Crime + investigation
A death, a $105 million lawsuit and a host who says the show just ran its course—what’s the real story of its cancellation?
A24, Icki Eneo Arlo /Range Media/Square Peg /Range Media Partners /Album/AlamyNearly two decades after NBC's To Catch a Predator went off the air, the true story behind its ending is resurfacing thanks to Primetime, the 2026 film in which Robert Pattinson plays a fictionalized version of the show's host, Chris Hansen.
Hansen has long said the show ended because it had done what it set out to do. The record from its final months potentially tells a messier story, one that centers on the death of a Texas prosecutor during a sting.
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The series debuted in fall 2004 as a Dateline segment, built on a partnership with Perverted Justice, a volunteer watchdog group whose members posed as young teens in online chatrooms. The first sting happened in Bethpage, N.Y.; once the show took off, NBC started paying Perverted Justice at least $100,000 per operation. When adult targets showed up expecting to meet the “teenager” they'd been messaging, they found Hansen instead. He’d confront them on camera about their chats while hidden cameras rolled and police waited outside to arrest them.
With roughly 20 episodes during its run, the show became a genuine phenomenon, pulling in as many as 7 million viewers by its final season. It also drew plenty of criticism. Media critics questioned whether the decoys' chats sometimes crossed from enticement into entrapment and whether the show's format compromised its distance from the law enforcement it worked alongside.
In Murphy, Texas, the district attorney ultimately declined to prosecute any of the 24 men arrested in one of the show's final stings, later saying that having non-officers running the operation is “what makes this case bad,” adding that “if professionals had been running the show, they would have done a much better job.”
That sting in November 2006 is where the show's ending actually begins. Louis “Bill” Conradt Jr., a chief felony assistant district attorney in Rockwall County, Texas, had exchanged sexually explicit messages online with an adult Perverted Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old boy.
Unlike the other men caught in the operation, Conradt never showed up at the decoy house, so police and a Dateline camera crew went to his home instead with arrest and search warrants. When he refused to answer the door, police heard a gunshot and forced their way in: Conradt had died by suicide. Walt Weiss, a Murphy police detective who was on the scene, later called it “a stain on my soul that I'm gonna live with if I'm any kind of a human being at all.”
Conradt's sister, Patricia Conradt, sued NBC Universal for $105 million. In February 2008, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin ruled the case could go to trial, finding that a jury could conclude that NBC had “placed itself squarely in the middle of a police operation, pushing the police to engage in tactics that were unnecessary and unwise, solely to generate more dramatic footage for a television show,” and that the network's conduct was “so outrageous and extreme that no civilized society should tolerate it.” NBC and Patricia settled out of court that June.
Their lives ended in a July 2026 murder-suicide.
Their lives ended in a July 2026 murder-suicide.
Hansen has long said the Conradt case isn't why the show ended. “At the end of the day, we had proved our point,” he told Time in 2015. Of Conradt's death specifically, Hansen has said, “Everybody on the scene would [rather have had] Bill Conradt tell his side.” But To Catch a Predator aired only a handful more episodes after the Murphy sting, the last airing in 2007. NBC settled the lawsuit with Conradt's family the next year.
That gap between Hansen's explanation and the documented timeline is central to Predators, a 2025 documentary from director David Osit, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, that revisits the series. “When you're a victim, as I was, you really can feel like you're not a human being,” Osit told NPR, describing what drew him to the material. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in a review for RogerEbert.com that anyone can now "mount our own version of an investigation into criminality, but distribute the results,” the same kind of vigilantism-as-content the show helped mainstream.
Hansen tried reviving To Catch a Predator with a 2015 Kickstarter campaign, then again with the program Takedown with Chris Hansen in 2022. Now Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim, dramatizes the show's story.
Nearly 20 years later, the two explanations for why To Catch a Predator ended—Hansen’s account that the show had run its course and the longstanding view that the backlash surrounding Conradt’s death contributed to its demise—remain in tension. A scripted film and a documentary landing in the same stretch suggest that debate isn't going anywhere.
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Taylor Floyd is a writer and producer based in Knoxville, Tenn., covering true crime, criminal justice and history. She is a frequent contributor to A&E Crime + Investigation and other publications.
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