And Why I’ll Never Serve Court Documents Again
By Susan Waller Lehmann
Back in May, engrossed in conversation with our visiting son, we were interrupted by someone ringing the doorbell and pounding on our front door. Startled, I looked at my watch. It was 10:38 p.m., late for someone to be at the door. My husband, Peter, bounded up the stairs. I went behind him, but our son Jacob held back on the landing, assessing the situation.
Peter flung open the door without hesitation, only to be greeted by an older woman screaming at him about our barking dogs. She sounded unhinged, every other word the F-bomb. She cursed and ranted for a while, then got into her car, backed down the driveway, and left.
Tense from adrenaline, we dissected the event. Yes, the dogs had been outside on the lower deck all evening. They were animated at times: chuffing, woofing in response to other dogs barking in the neighborhood. We had shushed them but decided they were being neither unruly nor obnoxious, so we hadn’t brought them inside.
Peter and I went out onto the deck and listened as several other neighborhood dogs continued barking. In the distance one sounded distressed, its noises plaintive and incessant. Peter took our dogs for a quick walk, then brought them inside for the night.
Shaken, yet a bit embarrassed, I locked up the house, started the dishwasher, and turned off lights.
Jacob saw things differently. “She’s lucky you didn’t shove a gun in her face,” he said. “Because people get shot all the time when they knock on the wrong door.”
He was right. And we were lucky she hadn’t shoved a gun in Peter’s face either.
There are so many ways the woman could have, should have, handled the situation. To be fair, we were new to this neighborhood, and she couldn’t call, text, or email us. We were remiss in allowing our dogs to bark after the official noise curfew of 10 p.m. But did this give her the right to angrily confront us as she did?
We continued the conversation with Jacob over the next few days. We live in a large HOA built in an area designed to minimally impact the abundant wildlife in our Western state. There are no streetlights or sidewalks. The roads are narrow, winding, and heavily treed. Out of respect for our neighbors, we don’t leave outside lights on, keeping with the ideals of a dark sky community. The woman had pulled close to our front door and left her car’s high beams on and engine running while she screamed at Peter. He couldn’t see her well and could only describe her as “older, with longish gray hair.” He said her vehicle was an SUV with square headlights.
“I guess she doesn’t know what you do for a living,” Jacob said to me. “Too bad we don’t have her license plate number, because then you’d find out everything there is to know about her.”
***
There’s no telling what awaits when you approach a house.
“No one can play ding-dong ditch anymore,” Jacob commented, wistful about his teenage years in the 1990s. “People see strangers coming to the door through their Ring cameras and shoot them.” Jacob, who earned his college tuition by serving court papers and working surveillance gigs for my agency, said he was relieved I no longer do this work.
I built my private investigations business by serving legal papers. These were the first paying jobs I conducted as a PI and something I continued doing until July 2018. This sideline led to a rewarding, if not lucrative, career as a criminal defense and mitigation specialist for capital murder defendants. I served appearance and records subpoenas for criminal and civil trials, as well as summonses and complaints for a variety of civil cases, including divorce, custody, evictions, and conservatorship filings, and lawsuits involving credit card delinquency, medical debt, and home foreclosures.
Over several decades, I’ve served more than a thousand court papers. That’s a lot of people-tracking and door-knocking to find folks who don’t want to receive the unwelcome news that these documents bring.
There was always a nagging worry about how a person would respond to being served. I approached each job with a smile and often, if given a chance, I’d talk with the person about their situation. I’d urge them to call the lawyer who had issued the papers, to try to work out a settlement, because a failure to answer could result in forfeiture: of property, wages, or custody of their children.
People opened their doors to me, maybe because they didn’t expect a civilian woman rather than a sheriff’s deputy to serve court papers. Most were gracious, often sharing their hardship narratives with me. They talked about job loss, divorce, illness, crippling medical debt, and bad luck. I witnessed much grief and shame on these doorsteps, and I carried their stories back to the attorneys.
Some people were rude, angrily snatching papers from my hands, slamming doors shut, as though their bad fortune was somehow my fault. Others refused to touch the papers, thinking that would prevent them from being served, but in those situations, I’d just set the documents down and drive away with the knowledge it was a good service. I learned much about human behavior and how people react in stressful situations.
One evening in 1999 I had to deliver a court petition for the surrender of an endangered baby. I took my son Danny, then a high school sophomore, along with me, and instructed him to speed off and call for help if anything bad happened.
“Just leave you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Drive until you get a cell signal and call 911 for help. Don’t stay here.”
He waited anxiously in the driver’s seat of the car as I presented the document to a man, his wife, and a group of ragtag children on the sagging porch of their derelict farmhouse in the outskirts of Elmore County, Alabama. Their collective body language was tense and hostile, though they remained quiet.
The baby, held by a rail-thin teenage girl, was clad only in a stinking, filthy diaper. Her father handed the petition to the young teen. She began to read aloud but struggled over the legalese while her parents listened. She shook her head and handed the papers back to me. I picked through the complaint and read aloud the words emergency, neglect, endangerment, feces, malnutrition, and failure to thrive. I said the baby had to be brought to court the next morning.
After some discussion, the man said, “We will be there. Now thank you kindly and get off my porch before I shoot you.”
His wife opened the front door and shooed the children inside. She handed him a shotgun and closed the door. I nodded to the man, walked quickly to my car, and Danny drove us home. Later, though shaken from adrenaline and fear, I realized that while nothing bad had happened, the danger had been real. The next morning the man and his wife brought the baby to the courtroom, clean and nicely dressed, and surrendered her to family services. While we sat together before the hearing, they didn’t acknowledge me, nor did I greet them.
I often think back to this situation and realize how badly it could have turned out—had we not acted civilly toward one another.
***
Most people are kind and level-headed when faced with an unexpected or worrisome situation. We use logic to understand, and to resolve, our problems. But some circumstances can trigger fight-or-flight responses, which often result in irrational or bad behavior. Later, upon reflection, we feel remorse and contrition for our actions.
On the other hand, bullies engage in disruptive behavior, sow discontent and violence, and destroy friendships and alliances, with no fear of reprisals or consequences. They goad, taunt, lie, demean, and threaten to appear smarter and more powerful than everyone else.
***
One July evening in 2018 I arrived at a home in West Jordan, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. I’d been serving civil papers to people throughout the state that summer for a short-term, high-interest loan company out of Ogden. I thought I’d just be serving a few sets of legal papers, but it turned into an ongoing gig as they had scores of “deadbeat” clients. Many had moved, leaving no forwarding addresses, so the company needed an investigator to skip-trace and serve their missing debtors.
This was my final stop of a long workday. The neighborhood was neatly kept, firmly middle-class, with pickup trucks and American-made automobiles. I drove by mailboxes, counting down to the address of record. I waved to a rotund elderly man walking a dachshund.
When I finally found the right address, there was a chain pulled across the driveway. I pulled alongside the curb, on the public easement, put the car in park, and stepped out, smiling my best smile, holding the court papers. A large American flag flew from the front of the house, and there were No Trespassing signs along the driveway. A pickup truck was plastered with bumper stickers supporting the then-president.
A middle-aged man stood behind the chain and held up his hand for me to stop.
“Get back in your car and get off my property,” he demanded.
“I have court papers for your daughter,” I said. “I didn’t want to serve her at work.”
“You’re not leaving those here,” he said as he pulled a gun from a shoulder holster and released the safety. He steadily aimed the weapon at me, with both hands.
“Come any closer and I’ll kill you.”
I took him at his word and got back into my car and pulled away.
The man with the dog stopped me down the block. “I saw that whole thing,” he said, with much enthusiasm. “He does that all the time, threatens to shoot people. Thinks he’s a tough guy.”
He had recorded the encounter on his phone, just in case, prepared to call the police if the man shot me. “I’d have the evidence,” he said.
Somehow this didn’t make me feel any better. I thanked him and drove back to Ogden.
My decision to serve the woman at home, rather than embarrass her at work, put my life in danger. The man in West Jordan was a bully, empowered by a climate of fear and anger that has swept our country, dividing families and neighbors, with an exultation of anger, lies, and abusive language trumping common sense and kindness.
It’s as if a modern Pandora’s box has been pried open and hatred has rained down all over us, contaminating much of what was once great in America.
The next morning, I drove to Salt Lake City and served the woman at work, escorted by a security guard and the human resources manager. I finished my billing and never served another set of court papers again.
***
Since that day, I have managed to avoid contentious situations, until now.
The angry woman from that night in May returned a second time, at 9:24 p.m. on June 21, six weeks after the first encounter. Our dogs were out on their lower-level deck. It was still light outside. Our windows were open. We hadn’t noticed any barking, although we’d heard other dogs in the neighborhood. While Peter went upstairs to the front door, where the woman was loudly banging on the door and ringing the bell, I went downstairs, secured the dogs inside, then hiked through the woods, uphill to the driveway. She drove off before I could see her license plate, but Peter managed to see it and wrote it down.
He was shaken when I came back to the house. The woman, blind with overwhelming fury and anger, had screamed that she f-ing hated us, and that our neighbors f-ing hated us, too. The invectives, the vitriol, the nasty, ugly things she yelled at Peter scared us both and convinced me that I needed to find out who she was and what kind of threat she might pose.
I ran her plate through my databases that night but didn’t get a hit. I didn’t have any more luck the next day when we spoke with a security officer for our HOA, a retired FBI agent. He said he knew the woman’s name but wouldn’t disclose it. So we kept searching. Peter studied maps of the area, especially the road down the hill from our house. We drove the streets, hunting the car with the license tag number we had both memorized. And eventually we found her vehicle. Once we had her address, we researched property records to get her name. I ran a background check and studied her social media posts to learn what I could about the woman.
Three things stood out: She’s married and in her early 70s. She’s a known neighborhood bully. And she’s a gun owner.
Despite our best efforts to be good neighbors, the woman will likely show up at our front door again. And we can only hope she won’t be armed. We’ll make sure to document any further encounters with her for our HOA office and law enforcement in case we need to obtain a restraining order. We installed a security camera. We’ve talked about moving our rifle from a secure area in the house to the closet by the front door, but this seems fraught with risk.
It’s one thing to yell. It’s another to confront an unwelcome person with a gun pointed in her face. Would that be enough of a deterrent against her bullying? Or would that make the worse?
It’s funny how our minds work once threatened.
After the second encounter, Peter suggested we take the woman flowers, or an apologetic note with our phone numbers, and invite her to call when she is bothered again by our dogs. But our neighborhood security officer strongly advised against it.
“Anything you do, no matter how well-intentioned, will only escalate the situation,” he cautioned. “People like her aren’t thinking rationally. Do not engage with her.”
In the meantime, I’ve spoken with my closest neighbors, who have assured me our dogs are delightful and not a nuisance. But we’re still left with a dark element of uncertainty in our day-to-day lives, an acute awareness that we exist in a society where it’s acceptable to spew hatred and unleash violence with little fear of repercussion.
My parents taught me to ignore bullies. I passed this advice to my children. But some bullies can’t be ignored. They won’t go away. We hold our collective breath and wait for the next shoe to drop.
The dogs. Their foot wear—paw wear, actually—is another story.
***
Susan Waller Lehmann is a licensed private investigator, capital murder mitigation specialist, freelance journalist, and award-winning author of two true crime books. Her newest book, Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder, a collection of true stories and essays, is scheduled for publication in January 2025 from Level Tru Books, a division of Level Best Books. Susan lives in the western U.S. with her husband and two golden retrievers. You can find out more about her at www.whiterhinopress.com, and on Facebook under “Susan Lehmann” and “Susan Lehmann Investigations.” You can also read more of Susan’s work on her Substack, The Weight of Words, at susanwaller.substack.com, where this essay first appeared.
