We Watch to Catch

The worst sorts of despicable criminals can’t always be prevented from continuing their destruction by playing fair.

A new documentary called Predators is making the rounds among the glitterati of the chattering classes, notably Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic.[1]

The documentary is a spare jeremiad chiding the NBC News show To Catch a Predator that aired for three years, from 2004-2007. Chris Hansen, in dubious alliance with a self-appointed group of vigilantes calling themselves “Perverted Justice,” would descend on a community and lure middle-aged men to what they were led to believe was an assignation with an under-aged girl. When the mark arrived at the “trap house” set up by the group and NBC, an under-aged-looking decoy would appear and lure the man in. After some small talk designed to have the man make clear his intentions, the decoy would make an excuse to leave the room for a minute.

Enter Hansen, who would question the potential pervert for a few minutes before saying, “Okay. You’re free to go.” Outside, the man would be surrounded by an abnormally large contingent of cops, often in SWAT gear, would make a “felony takedown,” usually including lots of shouting and pointing of guns.

The show imploded when the producers got lazy and instead of luring potential “predators” to them, they partnered with a small-town Texas police agency to target a man who was a former elected district attorney and who was still at the time of the show an assistant DA. The man had been corresponding online with someone he thought was a slightly underage boy. This time, instead of waiting for the man to come to them, the cops made a full armed entry accompanied by NBC cameras into the man’s home. The assistant DA-turned-potential-predator produced a pistol, assured the police pointing guns at him that they weren’t his targets, turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. He died immediately.

Dateline broadcast the episode, withholding the video of the man shooting himself. The show aired a few more times, but was soon canceled, in part due to the controversy.

The documentary and Sophie Gilbert, writing in The Atlantic (“Why Did We Ever Watch To Catch a Predator,” Dec 24, 2025), portray To Catch a Predator as part of early 21^st century obsession with teenage girls, citing Brittney Spear’s suggestive music videos of the era, and as a self-aggrandizing (for Hanson) act of public humiliation. Gilbert sympathizes with the potential predators, asserting that “To make a documentary is to have a kind of godlike power over someone else’s narrative.… The moment that the subjects realized they’d been caught was the instant around which the show was constructed, as we watched them register their new reality with horror, denial, and—often—desperate pleas for clemency.” Mark de Rond, an ethnographer interviewed for Predators, puts a point on it: “What you’re seeing is effectively someone else’s life end. And they realize it.”

Missing from Gilbert and de Rond’s commiserating is an unpleasant reality: The sexual abuse of children has been tolerated far too long.

Child sexual abuse is widespread and insidious in the United States. Popular culture continues to silence women who speak about it. People of all political beliefs and even churches are complicit.

There was plenty wrong about “To Catch a Predator,” but NBC and were finally talking very publicly about what is too often a private terror. At the time of the show’s airing, the National District Attorneys Association gave Hansen an award for bringing recognition to child sexual abuse.

But was Hansen conducting good investigations? No. Much more care and preparation is required before an operation like this will pass constitutional muster and afford a successful prosecution. For starters, a self-appointed group of vigilantes would never be allowed to run the deception. And investigators go to great lengths to ensure all communications with the “target” are recorded, to avoid accusations of entrapment.

One of my cases was about a previously-convicted murderer who was out on parole and working as a security guard. (Go figure.) Steven Howard Vorce was so committed to having sex with what he thought were six- and eight-year-old children that he traveled over 100 miles to meet with the undercover investigator posing as their mother. Even in this early internet age we made sure all communications were in writing. The actual meeting, in a hotel room, was heavily wired for audio and video by the Oregon National Guard who were military surveillance experts.

This disgusting piece of empty humanity was clearly prepared to rape what he thought were real children. He brought along a duffle bag full of sex toys, lubricants, and pornography. Still, his conviction required two trials. In the first trial the jury could not reach a verdict. All of the male jurors bought the defense’s claim of entrapment, while all the women on the jury voted to convict. The second trial featured the same defense lawyers and an all-woman jury, who had no problem in reaching guilty verdicts on Attempted Sodomy and Conspiracy to Commit Sodomy charges. The creep ended up serving about three years in prison.

Sting operations are not limited to drug or child predator cases. Around 1984, Joel Terrance Abbott was attempting to stab his common-law wife when her friend, Carol Ann Payne, stood between them and took the hit herself. Abbott was convicted of felony assault. Soon after, Carol Ann Payne, who was homeless, went missing. Several years went by with no identified suspect. Abbott had his felony conviction for stabbing Payne expunged after he went crime-free for a while.

In 1992, a former friend of Abbott’s approached police and told them it was Abbott who had killed Carol Ann Payne. The friend had occasionally asked about Carol Ann, and Abbott’s answers were always along the lines of, “Who cares? Anyway, she’s dead and gone, stop thinking about her.” Oregon investigators planned an operation.

Abbott was watched for weeks. Investigators placed a court-authorized tracker on Abbott’s car.

The informant was told to tell Abbott that the cops were getting close and he needed to get rid of the body. Hopefully, this would spook Abbott into driving from his home in Portland, Oregon, to wherever he had disposed of Payne’s body almost a decade earlier, almost certainly somewhere in the thousands of square miles of juniper high desert of Central Oregon where Abbott, his common-law wife, and Payne had lived.

Abbott got in his car but did not drive west. He drove north, towards Washington state and, presumably, the Canadian border. In either place, Oregon investigators would have lost jurisdiction.

About a mile before the Washington border, Abbott was stopped by four unmarked police cars and held at gunpoint.

He gave up nothing to police interrogation. He never confessed. He never offered an explanation or an alibi. All we had was circumstantial evidence from the informant. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence, which the jury and the judge believed, convicted him of aggravated murder, and sentenced Abbott to life in prison

(Abbott was one of the very few people I had convicted as district attorney that I worried about an early release and seeing him coming up my walkway some night. The chief investigators and I were fairly convinced Abbott had other victims, even other women he had killed, but we never were able to prove it. It was a relief to read in the newspapers in 2016 that he had died in prison.)

It isn’t clear whether Predators director/producer David Osit and Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert are more critical of the stings or of the public humiliation in Hanson’s TV show “To Catch a Predator.” We watch criminals so we can catch them.

The worst sorts of despicable criminals can’t always be prevented from continuing their destruction through the legal equivalent of the Marquess of Queensbury Rules that govern boxing. A court of law is not a sport. There are no guarantees in life that we will all be treated fairly and safely. Trials themselves, however one finds oneself at the defense table, are almost invariably public humiliations. CourtTV and Reddit, anyone?

Note: I prosecuted both the Vorce and the Abbott cases.

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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/predators-documentary-dateline-to-catch-a-predator-review/685421/