Originally published in the September 2007 issue

Click here for more on this story, and here for an update.

A cop guards the open gateway that leads from the house's driveway to the side yard, in case the man inside attempts to flee. At first the camera is static and the shot is simple: the cop, the gateway, vertical red fence planks, a right foreground portion of green bush. After a few minutes of this, the cameraman starts playing with the composition. The screen fills almost entirely with the bush, and then the view pans left from the bush to the cop, who is big and bald and has three upside-down blue V's -- sergeant stripes -- on the sleeve of his shirt. The cameraman zooms in past the cop to the patio area beyond, to a lattice of firewood and the blur of something green. The camera stills, focuses. The blur becomes a wheelbarrow. A green wheelbarrow leaning belly-exposed against a red wall.

While the shot of this particular wheelbarrow is superfluous to the television program being filmed here today and will be edited out along with most of the rest of this raw footage, there happens to be a story about the man inside the house in which a wheelbarrow plays a much more prominent role. The story begins more than two decades ago, at a party in another house not far from this one. The man inside was there, as were many of his friends, which meant that the attendees were a hodgepodge of the most notable lawyers and doctors and businessmen in Terrell, Texas. Anybody compiling a list of local luminaries back then might have placed the name of the man inside at or near the top. His high school class, of which he was president, had voted him most likely to succeed, and he had done so. At the time of the party, not much more than a decade out of law school and still in his thirties, he was already district attorney of his home county.

The party's host had hired a local kid named Eric Bishop to provide entertainment, and Bishop -- who would eventually change his name to Jamie Foxx and move west -- was playing old R&B covers, pounding them out on a borrowed piano. The man inside stood near the keyboard, watching. Watching and drinking. A couple drinks and then a few and then who knows how many until he was well and truly lit, until he was finally a staggering mess, until he was finally so far gone that the prospect of walking home, never mind driving, was an Everest summit attempt. And finally: The host and another friend poured the shambling young district attorney into, yes, a wheelbarrow. They delivered him to his home, legs and arms flopping out to the sides like the limbs of an upended turtle.

The reason people remember this story and still tell it twenty years on is that it is so remarkably uncharacteristic of the man inside. He is a man so proper, so predictable, that when he occasionally dons a colored shirt, the modest color jolts the eyes of his friends, who are unaccustomed to seeing him in anything other than solid white. Imagine how an episode of flagrant public drunkenness in the life of such a man might sear itself into the memories of those who witnessed it. Twenty years later and they still laugh at the thought of him being barrowed home with a brain full of booze.

Hansen and the rest of his production team must always remain loose limbed.

The cameraman pulls back, revealing again all the ingredients at once: the bush, the cop, the wheelbarrow, the red fence. A few seconds of this and then the view drifts upward to a chaos of tree branches against an overcast November sky.

A long view from a different camera shows the same cop in the same gateway. More of the house is visible, along with the broad driveway. Three voices are audible off camera.

"We should have craft services bring it in here," the first voice says, referring to the catering truck. The other voices laugh.

"If he's not in there, [inaudible] gonna take some heavy abuse," the second voice says.

"Oh, yeah," says the third voice.

The third voice is exceptional. A deep and furred rumble. Even on the basis of just those two syllables, most would intuit that the owner of the voice is either a radio or television reporter. Get a look at him and it's obvious he's the latter, standing self-consciously erect, hands on narrow hips, a plumb line between the top of his head and his heels, posture and hair perfect.

It is past 3:00 p.m. and Chris Hansen, the host of "To Catch a Predator," a recurring series on NBC's Dateline television news program, arrived here at 8:30 this morning, having gotten hardly any sleep the night before. He never gets much sleep on these shoots. Although aspects of his show are tightly choreographed, Hansen and the rest of his production team must always remain loose limbed, ready to adapt to changing circumstances and unpredictable hours. The show's protagonists, after all, are recruited on the fly, and everything depends on them. They drive the plot, and Hansen never knows exactly where that plot is going to take him. Before the unexpected series of events that began yesterday afternoon, for example, Hansen had no intention of ever being here, outside this house, waiting for a SWAT team on an overcast Sunday afternoon.

A crime-scene photo of Bill Conradt's den, taken shortly after his death. His laptop sits beside the far armchair, still on. Police monitored it through a window to make sure Conradt didn't erase the hard drive, and later seized it as evidence.

Yesterday, at around 1:00 p.m., a young actor named Dan Schrack leaned back against a folding table and held a tubular, bendable microphone close to his lips. Headphones pinioned his blond Prince Valiant hairdo over his ears. A coffee cup, a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, and a packet of Pepto-Bismol sat on the table, as did a Motorola cell phone. The cell phone was plugged in to a recording device. Before placing the phone in its cradle, Schrack had punched in the number of a man he knew as Wil, and now he was listening to the ringing in the headphones. Schrack had assumed so many different identities during the last few days that he had to actually pause a few moments before in order to quiz himself on some of the vital stats of his newest alias to make sure he didn't screw anything up.

My name? Luke.

Age? Thirteen.

Family? Parents divorced, dad neglectful, stepdad no good.

Current location? In the empty home of neighbors who are paying me to walk their dogs while they're away visiting an elderly relative.

In reality, the home he was in was not empty at all. Far from it. At the moment, it contained almost two dozen people. There were cameramen and technicians and producers from Dateline. There were people from a group called Perverted Justice. There was Chris Hansen. There was security: a former NYPD lieutenant and an off-duty police detective from a nearby city. And these were only the people actually within the house. Just outside, hidden in a moving van, there were at least a half dozen more people -- local city cops, the so-called Takedown Team -- all armed and ready to spring at a moment's notice.

A couple of months ago, when Schrack showed up at an audition at the NBC studios in Burbank, California, he hadn't really known what he was getting himself into. He had been in Los Angeles a few years, a twenty-one-year-old whose naturally rosy cheeks and guileless smile make him appear much younger. The biggest gig on his résumé was a Toys "R" Us commercial, and like many struggling actors, Schrack tried to squeeze in so many auditions that he didn't have time to properly research the roles he was reading for. So though he had known that he was auditioning for Dateline, he thought Dateline was just looking to film one of those dramatic reenactments that other programs like America's Most Wanted sometimes used. He'd never seen Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" series and didn't have any idea how it worked. A producer at the audition brought him up to speed.

The typical episode works something like this: Dateline leases a house in a small town somewhere in America and wires it for sound and video. Members of Perverted Justice, a group to which Dateline pays a consulting fee, pose in online chat rooms as underage teens living in that small town. If an adult man starts hitting on one of these fake kids, the Perverted Justice decoys save the transcripts of his chats. Eventually, the man is invited over to the wired house for a liaison. When he arrives, Chris Hansen confronts him with a printout of Perverted Justice's chat transcripts and attempts to interview him. As soon as he leaves the house, local cops (the Takedown Team) arrest him and charge him with online solicitation of a minor. Each episode focuses on a decoy house in a single city and documents the catching of six or seven men.

Bill Conradt and his sister Patricia, and portraits of the two as children.

Schrack's role in all of this would be as the real-life incarnation of the fake boys that Perverted Justice creates. (An actress would be hired to portray the fake girls.) His picture would be used in the online profiles, he would conduct any telephone or Web-cam conversations, and when the men showed up at the house, he'd be there to greet them at the door and invite them inside, usually getting a few moments of screen time before Chris Hansen makes his appearance.

A few hours after he left the Burbank audition, NBC offered him the gig: $5,000 per shoot, with each shoot lasting three or four days.

By this time, standing there with his headphones on, waiting for the man he knew as Wil to pick up his phone, Schrack had already wrapped two episodes and was one day away from finishing his third. This would be his last, since the first had just aired, effectively blowing his cover. Though he liked the money, he wasn't going to miss much about working for "To Catch a Predator." He wasn't experienced in improv, and he'd come to realize that improv was what this job amounted to. Before making this phone call, he'd had to read the alternately mundane and smutty transcripts of all the chat sessions conducted between the Perverted Justice decoy and Wil over the last two weeks. The transcripts gave him the parameters of the character he was playing and of his character's relationship to Wil: Luke was a thirteen-year-old dog walker, and Wil was a nineteen-year-old college student. Luke lived at home with his parents, who had not given him the Razr cell phone he'd asked for last Christmas, and Wil lived with a straight roommate, who had once walked in on him having sex with another man. Luke had confessed to falling in love with Wil, and Wil had confessed that he liked young boys. Within the broad parameters laid down in the chats, however, the actor was given conversational freedom. His only mandate now was to entice Wil to come visit him in the real world, at this new house about a half hour's drive north of downtown Dallas in Murphy, Texas, a house that NBC had leased and booby-trapped for television.

The actor's favorite roles had been in musicals. He preferred productions like that, where every line and verse and dance step was preordained before the curtain rose, and he knew going in whether the show was a comedy or a tragedy.

Dateline's Chris Hansen consulting with Murphy police chief Billy Myrick (left) and Detective Walter

"Hello?"

"Hey, is this Wil?"

"Yeah."

"Hey, Wil, this is Luke!"

"Hey! How are you? Did you get the dogs walked?"

"Yes, I did. So what are you doing?"

"Not anything. Well, actually, I'm sort of watching a football game."

Until this last line, everything about the beginning of their conversation, both its words and its premises, was false: The name of the man inside was not Wil, he was not nineteen, he lived alone, without a roommate, and he'd stopped being a college student more than three decades ago.

But there is reason to believe that the man inside was telling the truth about watching a football game. He was probably referring to Texas Tech's noontime rout of Baylor University, which Fox Sports Net was broadcasting at the time of the phone call. He graduated from law school at Texas Tech and usually pulled for the team, though with nothing like the passion he displayed for the Longhorns of the University of Texas, his undergraduate alma mater. He'd been a Longhorns fan forever. One of the precious gifts of his childhood had been a ticket to the 1964 Cotton Bowl, when the Longhorns beat Navy and seized the national championship. His parents had swaddled the ticket in multiple layers of wrapping paper and boxes of descending sizes, a Russian doll of a present that he'd remember for the rest of his life.

Before the kickoff of Saturday's game, the man inside had gone out for a little while: He'd dropped some of his white shirts off at the cleaners, he'd shopped for groceries, he'd bought a Texas Two Step lottery ticket.

Then he had come home, where he'd probably turned on his RCA and tuned in FSN shortly before his phone rang.

As Dan Schrack leaned against a folding table and talked on the phone, a number of Perverted Justice employees sat at nearby desks, working on computers. At some point, after Schrack hung up, some of these people ran the screen name and e-mail address and phone number of the man known as Wil through a variety of Internet search engines. They made certain discoveries, among them Wil's real name and occupation.

A cameraman recorded a scene shortly thereafter, when one of the Perverted Justice employees informed Chris Hansen. He told Chris Hansen that the man they thought was nineteen was actually fifty-six, that his name was Bill Conradt, that he was not a college student but rather an assistant district attorney of a neighboring county, the county's chief felony prosecutor.

He'd never exposed a prosecutor before.

In the two years since the first episode of "To Catch a Predator" aired, Chris Hansen had exposed men from a variety of professions. A doctor. A handful of soldiers. A couple of cops. Teachers. A rabbi. A minister. But he'd never exposed a prosecutor before.

The Perverted Justice employee rubbed his hands together, clapped them, obviously energized by the news he was imparting.

Chris Hansen's usual on-camera listening expression -- lips tight, eyes slightly narrowed, just the hint of a furrow to his brow -- did not change.

Bill Conradt was a good prosecutor. All of the judges and lawyers who knew him best, even the ones who served on the opposite side of the aisle from him, the men and women who defended their clients against him, say he was very good at his job. He had a near photographic memory for the law, they say, and this made him either a formidable opponent or a valuable ally, depending on where you stood.

So Conradt no doubt knew that statute 33.021 in the Texas penal code description of the crime of "online solicitation of a minor" states that an adult offends when he "communicates in a sexually explicit manner with a minor," and defines "minor" as anyone who represents himself or herself as being under the age of seventeen. And yet here are some of the things Bill Conradt wrote during the two-week-long online relationship he had with thirteen-year-old "Luke":

"could I feel your cock"

"how thick are you"

"i want to feel your cock"

"maybe you can fuck me several times"

"has anyone sucked you"

"just talking about this has me hard"

Bill Conradt, a good prosecutor, was used to straddling mires of facts and statutes and circumstances. It is hard not to wonder what he would have made of his own case.

"Did you leave yet?"

"No."

"You didn't leave yet?"

"No."

"Are you gonna come or not?"

Dan Schrack drenched the last line with all the petulance and neediness he could muster, so the final syllable stretched like taffy and leapt at least an octave in pitch: Are you gonna come or nahhhhhhhttt?

The desperation sounded genuine. It was about 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, and this was their third conversation in as many hours. Schrack had likely concluded their first conversation with an invitation to come visit him here at the decoy house, and Bill Conradt had accepted. He'd accepted and then he never showed up. By this point, everyone in the house, including Schrack, knew Conradt's real identity, and by this point the same question was on everyone's mind: Was he gonna come or not?

"Yes, I shall," said Conradt.

"Well when are you gonna come overrrrr?"

"Well, a little later."

"A little laterrrrrr?"

"Yeah. Is that all right?"

"Yeah, I guessssss."

In the edited Dateline episode, the SWAT entrance would seem dramatic, but in reality it was slow and plodding, as you can see over the next three pages. Here, the team assembles in front of Conradt's house.

The arrests made yesterday at the decoy house, like the arrests made the day before and the day before that, were all filmed. The footage played out in real time on monitors in one of the rooms on the first floor. Jimmy Patterson, an off-duty detective whom NBC was paying thirty-five dollars an hour to protect its employees in case one of the suspects got violent, had watched the first few arrests on these monitors. Then he had stopped watching. He knew if he kept watching, he would have to say something to somebody about all the stupid mistakes the Murphy Police Department's "Takedown Team" was making.

Detective Patterson had worked for a suburban Dallas-metro-area police department for the last twenty-two years, had spent the last twelve of those years on SWAT, knew his tactics, knew his weapons. And he knew that Murphy was just a small town, with a population of ten thousand, and so you couldn't expect all the cops in Murphy to be as well trained as he was. They didn't have the resources. But still. How hard was it to avoid a cross-fire situation? Because that's what he saw on those little gray-scale monitors every time an arrest was made: cross-fire situations. The cops on the Takedown Team would rush the suspect and surround him, guns leveled, and Detective Patterson winced when he saw it, because he knew that if those officers ever had to actually fire their weapons, well, they'd be just as likely to kill one another as the suspect. Sometimes he'd get a view right down the barrel of a Murphy cop's gun, a perspective straight out of Doom, courtesy of a Dateline buttonhole camera, and in the same shot he'd get a view of another cop's back.

Not to mention that the whole intensity level of these arrests, the way the Takedown Team would holler at the suspect, the way they'd throw him to the ground, the whole idea of even having their weapons drawn in the first place, all of that struck Detective Patterson as ridiculous. Just the other day, he'd been in a supermarket parking lot when he noticed someone who fit the description of a suspect in a bank robbery he'd been working. He called the sergeant, told him to send over some of the boys. And when his colleagues got there, you know how many guns were drawn, how much shouting was done? None. The officers walked up, introduced themselves, asked the guy to show some ID, and that was that. Sure, they had their holsters unsnapped, one hand near, but they didn't need to take it to the next level. You hardly ever have to, not in the real world. All that business -- the guns, the tackling, the shouting -- struck Detective Patterson as pure and simple TV: It might look good on camera, but if you're letting a camera influence how you do your takedowns, you've got a problem.

You hardly ever have to [take it to the next level], not in the real world.

All of this stuff was on Detective Jimmy Patterson's mind when he heard people on the second floor start throwing around the name Bill Conradt. He asked them to spell the surname. Sure enough. With a t. He knew a Bill Conradt. Had worked with him. Bill Conradt was the chief felony prosecutor of the county that included part of Detective Patterson's city. Bill Conradt had prosecuted people that Detective Patterson had arrested. Couldn't be the same Bill Conradt.

Early Saturday evening, Detective Patterson asked to listen to the tapes of the telephone conversations. The voice was familiar, but he couldn't be sure. Does he have a son? Sons often sound like fathers. Anyway, a voice wasn't enough. Something like this, somebody like this, you've gotta be extra careful. You're talking about law enforcement taking down law enforcement. You've gotta take extra precautions. But the way things had gone these last few days, what with the overzealous made-for-TV cops outside and the real TV people here inside, Detective Patterson wasn't at all sure that the necessary precautions would be taken.

As the evening wore on, Detective Patterson learned that Bill Conradt had stopped responding to Dan Schrack's phone calls. He'd also stopped responding to the AOL instant messages that the Perverted Justice chat decoy was sending. The IMs were starting to read like semiliterate poems of longing and anxiety:

i tried callin you alot

an u didn't answer :(

and i cried cuz ure so hot

At a little after 9:00 p.m., Detective Patterson overheard Lynn Keller, the lead producer of "To Catch a Predator," discussing Bill Conradt with another Dateline employee, trying to come up with different strategies they might employ to lure him to Murphy. Detective Patterson was the only law-enforcement officer inside the decoy house, and at that moment, standing there listening to a couple of civilians devising ways to lure an assistant district attorney, he was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. He felt as if he was being made party to something he was not at all sure he wanted to be involved in. Finally he approached Keller, told her that as an officer with the Rowlett Police Department, he felt obligated to call his boss, the chief of police, and give him a heads-up regarding the whole matter brewing with Bill Conradt. Lynn Keller stopped him cold.

"You're working for Dateline now," she said.

The SWAT team, marching in formation, preparing to enter Conradt's house.

A day or two prior to the beginning of the sting operation, NBC technicians had installed a high-tech video-projection system in a room at Murphy Police Department headquarters. Along with the projector, NBC installed all the equipment necessary to stream multiple live video and audio feeds from the decoy house a mile or so away. The room was normally the police department's training classroom and was usually referred to as such, but after the arrival of Dateline's impressive array of electronics, some officers began referring to it as "NORAD" or "the War Room."

Just around midnight on Saturday, the War Room was still busy, as it had been all day long. The whole Dateline crew was planning to pack up and fly out tomorrow evening, yet though the operation was nearing its conclusion, new men continued to arrive at the decoy house. Many of the Murphy detectives, whose job it would be to interrogate these men once they'd been hauled to the station, stopped by to watch Chris Hansen interview them first, getting a real-time preview of the next episode of "To Catch a Predator." The chief of police, Billy Myrick, was here, too, as well as one of the chief's lieutenants, a woman named Adana Barber.

Chief Myrick had held his current job for about a year and a half. He'd never been chief anywhere else but had been in law enforcement for more or less his entire adult life. He was now forty-eight years old, a naturally burly man drifting toward middle-aged paunch. When he applied for a job here in Murphy, the department ran a pretty comprehensive background check on him. Most of the officers Myrick had previously worked with, in various departments around north Texas, all said pretty much the same thing: He was a good officer but not a great leader. When he began getting into supervisory positions, he changed, one of his former coworkers said. "A bull in a china closet" who "blusters around" is how another put it. "He probably shouldn't be in supervision but is a great officer," the background report stated. But shortly after Myrick started working as a cop in Murphy, the sitting chief and city manager departed, and the new city manager, who has hiring powers at the police department, promoted Myrick to chief.

On July 22, 2006, an officer named Kevin Carter approached Chief Myrick and told him that a group called Perverted Justice had offered the Murphy Police Department its services. Two days later, Perverted Justice demonstrated what it could do, feeding the department information regarding an east-Texas ophthalmologist who'd been chatting with a Perverted Justice decoy. The doctor, Perverted Justice informed the police, had set up a liaison at a Murphy convenience store. Chief Myrick dispatched officers to the store, and sure enough, there was the doctor, waiting patiently in the front seat of his Ford Expedition, with a brand-new teddy bear. After the cops arrested the doctor, they seized his vehicle, which became de facto city property. Chief Myrick, who would eventually use that Ford Expedition as his ride-around vehicle, was hooked. When Perverted Justice broached the subject of doing something more ambitious in Murphy, a "To Catch a Predator" sting operation with Dateline, he didn't hesitate. Soon after, in early fall, he called a full departmental meeting, got all his officers together, and told them that "To Catch a Predator" was coming to town.

Not everyone in the department was sold on the idea. One of the chief's detectives, a man named Sam Love, stood up during that initial meeting and told the chief that the sting operation was going to generate a lot of cases, but the department wouldn't have the means to work them. Detective Love said it was hard enough for the Murphy PD to handle all the homegrown cases here in Murphy without luring in who knows how many perverts from out of town.

And the Collin County District Attorney's office, which encompassed Murphy, wasn't on board, either. A few weeks ago, Perverted Justice had faxed Collin County, notifying officials of the upcoming sting and requesting logistical and planning support. John Roach, the district attorney, was very surprised that a civilian group, not the Murphy Police Department, was the first to inform him of the sting. Roach directed Chris Milner, the head of his special-crimes unit, to draft a response and send it back to both Perverted Justice and Chief Myrick: The DA's office, the letter read, "will take no part in the planning or execution of the sting operation . . . we must take pains not to implicitly authorize or direct non-law-enforcement entities to act as our agents during law enforcement operations . . . the Collin County District Attorney's office is in the law enforcement business, not show business." Roach worried that the involvement of Dateline and Perverted Justice might badly compromise the sting operation, and he hoped that his letter might serve as a wake-up call to Chief Myrick, giving the chief an out.

In the parlance of television news, they will ambush him.

But all this nay-saying aside, Chief Myrick, standing there in the War Room late on Saturday, seemed to think the operation a resounding success. As he had told several officers, he hoped Dateline would "put Murphy on the map." He was in a joking mood: Whenever a suspect pulled up in a particularly nice automobile, he would lean over to Lieutenant Adana Barber, a petite woman with short-cropped hair, and say something like, "That one's mine!"

At about 12:30 a.m., according to Detective Sam Love, who was also in the War Room, Lieutenant Barber's cell phone rang. The conversation, recalls Love, was brief and mostly one-sided, and afterward Barber relayed a message to the chief: Chris Hansen wants the police to get an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Bill Conradt. He and the rest of the Dateline crew have decided that since Conradt is no longer responding to IMs or answering his telephone, he is probably not going to come to the decoy house in Murphy. Since he won't come to them, they've decided to go to him. Conradt lives in a small town called Terrell, about an hour's drive southeast of Murphy. Hansen plans to go to Conradt's house the next day. They're hoping Conradt might have some sort of Sunday routine, might go out for coffee or something. If he does, the Dateline crew will follow, and Chris Hansen will attempt to interview him. In the parlance of television news, they will ambush him. Then, if the Murphy police get the warrants, Bill Conradt will be arrested and carted away on camera. Basically, the producers want the interview and arrest of Bill Conradt to follow the standard "To Catch a Predator" formula, despite Conradt's evident unwillingness to visit the decoy house. And they want the warrants ready by morning.

Approximately fifty minutes after Lieutenant Barber relayed this message, at about 1:20 a.m., in a quieter room at the police department, Chief Myrick approached Detective Walter "Gator" Weiss. He told him they were about to net a big fish. A woman from Perverted Justice accompanied the chief, and she handed Gator a sheaf of papers that contained printouts of some Internet chat logs and a freshly burned compact disc that contained recordings of some telephone conversations. The chief ordered the detective to review the material and prepare a search warrant and an arrest warrant for Bill Conradt. And he told Gator they needed the warrants by morning.

The SWAT Team, just outside Conradt's door. In moments they will enter the house and make a grisly discovery.

Gator stared at his computer screen, wrestling with the assignment. He'd had qualms about the sting operation from the beginning, same issues that Detective Love had with it -- too many arrests, too much paperwork for a small department to handle -- but he figured that in the end, if it succeeded in taking some bad guys off the streets, they would have done some good. He'd been in and out of interrogation rooms for the past twenty-six hours straight, no sleep, talking with these suspects, and some of them, well, he sure wouldn't want them anywhere near his teenage son. And the suspects had, after all, come to the decoy house. That showed intent -- a willingness to take their whole mess off the Internet and into the real world.

This thing with Bill Conradt, though . . . it bothered Gator. When the chief told Gator about Bill Conradt, the first thing Gator thought was, We can't do this alone. This guy, he never came to the decoy house. And this guy, he was a chief felony prosecutor. He told the chief maybe they should call in the Rangers. He told the chief he'd also like to call Chris Milner, the guy in charge of special crimes at the Collin County District Attorney's office, get his advice. Don't worry about Chris Milner, the chief told Gator. Just worry about getting the arrest warrant and the search warrant together tonight.

So Gator sat down at his computer and he read the transcripts and he listened to the telephone conversations and then he started putting what he read and heard into the form of an affidavit for an arrest warrant. He wrote. He continued writing. He stared at the screen. He stared at the keyboard. He closed his eyes for a second. He woke with a start.

Goddammit. He'd fallen asleep at his computer. Just before dawn. Pages to go.

Even in the hurry he was in, trying to push everything to the back of his mind, a bad feeling was gnawing at him, creating a bigger and bigger pit in his stomach. Too much of a rush job. Why do they need to get this guy so fast, right now?

When Dateline airs the episode documenting this sting operation a few months later, Chris Hansen, narrating, will offer one explanation: "For some reason," Hansen will explain, "[Conradt] abruptly stopped chatting, and Perverted Justice discovered he'd deleted his MySpace page." Similarly, in a blog posting on the "To Catch a Predator" Website, Hansen will write: "We'll never know why Conradt abruptly ended his conversations with the decoy and why he apparently started to delete material from a MySpace account, but in the eyes of law enforcement, he'd already committed a crime. That night, Murphy Police began the process of obtaining an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Conradt." And in interviews after the sting has ended, Xavier Von Erck, the head of Perverted Justice, will offer a similar account to both The New York Times and Bill O'Reilly, an account summed up on Perverted Justice's own Website: "We began to notice that information was disappearing . . . and when we advised the police of this they chose to act." The implication was that the police had to get Conradt as soon as possible, since he was working posthaste to cover his tracks by deleting information from his MySpace account.

In the eyes of law enforcement, he'd already committed a crime.

When asked this summer if Perverted Justice had saved any versions of the page that was mentioned during the broadcast, Von Erck will respond: "His MySpace is still up. It was very blank then and it's still very blank." And then Von Erck will provide a Web link. The page will indeed still be up. And it will show that nobody had accessed or deleted information from it since August of 2006, three months prior to the sting operation. Von Erck will not respond to follow-up e-mails for eleven days, at which point he will write back that "the MySpace you were linked to is just another of the profiles of his that we found afterwards." Neither he nor NBC nor the Murphy Police Department will produce any other evidence regarding Bill Conradt's alleged vanishing MySpace page.

In any case, Gator had never been told about a MySpace page. Nor had he been given any other information that made the rush for these warrants explicable to him. He began to suspect the Murphy PD was trying to accommodate Dateline's schedule. If they're not gonna call in other agencies, Gator thought, at least send the evidence to a grand-jury referral. A confidential inquest. Get them to look at the facts, decide if warrants are warranted. Gator knew there was one easy way he could slow this down. He could leave. He could walk out the back door of the police department, drive home to his family, and sleep for a whole day. He could quit. He thought about it.

But that's not what he did.

At a little before 11:00 a.m., Gator finished writing the arrest warrant. A local municipal judge, Cathy Haden, came to headquarters and signed it. Chief Myrick told Gator to start in on the second warrant, the search warrant, immediately, and to radio him as soon as he'd gotten it signed.

Paramedics evacuating Bill Conradt after he has shot himself at point-blank range.

When the cops arrive at Bill Conradt's door on Sunday afternoon, a dog starts barking somewhere inside the house. Short, sharp, expulsions of nervous energy. Unmistakably a small dog. Bill Conradt has shared his home with a mini schnauzer named Lukas for the last several years. Before that he shared it with another mini schnauzer, Bismarck. Bismarck's ashes sit in an urn on a mantel in the den. His sister, Patricia, used to tease him about those ashes and his reluctance to part with them, told him to just bury Bismarck already, but then she lost her own dog and she didn't tease him about the ashes anymore after that.

A sergeant from the Terrell Police Department knocks on the door. The Terrell sergeant is here because early this afternoon Lieutenant Barber called the chief of the Terrell PD, Todd Miller, and asked for his department's assistance in making this arrest. Chief Miller complied. Along with the Terrell sergeant, a Terrell patrol officer and Murphy detective Snow Robertson are also at the door. Chief Myrick and Lieutenant Barber are about thirty feet away, hiding behind trees. Another man, a cameraman, is hiding behind a different tree, much closer to the door, evidently trying hard to stay out of the footage being recorded by the other NBC cameramen, perhaps for aesthetic reasons, perhaps because it is generally illegal for news cameras to be on private property without permission.

Dateline's cast and crew outnumber the five cops here by a factor of two. One of their cameras captures the sergeant as he presses a door buzzer that has not worked in years. The Murphy detective then draws his gun and holds it in both hands, angling it down so it aims at a spot a foot or two in front of his feet. The sergeant knocks again on the door, which does not lead into the house but rather into a large open courtyard. He tries the doorknob. He presses the useless door buzzer. He waits. Eventually the cameraman stops filming.

The video picks up again a few minutes later. Chief Myrick and the Terrell sergeant are talking, facing the camera as much as each other. Sometimes the camera zooms out a little and the back of Chris Hansen's head enters the frame. About twenty minutes ago, at 2:20 p.m., Gator finally Nexteled in news of the completion of the search warrant, straight from the living room of the district judge who'd just given it his signature. Hansen and his crew got here hours before the police did, but they never got their hoped-for chance to ambush Bill Conradt. During the Dateline crew's long and lonely stakeout, they didn't see much of note, though they themselves were seen and noted by many: Numerous residents phoned in suspicious-persons reports during the five hours that Dateline's three crowded vehicles were in the area, sometimes parked in front of the neighborhood watch sign.

Actually, Hansen and his crew did notice one thing. They saw the Sunday edition of The Dallas Morning News sitting just outside Bill Conradt's door. And then, the next time they looked, they didn't see it. Which is what the chief is talking to the sergeant about.

"And I just clarified," Chief Myrick says. "They didn't actually see him come out. But when they got here on surveillance, the paper was there. And then they look up again, the paper was gone."

"But no one's left the residence?" the sergeant asks.

Chief Myrick repeats the question to someone off camera.

"Yeah," Chris Hansen answers. He hasn't seen anyone leave the residence.

"Okay," says the sergeant. "In view of that, and the dog's barking, it's evident that if there's someone in there, they know we're out here. My chief says he's more comfortable calling the tac team out and, um . . ."

"Make an entry?" asks Chief Myrick.

"Make a forced entry," says the sergeant. "If it has to be like that, that's what he wants to do."

The decision to send in the SWAT team [was] "the stupidest and most unnecessary thing that I have ever heard of in law enforcement."

Many will eventually question the decision to call in SWAT. Ed Walton, at the time the sitting district attorney of Kaufman County, which encompasses Terrell, will label the Terrell Police Department "the most incompetent bunch of buffoons you've ever seen" and wonder whether the decision had something to do with an embarrassing and locally well-publicized incident that took place just weeks earlier, in which the Terrell police were forced to drop charges against the prime suspects in a murder case because of what Walton calls a "bollixed" investigation. Calling out their SWAT team for what they knew was going to be a nationally broadcast police operation was, in the opinion of Walton, "their great white hope. You know, to try to come in and show they really weren't a bunch of lummoxes." When asked about the matter later, Terrell chief Todd Miller will answer, "The Conradt case was not a Terrell Police Service case, it was a Murphy Police Department case," and refuse further comment. Mike Minor, an attorney who has worked in Kaufman county for thirty years and was a friend of Bill Conradt's, calls the decision to send in the SWAT team "the stupidest and most unnecessary thing that I have ever heard of in law enforcement. If they really wanted to do the right thing, they could have waited until Bill came out. [Or] they could have gone to the courthouse [where he worked] and arrested him. You know, he was not like John Dillinger. That was all for sensationalism."

But this afternoon, on Bill Conradt's lawn, nobody questions the decision, though one man takes pains to make clear that the decision doesn't come from him: Chief Myrick splays his fingers wide, holds a hand out sternum-high and tilted slightly upward, palm down, a universal sign for abdication of responsibility.

"This is y'all's call on that one," he says.

Conradt's body is loaded into an ambulance.

A few feet away from the chief, a man wearing blue jeans, an untucked olive-green button-down shirt, a brim-forward baseball cap, and a pair of big dark sunglasses says something.

Everyone here knows the man with the conspicuously incognito look as Frag, though Frag is not his real name. All the members of Perverted Justice have fake names. For example, the person who spent the last two weeks conducting an on-again, off-again chat-room relationship with Bill Conradt calls himself Jay Alternative, though his real name is Greg Brainer. Ostensibly the members of Perverted Justice adopt these fake names so that the men they trap do not seek them out in the real world, but the cartoony, superherolike aspect of most of their aliases perhaps also says something about the way the members of Perverted Justice perceive themselves. Online, Jay Alternative is a faceless crusader patrolling the dark side of the Internet. Offline, Greg Brainer is a middle-aged man who lives in Milford, Michigan, and spends upwards of forty hours a week sitting at a computer pretending to be a sexually available boy. Sometimes the fake names become real. A few years ago, Phillip John Eide, the founder of Perverted Justice, legally changed his name to that of his alter ego, Xavier Von Erck.

Von Erck, formerly a computer tech-support worker, launched www.perverted-justice.com after witnessing how commonplace it was for adults to hit on children in the Portland, Oregon, chat rooms he frequented. The Website was a sort of online equivalent of that medieval punishment, the stocks: Von Erck and other volunteers would pose as minors in chat rooms and then post and widely distribute the names, photographs, and other personal information of men that sexually solicited them. There was no law-enforcement aspect to Perverted Justice's early work, just a public shaming.

As Perverted Justice grew, it attracted increasing media attention. In 2004, Kevin Dietz, a television reporter at an NBC affiliate in Detroit, ran a piece on Perverted Justice. Dietz was a friend of Chris Hansen's, who saw the report and was inspired. Dateline ran its first story on Perverted Justice in September of 2004. In that first report, Dateline documented how Perverted Justice decoys lured men to a house, and then Chris Hansen interviewed these men once they arrived. But although that first episode drew high ratings, viewers complained that Dateline was not actually doing anything about the problem it was documenting and assailed local law enforcement for not arresting the men Dateline exposed. So starting with episode three, the arrest of the suspect became an essential and always-present ingredient in the show's formula: It serves as the climax of every vignette. The show's title, after all, is not "To Catch and Release a Predator."

Whatever wall may have once divided Dateline and the police has essentially collapsed.

Hansen and NBC News maintain that law enforcement and Dateline simply conduct "parallel investigations" that never influence each other, and that Perverted Justice creates an impermeable "wall" between the two entities. But by this afternoon, in front of Bill Conradt's house, whatever wall may have once divided Dateline and the police has essentially collapsed.

"You know we've got the number," Frag says to the cops standing on Bill Conradt's lawn. He points at Lynn Keller, the Dateline producer. "If somebody wants to call in and try to talk him out."

Neither the chief nor the sergeant nor any of the other officers on the scene have previously considered contacting Bill Conradt by phone. They nod approvingly at the idea.

The sergeant flips open a cell phone. Chris Hansen shuffles through a pile of papers, finds what he's looking for, then slowly dictates ten digits. The sergeant punches them in and settles the phone to his ear. "Might make an easy way to resolve it," says the chief.

Fifty-four seconds later, the sergeant hangs up. He doesn't leave a message.

Months from now, when Dateline has finished editing its raw footage, SWAT's arrival will be dramatic. The image on television screens will suddenly divide in three, 24 style, and the subscreens will host a confusing but portentous jumble of squad cars and body armor.

Today, in real time, SWAT's arrival is a dull trickle. The team leader, Ken McKeown, arrives first, strolls around the house, chooses a point of entry: a glass sliding door in the rear. The Murphy detective, Snow Robertson, has posted himself at the door. Through it, the detective can see a turned-on laptop screen glowing in a dark and empty room, and he's informed Chief Myrick that he plans to bust in without waiting for SWAT if he observes Bill Conradt making a move toward his computer, so that Conradt can't destroy any evidence the computer may contain. When the SWAT leader finishes his lap of the house, he waits across the street for the rest of his men. Time passes. A Dateline cameraman lingers on the branches of a sun-limned tree rising above an idle sergeant.

Eventually, SWAT is finally all here and ready. A camera tracks them left to right as they march in slow formation across the front yard, toward the door in the gateway that leads to the side yard. Their heads swivel in synchrony with their pace, eyes always on the house. In the foreground of the shot, a campaign sign rises on two wire stalks from Bill Conradt's lawn. White letters on a red background: howard tygrett, who's running in the upcoming election for district judge.

Four years ago, during the last election cycle, Conradt ran for that same position. In fact, a bunch of his old campaign signs, dusty failures, sit in a pile in the closed garage that the SWAT team is now marching past. At the time of that election, Conradt had been the district attorney of Kaufman County five times in a row, twenty-two years of service in all. Becoming district judge seemed like the next logical step. So when the sitting district judge announced his retirement, Bill Conradt announced he was quitting his district attorney's post in order to pursue the position. He campaigned hard, driving his dad's old pickup truck around the county, attending barbecues and fish fries. And then, for the first time in his political career, he lost.

Maybe he lost for macro reasons, because he was a Democrat and his opponent was a Republican, and 2002 was a year in which a Republican wave swept through Texas, scouring away not just Bill Conradt but hundreds of other Democrats. Maybe he lost for micro reasons, because the pastor at the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, a church Bill Conradt had attended faithfully his entire life, a church he had served as a cross-bearing acolyte when he was a boy, had unexpectedly decided to support his opponent. Maybe he lost because he was an unmarried middle-aged man in a rural county in Texas, and people talk.

Whatever the reasons, the loss devastated him. He didn't work at all for about a year. Then he went into private practice and slogged efficiently but without passion through the duties of a small-town defense lawyer. His heart wasn't in it. He hardly ever even bothered to collect on his bills.

A CareFlite chopper then ferries his body to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where Conradt will be pronounced dead.

In the aftermath of what is about to happen today, some of Bill Conradt's friends, trying to reconcile the exceedingly proper man they knew with the sordid and improper content of his chat transcripts, will reexamine their own memories, looking for signs. Some of them will dwell on the period following the last election. They will make oblique, tentative attempts to formulate some sort of explanation: Perhaps he lost more than an election. Perhaps the man they knew as the epitome of restraint somehow lost, during those hard days, control of himself.

Although trying to make sense is what humans do, sometimes it is senseless. Because four years ago, Bill Conradt fell, yes. But then he got up, and moved on.

For proof, look no further than that campaign sign on his front lawn. Howard Tygrett, the man whose name resides there, is the same man who beat him in the last election.

Bill Conradt is no longer wearing the ill-fitting suit of a defense lawyer. He is again a prosecutor, and while he is now only an assistant district attorney rather than the top guy, he has told some people that he prefers it this way, prefers focusing on the cases rather than managing an office. Just two days ago, on Friday afternoon, his best friend, Mary Gayle Ramsey, a woman he's known forever, a fellow lawyer who helped him through the rough times following that lost election, ran into him in the hallway of the Rockwall County District Attorney's office and they laughed and joked and talked shop like they always did. And when they parted, he said what he always said, asked her if there was anything he could do for her, and she told him no, and he smiled, and when he walked away, she never would have guessed . . .

SWAT files through the gateway into the side yard. Many of Bill Conradt's neighbors, none of whom knew him well, have been gathering on their own front lawns, watching. He's always been friendly enough, but he's a hell of a private guy, even though he's got no private life at all, as far as they can tell: This is the first time most of them can remember anyone besides the postman actually setting foot on his property.

The last SWAT officer through closes the gate behind him.

Gator slumps in the front seat of the same Ford Expedition they seized from that doctor back in July. He's got the signed warrant, though his weary hands had riddled it with errors, including the wrong city, county, and date. A woman named Sandra, a Murphy animal-control officer, is at the wheel. Sandra is driving because Gator's too tired. Might fall asleep behind the wheel, something he's been known to do.

When they're just pulling into Terrell, Gator radios, lets them know he's almost on the scene. Nobody responds for a minute. Then his Nextel crackles to life.

"A tactical situation has developed," he hears someone say, and then it goes dead, and nobody responds when he asks for clarification. The pit in his stomach grows.

The nimblest of the SWAT members scale the low chain-link fence that encloses about a fourth of the two-acre backyard, then turn and help some of the bigger cops over, before a quick reformation under trees. Bill Conradt's father planted these trees: a maple, a cedar, a pear, a loblolly pine. His father, a small-town physician who eventually became the medical director of the Texas division of Blue Cross Blue Shield, built this house. Moved in with his wife, his young son, his younger daughter. His children grew up here. And eventually his wife died here. And then, in 2000, he died here. And his daughter and his son decided to keep the house, and his son, who'd never married and lived alone with his mini schnauzer, sold his own house and moved here, back home, with Bismarck, who could run outside in this half-acre plot of fenced-in old cotton field.

SWAT's slow march resumes for a few more paces, delivering them past a coiled hose, past a lawn chair, past a grill, to a glass sliding door that leads into the house. One of the officers holds a black metal battering ram the size of a parking meter and is about to swing it. The leader of the team stops him, pulls out a device called a Halligan bar, and uses it to lever the door until the lock busts under the pressure and the door slides open. The SWAT team pushes through a floor-length curtain covered with a print of ducks and geese and rifles and enters a dim room. The screen of a Sony VAIO laptop provides scant illumination. The laptop sits in a far corner of the room, on an upside-down old-fashioned leather trash can, next to an easy chair. Eyes adjust and flashlights flare.

This is a den. Four easy chairs. A couch. A wood-paneled RCA television set. Recessed bookshelves contain very old copies of National Geographic and Gourmet magazine and dozens of medical texts that belonged to Bill Conradt's father. Two old sepia-tone portraits of Bill Conradt's parents, taken when they were children, hang in oval frames on the wall. Among the few things in this dusty-feeling room definitely belonging to Bill Conradt, and not simply leftover belongings of his parents, is a tidy stack of books sitting on an end table by the sofa. Atop the stack: a recently published, book-length account of the pivotal 1969 showdown between the University of Texas Longhorns and the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.

A green-and-white-checkered wool blanket puddles half on and half off the easy chair nearest the laptop, a note of dishevelment in the otherwise clutterless room. Somebody left this chair in a hurry.

SWAT sweeps the den, then files into the next room, a dining area adjacent to the kitchen.

A crime-scene photo of Bill Conradt's .380 Browning handgun.

"Terrell Police!"

"Search warrant!"

The kitchen is visible from here: wide open, with a cooking island in the middle where Bill Conradt's mother used to prepare the recipes she gleaned from Gourmet magazine. Conradt is a good cook himself, though the cupboards aren't as well stocked as they once were. The team turns right, enters a large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows that would, if the shades were not drawn, look out onto the backyard. The living room offers two paths: Either cut through the room and to a door in the rear, or head left, down a long hallway. Sergeant Hanks from Terrell SWAT shouts an order -- First four, follow me! -- and heads for the door in the rear of the living room. The remaining men, with an officer named Todd Wiley fronting them, turn left and head down the hallway.

One side of the hallway is glass. Beyond the glass, a concrete walkway borders a rectangle of grass in the house's interior courtyard. On the far side of this small lawn, to the right of an American flag, the door to the front yard, the one with the busted doorbell, remains closed. On the other side of that door: all the cameras and the neighbors and the cops wondering what's going on here, inside. Large plants in earthen pots line the hallway, growing so close together that the foliage brushes at the arms and legs of Todd Wiley and the men behind him. They hold their guns square and close to their chests and march forward.

Up ahead, at the end of the hallway, an open door.

Bill Conradt steps into view.

Today he's wearing one of his colored shirts.

Black slacks, a colored shirt, the same shock of thick fright-white hair he's had since his thirties. His small mouth, his wide-set eyes. His skin still ruddy, the trace of a burn from a district-attorneys conference he attended down on South Padre Island a month ago. He'd stayed out on the beach so long that he'd come home with serious carnage on the tops of his feet.

The wall behind him bears a framed illustration from a book about Australian wildlife: a trio of striped kangaroos. Conradt loves Australia. He travels there whenever he can, as often as once a year, pure vacation time, never on business. A friend who once accompanied him on one of his trips thinks Australia appeals to Bill Conradt so much because it is about the farthest he can get away from his hometown. His love for the country has left its mark on his home, and also on his language. Australian idioms creep into his speech and writing sometimes. During his chat-room dialogues with "Luke," for example, he sometimes typed both "good on you" and "no worries," unusual terminology for a native Texan.

The few other decorative touches that Bill Conradt added to this house consist of framed historical memorabilia. If he looks slightly to his right, at the wall beside the doorway that leads into the plant-lined hallway, he will see a poster-sized collection of Abraham Lincoln relics: a sliver of wood from his house, another from his law office, and a penny-sized scrap of fabric that once decorated the president's coffin.

But Conradt is looking straight ahead. All he sees is Officer Todd Wiley and his men behind him.

From the account Todd Wiley will write approximately two and a half hours from now: "He stepped back into dark room. His hands came up. I could see something shining."

All of the officers will eventually write down their best recollection of what Bill Conradt says now, and their memories are pretty consistent. If the testimony of at least one of the officers is perfectly accurate, then Bill Conradt says one of the following things:

"I am not gonna hurt anybody."

"I'm not going to hurt anyone."

"Guys, I'm not going to hurt anyone!"

"I'm not going to hurt nobody, guys."

And, of course, that means his last words, whatever their exact phrasing, are a lie.

Although the microphones outside of Bill Conradt's house have no trouble picking up a mini schnauzer's barks, none record Bill Conradt's Browning .380 handgun, which he places muzzle-first against his own temple and discharges.

The cops inside radio to the cops outside.

Lieutenant Barber enters and sees Bill Conradt lying faceup with part of the side of his head missing. A SWAT officer is trying to put Condradt's legs up on a large pot, to keep the blood flowing toward his vital organs. After noting that "the scene is secure," Lieutenant Barber goes back to the front yard to tell Chris Hansen what she's seen.

"He shot himself," she tells him, then explains she's not sure exactly when he pulled the trigger, whether it was the moment he heard SWAT making entry, or later.

Chris Hansen outlines the scenario he prefers to a crew member.

"Well, I mean, there's gonna be some controversy," Hansen says. "So it's better that he did it as they were coming in, as opposed to . . ."

The noise of approaching emergency vehicles swallows the rest of his words.

The camera settles on one of the SWAT-team members standing outside the closed door of the ambulance after they load the body inside. A middle-aged man in slacks and a sport jacket walks haltingly into the frame. He approaches a cop, one of the Terrell officers who now swarm the lawn wrapping trees with yellow tape. He's asking questions, though you can't hear what they are.

The guy in the sport jacket is named Greg Shumpert. He's the assistant city attorney for Terrell, has known Bill Conradt for decades. A friend. The first friend on the scene. And soon he'll call other friends, mostly other lawyers, and the news will spread. And the questions that Greg Shumpert is asking, the initial questions of what the hell is going on here, will lead to other questions. Friends will question their memories of their friend. Could he have done what the police say he did? Those transcripts. The ghastly sordidness of it all. It's so hard to imagine a man who never tells a dirty joke having a such dirty mind. Some will conclude that no, he couldn't have done it. Word will pass from friend to friend about a possible explanation. An excuse. Did you know that in the room where he worked on his laptop, on an ottoman not two feet from his own, he had a workbook from a conference he'd attended back in June? Did you hear what the conference was about? The title of the workbook? Investigation and Prosecution of Child Sexual Abuse. Doesn't that mean something? Doesn't that mean that he was probably working when he was typing those repulsive things? He was probably working on a little homegrown sting operation of his own, and then he got swept up in a larger sting operation himself. A tragedy, this whole thing, but at least Bill Conradt was innocent.

It's hard to imagine a man who never tells a dirty joke having a such dirty mind.

Of course the excuse doesn't really make any sense -- if he was trying to catch predators, he would pose as a child, not an adult teen -- but people, even smart people, invest themselves in explanations that provide them with the least painful world to live in. A world where their friends, their friend, the one who wears pressed white shirts and lives alone with his dog and always asks if there's anything he can do for you, doesn't, didn't, harbor unpleasant sexual fantasies.

Most of his friends won't even bother with this sort of speculation, will just leave the gray areas gray. They'll try to dwell on the good things, recount his many kindnesses: This was a guy who, when the Longhorns played for the championship, in 2006, had rustled up four tickets to one of the biggest Rose Bowls in history for his niece and her husband, his nephew, and his sister, even though he couldn't go, since he was in Australia. But they won't be able to stop wondering about his last hours. How long did he know what was coming? Did he see Dateline's vans early in the morning, like so many of his neighbors did? Did he realize then? Or did he not realize until the police arrived? Or even until SWAT busted in? When did he know for sure? And when did he decide what he was going to do?

Five hundred friends of Bill Conradt will attend his memorial service a few days from now, and for a little while they'll stop asking questions and just sit in receptive silence.

Another crime-scene photo. The bloodstained floor shortly after Conradt's body was removed.

What happens after a police officer arrests a suspect in Murphy, Texas, and charges him with a felony (say, online solicitation of a minor) is that the suspect is detained and a magistrate sets bail and then, eventually, the police send their evidence to the Collin County District Attorney's office. It is up to the DA's office to decide whether to present the evidence to a grand jury for indictment or, if there is insufficient or problematic evidence, to drop the case. The woman responsible for making the initial review of evidence is Doris Berry, one of the most experienced felony prosecutors in the 108-person office.

In the months following today, Doris Berry will review the cases the Murphy Police Department submits to her against the twenty-three men they arrested outside Dateline's decoy house, and she will find a variety of problems.

She will find that all of the arrests may have been illegal.

Some of the problems will be technical. For example, in most of the cases, she will find so-called venue problems. In order to pursue a case on an online-solicitation-of-a-minor charge, you've got to prove that either the suspect or the victim in the case was physically present in Collin County at the time the crime was committed. The location of the decoy house is irrelevant: What's important is where the chat suspect and the chat decoy were when they were actually doing their chatting. But in sixteen of the cases that the Murphy Police Department will submit to her, Doris Berry will find it impossible to prove that either the Perverted Justice decoy or the suspect was inside Collin County when the crime was allegedly committed.

The law is the law, and you can't just wish a batch of mangled cases good.

Some of the problems will be more fundamental: She will find that all of the arrests may have been illegal. Under Texas law, there are only certain circumstances under which a police officer can make an arrest without a prior warrant. But in all of these "To Catch a Predator" decoy-house arrests, it will come to light that not only was there no warrant but the police had done literally no prior investigation. Instead, they simply camped outside the decoy house and arrested the men who emerged after receiving a prior signal from the Dateline crew inside. The only thing Doris Berry won't quite be able to figure out is whether this means that Dateline had become an agent of the Murphy Police Department or whether the relationship was the other way around. She'll discuss this question with her boss, John Roach, the district attorney, and Roach will eventually form the opinion that "the Murphy Police Department was merely a player in the show and had no real law-enforcement position. Other people are doing the work, and the police are just there like potted plants, to make the scenery."

The thing is, Doris Berry is a prosecutor. She wants to see bad guys punished. She's read the transcripts, which means she knows most of these men are bad and a lot of them are probably dangerous. And if she rejects the cases, she knows what will happen: Instead of receiving the incarceration and supervision that might prevent them from someday soliciting real kids, not fake ones, they'll receive only Dateline's nationally televised shaming.

But the law is the law, and you can't just wish a batch of mangled cases good.

On June 1, 2007, seven months after the end of the sting operation, three months after Dateline airs the relevant episode of "To Catch a Predator," the Collin County District Attorney's office will announce that it has decided not to pursue indictments for any of the suspects Murphy police arrested outside the decoy house.

Gator arrives at the house soon after the SWAT team secures it. He enters and hastily executes the search warrant, seizing Conradt's Sony VAIO and a mainstream pornographic DVD called DreamBoy, as well as a bunch of other things that his sleep-deprived and shocked mind falsely thinks might have some relevance to this case, including an in-flight magazine called Red Hot and packets of imported Australian Vegemite.

Months later, Gator will learn that a forensic analysis of the laptop has verified that Bill Conradt was the person who chatted online with "Luke," but that the computer hard drive was otherwise devoid of anything illegal or indicative of sexual predation. Soon afterward, Gator will resign from the Murphy Police and consider never returning to law enforcement. He will make ends meet working at a private security firm. He will meet with a reporter in the reporter's hotel room, recount what he did and what he didn't do, and he will start to cry and then apologize for making a fool of himself.

Of the people directly involved in the events leading up to the death of Bill Conradt, only a couple of others besides Gator will express anything close to regret.

Dan Schrack, the actor, will feel terrible, as if he is somehow responsible. He will be at the decoy house when Frag phones in with the news. A few minutes later, Dateline will announce that it's shutting down the operation right away. Schrack will be hustled to the airport early. After he boards his flight, he will mull over his feelings that the pursuit of ratings was behind what happened today, and he will decide that he won't recommend auditioning for "To Catch a Predator" to his actor buddies. It's too real.

The search warrant for Bill Conradt's house, executed overnight by Detective Gator Weiss. Because of the rush job, the warrant would contain numbers errors, including the wrong city, county, and date.

District judge Mark Rusch, who signed the search warrant, won't necessarily feel guilt, but he'll feel anger when he learns that Dateline was present during the arrest attempt, a possibility the affidavit had not warned him of. He'll call the Murphy police, rip into an officer there: Did it ever occur to them that maybe, just maybe, an assistant DA who sees a camera crew out front and knows what he's been up to on his own damn computer can put two and two together, and had that camera crew not been out there, maybe he'd still be alive?

But most of the people involved won't express any second thoughts at all. (Chief Billy Myrick and Lieutenant Adana Barber will decline repeated interview requests.)

Xavier Von Erck, the founder of Perverted Justice, will say his only regret is that Bill Conradt died before he could face justice.

And Chris Hansen, during a phone interview eight months later, will say that though Conradt's suicide was very sad, something "nobody can feel good about," he doesn't have any regrets about how things were handled in Murphy or Terrell. He will say that the "To Catch a Predator" concept of "parallel investigations" works "pretty darn well" and that the police and Dateline are completely independent of each other: "Just like the police don't tell me how to do the interviews, we don't tell them how to do their business. Aside from saying hello in the beginning, I really don't have contact with law enforcement." He will deny that Dateline's presence constituted "surveillance," as Chief Myrick had characterized it on site, and deny that its cameramen were ever on Conradt's property. When asked about Frag's actions in Terrell, he will insist that "Frag was not out there," and then angrily suggest that the question stems from some "notion that Perverted Justice was calling the shots. Nobody from Perverted Justice was out there. I was there." It is only when it is described to Hansen what Frag was wearing that day, in detail, that he will put the phone on hold to consult with his producer, Lynn Keller (who declined to be interviewed), and then come back on the line and concede he was wrong. Similarly, he will heatedly deny that Perverted Justice or NBC personnel ever encouraged the Murphy Police Department to get warrants for Bill Conradt.

A spokeswoman for Dateline, Jenny Tartikoff, will decline to comment on the future of "To Catch a Predator" or on the show's relationship with Perverted Justice, other than to say, "We always evaluate our news-gathering procedures before and after each broadcast."

Among the final footage Dateline shoots today is a view of a CareFlite chopper that squats thundering in Bill Conradt's backyard, ready to take him to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the pronouncement will be made. The shot pans from the chopper to Lieutenant Adana Barber. She's on her cell phone. Although you can't hear what she's saying because of the helicopter, it's possible that she is on the phone with Jimmy Patterson, the off-duty detective NBC had hired to work security. Detective Patterson will later recall that it was at about this time that he called Lieutenant Barber. He knew Lieutenant Barber because she used to work at his department, in Rowlett. Detective Patterson had left the decoy house, was on his way out of the neighborhood, and had just noticed two Murphy Police Department squad cars pulling in behind him, lights flashing. He was in his black Ford F-150 pickup truck. Dateline had earlier advised the Murphy Police Department Takedown Team that one of the suspects scheduled to come to the house that day owned a black Ford F-150 pickup.

Detective Patterson tells Lieutenant Barber that the Murphy Police are pulling him over for some reason.

"Jimmy, you look like a pervert!" she says, laughing.

He tells Lieutenant Barber that several Murphy police officers have surrounded his truck. "Your guys are pointing guns at me," he tells her.

"You can take them!" Lieutenant Barber responds, still laughing.

The cops have yanked the F-150's door open and are now trying to physically haul Detective Patterson out of his vehicle.

"Tell your people to get their fucking guns out of my face," he says to Lieutenant Barber, and then drops his cell phone.

Eventually, a few minutes after the cops push Detective Patterson against his truck and handcuff him, the misunderstanding is resolved.

A man should take stock of the history of the desires he's never acted on, and whether he should ever have to defend that history in court, or see it detailed on television.

But the larger questions provoked by the last few days remain.

Is it possible that Bill Conradt, an adult pretending to be a teenager, might have suspected, correctly, that "Luke" was also an adult pretending? Yes: Everybody knows that the Internet is a swamp of false identities. And is there any evidence that Conradt had ever acted on the longings that his chats illuminated? On the contrary, he chose not to when presented with the opportunity. Was it morally wrong for Bill Conradt to engage in online sex chats with an apparent child? Of course. But did his actions merit the response to them? Before answering this question, a man should take stock of the history of the desires he's never acted on, and whether he should ever have to defend that history in court, or see it detailed on television.

Other questions may be answered in court. Patricia Conradt will say she plans to file a wrongful-death lawsuit, seeking $100 million, against NBC. Her lawyer, Bruce Baron, will explain that although this suit will not preclude suits against Perverted Justice and the cities of Murphy and Terrell, they plan to go after NBC first because "when you want to knock something like this out of our society, you knock it out from the head, not the legs. NBC is using everyone, including the police, to act as buffers, to do what they themselves can't ethically do as journalists." And further questions may be answered in the wake of another lawsuit, one that a former "To Catch a Predator" producer will file in May of 2007, claiming she was wrongfully terminated after she complained about an unethical level of collaboration between Dateline, local police, and Perverted Justice.

After ending her cell-phone call, Lieutenant Barber looks at the camera. She asks the cameraman a question, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the rumble and whine of the rotors. Although the events of the last couple of days provoke a lot of questions, perhaps the one Lieutenant Barber now asks is the most pertinent. When law enforcement and television entertainment have commingled so completely and so lethally, perhaps there is really only one question left that matters at all.

"We having fun?"

She asks the question, she smiles wide, and then she relays an update Frag gave her a little while ago, something about a three-hundred-pounder nabbed back at the decoy house.

A few minutes later, the tape ends and the screen goes blank.