Samantha Schrantz Takamori

I've been a criminal defense private investigator with my own company since 2019, right before COVID. I ended up getting a reputation of being really soft and easy to talk to, so attorneys started putting me on a lot of more difficult cases where they needed a softer hand, but equally as intellectual. A lot of investigators are retired police officers, and there's a lot of defense cases that involve guns and stuff, and those men are great for that, but I personally don't care if my client can never have a gun ever again, so I'm not the best person to investigate those cases. They started putting me on cases with young girl victims because I'm easily approachable and easy to talk to. I got to the point where I was working only with child sex abusers and murderers - these humans are just human that we're in a not-so-great situation, who may have made the wrong decision, and now they're gonna spend the rest of their lives in prison. The business was starting to break my heart to the point where I felt like I had to either harden or transition into a position where it wasn't gonna continually just break me down. In March of 2025, I graduated from the University of Oregon with my Master's in Psychology, and since then I've opened a second business. In the state of Oregon, in 2020, they legalized psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic use, so with my master's in psychology and a training program, as of late 2025, I'm also a licensed psilocybin facilitator. At this point, I'm working mainly remote. My two murder cases are in different parts of Oregon, and the cases that I have are on the unrepresented list, so as an investigator I'm making $75 an hour on both cases. What that looks like is a bunch of reading police reports, going through jail calls, watching body cam videos, making sure that my clients have been Mirandized, and essentially just scrutinizing all of the work that the police has done to see if at any point my clients' rights or liberties have been encroached.