CLICK TO HEAR JACK HALL’S INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS HANSEN, TRUBLU MEDIA
He’s back.
Chris Hansen, the journalist who popularized sting operations to nab men trying to have sex with teenagers on the MSNBC program “To Catch a Predator” is off on a new crusade. It’s the “Chris Hansen Takedown” program, and it’s very much like the old program except this time, it’s on a brand new digital streaming platform TruBlu.
And that crusade brought Hansen and his crews to Marquette County last week to do a sex sting up here, and seven men took the bait, traveling from all parts of the Upper Peninsula to a house near Gwinn to try to have sex with a 15-year-old child.
When these men got to the home, Hansen, his TV crews, and police were there waiting.
“There’s more opportunity and activity on-line than ever before for men looking to have sex with kids, and it doesn’t matter where you live,” Hansen told RRN News in a Wednesday morning interview. “What this shows is, Marquette is not immune, like anywhere else in the country.”
Arrested were 18-year-old Hunter Trepanier of Gwinn, 21-year-old Dylan Abramson of Houghton, 41-year-old James Peterson of Wallace, and 61-year-old Vincent Roop of Newberry. The other three, a 26-year-old Negaunee man, a 62-year-old from Skandia, and a 67-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, have not yet been arraigned.
Hansen says in this case, they used a young-looking decoy from the Marquette County Sheriff’s Department, who went into a chat room and waited for would-be predators to approach her. The conversation turns to sex, and a date to meet up is arranged.
“That’s where the crime happens, on-line,” Hansen said. “They get to the house, the decoy greets them at the door, and when the time is appropriate, I will come out there to confront them. We have our conversation, and it’s all recorded on hidden cameras. At some point, I’ll say who I am and the visual cameras come out. And then law enforcement makes the arrest. Usually, they sit down, and it’s amazing to me that guys still show up, and a lot of times, they know who I am. It’s astounding.”
Hansen says most of the suspects apologize and get emotional.
“I say, okay, you’re sorry now, but if I wasn’t here and law enforcement wasn’t here, you would have had sex with a 15-year-old child,” Hansen said. “And I find it very hard to believe, despite what some of them say, that this was their first time. You know, they’ve been down this path before and perhaps gotten away with it.”
Hansen says that during the sting here in Marquette County, four of the seven suspects knew who he was, and knew immediately that they were caught in an undercover sting.
“They know what they’re doing is wrong, but they come anyway, because they need to fulfill this fantasy of having sex with a child,” Hansen said.
Hansen says he came to Upper Peninsula initially to do a story on the sextortion case involving Marquette teenager Jordan DeMay, who killed himself when two Nigerian brothers, posing as a teenaged girl, threatened to publicize nude pictures that he had shared of himself. Those Nigerian men have been arrested and extradited to the United States and are currently facing federal charges.
“It’s tragic on every level, but we wanted to show the fine investigative work of law enforcement, the Marquette County Sheriff and the FBI, and the tenacity of Jordan’s parents, who bared their souls by going public to make sure this doesn’t happen to another child,” Hansen said. “So, we were profiling that story and I got to talking with the sheriff and we talked about the possibility of doing a sting. One thing led to an other.”
You’ll be able to watch these sting operations from Marquette County at www.watchtrublu.com for $4.99 a month. There is an app that you can use on Roku and Fire TV to watch on your television sets. Hansen says the seven Marquette cases will be released in seven episodes on each of the next seven Thursdays, starting this Thursday.
The first episode features the 61-year-old Roop, who drove all the way from Newberry to this home in Marquette County, only to get caught in Hansen’s sting.
“It’s shocking,” Hansen said. “He knows what he did was wrong, and he admits that. He tries to get sympathy and says he’s scared, and says ‘don’t hurt me’, well, what was he there to do? To hurt a child. More shocking, it turns out, that Vincent was a school custodian. So, in his job, for many years, he worked with children!”
There’s dozens of other “takedown” episodes on this app, plus many other true-crime programs, all available on-demand. One $4.99 fee covers all of the content on the app.
Hansen says they are still working on the Jordan DeMay sextortion documentary, and he plans to put together a special edition to give to high schools, at no charge to the schools, to show to students.
His message to kids in the same position DeMay was in that night?
“It’s not the end of the world, it’s a bump in the road,” Hansen said. “There’s no reason to take your own life. You’ll get through it. Jordan should be starting his sophomore year of college right now. He was a good kid from a good family. But a lot of times, it’s the good kid with a lot to lose who gets caught up in these things. And in 1 hour, 45 minutes, he was gone. It’s just heartbreaking.”
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