Original subtitles

The following program

documents real law enforcement investigations

of child sexual predators.

This deeply disturbing content

may be triggering for some viewers.

Please watch with care.

Next, the team hunts a predator in Houston.

The twist is, he's one of their own.

He's a pervert with a badge.

Concern would be an understatement.

Then Detective Tony Godwin

races to stop a predator

who secretly records his victims.

I'm like, "This guy is sick."

Never in a million years did I imagine this would happen.

And, later, Tony joins forces to stop a predator

who just can't keep it in his pants.

There he is, in all his glory,

pants and underwear down around his ankle.

It's a very, very memorable arrest.

Get on the ground!

A team of police professionals

in North Dallas has one goal.

Get out the car!

Take down online predators

before they harm a real child.

Child predators are everywhere.

Online predators pose the biggest danger

to America's children today.

Kids are being targeted at an alarming rate.

This team is opening its case files

for the first time to show you how it tracks them down.

All right, he's coming this way.

And brings them to justice by any means necessary.

Put your hands on the car.

This is Detective Tony Godwin and his team is

the Predator Hunters.

It's 2017.

Detectives Tony Godwin and Brandon Poor are facing

their toughest takedown yet.

Both terrifying and shocking.

But what I find out next is just mind blowing.

This guy is a cop.

You know, these cases come along

that you're never going to forget.

This guy here, Donald Dehnert, this is one of them.

This one hits so close to home because this guy was a cop.

At the end of the day, we were able to take

his knowledge of law enforcement and tactics

and use it against him to get him into custody

without him even knowing about it.

- Hey. - Hey.

This case revolves around

my friend and colleague, Brandon Poor.

He's a detective on the ICAC Task Force.

I have known Brandon for a very long time,

over 10 years.

We collaborate on cases quite a bit.

A lot of times I'm assisting him

on his search warrants and his cases,

and he's doing the same for mine.

Brandon is online

doing an undercover proactive investigation

into the Internet relay chat, what we call IRC.

IRC is one of the oldest chat platforms that exists.

Looks very old school.

It consists of a bunch of different channels

and forums that's unmonitored.

The culture of IRC is horrific.

It's not for the faint of heart, I promise you.

There are channels like dad and daughter sex,

baby and toddler love, and things that are horrible.

You will find predators

who are sharing back and forth material and communications

and talking about things

that would literally make your stomach turn.

So, in this case, I created an undercover profile

of a 31-year-old mom named Laura.

I portray myself as a mom of two daughters, ages 5 and 11.

The idea is that

Brandon's going to use this profile,

who's got two daughters available,

and offer them up for sex.

The sad reality is it's based on real things

that we know have happened.

Real adults who have

had their own children or access to children,

offered them up for sexual purposes.

I'm hit with dozens of messages right away.

But one user sticks out from the others

because its title, LovesYng,

gives me some sort of indication

as to what this user might be looking for.

He's asking me how many daughters I have.

And he says, "I bet they're both so cute and sexy.

I love mothers and their young daughters."

So out of the realm of anything a normal person

would even think about.

Feels a little more creepy to me.

I have kids and it hits a little closer to home.

So I'm playing naive.

I'm basically telling him I haven't really talked

about anything like this.

And he's saying it would be something

he would want to actually do.

Over the next few weeks, the messages start becoming

more graphic and more explicit.

Both terrifying and shocking.

Concern would be an understatement.

My biggest fear that he's going to go meet a real kid

or, in this case, the parent that has access to kids.

Brandon shows me some of the communications

between he and this user, LovesYng.

I'm telling you, it's so disgusting.

The deviant, horrible things he wants to do to a child.

This guy is a problem, so we've got to do everything we can

to figure out who he is, find him,

and put his ass in jail.

Tony subpoenas the Internet provider

for information about LovesYng's identity.

I eventually get the information back

and they give me an address in the Houston area.

And it comes back to a guy named Donald Dehnert.

I do a little bit of digging

and I find a Facebook profile for this guy.

And on the surface,

he just looks like some normal married guy, family dude.

He's got a pet.

But what I find out next is just mind-blowing.

This guy is a cop.

He has lived a life of sworn to protect the community,

yet he leads this double life where he's soliciting someone

to have sex with children.

It really makes me sick to my stomach to say these things.

At the end of the day, he's a pervert with a badge.

The next thing that Brandon needs to do is really establish,

is this guy, Dehnert, going to follow through

in what he's been saying online and actually show up to engage

in a sex act with a child?

We're talking over the holiday period.

He says he wishes he could have my girls

under the Christmas tree and unwrap them slowly.

I mean, what do you say to that?

He's most certainly having

some sort of Christmas with his family,

but he's stepping away

to go to the computer and tell me these things.

Jekyll and Hyde.

That's what it is. It's Jekyll and Hyde.

After several months of Brandon

working this undercover Laura profile

and offering up these two girls,

Dehnert finally makes

a suggestion for a meet in real life,

and he's going to engage

in a sexual encounter with two kids.

He's making it very clear

he wants an entire weekend with these kids.

Sexually abusing these children.

Now that he's given me a concrete day,

I think it's time to make an op plan.

I'm going to go meet with Tony to do that now.

You know, this is an absolute worst case scenario

for us.

There's so many things that could go wrong.

One, this guy knows every tactic used by law enforcement.

We have to confront him at his house.

We've gotta come up with a plan

that's not gonna alert him that he's being arrested.

He's got guns, or at least, a gun.

He could barricade. We could get into a shootout.

There's so many variables,

and this is so touchy. It's like a powder keg

about to explode.

Okay, I got a plan.

We use what he knows about what we do

to help us and benefit us, right?

So his house is here.

He's got a street here.

And he's got a neighbor right across the street there.

What if we park the SWAT van right here?

Put an ambulance here

and make it look like we're at

some police operation across the street.

And then before he has a time to think about it,

they surround him.

We have him put his hands on his head and disarm him.

So putting the SWAT truck

and an ambulance directly in front of his house.

- It's crazy. - It's genius, though.

We need this guy to be so dismissive.

Like, "Who knew I was across the street from a crime

or a criminal?" when, in fact, it's for him.

We're set up right in front of Dehnert's address,

waiting for him to come out.

It's like 6 o'clock in the morning.

They know full well this is the normal time

that Dehnert leaves to go to work.

The whole anticipation is unlike anything else

because everybody's anxious, everybody's amped up.

It's really nerve-wracking.

And then he comes out of his house,

cup of coffee in hand, oblivious to what's going on.

His focus is on the SWAT guys,

and he doesn't really have a moment

to think about what might be happening.

They all turn.

They focus all their weapons on him.

And they get him into custody.

All I had at this point was a search warrant.

That's part of the reason why we don't handcuff him,

so that we can build a rapport

to hopefully get him to agree to an interview.

I'm a little curious as to whether

he's gonna talk to us.

I mean, he knows what an interview is like

for a police officer and investigator in this case.

Before Brandon conducts his interview,

the team searches Dehnert's home.

What they're looking for, obviously,

is anything capable of connecting to the Internet.

They seize 40 electronic devices in total.

SD cards, memory sticks, cameras, laptops,

everything you can imagine,

all of which has to be submitted

and examined forensically.

The fact that

he's doing this interview in the car,

this is a really common tactic that we use.

Get them while they're really thinking,

"What is going on?"

And see if we can capitalize on it.

I'm baffled.

The fact that this guy who's been in law enforcement

talking to a detective about this type of crime

and doesn't ask for a lawyer,

blows my mind.

Detective Brandon Poor confronts one of his own,

Deputy Sheriff Donald Dehnert.

My belief is Dehnert knows why we're there,

but he doesn't know how much we know.

Dehnert opens up to us quite a bit.

He was a lot more forthright than I expected him to be.

He's saying right there,

he thinks it was one of us or maybe even me.

And I'm not going to let him know it was.

I think that he's thinking,

if this weren't a real person with real kids,

then it's not even that big of a deal.

You know, some of the horrible things

that he said and that he planned to do.

If you read through the communications,

there's no indication that this was anything other

than something he wanted to act out.

If there was any doubt

about how real this is in his life,

he's now admitted to viewing child sex abuse material

on his laptop

and moving it to a thumb drive.

The fact that we're now going to find CSAM

in the home on more than one device

means that it's additional charges

and additional crimes that we have to investigate as well.

I don't view Dehnert any differently

than any of my other child predators.

The fact that Dehnert was a police officer just meant

that he was a predator that flew under the radar

until we could catch him.

Brandon did a great job.

And he's able to get information from Dehnert

that he had a USB device

that had child sex abuse material on it.

A recovery of that device

and a further examination of that device

revealed a thousand-plus images of child sex abuse material.

What we know about people who prey on kids

is they're the teachers and the pastors and the doctors

and the farmers and the plumbers

and everyone else around you

that looks just like anyone else to you.

It's 2009.

Detectives join forces to stop

a predator who's exposing himself to a child.

He's transmitting webcam. He's panning up.

Shows his face.

You can't make this stuff up, right?

These guys are so pathetic.

Every once in a while,

we find an offender that's so twisted,

it shocks even a seasoned veteran like me.

This guy, Michael Vanmeter,

sent a boatload of child sex abuse material

to what he thought was a 13-year-old girl.

We had to coordinate

to get this guy caught with his pants down, literally.

I got a phone call from Lieutenant Gary Marquis.

He was a friend and colleague on the ICAC task force

in a different county in North Texas.

He was kind of in a bit of a panic because he's like,

"Hey, man, I'm online in an undercover capacity

"talking to this suspect that lives in your city,

and I need you to check it out."

In 2009, Yahoo was the big kid on the block.

They had numerous chatrooms.

There could be tens of thousands of people in these chat rooms.

I was actually going into these chat rooms,

looking for individuals that search

for underage children to have sex with.

Gary tells me he created this profile, Texasgrl13.

He was a 13-year-old female.

And he tells me that he got contacted right away

by a user named MV-57.

MV-57 wanted to know my age, sex, and location.

And I told him I was 13, female, and I lived in Texas.

He didn't even blink at the age of 13.

My undercover name is Alexis.

Nice to meet you, Mike.

The next communication is,

"You ever been with an older man?"

I replied, "I'm still a virgin."

His end goal is for Alexis to start trusting him.

Like really creepy predator behavior, right?

But it gets worse.

Within minutes, this same user, MV-57,

began to send me images of child sexual abuse material,

or CSAM as we refer to it.

You know, typically in these investigations,

I get a picture of their junk

that they want to show off to a young girl.

But this is like taking a 2x4 to the head.

This is some hardcore child pornography.

That's a felony to share or send

child sexual abuse material to another person.

It pisses me off, the fact that this guy is willing to go

and share horrible material

with what he thinks is a real kid.

The rapid nature in which this happened is really concerning,

was really concerning for Gary. We don't know who he is.

And at the end of the day,

he could be doing something to a real kid.

I need to identify him quickly.

Lieutenant Marquis is communicating with

a determined online predator called MV-57.

A few weeks into the chat, he receives a friend request.

Oh, wow. That took his display name off

and his first and last name is visible.

That's his freaking name, Michael Vanmeter.

It's a surreal moment because you're thinking,

"How dumb can you be?"

Like, you are out here doing this crime.

You're doing things

and soliciting a child for sexual purposes,

yet you're dumb enough to put

your real name on your profile information?

And then Michael Vanmeter

began transmitting live webcam feed.

This feed began at his genitals and then moved up to his face.

Then I took a screenshot of his face.

Just goes to show you these guys

are not the brightest bulbs in the box.

We have a picture of him.

We have his name.

Now we can determine who he is and where he's at.

A search on the police database reveals

that Vanmeter lives within Tony's jurisdiction.

When Lieutenant Marquis calls me

to tell me about this predator,

Michael Vanmeter, who lives in my city,

that's a real concern for me. Because this guy's talking about

the things he's talking about and sharing that material,

I move right away to start working on that.

As Gary and I discuss a way to get Vanmeter out

into the open to get him arrested,

he throws a curveball that really floors us,

and it kind of changes

the course of everything that we do.

I get a message, and the message says,

"It's my birthday on Monday.

I hope to obtain a great birthday present."

And I respond, "What would it be?"

Vanmeter replies,

"Seeing my 12 and 14-year-old neighbor kids naked."

When he says, hey, it's my birthday weekend

and I might have access or availability to a real kid

and see some kids naked

as like a birthday present kind of a thing.

I'm like, "I'm going to put eyes on this guy.

"I'm going to put eyes on his house

"and I'm going to get a team of people together

to make sure that doesn't happen."

Tony and Lieutenant Marquis

devise a plan to snare Michael Vanmeter.

Gary, if he's on the computer with Vanmeter

while we're setting up to do

the arrest warrant and search warrant,

the chances of him being able to access a kid are minimized.

So this is kind of a dual plan that we have in place.

It's not going to be simple,

but we're going to make it happen.

August 7th, 2009, this is Detective Godwin.

It is 5:33, 5:33 pm.

I'm sitting outside the target house

for this gentleman right here, Michael Vanmeter.

As I'm sitting here, I'm in contact also

with Gary Marquis.

The reality is I gotta keep eyes on this place

while all the other moving parts are happening.

As soon as that warrant is signed,

we're gonna hit the house.

I get the team to do a perimeter around the house.

And we have some radio chatter going back and forth

and I have a teammate that tells me, "Hey,

"I can see through a window,

and I can see Vanmeter sitting at a computer."

I'm communicating with Vanmeter

in Chat Messenger.

He actually starts transmitting video footage.

So I call Tony and I tell him

he has no idea that y'all are outside.

It's go, go, go.

We're at the front of the residence

and I'm banging on the door.

"Police, police, search warrant, open the door, open the door."

The door gets open, and I'm greeted by

what I believe is the roommate.

I talked to Tony and say,

"You know, this is what he's doing.

He's masturbating on webcam."

I send two guys immediately down the hall.

They beeline straight for Vanmeter's door.

They push right through.

Guess what they see?

There he is in all his glory,

pants and underwear down around his ankle.

He's in full bloom, just masturbating away.

You can't make this stuff up, right?

These guys are so pathetic.

They're such deviants.

I'm walking into the room

and I'm on the phone with Gary Marquis.

And so I take my badge off and I just kind of zoom it up

into the webcam on the computer.

What a nice finish to see this guy finally into custody,

bagged and tagged. He's not hurting a real kid.

Detective Godwin's team searches the home

of child predator Michael Vanmeter,

following his arrest.

There's loads of child sex abuse material

and he's got a map that's laid out.

And on that map, he's got an area

that's designated right where

Gary Marquis's undercover profile is, Alexis.

And that's really indicative

of what this guy's real intent was.

He's now mapping out a drive

to go to this location, which is a couple hours away,

to have a sexual encounter

with what he believed to be a child.

Vanmeter agrees to have

an interview without a lawyer present.

I love the interview process.

I don't care that I haven't eaten,

that I haven't slept, that I've been up for hours.

It doesn't make any difference.

He's got his head in his hand.

Like, he's so broken, in my mind,

I'm thinking, "This is right where I want him to be"

because this is the best case scenario for me

to get this guy to confess to everything.

He says, "No, I was never going to go meet that child."

Dude, give me a break.

We found a map to her location at your place.

This guy is so creepy.

The type of material that he sent and forwarded

to this child is so disturbing,

so unnerving.

It would shock the conscience of the American public

if they actually had to see something like that.

It's the most deplorable, disgusting stuff on the planet.

The takeaway for me on this Vanmeter case

is he shared child sex abuse material,

horrific stuff, in a moment's notice,

like 10 minutes within talking to this 13-year-old girl.

So as a parent, be super vigilant.

You'd rather know full well what's going on

and where they're going than being in the dark

and letting them get exposed to a predator

like Michael Vanmeter.

It's 2012.

Detective Tony Godwin

is in a race against time to stop a predatory lawyer.

He is the creepiest of the creepiest,

the worst of the worst.

Never in a million years did I imagine this would happen.

You know, once in a while,

you get a case that just blows your mind.

That is this case for me, Christian Gieseke.

This started out as like an inappropriate conversation

with a young girl

who was spending the night with his stepdaughter,

and it morphed into something that was unbelievable,

deviant behavior that nobody was really expecting.

This guy, hidden in plain sight.

I'm proud that we were able

to get this guy off the street and behind bars.

On July 7th of 2012,

I got a phone call from a concerned parent.

She told me that her daughter, a 13-year-old,

was spending the night with her best friend, Skylar.

And while she was there, her best friend's stepdad

had made some very inappropriate

conduct and communications with her.

I tell the mom that she needs to bring her daughter,

Natasha, into the police station

so I can have a conversation with her.

Natasha is a fake name

to protect the identity of the real victim.

Natasha tells me around 2:00 in the morning,

Skylar's stepfather, Christian Gieseke,

looked in the room and saw that she was awake

and invited her to just watch TV.

And they started watching Friends.

But then it kind of took a weird turn.

Christian started to ask her very inappropriate questions.

She is freaked out, right?

But that doesn't deter him at all,

because what he does next is shocking.

He tries to show her pornography.

She is completely frozen.

She begins to cry.

Christian then suggests, "Hey, why don't you go take a shower,

calm down. I'm just trying to help you."

She's like, you know what?

I think I'm just going to go back in the room.

This is really creepy predator behavior, right?

Natasha tells me she does not wake Skylar up.

She just kind of lays there, paralyzed in fear.

She's able to get a couple hours of sleep.

This guy is acting out.

He's on a path to escalate to put his hands on a real kid.

And that is a huge issue for me.

The next step for me

is to make sure that his wife and stepdaughter,

Skylar, are in a safe place.

So I have to interview them.

And Skylar reveals some information to me

that is absolutely mind-blowing and shocking.

It scares me to the point where we are going

to move on this guy immediately.

Detective Tony Godwin

interviews the mom and daughter

who share a home with suspected child predator

Christian Gieseke.

Thankfully, I'm able to get Skylar and her mom

to the PD about 1 o'clock,

get them away from this guy

who I now am believing 100% is a predator.

When Skylar comes in,

she's nervous and she's a little scared.

And you can just see that

the bottom of their world has dropped out.

Christian, he was just the dad at my house.

And he was very trustworthy,

taught us how to protect ourselves

and taught us how to look out for ourselves, too.

Never in a million years did I imagine this would happen.

I have a daughter the same age.

And so I really connected with her.

And then she tells me a story that blows my mind.

A bunch of things are going through my mind.

I'm thinking back to what Natasha said,

that how he's like, "Oh, calm down.

You should go take a shower and calm down."

Now Skylar's telling me about this weird black box

that's in the room.

I had a bad feeling that it might have been a camera.

I'm like, "This guy is sick."

Hidden cameras for his stepdaughter,

wildly inappropriate request

to a 13-year-old girl who's spending the night.

He makes me sick to my stomach.

Where is this guy?

Because I need to get him right now.

I'm going to put a surveillance team

on his house to start watching him.

But I can't afford him to start deleting evidence.

However, I still need to interview Sarah,

Skylar's mom, and figure out her side of things as well.

She is really, really upset.

Obviously about what's happened with Natasha,

now what's going on with her own daughter.

She lets me know that, you know, her and Christian

lived together for several years,

but they've only been married about a year.

I want to try to find a way to have a conversation

with his wife and figure out

what it is that sexually turns him on.

I'm building up this pattern of behavior

because the best predictor of future behavior

is past behavior.

Sarah's a trooper in this.

Like, she gets it and she understands it,

and so she's very candid and clear with me.

He has tons of cameras.

Like, he's always recording.

He's got all this different equipment.

And in my mind, I'm like, holy smokes.

Like, the lid has come off this can, right?

I talked to Sarah about what Skylar said

about this hidden device that she found in the bathroom.

And Sarah pulls out this small, square device.

As soon as I saw it, I knew this is not a camera.

This is a decoy.

And so that tells me, "Oh, my gosh, like,

"this guy is so paranoid that he switched out

the camera for this fake DVD drive."

Time is really of the essence because where's the camera?

If what was in that bathroom

that Skylar described is a camera,

I know that it has to probably be viewed on a laptop,

which means, if he's moving evidence

or transferring evidence or disposing of evidence,

that could be my case.

I'm going to try to get him arrested immediately.

Once I finished the interview with Sarah, like, I'm moving

to secure an arrest warrant for Christian.

While I'm waiting to get the warrant signed by the judge,

I check in with my surveillance team

who've been sitting on his house.

And then at 3:53 pm,

they tell me they spotted him.

He's carrying a bag, which tells me

he's maybe trying to get rid of more evidence.

I just don't have the warrant signed yet,

so they can't do anything

except watch him and follow him if he leaves.

If they see him do a traffic violation,

what that allows them to do is get him stopped,

get him identified, and hold him.

That way he's not getting rid of anything.

He's driving like a weirdo,

like he's doing what we call a heat run.

A heat run is what it is, when someone is suspicious,

the police might be watching him.

This guy's paranoia is through the roof,

but he's following all the traffic laws.

It looks like he's having this meltdown with himself.

This guy, he is unhinged.

Tony's team is tailing the vehicle

of child predator Christian Gieseke.

And I tell them over the radio,

"It's a go. I've got it."

Two of the four covert guys jump out.

Well, they jump and grab ahold of him.

They're getting him cuffed up.

Uniform squad's able to get there,

take him and put him in the car, get him into custody

before he's able to do anything with that bag that he had.

He's like, "Well, what's the warrant for?"

Come on, dude.

Like, you know what the warrant's for.

You've been driving around doing crazy, manic,

stupid things for the last half an hour.

You know you're caught.

Once they let me know that he's in custody

and he's on his way to the jail,

they tell me that they found a black briefcase.

Inside that black briefcase were two laptops,

and so that stuff was seized as evidence

and brought back to the station.

Gieseke refuses to speak to Tony without a lawyer.

I'm sick because this is where I wanted this guy,

in the room, to get him to open up,

and now I can't.

I'm able to get the search warrant

for Gieseke's residence.

I cannot even begin to tell you the staggering

amount of stuff that we found.

Hard drives, computers, laptops,

tablets, tons and tons of stuff.

But the most telling thing that I found was a box.

And that box was for a hidden camera

that looked very much like what Skylar described

was in the bathroom.

Tony reviews the video files

recovered from Gieseke's electronic devices.

This is a clip of Christian Gieseke's bedroom.

And then, all of a sudden, you see

Christian Gieseke with no clothes on,

lean over and look directly at the camera.

Just to check the angle,

the view, what can the camera see?

What can he see as the camera goes?

We found hidden videos taken

of various women who appear to be adults

who, unbeknownst to them, they were being recorded.

But the biggest, most damaging thing

that I found were the hidden videos of Skylar.

This is an image inside Skylar's private bathroom.

This is a test run.

This is Christian Gieseke walking in.

It's motion activated. He wants to know,

is it going to come on like it's supposed to?

He flushes the toilet, validates that it's dawn,

and he turns right out and walks out.

This is the absolute slam dunk that we needed.

This is so depraved and so disgusting.

The fact that he's been in this kid's life

for eight years and he's reached this level,

that is disgusting.

I'm shocked. I'm appalled.

Why did I not have a reason to trust my stepdad?

You know, especially as a fatherly figure,

that should be the number-one person

that is supposed to protect you.

The forensic specialists

that I turned everything over to

to examine have come back to me

and told me they found over 4,000 images

of suspected child sex abuse material.

In addition, over 160 suspected child pornography videos

or child sex abuse material videos.

They got a divorce shortly after, which was relieving,

especially for my mom.

I mean, you want to do that as soon as possible.

Every flag goes off with this guy.

Like, he is the creepiest of the creepiest,

the worst of the worst.

This guy I despise on so many levels.

Everything that he represents is exactly why I do this job.

There was definitely a sense of relief

when he was sentenced to 20 years.

Natasha and I are still best friends.

I think it was satisfying for all of us

to kind of just take a deep breath

and just move on, too, from it.

Kind of get the closure that we all needed.

that over 90% of children

who are abused, sexually or emotionally,

are done so by someone they know and they trust.

This is the case with Christian Gieseke.

Child predators are everywhere.

They come from all walks of life.

There are professionals in this arena like me

and teams of us all over the country.

This is what we do. This is our playground.

If you're a predator, if you're out there

and you're preying on children, guess what?

We're looking for you and we're going to find you.