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, a man turns up

to meet two underage boys for sex.

He doesn't know he's walking right into a sting.

Then, Detective Tony Godwin tracks a predator

with thousands of illegal images on his phone.

I'd like for you to please stand

over here in the kitchen.

We're going to search the house real quick.

And the team takes down a man

trying to have sex with a 13-year-old girl.

On the ground!

A team of police professionals

in North Dallas has one goal--

Get out of 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.

I grew up in a military family.

We moved around a lot.

At 17, I joined the Army.

By 23, I'd left the military

and started tracking down criminals on the street.

In 2005, I made detective. And ever since,

I've worked internet crimes against children.

Now that I've got kids of my own,

this work, it means everything. It's personal.

There's nothing I'd rather be doing than saving kids' lives.

I'm surrounded by a team of people

who are just as dedicated as I am.

So far, we've put away close to 200 predators.

Most of them are serving ten years or more.

That's over 2,000 years of prison time,

and we're not done yet.

] I call this my wall of shame.

I put every one of these offenders behind bars.

No two of these guys are the same.

Every one of them has a story to tell.

Take this guy, for example, James Wade King.

This is the classic guy.

It really took a team effort to get this guy into custody.

But at the end of the day, it worked.

February 13, 2020.

Detective Tony Godwin waits in a parking lot for Wade King.

The predator believes

he's meeting a 13-year-old girl for sex.

He's convinced she's into him

after talking to her on the phone.

In reality, the girl is an undercover police officer,

and Wade King is walking into a trap.

The cases I work, there's two kinds,

proactive and reactive.

In a proactive capacity, I'm putting myself online

as a child in the hopes that a predator's gonna reach out

to me and talk to me.

Social media platforms,

gaming applications and sites, chat rooms,

anywhere that kids are, is where I put myself.

Today, Tony is investigating

a social media platform called AntiLand.

One of the things that they market is the fact

that you're anonymous while you're on here.

Age, terms of service, says you have to be 18,

but there's kids all over it.

I set up the vanity name as Dinasaurus13TX,

which lets everybody in the rooms know

that my name's Dina, I'm 13, and I'm from Texas.

And then just put myself out there and start to fish.

Within seconds, I'm just slammed with messages.

One user in particular, his name was Kingfish,

he was very interested.

Kingfish opens up with,

"How old are you? You ever talk to older guys?"

That is a huge red flag.

And I tell him, "I'm almost 14, what about you"

Kingfish tells me, "Probably too old. I'm 45."

A bunch of things run through my head.

Like one, this guy's too comfortable

talking to a 13-year-old kid about this.

I can't put myself out there

and lead someone into a sexual situation.

Anything that got initiated by me would wipe my case.

Developing the ability to speak like a kid definitely took time.

I have honed that to a pretty decent skillset.

I misspell things, I say words

that to adults mean absolutely nothing,

and that needs to be as realistic as possible.

I want to see what direction he's going to take this.

And I say, "LOL, why wouldn't I want to talk to you, silly?

You seem really sweet."

Kingfish suggests we move over to SMS.

I give him my cell phone number,

and he immediately text messages.

I introduce myself,

and he replied his name was Wade.

Tony hands Wade's name and number

to his co-worker, Tavie Guthrie.

She is a specialist in unmasking predators.

I'm a digital investigative analyst.

I've been doing this with Tony for about two years now.

I am a little bit of a cyber sleuth.

I started out as a 911 operator.

I really credit that to preparing me for what I do now.

When I get a phone number, the first thing I do

is just check our local database

to see if we have any records with them.

If they're in our system, then it makes it really easy,

because we've already verified an ID for them.

So our guy is James Wade King.

And this guy is a real winner. He's got prior charges.

He's in the Dallas area.

We've got false report, terroristic threat.

Interestingly, no prior sex offenses,

but I'm not sure if that's just because he hasn't been caught.

My communications with Wade, they keep going.

Wade begins to ramp things up.

He wants to normalize sexual behavior,

bring it down where a child would feel OK

to have a conversation like that.

And then he sends me a text.

He's asking this child about having sex with a grown man.

It's freaking disgusting.

So I want to feed into his little fantasy.

There's not one doubt in my mind

this guy is an absolute predator.

He's got to be a real threat to a real child,

and I need to get him.

But I need him to make a mistake for me to do that.

Wade decides to send me a photo of himself.

It's a mirror selfie. The way he's posed himself

in this photo to look like a teenage kid,

even though he's a creepy old man, very sexually suggestive.

And then Wade does what most of these predatory types do.

He asks her to produce nude imagery or videos.

Obviously, I can't do that.

I don't look much like a 13-year-old girl.

But fortunately, I do have access to people who do.

I first met Tony about eight years ago.

He came up to me and just said, "You look pretty young."

I must have looked so creeped out,

like, "Who is this man?"

My coworker was with me, and she kind of gave me

a little bit of backstory on him.

And we got to talking, and he asked me

if he could maybe use my photos or my voice

to make a profile to talk to predators.

To know that Wade is looking at these photos,

it's just disturbing.

But providing my photos to Tony means that these people

are looking at a picture of me rather than a picture

of a real child that would be really traumatized.

Tony sends Wade a photo of Audrey

taken when she was a young teen.

I kind of make fun of my hair looking kind of crazy.

I immediately say, "Yeah, I'm sure you don't really like this.

And that's OK. You can just tell me."

The fact is, I'm just trying to make him buy into the fact

that I'm a 13-year-old kid with some low self-esteem.

And then he replies immediately.

"You don't think bad of me, do you?"

Like, "Yes, I do think bad of you.

"You're a 45-year-old creepy dude

chatting with a 13-year-old girl."

That's a problem.

All I got to do now is just reel him in,

because he's wrapped up in this fantasy.

In order for me to get my hands on him,

I have to put Wade behind the keyboard of the device

with 100% certainty

that he is the person that I've been communicating with.

I get the break I need through Wade.

The fact that he suggested to meet in person,

he's just crossed the line

as far as criminality, and his intent.

And so now that puts together a better case for me.

So I tell him, "Hey, I'm available February 13th."

I'm ready for that meet to take him down and arrest him.

Tony's undercover profile, Dina,

arranges to meet Wade at an apartment complex.

As we're set up for the takedown,

Wade throws a curveball.

Wade wants to have a conversation on the phone.

Tony calls me, and he asks me if I can come help him,

use my voice to convince this man

that he has actually been talking to a real child.

Audrey prepares to call child predator Wade King.

She must make him believe that she's 13 years old.

I'm feeling like the weight is on my shoulders

if he doesn't believe what I'm saying.

The weight of this is not on you at all.

This is just a necessary evil.

Audrey was full of nerves.

I told her, "You're going to do fine.

Just keep it short. Keep it sweet."

It always surprises me that

as soon as the men hear my voice,

they immediately have this sigh of relief.

You can hear that their confidence builds,

and that they are much less nervous

to actually come and meet up with me.

Audrey nails it with the phone call.

You did a fantastic job.

Like, I couldn't have asked for anything better,

because all he thinks about is the prize.

And the fact that he thinks he's about to score with a real kid,

you can just hear how assured he is.

So the meeting is set for the next day.

The location that I use

is one that I have used many, many times over the years.

It's a controlled environment for us,

because it's a one way in, one way out.

It's a huge operation, a lot of moving parts,

a lot of people, a lot of assignments.

People have to be at the top of their game

in order for it to happen and go down perfectly,

and so that Wade doesn't know it's a trap.

7:35 a.m., I send King a message.

I radio all that information to my team,

and now we're good to go.

Takedown days are full of angst, concern, worry.

I'm very demanding, because I don't want it to go wrong.

One of Tony's team spots Wade's black car.

Standby.

He's walked right into the trap.

We got him.

My involvement with the case isn't even close to being done,

because now I have to go interrogate him.

It's my favorite part of the job.

He's got an open posture through a good portion of it,

but you can just tell, like, he's got stress all over him.

Like, he is freaking out inside, as he should be freaking out.

He does, like, this Oscar Award-winning performance.

He puts his hand on his face. Complete garbage.

He's doing that for the camera, and for no other reason.

Like, I want him to admit what he did.

I want to put some closure to this. And so that's my goal.

I can't talk to him any further, but that's fine.

I know that I've got enough evidence against this guy

to put him away for a very long time.

There's one small piece of good news with this.

King has been sentenced. He's behind bars.

There's one less predator out there to prey on kids.

Me and my team, we just move on and get to the next on.

Because there's plenty more where that came from.

April 7, 2022.

A tip-off leads Tony to a new target.

He turns out to be a collector

of some of the worst child sexual abuse material

Tony's ever seen.

Have you ever looked at child pornography?

To bring him to justice,

Tony must hit two locations at the same time.

We have a search warrant for your residence.

I need to see this, and I need to see that.

A single misstep could give the predator

the chance to destroy the evidence of his horrific crime.

Jared Capizzi.

This guy had one of the largest and sickest collections

of child pornography that I've ever seen.

This case focuses on the methods used by these predators

when they're sharing child sex abuse material,

and how we detect them doing it.

This case begins on March 28th of 2022,

when I receive a series of cyber tips.

We call this a reactive case.

Cyber tips are the benchmark for alerting law enforcement

that there is online activities

either involving some sort of exploitation

involving a child, or child sex abuse material,

which we call CSAM. A member of the public

or one of the electronic service providers reports CSAM

through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,

which we call NECMEC.

In this case, the NECMEC cyber tip

relates to 31 files that were flagged and uploaded

to a cloud storage system.

NECMEC already identified the classification

as apparent child pornography.

When I download the files, they are absolutely horrific,

involving very, very small prepubescent children.

Anyone, in my opinion,

who downloads this type of material

is an absolute threat to children,

and is someone that I'm going to put behind bars.

And in this case, because it's provided in the NECMEC tip,

I know who this target is, and his name is Jared Capizzi.

- An interview? - Yes.

To build the case against predator Jared Capizzi,

Tony brings in trusted fellow detective Robert Golladay.

We're academy mates.

We've been the best of friends for over 30 years.

He really does a great job on the forensic side of the house.

The information search on Jared Capizzi

brings up that Capizzi is a habitual offender.

He has convictions for drug possession, forgery, fraud.

He's also on parole. He's living at his mother's house.

We didn't find any previous convictions

for crimes against children.

One of the big concerns we had with Capizzi is the fact

that he has a child of his own. He has a son.

Anyone who's in a position of trust or authority

who has access or availability

to a child pushes them up higher on the chain.

I know Capizzi is our guy that has uploaded the 31 files

from the NECMEC cyber tip.

The problem I have is this.

He has access to a cloud account on a device,

which means he has access to a cloud account

potentially on multiple devices.

If I don't get all of those devices,

Capizzi could remotely wipe that material from the devices

that are in our possession.

So it's vital that I get all of the devices at the same time.

So the simplest way for me to get

the most updated information about Capizzi

is to reach out to the parole office.

Parole officer tells me that Capizzi is doing great.

He reports regularly. He checks in.

He has a steady job with a construction company.

He's living with his mom.

The parole officer also tells me

that he does not have his son living with him,

that the child lives in another location with the mother.

So luck is on my side.

Capizzi is scheduled for a urinalysis test

to be in compliance with his bond conditions,

or his parole conditions on drug use.

And so I'm like, "Great."

"I know where he'll be. I know when he will be there."

And now all I do is basically hatch the plan

on how I'm going to get him and what I'm going to do with him.

I need to get all of the devices from the mom's address,

so this is going to be a really unusual takedown.

I have to have teams at two different locations

in two different parts of the city at the exact same time.

3:15 p.m., The operation begins.

Tony waits to intercept Capizzi at the probation office.

At the same time,

Detective Golladay prepares to search his home.

Timing is critical.

What's really vital for me as far as coordinating goes

is that I have my hands on Capizzi before the home is hit.

But Capizzi is late. By 3:30, there's no sign of him.

3:40, my concern is growing.

If I don't get all of those devices,

Capizzi, or really somebody else,

could remotely wipe that material,

causing a big problem for me.

At 3:45, the parole officer updates Tony

that Capizzi has arrived.

- How are you, man? - Good, how are you?

- Have a seat real quick. - Gotcha.

When Capizzi enters the room,

we confiscate two phones in his possession.

I need to see this. And I need to see that.

And I'll explain to you what's going on.

So the two phones are immediately handed off

to another detective who's there with me.

His responsibility is to get them to be processed.

We're gonna have a chat about something,

and I'll kind of explain to you what's going on.

He has absolutely no idea why we are there.

While Tony grills Capizzi,

Detective Golladay executes the warrant to search his residence.

Capizzi's mother meets the officers outside.

She is unaware of what her son has concealed.

My name's Robert Golladay.

We have a search warrant for your residence.

And so that's what we're here to do,

is we're searching for computers,

cell phones, and stuff of that nature.

So what we're going to do

is we're going to walk in the house.

I'd like for you to please stand over here in the kitchen.

We're going to search the house real quick.

At the parole office, my interview and interrogation

of Capizzi has started.

Here's my card.

I work internet crimes against children.

I advise him of his legal rights.

He waives his rights.

He signs a document, and our conversation begins.

Jared, so listen. When I tell you

that I work internet crimes against children--

-does that give you any reason

why I would be contacting you?

In the beginning, he's providing information.

He's seemingly pretty chill.

Do you look at pornography on your phone?

Adult pornography?

Have you ever looked at child pornography?

OK.

And where would you be when you would come across it?

Capizzi makes an admission

that he downloaded this random link,

which contained a large amount of child sex abuse material.

He frames it as though it was an inadvertent download.

I know from my training, those are directed links,

typically coming at a request

of someone who's requesting this particular type of material.

There's no point in him lying to us anymore.

Just give it up. We already know.

Detective Tony Godwin grills Jared Capizzi

after a cyber tip revealed he'd shared CSAM,

child sexual abuse material.

What I'm talking about isn't a gray area.

I'm talking about when you see it at a glimpse,

you know automatically this is a very small, young kid.

The fact that it contained far more imagery

than I even was aware of was a very telling statement.

So you deleted that stuff or what?

Tony confronts Capizzi with the images

that the cyber tip flagged as CSAM.

Do you remember sending those pictures?

Some of them?

The ones that looked familiar?

So you've sent those? And who did you send those to?

The minute we go into interrogation mode,

which is more pointed to the actual crime

that I'm interested in, his tune changes considerably.

So here's the deal.

I told you we have a warrant to record anything electronic,

anything capable of storing digital media.

That's not only for here, you, and your person,

but it's for your home as well.

When we go to the house,

the mom's not very happy that we're there, obviously.

Just because the police just barged into her house.

And we're trying to tell her what her son has done,

and she doesn't believe us.

Holy [bleep].

You obviously saw what the warrant is for.

- Yes! - OK.

I cannot believe any of this.

He's already admitted to it,

and admitted to downloading it, and sharing it.

We start searching all the drawers, all the closets,

under the bed, on the bed, everywhere we can look

that an electronic device could be hidden.

And we found two phones, three tablets,

two computers, and two thumb drives.

Detective Golladay uses digital forensic software

to scan the recovered devices. The process takes 60 minutes.

If CSAM is on them, the software will find it.

So the special software we use

when scanning these devices has identified

over 2,000 items of child sex abuse material,

and over eight and a half thousand images.

Those images and videos found on Capizzi's device

included the 31 files that were uploaded

and sent to me through NECMEC and the cyber tip.

At that point, we take him into custody

and put him under arrest.

Out of the 18-plus images I showed you,

or more than that, they're on here.

Which means I got to take you in, man.

- I'm not gonna resist. - Just want to make sure.

No, I'm not doing anything.

It's like...

He throws out the blame game, how his mom's gonna be alone,

his kid's going to lose his father,

and those things are going to happen,

but it's because of his own actions

that he doesn't want to take responsibility for.

That imagery is the worst day of that child's life.

It's a visual depiction of a child being exploited

and sexually abused and molested.

It's a day in the life of that child that never goes away.

He is a predator. He is a monster.

He damaged more children

by sharing the material that he got,

and he absolutely got what he deserved.

July 27, 2017.

Tony and his partner, Detective Brandon Poor,

are conducting surveillance in a North Dallas parking lot.

They're monitoring a suspect who believes he's meeting

two teenage boys for sex.

He's confident enough to stop and buy condoms on the way.

His arrest is one of the most dramatic takedowns

of Tony's career.

Put your hands up!

Down on the ground!

The predator in this next case is the sickest dirtbag

I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

William Potter.

This guy was prolific online, and super cautious, too.

To catch him, my coworker and I

had to run two undercover profiles

at the same time to lure this guy out.

July 10th of 2017,

I got a phone call from Brandon Poor,

one of my colleagues on the task force.

And he began to give me some details

about the target he's identified that was in my particular area.

Brandon works undercover cases for a neighboring agency.

I basically got him trained up, pointed in the right direction,

and he hit the ground running, and took off like a rocket.

I joined the Crimes Against Children Unit in 2014.

I love the work.

It's the best spot in the entire policing industry.

It's the place where you get truly innocent victims

and you make an impact for life.

Detective Brandon Poor briefs Tony

on a suspected predator he's found online.

Brandon tells me that

he had responded to a pretty crazy Craigslist ad.

OK, so this is the ad I responded to.

"I'm looking for a son that wants to play.

"I'm open to almost anything that feels good,

"including touching, body contact,

"cuddle, being [bleep], et cetera.

18 to mid-twenties is a plus, but open to all."

Some problematic stuff in there, yeah? Boy.

Yeah, the 18 to twenties, but open to all,

that was enough for me to know.

Yeah, he tries to be a little ambiguous,

but it's pretty clear what he's looking for.

I suspect he's had some success,

if he's so bold to put all that in there, you know?

- And you replied to this ad? - I did.

When I saw the ad on Craigslist,

I created a profile of a young underage boy named Ethan,

and sent an email in response to his ad.

He introduced himself as Joe Richards.

I know from experience and just doing this for so long

that Joe Richards is probably not his name.

I told him I have a cousin.

He told me that I should tell him I was 18,

putting in parentheses, "hint, hint."

It was clear in his communications

that he wanted to do things

that would be harmful to children.

He is very dangerous.

Knowing that he's in Tony's backyard,

I call Tony and tell him we need to team up.

On July 2017, I create a new undercover profile

of a 14-year-old boy named Adam, and this is Ethan's cousin.

I email Joe Richards as Ethan

and make an introduction to my cousin.

This is really unique.

Two undercover boy profiles with the same subject.

Joe Richards bites.

I'm trying to just be kind of chill and coy and cool.

But seem appealing enough that he'll want to continue to talk.

So now I want to show that I am a vulnerable kid

who's confused about my sexuality.

The particular message about being discreet and secret,

it's a huge red flag.

I'm ready to see if this guy's interested in a meet.

I do that by telling him, like,

"Oh, hey, I told you Ethan's coming to stay next week."

He is very, very excited.

And he suggests that we meet July 27th of 2017.

At this point, he thinks he's hit the lottery.

He has scored so big in his own mind,

he's going to have a sexual encounter with two boys

at the same time? This dude is over the moon.

What Joe asks me next kind of shocks me a little bit.

He asked me to go shopping.

Who does he think he is to get this kid

to go buy condoms for his own sexual assault?

I tell him I'm afraid. He tells me that's fine.

He will do it, but I have to pay him back. What a cheap ass.

It just shows the real depravity of this guy's brain.

We're trying to find out Joe Richards' real identity.

We subpoenaed Craigslist,

we get back a treasure trove of records,

including postings that he's made for the last year,

all very similar to the one that I responded to as Ethan.

The true identity of the person

who's made these posts is William Potter.

Here's our guy, William Potter.

We find out he was arrested by Waco PD on March 31st of 2017.

And he was charged at that time

with online solicitation of a minor.

Investigators in Waco later dropped the charge,

and Potter is convicted of no crime in relation to that case.

At the time of that arrest,

his computer and cell phone had been seized.

We find out that this guy's been handled

by three different agencies.

So we want to make sure that we get our hands

on him as quickly as possible.

Tony is hunting

suspected child predator William Potter.

There's an exchange of messages between Potter and I

about where and how to meet, and I suggest a local store

that's down the street from my house.

The reason I picked that particular store

is he is familiar with the area,

and it gives me and my team tactical advantage.

We can sit up and watch and have the capability

of doing a safe takedown.

I asked Joe, like,

"How am I gonna know if you're there or not? What are you in?"

And he describes a 1991 Pontiac Firebird with blue wheels.

Really specific, really random car.

Going to be super easy to spot.

We don't have to wait long,

because he does not live far from this location.

Potter sits in his car for just a minute,

just assessing the situation.

And at one point, he exits the vehicle,

and he begins to walk into the store.

If he does go to purchase the condoms,

it's magnificent evidence, it will be used against him.

Potter pays for the condoms.

He's about to exit the store and be arrested.

As he exits the store, we are watching him.

What happens next is crazy to me.

Get on the ground!

What are you doing!?

Potter is very unhappy about his arrest.

He is moaning and groaning, making a big production.

I have zero sympathy for him at this point.

Potter invokes his Miranda rights,

which he's very entitled to do.

It was wildly disappointing for me, for him to do that.

I almost take it as a personal failure,

that I could not convince this guy

to have a conversation with me.

So Potter is afforded an opportunity to use the phone,

and does, and calls his wife.

To accept this call, press one.

Call accepted.

I feel bad for his wife,

because her life just absolutely fractured in half.

Her world just collapsed with this news.

I feel for her, because now she has no choice

but to live with the actions of her stupid husband.

My takeaway from the Potter case

is he's just a bad guy.

He wanted to meet minor boys for sex no matter the cost.

And it was clear that he wouldn't stop

until we had to stop him.

This case shows that predators like William Potter,

they do exist.

And that is why I do the job that I do.

My team and I, we have one mission and one mission only:

keeping America's children safe.

To all the bad guys out there committing these crimes,

you better sit up and take notice.

The Predator Hunters are coming for you.