“Predators” is divided into three parts, with the first focusing on the case that presaged the end of “To Catch a Predator.”
In 2006, Louis “Bill” Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney for a neighboring county, killed himself when police ambushed him at his home in Murphy, Texas, while the “Dateline” cameras were rolling.
It was the first time the “To Catch a Predator” crew and police had come to their target’s home rather than confronting him in the rental house they’d outfitted for their sting operations.
That’s because Conradt didn’t act on his promise to visit the person portraying themselves as a 13-year-old boy in the allegedly sexually explicit online chats and phone calls they’d shared. (The authenticity, completeness and evidentiary value of Perverted Justice’s chat logs have been questioned in court.) There is no proof that he intended to leave his home, either, despite the decoy’s disappointed whining in their recorded calls: “Did you leave yet? … Are you gonna come or not?! …When are you going to come over?”
Dan Schrack, the decoy who posed as that boy, said on “Predators” that he is still troubled about the role he played that day.
“I don’t like knowing that I could have been the last person that this guy had a conversation with, outside of when police showed up. This was something I had started to pack up as nicely as I could and bury as far back as possible,” he said.
Former Murphy police detective Walt Weiss is consumed by guilt and regret for his part in the sting.
“That’s a stain on my soul that I’m gonna live with if I’m any kind of a human being at all,” he said.
He is also angry that the targets were not informed of their legal rights before being questioned by Hansen — even though police would include the men’s responses in their reports, he said.
“Chris Hansen is acting as an agent of the police in this instance,” Weiss said. “He’s interrogating them! And the police are gonna use that information, they’re gonna submit it to the prosecutor. This [alleged] perpetrator doesn’t know he has a right not to talk, he has a right to have an attorney, all those things … it was just perfectly clear that these cases were not prosecutable.”
In fact, then-District Attorney John Roach — who had previously warned “Dateline” not to come to Murphy, saying, “We’re in the law enforcement business, not show business” — refused to prosecute any of the 24 men apprehended during the four-day sting.
The Columbia Journalism Review sharply critiqued the tactics used by “To Catch a Predator,” saying in a 2007 feature that it prioritized spectacle over responsible reporting: “Dateline hasn’t so much covered a story as created one. In the process it has further compromised the barrier between reporters and cops that is central to the mission of journalism.”
After “To Catch a Predator” ended, Hansen resurrected its format for other projects, including “Takedown With Chris Hansen” on TruBlu, a subscription-based true crime streaming network he cofounded with Shawn Rech. The formula is so popular that it spawned copycats, which Osit examines in the film’s second part. Unlike Hansen’s projects, these social media vigilantes do not work with law enforcement — although they often contact police during their confrontations.
Skeeter Jean has 2.36 million subscribers to his “Skeet a Predator” YouTube channel. He too works with decoys and tells alleged predators that he is with the “Predatorial Investigation Unit.”
In one meta scene, Osit’s documentary team is crammed into a small motel room with Jean, their cameras rolling while Jean’s crew filmed his confrontation with a man who had arranged a meetup with a decoy.
The man, whose face was blurred in “Predators” because he didn’t sign the documentarians’ appearance release form, sobbed in despair. The crews became so alarmed that they asked authorities for help, saying they were worried he might kill himself.
Finally, the third part of the film focuses on a high schooler who was the subject of an episode of “Takedown With Chris Hansen.” He was 18, about to start his senior year, when he walked a few blocks to allegedly have sex with someone he believed to be a 15-year-old boy — actually an adult decoy — he had been talking to online.
During an interview with his mother for the documentary, he can be heard weeping from his bedroom — just as he had done when he begged Hansen not to “ruin his life.”
In a conversation caught on camera for the documentary, TruBlu’s Rech expressed the same concern to Hansen when they discussed an early cut of the episode, pointing out that in other states the three-year age gap would be legal.
“It is what it is,” Hansen is heard saying. “I think people will be forgiving.”
“I didn’t believe that they were actually going to air this 18-year-old’s mistake — that Chris Hansen would be willing to stoop so low for his show. I just don’t know how the worst day of my life could be something that people are getting snacks for,” his mother said.
Her son, along with six other men arrested in the undercover child sex crime operation, was charged with four felonies.
TruBlu eventually took down the episode after the court decided that if the 18-year-old “didn’t reoffend, his record would be wiped clean,” Hansen told Osit.
True crime shows have traditionally ended with a criminal being arrested, tried and sent to prison. But for Osit, the story doesn’t stop there.
In one scene, during the crisis in the motel, the man asks Skeet’s team if they know of any “programs” to help him, saying he wants to take the “right steps” instead of “going backwards.”
This has long been a question with pedophilia. Can people who are sexually attracted to children be rehabilitated? And if so, how?
In another scene, Osit asks Greg Stumbo, a former Kentucky attorney general who partnered with “To Catch a Predator” in several sting operations, whether he’d ever asked himself, “How can we stop this from happening? How can we fix the problem? How can we rehabilitate these men?”
Stumbo interrupts him.
“My job’s not to rehabilitate ’em, my job’s to make ’em be responsible for the act that they committed … I have absolutely no compassion for ’em,” he says firmly.
But Osit said he believes people experience empathy for others not because of their actions but rather by finding a way to relate to them and “access their humanity.”
“I don’t think that empathy is something that someone earns from you and then gets taken away based on what they’ve done. Empathy is just something that we choose to give out, something that we choose to provide. It’s whether we choose to basically see that someone is a human being or not,” he told me. “When we empathize with somebody, it’s not forgiving — it’s just seeing someone for the multitudes they have.”
He said that in making the film, he set out to “find common ground with everybody” and avoid the paradigm inherent in “To Catch a Predator” and other true crime content that tells you “what’s right and what’s wrong.”
“I really wanted to avoid that, because to me, that’s part of the paradigm that shows like ‘To Catch a Predator’ created: there’s good guys and bad guys, and those binaries don’t leave room for how completely and horrifically complicated we are as people,” he told me.
“All of us are part of that cycle of hurt and inability to heal,” Osit said. “And I tried to make a film that showed that the audience was as much a part of that cycle as I am, and as much a part of that cycle as any of the people who we call predators.”