193. The Sting Operation That Ended “To Catch a Predator”: Bill Conradt

To Catch a Predator was the biggest franchise in true crime television until a sting in Murphy, Texas spiraled into one of reality TV's darkest disasters. This is the story behind the show's most unexpected catch, and how it ultimately ended the show’s long-standing reputation as “the good guys” on TV. These are the facts of the story that inspired “Primetime,” A24’s movie starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. TW: Child Abuse, SA, Suicide Love true crime, horror, folklore, and the unexplained? Join us in the Rogue Detecting Society on Patreon. Start for free to stay up to date on all things HSP with our newsletter, bonus content, and more. If you want to dive deeper into a community of fellow darkly curious listeners, upgrade for ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes with topics voted on by members, merch perks, and Patreon-only group chats. High Council members also get Footnotes, our weekly after-show where Kaelyn dives deeper into the episode, recent true crime news, theories, and other scary stories from around the internet. Join free or go paid: https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

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• 0:43Kaelyn Moore?

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• 2:00Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaila Moore. Maybe you've seen the trailer for the new 824 movie that's coming out, Primetime, where Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen. I'm actually looking at it now and the trailer has almost 50 million views on YouTube. But did you know that this movie is based on the biggest To Catch a Predator sting in the show's history? It's a sting that also went so horribly wrong, it contributed to the show's demise. Well, today I want to tell you what happened during the Murphy sting on To Catch a Predator and how not everyone involved made it out alive. But first, before we jump in, I wanted to remind everyone that my Netflix podcast,

• 2:42Kaelyn Moore?

  Last Trace with Kaila Moore, airs on Netflix starting on Monday, September 28th. If you're interested in my true crime deep dives, this is the show for you. We are digging into the mysteries that keep me up at night, the cases that just don't sit right with me. You can check it out exclusively on Netflix, September 28th. I worked so hard on this show, I cannot wait to share it all with you. And thanks to everyone who's been with me since day one, when I would record this in my closet and is now seeing this all the way through to a Netflix show. Thank you, guys. Okay, I have a lot to tell you about today, so why don't you have a seat? On a quiet street in an upscale neighborhood in Murphy, Texas, a brand new pickup truck slowly creeps down the street towards a huge home.

• 3:26Kaelyn Moore?

  Inside of the car is a 32-year-old man named Timothy Gilliam. He's married, he has two kids at home, and he thinks he's about to meet a 14-year-old girl for sex. Timothy pulls up to the house and waits outside in his car looking nervous. The front door opens to reveal a young girl standing in that doorway, holding a cat. And she starts beckoning Timothy to come in. She says, "I can't come out and meet you, I'm holding the cat, come in." But Timothy shakes his head. Maybe he's starting to second guess things. Or maybe he senses that something about this encounter is not what it seems. Seven cameras placed strategically in the neighborhood have tracked him as he approached the house. They've caught his face, his license plate number, but they don't need any of that information

• 4:12Kaelyn Moore?

  because inside of this home is a team of people that already know everything about Timothy. And that's because for the last few weeks, Tim has been chatting with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl under the username DallasBadBoy2002. Under that screen name, he sent her pictures of his genitals, he asked her explicit questions about herself, but actually, Tim had been talking to an adult volunteer with Perverted Justice, a watchdog group dedicated to busting child predators. Perverted Justice had been working with Dateline's To Catch a Predator for eight undercover investigations at that point, and the show had become incredibly popular. So popular that Timothy even mentioned in his messages to the girl that he had seen

• 4:56Kaelyn Moore?

  the show and that he needed to be careful because so many guys had been getting caught on it, but he thinks he has a way to get around that. As he sits in his car, he reaches over and he grabs something from the passenger side. It's a webcam. He beckons the girl over. His plan is to give it to her so that she can set it up and he can watch her remotely. Because for some reason, Timothy thinks that he won't get caught if he's preying upon young girls from a safe distance. But he is very mistaken. The girl in the doorway won't come outside, so Timothy starts to drive off. But immediately, he is stopped by police, he's arrested, and he's brought down to the station. Timothy doesn't know it yet, but he's the first arrest in what's supposed to be the

• 5:39Kaelyn Moore?

  biggest production in To Catch a Predator history. But this is also the sting where everything would change for the show and ultimately what would become one of the biggest disasters ever captured in a reality TV show. So here's how the Murphy sting was going to work. NBC leased a two-story house in an upscale subdivision, ironically, two blocks away from an elementary school, and they filled the walls with hidden cameras and wired every room for audio and video. Inside, decoys from a private watchdog group, Perverted Justice, would handle all of the online chats and phone calls, and a young decoy actor would greet the men at the door. Chris Hansen was waiting just off camera until the exact right moment, then he would

• 6:22Kaelyn Moore?

  confront the men, and after that confrontation, the man usually would walk out of the front door and police would be waiting outside to tackle him on the lawn or stop him in his car. About a mile from this bait house inside of Murphy's police station, NBC had also installed a full video production system streaming every feed from the house in real time. Officers referred to this as "the war room." And the producers of the show, the police, and the Perverted Justice volunteers were all in that room together, watching the monitors, waiting for men just like Timothy who thought they were coming to meet children as young as 12 years old. But instead, they were all met by a calm and collected Chris Hansen, who would say his famous, "Why don't you have a seat?"

• 7:04Kaelyn Moore?

  By the time NBC had planned the Murphy sting, To Catch a Predator was one of the most-watched segments on American television. Now, most people remember To Catch a Predator as being its own show entirely, but it actually wasn't. It was just a recurring segment on Dateline NBC. And this segment was so popular and it also had critical acclaim. Chris Hansen had eight Emmys, Congress praised the show, it pulled in more than 10 million viewers at its peak, and it seemed to be providing a real public service. They were catching actual predators. During the show's second-ever sting, there was an unemployed 43-year-old in the suburbs of DC who told a 14-year-old boy that he was a 29-year-old prep school teacher.

• 7:47Kaelyn Moore?

  He declared himself the boy's boyfriend within the first hour of contact, and he walked into the sting house completely naked. After that, they caught a special education teacher from Prince George's County Schools. He was 54, he was married, he also thought he was talking to a 13-year-old boy named Brandon, and he explicitly described what he wanted to do to this child, and he asked for assurances that the boy's father was going to be out of town. This man would eventually be sentenced to five years and was registered as a sex offender. In Fort Myers, Florida, during one operation, they caught 24 men who came to a house wired with 13 hidden cameras. More than half of these guys lived more than two hours away.

• 8:32Kaelyn Moore?

  One of them even took a four-hour bus ride to get there to meet with a child. There was also a US Army sergeant, a Navy engineer, there was also a Sunday school teacher who volunteered with kids at his church and drove two hours to the Fort Myers house, less than 24 hours after first contact with the decoy. There was also a man in Riverside, California, who showed up eight months later to the show's next house in Long Beach. He got To Catch a Predatored twice. But this sting, the one in Murphy, was going to be bigger than anything the show had done before. For one, they had that room at the police station, the war room, when most episodes would cram producers and decoys into a room inside of the rented house.

• 9:15Kaelyn Moore?

  Then there was how the city manager, this guy Craig Sherwood, had approved the whole operation. He had been approached by Dateline and Perverted Justice, and he signed off on the sting without telling the mayor or the city council because he believed that secrecy was necessary to pull something like this off. But also, on top of all of that, now they were in Texas, and the laws regarding child predators are slightly different there. During the other stings, NBC would have to wait for predators to show up to the house. But in Texas, the crime of being a child predator occurs when the first message is sent to a child. So that meant if the predators didn't show up, the team could go get them. And this was supposed to be the biggest television event of To Catch a Predator's

• 10:00Kaelyn Moore?

  Run. The Murphy sting started off really strong. Over four days, roughly 24 men were arrested trying to meet up with decoys that were posing as children between 12 and 14 years old. A 52-year-old oil worker named Randall shows up at one point. He has a 26-year-old daughter, and he's been talking to a decoy that he thinks is a 13-year-old girl. Within two hours of the conversation turning sexual, he shows up to the house. He meets the girl, an actress, inside, and he starts immediately making himself at home. He pours himself a soda, he's chatting up the actress playing the 13-year-old, and he sees that she has a pool table in her house, and he starts talking about the time he did it on one.

• 10:42Kaelyn Moore?

  And then Chris Hansen walks in, and he says, "So why don't you make yourself at home?" The actress runs out of the room really quickly to safety, and then it's just Randall and Chris alone. And all of a sudden, Randall's tune totally changes. He shakes Chris's hand and says that he's a 49-year-old man, not true, and actually, he tells Chris, "He was gonna sit and wait until the girl's mother showed up so that he could tell the girl's mother about these inappropriate chats." He can tell that Chris Hansen does not believe this story, so he says, "You know, it doesn't matter if you believe me, the Lord is my Savior and He knows the truth." To which, Chris Hansen replies, "Oh, does your faith involve visiting 13-year-old girls who are home alone?"

• 11:27Kaelyn Moore?

  You know, that's really the beauty of Chris Hansen. His comebacks are just perfect. Randall tries to leave the house and immediately he's greeted outside by officers with their guns drawn, who tell him to get down on the ground. Other catches from the week include a 54-year-old middle school math teacher from Dallas. He told the decoy that he wanted to teach the inexperienced boy different sex acts. Like Timothy, he also sent pictures of his genitals. A retired doctor showed up and so did a traveling businessman, a Navy veteran. It was everything that people came to fear from To Catch a Predator. A bunch of seemingly normal men with careers and wives, some had children, and most of them were active participants in their communities.

• 12:11Kaelyn Moore?

  A lot of these guys were just people you would never expect this from. But the most unexpected predator of all was about to be uncovered. On the last night of the sting, when production was winding down, one of the members of Perverted Justice was scrolling through the chat logs of older men who had made contact. A lot of them would use screen names, so you couldn't always tell who the person was. And that's when they came upon a chat with a user named INXS00. Sometime in the days before the sting, the user started talking to a Perverted Justice decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy. Then, INXS00 did something that caught the volunteer's attention.

• 12:52Kaelyn Moore?

  He approached a second decoy, another boy whose screen name was FalloutBoy93, and he started hitting on him too. But he gave the two boys different stories. He told one that he was 19 and he told the other that he was 21. And that discrepancy set off an alarm bell in the Perverted Justice member's mind. It started becoming clear that this was probably an adult. The volunteer running the second decoy backed off, but they let the first decoy keep the conversation going while they tried to dig around and find out this guy's identity, which they found all right. And this man on the other end was not 19, and he certainly wasn't 21. His name was Louis William Conrad Jr., Bill to those who knew him.

• 13:35Kaelyn Moore?

  He was 56 years old, and he was the chief felony assistant district attorney of Rockwell County, Texas, the next county over. Bill was a prosecutor who put child abusers away. Bill Conrad had basically spent his entire adult life inside the Texas criminal justice system. He was elected district attorney of Kaufman County in 1980, when he was barely 30 years old, and he held that seat for over two decades, five consecutive terms. Kaufman County sits just east of Dallas, and its criminal DA handles everything from misdemeanors to felonies, civil matters. The full legal apparatus of the county runs through that office. And Conrad ran it for 22 years.

• 14:20Kaelyn Moore?

  His caseload included the worst things that a prosecutor sees. Violent crimes, sexual offenses. As chief felony prosecutor, he managed the office's most serious cases, including child sexual abuse cases. He knew Texas's child exploitation statutes inside and out because he spent his entire career building cases around them. He stood in front of juries and he argued that men who prey on children deserve to go to prison, and juries often agreed with him. And what's even worse is his colleagues described him as a fair but relentless advocate who believed deeply in the work he was doing. In 2002, he left the DA's seat to run for a district judgeship, but he lost.

• 15:03Kaelyn Moore?

  He did a brief stint in private practice, and by 2004, he'd taken a job as the chief felony assistant DA in Rockwell County. Bill lived alone in Terrell, Texas, about 35 miles southeast of Murphy. And when the team at Perverted Justice learned all of this, they just could not believe it. It was one thing for them to catch people who worked with children, like teachers and coaches, but to catch someone who was supposed to be putting predators away and was one himself? That was just absolutely next level. And so, knowing exactly who he was, the operation kept going. Bill allegedly sent explicit photos of himself and photos of others that he would find online.

• 15:45Kaelyn Moore?

  He described what he planned to do when he met up with the child. He asked whether he could take sexual pictures of the boy. On November 4th, the decoy and INXS00 talked on the phone for the first time. And the decoy that was playing the role of the child was named Dan Schrak. He was 21 years old and an actor that Dateline had hired for this. He was paid about $5,000 per three-day shoot, and his face was used in the online profile so that it would match up when the predators arrived. He was also the one that would greet them when they would arrive at the door. Dan's job was to get Bill to come to the house. So the two of them talked on the phone more than once, but Bill was being really wishy-washy about meeting. The decoy repeatedly asked him to show up.

• 16:30Kaelyn Moore?

  He was practically begging at points. And finally, Bill agreed, still pretending to be a 19-year-old. But then all of a sudden, he went dark. He stopped sending messages. And so, Dan the decoy tried calling him, but his phone would just ring and ring and ring. He was not picking up. After that, the team noticed that Bill deleted his MySpace page, which is what he was using to send the messages. And that meant that he was probably destroying evidence, which would ruin their chances of convicting him. You know, maybe there was a chance that he was catching on to what was happening. Behind the scenes, the pressure was starting to build. The sting was wrapping up, and the highest value target that the show had ever identified had gone silent 35 miles away.

• 17:14Kaelyn Moore?

  Producers in the house started discussing ways that they could lure Bill there and, you know, what to do if he didn't show up. And then sometime at around 12:30 in the morning on November 5th, 2006, inside of the war room at Murphy Police Department, a lieutenant's phone rang. Chris Hansen was on the other end of that line. He wanted the police to get an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Bill Conrad. And that's because a decision had been made. If Bill wasn't going to come to them, then they were going to him for the first time in To Catch a Predator history. This episode is brought to you by Dose. How many times today have you thought about your liver? If you're like me, the answer's probably zero. Your liver performs over 500 functions every day, though. Think energy, digestion, metabolism.

• 17:58Kaelyn Moore?

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• 18:40Kaelyn Moore?

  That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y.co/hsp for 35% off your first month's subscription. Try it for three months and see how you feel. This episode is brought to you by Bigelow Tea. By now, you should all know that I'm obviously a very curious person, and I'm also a big tea drinker. So I've always heard about this tea called Bigelow Constant Comment. It's been around forever, and people absolutely love it. I realized I had no idea what it actually tasted like. Obviously, I had to investigate, and now I'm obsessed. Constant Comment is this incredible black tea with real orange rind, cold-pressed orange oil, and sweet spices. The best way I can describe it is it's like Christmas in a cup, except you get to drink it all year long.

• 19:25Kaelyn Moore?

  Then I learned the story behind it, which made me love it even more. Constant Comment was created by Ruth Campbell Bigelow and her New York City kitchen in 1945. She shared it with her friends, and everyone kept talking about it. And all of those "constant comments" actually gave it its name. The recipe is still a Bigelow family secret over 80 years later. So this one is a mystery worth investigating for yourself. Bigelow Constant Comment. Curiously different, impossible to forget. It's now the middle of the night in Murphy, Texas, on November 5th, 2006. In the war room at police headquarters, the troops start to rally. They're going to Terrell to confront Bill. Chief Merritt wakes up one of his detectives and puts him to work writing the affidavit,

• 20:07Kaelyn Moore?

  the sworn statement that will get a judge to sign an arrest warrant. He's working from what Perverted Justice has given him. The chat logs, the phone recordings, the identification of Bill, and he uses that to work through the rest of the night. By 8:30 the next morning, before any judge has signed anything, Chris Hansen and a Dateline production crew are already in Terrell. They set up on Davidson Drive, which is Bill's street, a quiet residential area with big front yards. I imagine it's the kind of block where everyone knows whose car is whose. And as families are waking up, walking their dogs, and sending their kids off to school, NBC vehicles start arriving with cameras, all pointed at a one-story house that Bill Conrad has lived in since he was a child.

• 20:52Kaelyn Moore?

  And then they just wait. At 11:00 AM back in Murphy, the arrest warrant is finally signed by a municipal judge, and it's go time. Now the police can take Bill into custody. But they still can't go inside of his house because for that, they need a search warrant, and that has to come from a different judge, a district judge, and it's taking a little bit longer. So the crew on Davidson Drive just keeps waiting. 9 o'clock becomes 10 o'clock, 10 becomes noon, noon becomes 1. And inside of Bill's house, the whole time they're out there, they don't see anything. It's almost like no one is inside, even though the car outside of the house indicates that Bill is home. Around 2:20 in the afternoon, the search warrant finally comes through.

• 21:36Kaelyn Moore?

  The Murphy officers with the Terrell police alongside them move towards Bill's house. They knock and announce themselves. Someone also calls the phone number that they got from NBC, the one that Bill was using with the decoy, but there's no answer. At 2:40, the Terrell police chief requests a SWAT team to come to the residence. And they arrive a little after 3:00. Now there's seven officers decked out in body armor, holding tactical weapons, and they move around to the back of the house, to a sliding glass door that opens onto the den, and they breach it. The first thing they see inside of the house, inside of the den, is a desk. And on that desk is a computer. Next to the computer is a workbook, and the title on the cover reads, "Investigation and Prosecution of Child Sexual Abuse."

• 22:23Kaelyn Moore?

  It's a really upsetting image. A workbook on prosecuting crimes against children next to the computer that was used to inappropriately message one. But there's no time to reflect on that now. The team moves deeper into the house looking for Bill. They turn down a hallway and there he is, standing at the end of it. And his hand is a Browning .380 caliber handgun. He calls out, "I'm not gonna hurt anybody." And then he turns the gun on himself. A medical helicopter lifts Bill off of Davidson Drive and flies him to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where he's pronounced dead within the hour. Now, in the hours and the days that followed, the people who had been part of this operation started to take a closer look at what they'd done.

• 23:08Kaelyn Moore?

  It seems like most people left the sting with a bad taste in their mouths. And even though they had caught over 20 predators, it felt like the situation with Bill should have been handled a little differently. Like, for instance, the warrants. Detective Weiss, who was the man who wrote the affidavit, would later say that he felt like the whole thing had been a rushed job. He felt like they should have brought the Texas Rangers in, or maybe consulted the district attorney. You know, maybe they could have even taken it to a grand jury. But none of that happened. The Collin County DA had refused to participate in the sting at all. He also warned the police chief against it. So the warrants went through other channels really fast on a timeline that had more to do with the television production than with law enforcement.

• 23:51Kaelyn Moore?

  And, you know, the search warrant had the wrong city on it. It also had the wrong county and the wrong date. And you know, I hear some of you now in the audience saying, "Kaelyn, you know, I really don't care about clerical errors when it comes to catching pedophiles." Or, you know, "What does it matter how the whole thing ended? There's one less predator on the street." And I get it. I hear you. I hear you, guys. I also don't care about the way a child predator is caught, especially now as a mom. I just care that they are caught. But I bring up the warrants because when you rush and you write a warrant incorrectly, anything that's seized under that warrant could get thrown out of court. So what that means is that if there was anything that was pertinent in Bill's house,

• 24:36Kaelyn Moore?

  any evidence that could have been used against him, it wouldn't have mattered. It was void. And that is why you should care about clerical errors when it comes to this stuff. But also, not only was everything that they would have collected in Bill's house useless, turns out the entire weekend was basically useless. Because while arrests were made over those few days, not a single one of those predators saw a conviction. Seven months after the Murphy sting, the Collin County District Attorney announced that he was declining to prosecute every single one of them. And here's why. It's a little complicated. But remember in Texas, the crime is the messages that are being sent. It's not the fact that they went to another location to solicit sex from a minor, like

• 25:20Kaelyn Moore?

  how it works in some other states. And that's what let them charge men that never showed up to the house. But it also means that the crime happens wherever the people are sitting when they type those messages, not where the bait house is. And the issue with that is that these predators were typing from all over. They were in different counties, some of them were in different states. And also, so were the perverted justice decoys. They were volunteers chatting from really wherever they lived. So in 16 of the 24 cases from that week, nobody could prove that either person had actually been in Collin County when the crime occurred. These were crimes without jurisdiction, which is why the Collin County DA threw them out. And the other eight crimes, the ones that did happen in the county, the evidence was

• 26:03Kaelyn Moore?

  chat logs from anonymous civilians that were being paid by NBC. Neither the police nor NBC could guarantee that the logs were complete or authentic because they were not the entities running those chats. And, you know, you see this now with TikTok, honestly. When I lived in Austin, there was a group that was trying to run their own To Catch a Predator-style stings inside of my HEB, my grocery store. They would make dating profiles pretending to be minors, and they would invite the guy to the HEB to meet up, and then they would shove a camera in his face and pose it to TikTok, doxing the person. And you know, public shame does go a long way, but it is not enough to send anyone to jail. And that can be a real problem in situations like this.

• 26:46Kaelyn Moore?

  Because remember one of those guys that was caught in the Murphy sting? His name was Stanley Kendall. He was a 54-year-old middle school teacher. Well, charges were dropped against him in June of 2007. And then, in 2014, he was substitute teaching inside of Indiana schools until someone recognized him because they had been watching an old episode of To Catch a Predator. A criminal background check hadn't revealed anything because the charges were dropped on a technicality. And so Kendall was allowed to continue working with kids ages 12 to 14, the same age that he was trying to meet up with at the Murphy sting. And unfortunately, this was a recurring problem with To Catch a Predator. Now, let's go back a little bit further to the beginning.

• 27:30Kaelyn Moore?

  Before Dateline came in, before Chris Hansen, you have to understand what perverted justice was before they were ever on camera. So, the group started in the early 2000s as a straight-up internet vigilante operation set in this new age of the internet. Volunteers would go into chat rooms on AOL and on Yahoo. They would pose as minors, and they would wait. When adults made contact and the conversation turned sexual, the volunteers would collect the man's personal information, like name, photo, employer, their home address, and they would publish it online on their website. It was all just doxing. There weren't any arrests, kind of like what they were doing at my HEB. But from the beginning, law enforcement had concerns with this operation.

• 28:12Kaelyn Moore?

  The chat transcripts that they collected were never enough for criminal convictions. And part of it was because the volunteers were anonymous, and there was no way to verify what they actually said in the chats, or whether they followed their own rule about not initiating the sexual conversation. The group was warned that the main effect of their work was probably just training predators to be more careful online. But the group's founder, Xavier Von Erk, he kept going. Perverted Justice then partnered with local television stations to start televising their confrontation. And the early busts that they would run were rough. They were kind of punk rock, honestly. Men would show up to a house or an apartment, wherever the decoy house was, and they were

• 28:55Kaelyn Moore?

  met with a camera and a baseball bat. And when Dateline producer Lynn Keller found Perverted Justice in early 2004, she felt like it was an immediate fit. The first investigation that they did together aired in November of 2004, and it took place in Bethpage, Long Island. 18 men showed up to this house in two and a half days. And immediately, it had massive ratings. However, there were no police on site for this sting, and the men all walked out past the cameras and went home. And the same thing happened at the second sting, suburban Virginia in 2005. No arrests because no police were involved. By the third investigation, one that took place in Riverside County, California, law

• 29:38Kaelyn Moore?

  enforcement was on the ground with NBC and they were making arrests. It was a sting that brought in 51 men over just three days in early 2006. And I was reading about how messy these early stings were. There would be guys showing up to the front door while the other guy was leaving out the back getting tackled by the police. They would often run into each other in the driveway and they had no idea what was going on. It was like guerrilla-style filmmaking back then. It was also this time where money really started flowing into the show. NBC retained Perverted Justice as consultants, and they were making somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000 per sting. According to Perverted Justice's own tax filings, NBC paid the group over $800,000 in 2006 for seven operations.

• 30:23Kaelyn Moore?

  And by late 2007, the total was roughly $2 million. And some people would say, "2 million dollars? That's a small price to pay to get 51 predators off the streets in one weekend." But a producer named Marcia Bartel joined the show in August of 2006, right before the Murphy sting happened. She was an NBC veteran. She worked there for 21 years. And she had a lot of concerns over the operation that was taking place. Paying Perverted Justice, she argued, gave the group a financial incentive to produce more catches. They might start pushing harder or luring people more aggressively, and these were things that could start putting the decoys at risk when men showed up to the house.

• 31:05Kaelyn Moore?

  She was also nervous that the group would start fabricating a conversation and try to frame people just to get them on camera. Bartel was then fired, effective Christmas Day of 2006. She sued for $1 million alleging retaliation for her ethical complaints. The suit was dismissed. There were also some complaints over the number that NBC kept giving. It was the claim that they said repeatedly in promos and on air that there were 50,000 predators online at any given moment. I mean, to me, it sounds like a real statistic. Turns out, it was not. The figure had been invented by an ex-FBI agent who recycled debunked numbers from the satanic panic of the 1980s and kidnapping scares of the 1970s.

• 31:50Kaelyn Moore?

  The actual research showed that approximately 3% of children surveyed reported being aggressively solicited by an adult online. Online predators were real, but the scale that Dateline was presenting was manufactured for television. In February of 2007, the Murphy episodes aired on Dateline. It was two parts back-to-back. The first two-thirds covered the bait house operations, and the rest covered Bill Conrad. His name, his title, they talked about his death. And then, Murphy, Texas, where it all happened, started to come apart.

• 32:26Kaelyn Moore?

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• 33:10Kaelyn Moore?

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• 33:55Kaelyn Moore?

  I mean, think about how difficult it can be sometimes to sign up for therapy. You have to go through the website. Sometimes you're on your insurance's website. Find someone who's actually accepting new clients, find out when they can meet, and then also go through finding out if your insurance is really taken. The whole process can take months sometimes, but not with Rula. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's covered by insurance. Visit rula.com/hspod to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash HSP pod. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. This episode is brought to you by GU Skincare. GU just launched their Heal and Seal Trio, a simple three-step Korean skincare routine that replaces those complicated seven-step regimens,

• 34:37Kaelyn Moore?

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• 35:21Kaelyn Moore?

  And use code HSP for an additional 20% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. So Bill's sister was an attorney. She stood in front of the counsel and she called the NBC operation, "The Judge, Jury and Executioner." She also said it was, quote, "encouraged by an out-of-control reality show." She said everyone involved had blood on their hands and that they were actually responsible for her brother's death. It was not him who was responsible for his own death. In July of 2007, she filed a suit against NBC Universal for more than $100 million. NBC called this lawsuit completely without merit, but a federal judge read the complaint and disagreed with that. In February of 2008,

• 36:04Kaelyn Moore?

  Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York let that case go forward. And his ruling was very scathing. He said that a reasonable jury could find that NBC had, quote, "crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement, and that it had placed itself squarely in the middle of a police operation, pushing the police to engage in tactics that were unnecessary and unwise, solely to generate more dramatic footage for a television show." He said there was no legitimate need for a heavily armed SWAT team to confront a 56-year-old prosecutor, and that because of that, Bill taking his own life was foreseeable. He cataloged what the operation looked like from inside the house, his own perspective on it.

• 36:48Kaelyn Moore?

  He said there were on-camera strategy sessions between producers and police. Dateline interviewed suspects before the officers did. There was physical fusion of the production and the police department into a single apparatus, all of which was unethical. And four months later, in June of 2008, NBC settled the lawsuit. The terms were never disclosed, but within about 48 hours, every reference to "To Catch a Predator" was scrubbed from NBC's website. The show itself, some argue, was already basically dying. The last new episodes aired in December of 2007. It was a sting that happened in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but only seven men showed up, which is just a fraction of the earlier operations.

• 37:31Kaelyn Moore?

  After that, the show just stopped. However, that format did not die with the show. It just kind of moved to other places. There was this whole crop of YouTube predator catchers that rose up, like Dads Against Predators, Creepcatchers. There were also anonymous streamers that filmed confrontation in parking lots and posted them for clicks. You can also see it in the documentary that just came out from Louis Theroux, Manosphere, where they do their own sting inside of it. It was all based on the blueprint that Chris Hansen had drawn. In 2025, a documentary called Predators went back to some of the people who had been inside of the machine. Dan Schrak, the decoy actor who voiced the 13-year-old boy on the phone with Bill Conrad, said that you could offer him $10 million

• 38:14Kaelyn Moore?

  to film that Texas episode again, and he would not take it. He said, quote, "I don't like knowing I could have been the last person this guy had a conversation with." Detective Walt Weiss, who drew up that warrant, said that the role he played in the Murphy sting was "a stain on my soul that I'm gonna live with if I'm any kind of human being at all." And Chris Hansen, for his part, has not really been affected by all of this. He's still going. He's still out there catching predators. He made a Kickstarter-funded web series. He also has a streaming service called True Blue. He has a podcast, another show called Takedown. He's still out there catching predators, or fighting the good fight, as some people would say. And now, there is the movie.

• 38:57Kaelyn Moore?

  A24's Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim, written by A. John Singh, is based on the Esquire article that told the story about how Bill Conrad died. And it stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. It premiered to rave reviews, but Chris Hansen has not seen it. He walked out of a private screening at A24's Manhattan offices after declining to sign an NDA. According to him, A24 wanted him to sign away his rights to his name, image and brand, but A24 disputes that. They say no consultation or permission was required. And Chris Hansen has an answer for all of this. He is buying pre-show ads for his own streaming service, True Blue, in the theaters that are showing this movie about him and about that night. And you know, at the end of all of this,

• 39:42Kaelyn Moore?

  I wanted to end the episode with a quote from Chris Hansen that kind of sums up this whole thing. "Two weeks after Bill Conrad's death, Hansen was asked whether he felt responsible. And he just said, 'I sleep well at night.'" Because, at the end of the day, a predator caught is a predator caught. Even if they weren't thrown into jail, a lot of people think that the doxing of these people was reason enough to keep the show going. Because, as we've seen a million times, a lot of these people would probably not have gone to jail anyways, if I'm being honest. They would have stayed online, in chat rooms, exposing themselves to children and soliciting them for God knows what. I mean, seriously, how many of us have had bad experiences with an adult online as a child?

• 40:27Kaelyn Moore?

  Man or woman? And how many of those sickos do you think are actually behind bars right now? If you told me the answer was zero, I would believe you. This stuff gets me very fired up now that I'm older and I can kind of do a postmortem on my internet use as a young teen. And if you're younger than me, I imagine it was even worse for you because you had more access to the internet at an earlier age. But what do you guys think? Now, I turn all of this over to you. Let me know if you go see the movie as well. This is obviously a sensitive subject that gets people very passionate, so I'm just curious to hear from all of you, your thoughts, your own experiences online. Leave a comment wherever you listen. I'm gonna be back here next week with another episode for you all. And until then,

• 41:13Kaelyn Moore?

  you see how this looks, right?

• 41:19Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out hearts start pounding dot com.

• 41:40Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom mugs made from Vistaprint, and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality. The quality feels expensive without having an expensive price tag.

• 42:25Kaelyn Moore?

  There's a reason over 17 million businesses trust Vistaprint with their print needs. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint dot com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint dot com using code NEW20.