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

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SOURCES

https://www.wired.com/2004/03/vigilantes-troll-for-pedophiles/

https://www.wired.com/2004/03/they-wanted-to-teach-him-a-lesson/

https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=260587&page=1

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutor-commits-suicide-over-sex-sting/

https://www.cjr.org/feature/the_shame_game.php

https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=3235975&page=1

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2007/jun/29/texas-town-resists-nbc-pedophile-sting/

https://classic.esquire.com/article/2007/9/1/tonight-on-dateline-this-man-will-die

https://www.wired.com/2007/11/perverted-justi/

https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/conradt-v-nbc-universal-885233409

https://abcnews.com/Blotter/story?id=5238922&page=1

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/show-tracker/story/2008-06-24/nbc-resolves-lawsuit-over-to-catch-a-predator-suicide

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-26-et-predator26-story.html

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1219598.html

https://time.com/3713694/chris-hansen-predator-killer-instinct/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1606694156/hansen-vs-predator

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/to-catch-a-predator-documentary-exclusive-awards-insider

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/27/to-catch-a-predator-sundance

https://ew.com/to-catch-a-predator-participants-reflect-suicide-during-production-11817949

https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2026/venezia-83-competition/primetime

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2026-08-31/to-catch-a-predator-film-why-chris-hansen-hasnt-seen-it

https://people.com/chris-hansen-weighing-legal-action-over-robert-pattinsons-primetime-12071167

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOgsPglrFdc

https://www.watchtrublu.com/watch?id=019f6c6a-a00c-7c18-9c99-34b09de1a268

https://www.paramountplus.com/movies/video/WZJCMAbZA_gjMjy7ErurPinXC6awErEb/

https://to-catch-a-predator.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Clemente

https://to-catch-a-predator.fandom.com/wiki/Shawn_O%27Brien

https://www.radioresultsnetwork.com/2023/09/20/hansen-responds-to-recent-viewer-backlash-previews-thursdays-episode/

https://to-catch-a-predator.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_Warrecker

https://to-catch-a-predator.fandom.com/wiki/John_Kennelly

https://to-catch-a-predator.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Hicks

TRANSCRIPT

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.

Inside of the car is a 32 year old man named Timothy Gillyum. He’s married, he has two children 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 of the house opens to reveal a young girl standing in the doorway holding a cat. And she starts beckoning timothy to come in. She’s saying I cant come out and meet you, I’m holding the cat, come in. 

 But Tim shakes his head. Maybe he’s second guessing 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. They’ve caught his face, his license plate number. But they don’t need that information, because inside the home is a team of people that already know everything about him.

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. He said he wanted to teach her how to touch herself. 

But he had really been talking to adult volunteers from Perverted Justice, a watch dog group dedicated to busting child predators. 

Perverted Justice had been working with Dateline’s To Catch A Predator for 8 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 the show, and said that he needed to be careful because so many guys had been caught on it.

But, he thinks he has a way to get around being caught. 

As he sits in his car, he reaches over and 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 out, so he starts to drive off, but he’s immediately stopped by police, arrested, and brought down to the station. 

Timothy doesn’t know it yet, but he is the first arrest in what is supposed to be the biggest production in To Catch a Predator history. 

But it is also the sting where everything would change for the show, and ultimately become one of the biggest disasters ever captured in a reality TV show.

<<>>

Here's how the Murphy, Texas sting was going to work. NBC leased a two-story house in an upscale subdivision, ironically two blocks from an elementary school. They filled the walls with hidden cameras and wired every room for audio and video. Inside, decoys from a private watchdog group named Perverted Justice handled the online chats and phone calls. A young decoy actor would greet the men at the door. Hansen waited in the kitchen. And when the confrontation was over and the man walked out the front door  police would be waiting outside to tackle him on the lawn or stop him in his car. .

And a mile from the bait house, inside Murphy's police station, NBC had installed a full video-projection system streaming every feed from the house in real time. Officers called it the War Room. 

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 kids as young as 12 years old. 

But instead, they’d be met by a calm and collected Chris Hansen who would say his famous,

“Why don’t you Have a seat?”

By the time they had planned The Murphy Sting, To Catch a Predator was one of the most watched segments on American television. Most people remember it as being it’s own show, but it actually wasn't.

It was a recurring segment on Dateline NBC.

This segment was incredibly popular, but it also had critical acclaim. Hansen had eight Emmys. Congress even praised the show. It pulled in more than ten million viewers at its peak.

And it seemed to be providing a public service. They were catching REAL predators. 

During the show’s second ever sting, There was an unemployed forty-three-year-old in the D.C. suburbs who told a "fourteen-year-old" boy he was a twenty-nine-year-old prep school teacher. He declared himself the boy's boyfriend within an hour of first contact, and walked into the sting house completely naked. 

After that, they caught a special-education teacher from the Prince George's County schools. He was fifty-four, married. He thought he was talking to a "thirteen-year-old" named Brandon. And he explicitly described what he wanted to do to him, and asked for assurances that the boy's father would be out of town. He got Five years in prison and was registered as a sex offender. 

In Fort Myers, Florida, during one operation, they caught twenty-four men who came to a house wired with thirteen hidden cameras. More than half of them lived more than two hours away. One even took a four-hour bus ride to get there. 

There was a U.S. Army sergeant. A Navy engineer, court-martialed and sentenced to military prison. There was a Sunday school teacher who volunteered with kids at his church and drove two hours to the Fort Myers house less than twenty-four hours after first contact with the decoy. There was also one man caught in Riverside, California, who showed up eight months later at the show's next house in Long Beach. He got to catch a predator’ed TWICE.

But this sting in Murphy was going to be bigger than anything they had done before. For one, they had that war room at the police station, when most episodes crammed producers and decoys into a room in the rented house. 

The city manager, a man named Craig Sherwood, had approved the whole operation. He'd been approached by Dateline and Perverted-Justice, and he'd signed off on the sting without telling the mayor or the city council. He believed secrecy was necessary to pull it off.

But also, they were in Texas, and the laws regarding child predators are different there. During the other stings, NBC had to wait for the predators to show up to the house. But in texas, the crime occurs when the first message is sent. So that meant if the predators didn’t show up, the team could go get them. This was supposed to be the biggest television event of the To Catch a Predators run.

<<>>

The Murphy sting started off really strong, over four days, roughly twenty-four 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 2 hours of the conversation turning sexual, he showed up to the house. 

He meets the girl inside and starts immediately making himself at home, he pours himself a soda and is chatting up the actress playing the 13 year old. He sees her pool table and starts talking about a time he “did it” on one. 

And then, Chris hansen walks in. and says “so why don’t you make yourself at home”. The actress runs out quickly, and it’s just Randall and Chris alone in the living room. 

And all of a sudden, Randall's tune changes. He shakes Chris’s hand and says he’s 49. And actually, he tells Chris, he was going to sit and wait until the girl's mother showed up, so he could tell the girls MOTHER about their chat. 

He can tell that Chris hansen does not believe this, so he says, well it doesn’t matter if you believe me, the lord is my savior and he knows the truth. 

To which, Chris replies, does your faith involve visiting 13 year old girls who are home alone. And that’s really the beauty of chris hansen. His comebacks are just….chefs kiss. 

Randall tries to leave, and is immediately 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 he wanted to teach the inexperienced boy different sex acts. Like Timothy, he sent a picture of his genitals. 

A retired doctor showed up. 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, who were active participants in their communities, 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, production was winding down.  one of the members of Perverted Justice was scrolling through the chat logs of older men who made contact, a lot of them used screen names so you couldn’t always tell who the person was. 

and they came upon a chat with a user name inxs00

Sometime in the days before the sting, this user started talking to a Perverted-Justice decoy posing as a thirteen-year-old boy.

Then inxs00 did something that caught the volunteers' attention. He approached a second decoy, another "boy," whose screen name Fallouttboi93 and hit on him too. 

But he gave the two boys different stories. He told one he was nineteen. He told the other he was twenty-one.

that discrepancy set off an alarm bell in the Perverted Justice members mind. 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 this guys real identity. 

Which they found, alright. And the man on the other end wasn't nineteen, and he wasn't twenty-one.

His name was Louis William Conradt Jr. Bill to those who knew him. He was Fifty-six years old. And he was The chief felony assistant district attorney of Rockwall County, Texas — the next county over.

Bill was a prosecutor who put child abusers away.

Bill Conradt had spent basically his entire adult life inside the Texas criminal justice system. He was elected district attorney of Kaufman County in 1980, when he was barely thirty, and held that seat for over two decades. Five consecutive terms. 

Kaufman County sits just east of Dallas, and its criminal DA handles everything — misdemeanors, felonies, civil matters. The full legal apparatus of the county runs through that office. And Conradt ran it for twenty-two years.

His caseload included the worst things a prosecutor sees. Violent crime. 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 career building cases around them. He'd stood in front of juries and argued that men who prey on children deserve prison. And juries agreed with him, again and again, for decades.

And whats even worse is colleagues described him as a fair but relentless advocate who believed deeply in the work. 

In 2002, he left the DA's seat to run for a district judgeship but He lost. He did a brief stint in private practice, and by 2004 he'd taken a job as the chief felony assistant DA in Rockwall County

Bill lived alone, in Terrell, Texas, about thirty-five miles southeast of Murphy. 

When the team at perverted justice learned this, they couldn’t 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 next level. And so, knowing exactly who he was, the operation kept going.

Bill allegedly sent explicit photos of himself, and others he'd found online. He described what he planned to do when they met. He asked whether he could take sexual pictures of the boy. 

On November 4, the decoy and inxs00 talked on the phone for the first time. The voice belonged to Dan Schrack, a twenty-one-year-old actor Dateline had hired as a decoy.

He was paid about five thousand dollars per three-to-four-day shoot, and his face was used in the online profiles. He would also greet the men when they arrived at the door. 

Schrack's job was to get Bill to come the house. The two of them talked on the phone more than once, but Bill was wishy washy about meeting. The decoy repeatedly asked Bill to show up, practically begging. And finally, Bill agreed. Still pretending to be a 19 year old. 

But then he went dark. He stopped sending messages. The decoy tried calling him, but it would just ring and ring and ring. 

And then, they noticed that Bill deleted his Myspace page, which is what he used to send the messages. Which meant that he might be destroying evidence, which would ruin their chances of convicting him. Maybe he was catching on to what was happening. 

Behind the scenes, the pressure was building. The sting was wrapping. And the highest-value target the show had ever identified had gone silent thirty-five miles away.

Producers in the house started discussing ways to lure Conradt in, and what to do if he wouldn't come. 

And then, sometime around twelve-thirty in the morning on November 5, 2006, in the War Room at Murphy PD, a lieutenant's phone rang, it was Chris Hansen. He wanted the police to get an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Bill Conradt.

A decision had been made. If he wouldn't come to them, they were going to go to him. For the first time in To Catch a Predator history. 

It's now the middle of the night in Murphy, Texas. November 5, 2006.

In the War Room at police headquarters, the troops start to rally: they're going to Terrell to confront Bill. Chief Myrick wakes up one of his detectives and puts him to work writing the affidavit — the sworn statement that will get a judge to sign an arrest warrant for the chief felony assistant district attorney of the county next door. He's working from what Perverted-Justice has given him: the chat logs, the phone recordings, the identification. He works through the rest of the night.

By eight-thirty 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, Bill’s street. a quiet residential area, big front yards, I imagine it’s the kind of block where everybody 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 Conradt has lived in since he was a child.

And they wait.

At eleven a.m., back in Murphy, the arrest warrant is finally signed by a municipal judge. And it’s go time. Now the police can take him into custody. But they still can't go inside the house — for that, they need a search warrant, and that one is coming from a different judge, a district judge, and it's taking longer.

So the crew on Davidson Drive keeps waiting. Nine o'clock becomes ten. Ten becomes noon. Noon becomes one. 

Inside the house, that whole time they’re out there, they see nothing. It almost seems like no one is inside, even though the car outside indicates Bill is home.

Around two-twenty in the afternoon, the search warrant comes through. The Murphy officers, with the Terrell police alongside them, move toward the house. They knock and announce themselves, someone also calls the phone number they got from NBC, the one Conradt gave the decoy.

But there’s no answer

At two-forty, the Terrell police chief requests a SWAT team come to the residence.

And They arrive a little after three. There’s Seven officers decked out in Body armor, holding tactical weapons. 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, in the den, is a desk. On the desk is a computer. And next to the computer is a workbook. The title on the cover: Investigation and Prosecution of Child Sexual Abuse.

It’s an upsetting image, a workbook on prosecuting crimes against children next to the computer that was used to message one. 

But there’s no time to reflect on it 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 the hallway. 

In his hand is  Browning .380 handgun. 

He calls out "I'm not gonna hurt anybody."

And then he turns the gun on himself. 

A CareFlite helicopter lifts him off Davidson Drive and flies him to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where he is pronounced dead within the hour.

Now, in the hours and days that followed, the people who had been part of this operation started to look at what they'd done. It seems like most people left the sting with a bad taste in their mouths. And even though they had caught over 20 predators, they felt like the situation with Bill should have been handled differently. 

Like, for instance, the warrants. Detective Weiss, the man who wrote the affidavit,  would later say the whole thing had been a rush job. He felt like they should have brought in the Texas Rangers. Or have consulted the district attorney. Maybe take it to a grand jury. 

None of that happened. The Collin County DA had refused to participate in the sting at all — he'd warned Chief Myrick against it. So the warrants went through other channels, fast, on a timeline that had more to do with television production than law enforcement.

I mean, the search warrant had the wrong city on it. AND The wrong county. AND The wrong date. 

And I feel like I can hear some of you now saying, Kaelyn I don’t care about clerical errors when It comes to catching pedophiles. Or, what does it matter how it ends, there’s one less predator on the street. 

And I get it, I hear you, I hear you. I also don’t really care about the way a child predator is caught, especially now as a mom, i just care that they are CAUGHT. I bring this up though because when you rush and write a warrant incorrectly, Anything seized under that warrant would get  thrown out of court. 

So what that means is if there was any pertinent evidence in that house, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was void. And THATs why you should care about clerical errors when it comes to this stuff. 

But also, not only was everything they would have collected on Bill useless, but the entire weekend was 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 he was declining to prosecute every single one of them. Here's why.

Remember, in Texas the crime is the messages that are being sent. It’s not in going to another location like it is in some states.That's what let them charge men who never showed up. But it also means the crime happens wherever the two people are sitting when they type those messages. Not where the bait house is.

And the issue was that these predators were typing from all over, different counties, different states, And so were the Perverted-Justice decoys. they were volunteers chatting from wherever they lived. So in sixteen of the twenty-four cases, nobody could prove that either person had been in Collin County when the crime occurred. These were crimes without a jurisdiction

The other eight crimes? The evidence was chat logs from anonymous civilians that were being paid by NBC. Neither the police nor NBC could guarantee the logs were complete or authentic because they weren’t the ones running those chats. 

And you see this now with TikTok, honestly. When I lived in austin guys were always trying to run their own stings inside of my HEB. They’d make dating profiles pretending to be minors, they’d invite the guy to the HEB to meet up, and then they’d shove a camera in his face and post it to tik tok. Which, you know public shame goes a long way, but its not enough to send anyone to jail. And that can be a real problem. 

Remember one of the guys that was caught in the Murphy sting? Stanley Kendell, the 54 year old middle school math teacher. Well, Charges were dropped against him in June 2007. And THEN, in 2014, he was substitute teaching at 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 Kendell was allowed to continue working with kids ages 12-14, 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 

To understand what went wrong in Murphy, you have to go back to the beginning — before Dateline, before Chris Hansen. You have to understand what Perverted-Justice was before they were ever on camera.

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 Yahoo, pose as minors, and wait. When adults made contact and the conversations turned sexual, the volunteers would collect the man's personal information, like name, photo, employer, home address and publish it online. It was all just doxxing, kind of like what they were doing in my HEB.

From the very beginning, law enforcement had concerns with this operation. The Chat transcripts they collected weren’t enough for criminal convictions. 

Part of it was because The volunteers were anonymous and there was no way to verify what they'd actually said in the chats or whether they'd followed their own rules about not initiating sexual conversations. The group was warned that the main effect of their work was training predators to be more careful online. 

But the group's founder, a man born Phillip John Eide who legally changed his name to his online handle, Xavier Von Erck, kept going. Perverted-Justice partnered with local television stations to start televising their confrontations. The early busts were rough…. They were a little punk rock. Men showed up to a house or an apartment and were met at the door with a camera and a baseball bat.

When Dateline producer Lynn Keller found Perverted-Justice in early 2004, it was an immediate fit. The first investigation aired in November 2004. It took place in Bethpage, Long Island. Eighteen men in two and a half days. And it had Massive ratings. But no police were on site, and the men walked out past the cameras and went home. 

Same thing with the second sting — suburban Virginia, 2005. Still no arrests.

By the third investigation, Riverside County, California law enforcement was on the ground making arrests. It was a sting that brought in fifty-one men over three days in early 2006.

And now the money started flowing. Perverted-Justice hired an agent. NBC retained them as paid consultants: they were making somewhere between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per sting. According to Perverted-Justice's own tax filings, NBC paid the group over eight hundred thousand dollars in 2006 alone for seven operations. By late 2007, the total was roughly two million dollars.

A producer named Marsha Bartel joined the show in August 2006 — right before the Murphy sting. She was a twenty-one-year NBC veteran, 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 more aggressively. These were things that could put the decoys at risk when the men showed up to the house.

She was also nervous that the group would start fabricating a conversation and framing people. 

Bartel was fired effective Christmas Day. She sued for one million dollars, alleging retaliation for her ethical complaints. The suit was dismissed.

Then there was the number that powered the whole machine — the claim, repeated constantly in promos and on air, that there were fifty thousand predators online at any given moment. It sounded like a real statistic. It was not. The figure had been invented by an ex-FBI agent who'd recycled debunked numbers from the satanic panic of the 1980s and kidnapping scares of the 1970s. The actual research showed that approximately three percent of children surveyed reported being aggressively solicited by an adult online. Online predators were real. The threat was genuine. But the scale Dateline presented was manufactured for television. 

In February 2007, the Murphy episodes aired on Dateline — two parts, back-to-back. The first two-thirds covered the bait house operations. The rest covered Bill Conradt. His name. His title. His death. Broadcast to millions of people, nationally.

And then Murphy, Texas started to come apart.

Bill's sister was an attorney. She stood in front of the council and called the operation the  judge, a jury, and an executioner, "encouraged by an out-of-control reality show." She said everyone involved had blood on their hands. She said she would never consider her brother's death a suicide.

In July 2007, she filed suit against NBC Universal for more than one hundred million dollars.

NBC called the lawsuit "completely without merit."

A federal judge read the complaint and disagreed.

In February 2008, Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York let the case go forward. And his ruling was one of the most scathing judicial assessments of a television network's conduct in recent memory.

A reasonable jury, Chin wrote, could find that NBC had "crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement." 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." That there was no legitimate need for a heavily armed SWAT team to confront a fifty-six-year-old prosecutor. That the suicide was foreseeable. 

He cataloged what the operation had actually looked like from the inside — on-camera strategy sessions between producers and police, Dateline interviewing suspects before the officers did, the physical fusion of the production and the police department into a single apparatus. 

Four months later, in June 2008, NBC settled. The terms were never disclosed. But within about forty-eight hours, every reference to the To Catch a Predator sting series was scrubbed from NBC's website. 

The show itself had already basically died. The last new episode aired December 28, 2007 — a sting in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where only seven men showed up, a fraction of what earlier operations had produced. After that the show just stopped

But the format didn't die with it. The format metastasized. YouTube predator catchers — Dads Against Predators, Creep Catchers, anonymous streamers filming confrontations in parking lots and posting them for clicks built entire audiences on the blueprint chris Hansen had drawn. 

In 2025, a documentary called Predators went back to some of the people who'd been inside the machine. Dan Schrack, the decoy actor who'd voiced the thirteen-year-old boy on the phone with Bill Conradt, said you could offer him ten million dollars to film that Texas episode again and he wouldn't take it. "I don't like knowing I could've been the last person this guy had a conversation with."

Detective Walt Weiss — the man who'd drafted the warrant overnight because his chief told him to — said the role he played in Murphy is "a stain on my soul that I'm gonna live with if I'm any kind of a human being at all."

Chris Hansen, for his part, has kept going. He made A Kickstarter-funded web series. A streaming service called TruBlu. A podcast. A show called Takedown. Still out there catching predators. Or, fighting the good fight as some would say

And now there's the movie. A24's Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim, written by Ajon Singh, based on the Esquire article that told the story of how Bill Conradt died — stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opens in theaters September 25, 2026. 

Chris Hansen hasn't seen it. He walked out of a private screening at A24's Manhattan offices after declining to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He says they wanted him to "sign away my rights to my name, image and brand." A24 says no consultation or permission was required.

And Hansen is doing one last thing. He's buying preshow ads for his own streaming service  TruBlu  in the theaters showing the movie about him.

But I think there’s a Chris Hansen quote that really sums all of this up nicely. 

Two weeks after Conradt's death, Hansen was asked whether he felt responsible.

And he said  "I sleep well at night."

Because at the end of the day a predator caught is a predator caught. And even if they weren’t thrown in jail, a lot of people think the doxxing of these people was reason enough to keep the show going. Because, as weve seen a million times, a lot of those men would probably have never gone to jail anyways. They would have stayed online, in chat rooms, exposing themselves to children

I mean seriously, how many of us had a bad experience with an adult online as a child, man or woman. How many of those sickos do you think are behind bars right now? If you told me the answer was 0, I would believe you. This stuff gets me so fired up now that I’m older and I can do a post mortem 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 access to MORE internet at an earlier age

But what do you guys think? I turn it over to you now. Let me know if you go watch the movie. This is a sensitive subject that obviously people get very passionate about, so I am so curious to hear from all of you

I will be back here next week with another episode, and until then..

You See How this looks, right?

OoooOOOOOoo

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Cursed Horror Movies: The Omen and Nosferatu

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Revisiting the True Story Behind Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story