The 30 men in a Catoosa County Jail cell block didn’t appear to be the usual kind of inmates locked up on an October weeknight in rural northwest Georgia.
“This was a group of people walking around shell-shocked and stunned about where they were,” said Steven Donaldson, one of the inmates.
It only took a few moments to realize the connection they all shared: Craigslist.com.
“This entire cell block is sex offenders,” said Donaldson, whose case is pending in federal court. “I had one guy walk up to me and say, ‘Are you on Craigslist?’ There were businessmen there. A man from Chattanooga. A kid straight out of the Navy.”
These men claim they lead good lives and are not criminals. They insist they never planned to meet underage boys and girls for sex but were tricked or pressured by undercover officers to agree to a meeting.
Law enforcement officials, however, say these men are predators. Police set things up, officials said, but those arrested could have just walked away from the electronic conversations once the person posing as a child admitted that they were underage.
Donaldson, 51, and other suspects were allegedly lured with promises of no-strings-attached sex with boys and girls in their teens and younger by a joint federal-local Safe Child Task force that has made dozens of cases in northwest Georgia and many more nationwide.
Most of the men walked into law enforcement traps when they responded to ads placed under WFM -- women for men -- in the "casual encounters" section on Craigslist.com.
The wording of the ads is benign. "Lonely & bored ... Take me away." "School's out. I'm simply bored to tears." "There must be somebody out there to take me away." "Hey guys, we're back in town. Looking forward to return engagements with old friends. Drop us a line."
But the follow-up emails are titillating with graphic sexual descriptions, according to accounts at trial and in court documents.
Law enforcement officials say these men are "predators" who can't help themselves. Attorneys for some of the defendants disagree.
"These guys are the real predators. They're bullies," said attorney McNeill Stokes of the police. Stokes is representing eight men arrested in the northwest Georgia operation.
"It's like the ‘Minority Report'," Stokes said, referring to the futuristic film about authorities who can read minds and make arrests before crimes are committed.
Authorities are stepping up efforts to catch these "travelers" -- suspects who travel great distances for arranged meetings -- with a "proactive approach rather than a reactive approach," according to testimony that FBI agent Kenneth Hillman offered in one of the trials.
Hillman said in court he wanted to catch pedophiles before they can actually hurt a child.
The FBI declined to discuss the operation, and local law enforcement officials were unable to say how many cases had been brought since this particular task force was created three years ago to operate in the sparsely populated northwest corner of the state.
But those cases are now being brought to trial. A conviction could mean as many as 20 years in a state prison, or life if in federal court.
In just one week in Catoosa County, five cases were scheduled. Only three men had gone on trial before time ran out for Catoosa's spring term for court, and all were convicted.
“There is no rational way in a normal person’s mind to understand these guys,” said Conasauga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Kermit McManus, the prosecutor in neighboring Murray and Whitfield counties.
McManus wonders why men continue to solicit underage girls and boys despite the media spotlight on such undercover operations. For example, a NBC news series, "To Catch a Predator," ran for years, showing men coming to meet young girls they had met on the Internet for sex. The FBI has issued dozens of news releases announcing arrests and convictions that resulted from the work of the Safe Child Task Force.
McManus said there is “no pressure" put on the men to agree to meetings in isolated places. "It’s the choice they are making,” McManus said
But Stokes said local officers and federal agents are “entrapping … lonely men who responded to ads placed on an adult Craigslist site where the posters are certified to be over the legal age of 18.”
They are drawn in by “role-playing fantasies … They were not pedophiles,” Stokes said.“They are enticing these people. They are just wrecking people’s lives. They [law enforcement] are creating the crimes.”
But a legal expert at Emory Law School, Kay Levine, said these operations are much like situations in which an undercover officer dresses like a hooker and walks the streets in areas known for prostitution. She said entrapment is almost impossible to prove.
"It was decided several years ago ... we didn't want to interfere with undercover officers," said Levine, whose specialties include criminal procedure and sex crimes. "The fact that the undercover officer is the first one to suggest illegal activity does not make the entrapment defense."
Augusta lawyer Pete Theodocion, who has defended several people accused of sex crimes involving children, agrees such law enforcement approaches are legal. Still, “there’s something real wrong about law enforcement taking part in criminal activity that otherwise would not have taken place. ... It’s a unique and sometimes unsavory aspect of criminal prosecution.”
Dr. Michael Vitacco, a psychologist and assistant professor at the Georgia Health Sciences University in Augusta, said there are many reasons adult men pursue sexual encounters with underage girls and boys.
"Part of the issue clearly revolves around the easiness of the Internet and the anonymity surrounding that," said Vitacco, who has not evaluated any of the men charged in the Georgia cases. "Children are much more accessible than they've ever been... These [Internet] sites allow them to be predators in an anonymous way where they won't be accountable for their actions. These men often lack social skills. They find these children are their social equals."
Donaldson was an unemployed electrical engineer who had time to cruise the Internet. His electronic exchanges started with an agent posing as adult. And after a few messages, the undercover agent suggested bringing a boy to the proposed sexual encounter.
“We began talking about some adult role playing and he interjected, ‘I’ve got a 12-year-old boy,’ and he sent me, without my asking, a picture,” Donaldson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "He kept after me. One day I agreed but said ‘I want to meet you in public.’ I never believed he had a kid.”
Their rendezvous was at a gas station just off Interstate 75 in Ringgold, where police were waiting. Donaldson was in jail 40 days before getting out on bond; if convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. No trial date has been set.
Legal experts have said for years that child molesters often are not caught until they are older, sometimes already senior citizens, and until then they have seemingly normal lives.
"A lot people mask pedophile tendencies. They lead otherwise law-abiding lives. This is their secret addiction," Levine said.
The program is “designed to ferret out these predators that are using the Internet to make contact with underage girls for purposes of having sex with them,” McManus said.
Otherwise, McManus said, these men “don’t have bad criminal records. Most defendants are great people otherwise. They’re great fathers, great workers, great breadwinners."
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