Merrilea Place joined IPF as a Senior Staff Investigator in July 2026. Prior to her current role, Merrilea spent the last 12 years working solely in public defense as an Investigator. Merrilea started her investigative career as an Intern Investigator at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia in 2014, before eventually being hired on as a full-time PDS Staff Investigator. She left PDS in 2017 to work for the Georgia Public Defender Council in the Augusta Judicial Circuit. In 2018, Merrilea joined the Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases as a Fact Investigator in Angleton, Texas. She spent four years at RPDO investigating capital cases at the trial level where the State of Texas was seeking the death penalty. Merrilea left Texas in 2022 to work for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts, where she won the 2023-2024 CPCS Investigator of the Year award.
Outside of the office, Merrilea is an OSINT expert who specializes in geolocation of images and videos without the need for specialized software. Merrilea has been a featured speaker on this topic at numerous conferences, and frequently conducts OSINT trainings for public defender agencies across the country. Additionally, she lends her skillset to OSINT projects for the United Nations investigating war crimes. Merrilea speaks Russian, English (sometimes), and, unlike many of her coworkers, is NOT a Taylor Swift fan.
