Discussing Conradt’s death over lunch a couple of weeks later, I asked Hansen how it made him feel. Standing outside the house with his crew, the Dateline correspondent Chris Hansen said he did not hear the shot that ended Conradt’s life, but did see his body wheeled out on a gurney. Then he fired a single bullet into his own head. “I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Conradt reportedly told the police. Inside they encountered the prosecutor in a hallway holding a semiautomatic handgun. When the prosecutor failed to answer the door or answer phone calls, police forced their way into the house. Armed with a search warrant - and with a Dateline camera crew on the scene - the police went to Conradt’s home to arrest him. Under a Texas law adopted in 2005 to combat Internet predators, it is a second-degree felony to have such communications with someone under the age of fourteen, even if no actual sexual contact takes place. In all, twenty-four men were caught in the Murphy sting, including a retired doctor, a traveling businessman, a school teacher, and a Navy veteran.Ĭonradt had never shown up at the Dateline house, but according to the police, using the screen name “inxs00,” he did engage in explicit sexual exchanges in an Internet chat room with someone he believed to be a thirteen-year-old boy (but was actually a volunteer for Perverted Justice). As with several similar operations previously conducted by Dateline, there was no shortage of men looking to score with underage boys and girls.
Dateline had leased a house in an upscale subdivision, outfitted it with multiple hidden cameras, and hired actors to impersonate minors to help lure suspects into the trap.
Dateline to catch a predator series#
For weeks the police in the nearby town of Murphy had been working with the online watchdog group Perverted Justice and producers from Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator” series in an elaborate sting operation targeting adults cruising the Internet to solicit sex from minors. Rather, the veteran district attorney, who had prosecuted hundreds of felonies during more than two decades in law enforcement, was himself the target of an unusual criminal probe. Though the fifty-six-year-old Conradt was a colleague of some of the officers, they hadn’t come to discuss a case or for a backyard barbeque.
on a Sunday afternoon last November when a contingent of police gathered outside the home of Louis Conradt Jr., a longtime county prosecutor living in the small community of Terrell, Texas, just east of Dallas.
Dateline to catch a predator full#
How different things would be if there existed grainy hidden camera footage of Polanski rounding the corner toward the bathhouse, with a grocery bag full of champagne and Quaaludes.It was just before 3 p.m. All this being said, I feel confident that I am not the only one fantasizing about Dateline NBC's Chris Hansen getting in a time machine and blasting off to Jack Nicholson's house in 1977.
But, I have small children and I have not watched television in several years, so for me the reference feels very fresh! I live in an entertainment time capsule, and everyone will just have to deal, so there. I know that To Catch A Predator's moment in the sun has passed and any reference to it may seem dated and passé.
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