemetery, and the driver was still behind the wheel.”

Purdy got back on the phone with the police dispatcher. “They definitely recognized my voice by now,” she quipped. The dispatcher advised that police officers were in the area, and asked her to keep an eye on that truck in the interim. Then, as they both stayed on the phone, the driver left the truck and entered the grocery store.

As it turned out, at that very moment two officers were parked on the other side of the grocery store parking lot. So those officers followed the driver into the store and apprehended him. According to Tuana Jones, a public affairs specialist with the Rural Development mission area State Office in Olympia, Wash., the driver subsequently confessed to stealing the two trucks and breaking the window on the third truck. Accordingly, along with evidence of other crimes that the driver had committed, he faced an estimated three years of incarceration.

“My three colleagues later presented me with a homemade ‘Certificate of Merit,’ for helping to ‘track down the perp’,” Purdy laughed. “It’s hanging on my partition--and I think it’s great.” •