https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/authorized/is-there-any-way-to-get-phone-records-of-a-decease-4927423.html?answered=true                      Is there any way to get phone records of a deceased loved one?      My brother recently took his own life. His wife and him were legally married but had not been together for months and he was there visiting his kids. We suspect foul play that she antagonized him to do it as she has mentally and emotionally been abusing him for many years. The small town police department refuse to look into it further claiming they could not get into his phone and just recently released it to her. Is there any way with a private investigator or an attorney to subpoena his records since the police have not?

1 attorney answer, Jay K. Nixon, 10 reviews, Licensed for 40 years, Avvo Rating: 10, Criminal Defense Attorney in Kenosha & Janesville, WI            

I am sorry for your loss. If you can get yourself appointed as personal representative of your deceased brother's estate, you should be able to get any records you need. I'm not sure that I'd believe that the police would have trouble getting phone records in a homicide investigation, but either way, a court appointed estate representative and the estate's agents, such as a private investigator, would certainly be able to get them. If you really suspect foul play in a so called suicide, the first step would be an autopsy, and I'm not sure that postmortems are automatically done in all of them, so you might want to check. As estate representative, you would also be able to pay for a private autopsy, either way, if it is not too late. In this scenario, there could well have already been one, finding nothing suspicious, and this is the reason the police have so little interest in follow-up. If there were highly suspicious circumstances suggesting a motive to kill him, such as the spouse purchasing life insurance on him shortly before the death, the police probably would probably have gone further on their own. Either way, on its own, emotional abuse probably would not rise to the level of "suspicious," however, since that is a common element of many estranged relationships.