The Ever Elusive Insurance Claim 29th August 2009

So a full eight and a half months after my house was burgled I finally got the call saying my insurance claim had gone through. You always hear stories about how the insurance companies try to screw you over but in my case they were the champions. My insurance company don’t actually handle the claim, they pawn the work off to a third party company called Cunningham and Lindsey. In my case it was handled by someone called James Cook. He was well neat from the beginning as he came around and reviewed everything about the situation. He checked all the doors and windows etc, ran over the story with me and just covered everything really. It did seem things where going great. Then things started to drag on, and on and on. The whole way through the police kept battling us. First they wouldn’t give us a crime report ID, then they kept changing their official reports then, the thing that’s dragged it on for so long is that they kept avoiding interviews with James.

The police did loads of naughty things. For one they didn’t follow up on information I gave them about my builders. The builders are the only other people who had keys for my house. I sent them numerous emails to an address it turns out was bogus. The officer in charge actually gave me a fake email address. After those kept getting bounced back I started ringing his station and leaving messages that I was told were getting tacked to his clip board thing. Still nothing. Then they actually arrested one of the builders sons friends as he had stolen a bunch of jewelry off the builders wife. They could of quizzed him about my house but did nothing as they refused to acknowledge my phone calls/emails.

Another thing they did was to exclude a witness statement from the report. A lady across the road told them that she saw a car parked on my drive that matched the builders son, on the day of the crime during the time I was out of the house. The police told me about her on the day I reported the crime but they didn’t write it in their report. When they came back with a detective from the burglary unit he didn’t know to talk to her because it wasn’t in the report he read and they never mentioned it to him vocally. I didn’t know that he didn’t know.

They also didn’t mention to him the fact that the box for the TV had been stolen. That easily adds an inch or two to each of the dimensions and makes it virtually impossible to get out of the window. Personally I think the burglary officer also lied to James as I’m like 90% sure I told him myself about the box as I remember explaining to him about how they could of collapsed it and pushed it out of the window. I also pointed out that there was no styro-foam bits all over the floor which I reckon there would of been if they had snapped it up to push out of the window.

I always thought the “They pushed your 50+ inch plasma TV out of your top living room window” was a pants idea as it was mid morning, broad daylight and I just really doubted it would fit. At one point I was told that he said it was my idea and that he was skeptical. I know it wasn’t my idea since I totally doubted it when he said it. James Cook reckons he’s just trying to distance himself from the case due to all the other oddities.

All in all though it worked out alright in the end. James Cook did loads of neat detective work and got to the bottom of it all in the end. I think dads well going to want to push things further with the police, accountability and all that. One cool thing that James said was that if the police quiz the boy in jail and he admits to it then he could server the new sentence concurrently with his current one. That sucks for rape and murder but for my burglary it means he could confess and tell them how things happened i.e. he was given the key by the builders and he might even say where it is. That all depends on if the police will question him in jail and if he confesses.