To Catch A Predator
by Jesamyn Go, Dateline Web producer
After every ‘To Catch the Predator’ broadcast, the Dateline inbox always gets this question from viewers: Where are the female predators?
“They are out there,” one e-mailer wrote. “I find it hard to believe given all the teacher scandals that there are no female Internet predators.”
Perverted-Justice has only ever encountered one female predator, according to Del Harvey, who has been a Perverted-Justice contributor since 2004 and who has acted as a decoy in the group’s investigations. The contributors use decoy profiles that are of girls and boys, but only men have shown up for meetings with what they thought to be underage teens.
Robert Weiss, executive director and founder of the Sexual Recovery Clinic in California (and who has been featured in one of our episodes), says that while their center treats both male and female offenders, sexual compulsions on the Internet do seem to be a male-dominated thing. “Women, in general, seem to look for relationships and not necessarily sex – although female offenders will have sex with a minor. They’re just less likely to seek someone out randomly online.”
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Seven of 20 men in the Harris County, Georgia leg of the 'To Catch a Predator' investigations pleaded guilty yesterday. They were sentenced to prison plus probation.
Click here to read the full story from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
Today, one of the men featured in our "To Catch a Predator" report posted a "mea culpa" on his Web site.
28-year-old Alvin King was seen in “To Catch a Predator” Long Beach last Tuesday. He was arrested, although he never entered the undercover house. He was picked up by Long Beach police at a nearby park as he met a decoy pretending to be a 13-year-old girl. We later learned that he runs a site featuring pictures of women's feet.
He pleaded no contest to one count of an attempted lewd act upon a child, and to one count of attempting to send harmful matter.
He posted a message on his blog...
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This (live) blog was meant to coincide with the broadcast.
by Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent
7:56 p.m.
I’ve read some of your blog comments and a few of you asked me if confronting the men who come into our hidden camera houses gets tedious. The answer is no. Not just because I am genuinely curious about what brought the men into our hidden camera house, but also because of the things these guys admit to me.
Take the case of one of the first men your going to meet tonight in Long Beach, Calif. Corye Blagg is a former Marine who works for a computer company in San Diego. Blagg told a decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl on line that he wanted to take her virginity in the hot tub. But when I start asking the questions, he says he was just coming over to hang out. He also tells me that this isn’t the first time he set up a date with someone he met online, although he says the others were of legal age. He even makes a surprising admission: that one of his dates ended up being a transvestite. CONTINUED >>
by Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent
Long Beach, California is our eighth “To Catch a Predator” investigation in two years. You’d think by now that potential predators would get the message -- not so.
In Long Beach, we saw the second highest number of men in any of our previous investigations. 38 men showed up in three days. 35 of them were charged with crimes including an attempted lewd act upon a child. So far, 12 of them have pleaded no contest or guilty.
We did see something in Long Beach that we didn’t see in our previous investigations and it forced us to adapt behind-the-scenes: Some of the men, perhaps having heard about our earlier shows, were afraid to come to the house and instead wanted to meet at a different location.
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Jesamyn Go, Dateline Web producer
Think your teen knows more about computers than you do? You are not alone. According to an i-SAFE America study (.PDF here), 53 percent of parents surveyed felt that their kids were proficient or experts in computer use; while 30 percent of students felt their parents' Internet skills were either “weak” or “very weak.”
And it’s not just a question of who’s more tech-savvy– there’s also a cultural gap. A lot of parents don’t understand the allure of MySpace, FaceBook, or instant messaging.
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This (live) blog was meant to coincide with Tuesday's broadcast.
by Chris Hansen, Dateline Correspondent
7:54 p.m.
We've just come off of an eye-opening investigation in Petaluma, Calif. and are now in Long Beach, Ca. Once again we tried to set up the house so that my confrontations with the potential predators would be outside on the back patio. The weather cooperated. The sound of jets taking off and landing at two nearby airports did not.
Plan B, as you're about to see, is to set up a bar and stool inside the house. As a location, Long Beach was perfect: easy to get to and surrounded by several major metropolitan areas, but inside the house we're a bit cramped, so much so that a few guys actually spot some of our crew and try to make a run for it. CONTINUED >>
by Meade Jorgensen, Dateline producer
When I was asked to work on the “To Catch a Predator” project, I didn’t know what to expect.
I flew into Long Beach a couple of days before the shoot was supposed to start. When I got to the undercover house, I was amazed by the amount of work that still had to be done.
Mitchell Wagenberg and his team of “Street Visions” technicians were scurrying all over the place. They were wiring up fifteen hidden cameras, and just as many microphones to get ready for the first “visitor.”
As they always do, the “Street Visions” guys got it together in time. The “Perverted Justice” decoys were chatting with men on line and our live decoy actors were ready. Along with Chris Hansen and more than 20 people crammed into the house… I waited for our first visitor.
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by Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent
Some of the screen names are as frightening as the conversations the potential predators are having with the young teens they think they’re talking to online. A 29-year old unemployed computer technician is using the name "can_I_rape_you_" in a sexually charged conversation with a girl who told him she was 13. In graphic detail, he lists the sex acts he wants to perform with the girl. When she types back that it sounds like some of them could be painful the man responds "ya, but it’s a good pain ya know."
Of course the girl is really a decoy with the online watchdog group Perverted Justice which has again teamed up with Dateline for another "To Catch A Predator" investigation-- this time in Long Beach, Ca.
The potential predator, Michael Warrecker later tells the decoy: "I like rape" but, then explains that he doesn’t really want to rape the girl "just rough sex…I’d want you to resist and pretend that you don’t like it and stuff." He also tells her: "I might want to cut you a little…suck on your blood lol."
Later, when he shows up at our undercover house for his date, I confront him and he tells me he was just coming to "hang out." That excuse, however, does not explain the scary movie, video camera, and lubricant he brought with him. Warrecker has since pleaded no contest to charges of an attempted lewd act on a child. He received credit for 120 days time served in jail, has to take sex offender classes and has to register as a lifetime sex offender. Any violation and he could face four years in prison.
Warrecker is one of 38 men arrested in the Long Beach investigation, our eighth. CONTINUED >>
Click here for some preview video clips on some of the men that are going to be featured in Tuesday's 'To Catch a Predator' report.
Mike Warrecker sips a drink as he is being interviewed by Chris Hansen; Paul Clemente hides inside his T-shirt -- and mentions "Dateline" as soon as he sees Chris.
Most shocking is Michael Seibert: he had already shown up in a previous Dateline sting. He arrived at the Long Beach home not too long after a court date related to the previous arrest.
Warrecker plead "no contest" on one count of attempted lewd act on a child. Clemente and Seibert have both pled not guilty.
An all-new 'To Catch a Predator' investigation in Long Beach, California, premieres Tuesday, Jan. 30, 8 p.m.
