Bring your tissues because best-selling author, personal motivator, former private eye, father to seven and veteran “locator” Troy Dunn offers an emotional 30 minutes of real-life drama as he finds and reunites people in WE tv’s new series The Locator, airing Saturdays beginning Sept. 6. Dunn’s family-owned business has resulted in life-changing reconnections for over 40,000 family and friends during the past 18 years.
The 10-episode series follows Dunn and his team in the search, and — when successful — the reunion. Their clients range from an adopted daughter seeking her birth mother to a leukemia-diagnosed mother wanting to see her daughter again. Inspired by his mother’s personal quest to find her biological mother, Dunn made it one of his life missions to help others in similar situations.
Humble about his professional successes and committed to his family values, Dunn is a man to admire. We caught up with him in Los Angeles earlier this summer and talked about his new show.
There’s so much emotion in doing what you do. How do you keep it together?
Troy Dunn: I asked a similar question to a friend of mine who is a surgeon [and he told me that] “I focus on the task and I fall apart later.” That’s actually what I feel like I spend my time doing. I focus on the search.
I don’t like to be there after the reunion because they always feel they need to thank me. I get the heck out of there, because I don’t want it to be about me; it’s about them. Frankly, I get in my rental car and cry my way back to the hotel. Because once I walk out of there, that’s the first time I can let out my emotions. I always feel like I’m new at this because every case, every family, is different. I never know how they’re going to end. I’m more nervous then they are when I spring the news on them. I pray it’s going to go well.
What’s it like working with your mom?
Amazing. Weird. Have you met my mom? She’s crazy. We should probably be more professional and formal, but we just have such a great time. We still high-five when we get a good solve, and do a happy dance.
How do your kids respond to or describe what their dad does as a career?
Well I know how they describe it because you see all my different titles. He’s an author. He’s a speaker. I don’t know. I think my children’s friends’ parents think I’m in the Mafia, because they can never explain exactly what I do. I’m gone all the time, but I show up at all the school events like I don’t have a job. I’ll come and cut crafts out. I’ll build a gingerbread house at school and it’s me and all the moms.
I don’t really come home and spend a lot of energy on my life as “The Locator.” It’s the third most important thing in my life. The first is as a husband, the second is being daddy to seven people [ranging in age from 18 to 3] — it’s all I can do to keep up with that. When I walk in the door, they are more interested in telling me how their day is and I’m totally into that. And at the end of all the drama of my day, I want to hear how the game was, if they’re going to the horse show tonight or if they got the red or green circle today. That’s at least as fulfilling or gratifying.
I read that one of your cases took seven and a half years to solve; can you share what happened with that?
It was a black market adoption, and unfortunately in black market adoptions there is a lot of falsifying of records. So this person who asked thought they knew a lot and it turned out they didn’t; it was faked. We really had to spend a lot of time looking for information that didn’t exist. Every couple of months we’d check the new public records to see if something would surface – if this person gets married it creates a new record, divorced it creates a new record, has a baby creates a new record, moved it creates a new record. Waiting for something to surface. It was frustrating because the person who had asked us to search had given up and thought we had given up and so when we solved it and went to tell the client, the client had moved, so we had to start a new search, so that took a few more weeks. We will search until we’ve exhausted our resources and even then sometimes we park it to the side [temporarily].
You’ve helped celebrities search for people as well. Can you share who, or is that confidential?
There are some clients that insist and contractually obligate me to take it to my grave, and I will. I’m very trustworthy. I’ve always said to my wife, “If we could tell all of our celebrity stories, we would be rich.”
So you really can’t say any names?
No. Only if they would go public. One is an Academy Award-winning actor, another a big action star, one is a multiple Emmy-winning performer, one is arguably one of the most powerful women in television. I just feel guilty really [but] lucky because I get to see this whole other side to them. They share with me not only secrets, but a sacred part of their life they successfully blocked from the media, yet they have that need. As I like to say, you can’t find peace until you find all the pieces. The same [holds true] for celebrities. They have the same holes in their hearts if they are adopted or if they are missing someone they loved in their life. Oftentimes they suffer in silence, until they run into another celebrity that says, “Troy will help you and won’t tell a soul.” There are a few that have gone public with their stories. Melissa Gilbert went public with her story [she’s adopted]. She was looking for her father after Michael Landon passed away. I think Ray Liotta went public, he’s adopted. We helped him find his family. There are a lot of celebrities that have adopted children and they need to find the birth family so they can get medical information. Then I have to do this search for this family without letting them know that the person who adopted their child is this massive movie star. It’s amazing how vulnerable they really are.
Would you love to do another season if WE picks it up?
I’d love to because it will allow us to reach thousands of families we’d never have had the chance to reach. There will be people this Christmas who will have somebody sitting around that if they hadn’t have seen the show wouldn’t have had the inspiration to find someone. I don’t know how to say this without sounding cheesey, but there will be lives changed just from watching the show because it will trigger a series of decisions and discussions amongst families.