CLICK BELOW TO HEAR JACK HALL’S INTERVIEW WITH JOURNALIST CHRIS HANSEN
The latest of the seven suspects in the August sex sting operation in Marquette County will be profiled Thursday in the “Takedown” series, produced by TruBlu Media journalist Chris Hansen.
The seven men were arrested in early August after they allegedly showed up at a home in Forsyth Township to have sex with an underage teenager they had talked with on-line.
This week’s episode shows the arrest of 26-year-old Ryan Howard of Negaunee, who Hanen says showed up at a sting home in Forsyth Township looking to have sex with a 15-year-old boy.
“What sticks out about Ryan is how comfortable he is walking into this sting house to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex,” Hansen told RRN News. “You see this on our hidden cameras. You’ll see it in the episode. He walks in, he’s got things that he’s brought along with him to facilitate sex with a young man. He is invited in by the decoy, and he sits on the couch and he waits and calmly waits, as he’s talking about what’s going to happen next, for the boy to come back.”
The problem for Howard, as well as for the previous five suspects featured in Hansen’s program from Marquette County, is that there was no boy. The Marquette County Sheriff’s Department, with help from downstate Genessee County, were there instead, as was Hansen and his crew.
“When I come in, he’s stunned, obviously, but it struck me how comfortable he was sitting on that couch, as if there was nothing wrong with meeting a child on-line for sex. And as I slowly unravel the details of his situation, we find out he works for a bank. And suddenly, he’s very sorry for what he did. He knew it was wrong, and he did it anyway.”
Meanwhile, Hansen and his crew continued to deal with the backlash from the episode that aired two weeks ago against the other young gay man who showed up at that house looking for sex: 18-year-old Hunter Trepanier.
Hansen and his crew removed the Sept. 15 episode from the TruBlu app and website after it became clear that authorities were willing to put Trepanier into a “diversion program”, rather than a full-out criminal court case.
Has he ever done that before, in his 19 years of “predator” investigations?
“We have,” Hansen said. “It’s very rare. With these very young adult offenders, if they enter a diversion program or look they’re going into a diversion program where they have a shot at a second chance because of their age, and because of other circumstances, we’ve done it. We’ve obviously have the ability to put it back up if there is another offense, or if something changes.”
Hansen admits that that episode generated the most polarizing feedback than any of the episodes that have aired so far. Some argued that the fact that Trepanier is a Gwinn High School student makes it a totally different situation than the other men who showed up at that house. Others suggested that the investigation was completely appropriate due to Trepanier being over the legal age of 18, and the possible victim being 15.
Comments on the Radio Results Network Facebook page also covered the whole spectrum of opinions.
Hansen spoke with RRN News Wednesday as he returned from Florida, where his undercover operation netted six more potential child predators. In his nearly 20 years of doing this, first at NBC and now on his own, more than 500 arrests have been made.
“The problem’s not going away,” Hansen said. “The predators are skilled, and they evolve.”
There will be one more episode next week, featuring a Sault Ste. Marie man who traveled across the Upper Peninsula only to be caught in Hansen’s sting.
Meanwhile, Hansen and his team continues working on a much larger project, covering the sextortion case that led to the suicide of Marquette teenager Jordan DeMay in early 2022. That case, which has seen a pair of Nigerian brothers be charged in that disturbing social media event, is what brought Hansen’s team to the UP to begin with last month.
“That is a passion project very much for us,” Hansen said. “I’ll have some details on where that’s going to air and when, very soon.”
The “takedown” program is available at www.watchtrublu.com, and the TruBlu app. The cost is $4.99 a month, and you can watch it on devices like Roku and Amazon Fire TV. There are some older episodes already available on his YouTube page, and Hansen says that next month, they will have their own channel on Pluto TV. That is an app that includes hundreds of channels that is free to use (with commercials). It airs mostly older content and many creators use it as a way to drive traffic to their newer content on other platforms.
Hansen began doing predator stings like this nearly two decades ago for the NBC program “To Catch a Predator” before starting his own on-line streaming venture. The sting operation in Marquette County was coordinated through the Marquette County Sheriff’s Department, with help from several other law enforcement agencies.
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