He was one of 29 men busted in three-day enforcement to be
televised by Dateline
Gilroy – Television cameras – and handcuffs – greeted Juan Gutierrez, a Gilroy car salesman, when he arrived at a Petaluma house Aug. 25. Police say he showed up for a tryst with a pre-teen girl he’d met online.
Gutierrez, who gave his age as 23 online, was one of 29 men arrested in the three-day sting, a joint effort of Bay Area law enforcement and Perverted Justice (PJ), a volunteer organization that monitors and exposes sexual predators. The television show Dateline will air footage of the sting tonight and next Friday, in a series titled ‘To Catch a Predator.’
“Juan Gutierrez was one of the most dangerous predators, because he’s serial,” said Xavier Von Erick, PJ’s director of operations. “He was really aggressively looking for a minor … Five minutes into the [online] chat, he asks if she’s a virgin. Very charming.”
PJ’s trained volunteers post online profiles and frequent Internet chat rooms, posing as 10- to 13-year-old children. When predators strike up conversation, and attempt to lure the “kids” to parks, hotel rooms or strange houses, PJ sends in the police.
Gutierrez first chatted online with PJ volunteers March 27, said Von Erick: a long, lurid chat that “went cold.”
“They can get paranoid, and go away,” he explained. “In one second, they can jet.”
Less than five months later, Gutierrez solicited a second PJ volunteer online, Von Erick said, and sent a photo of his genitals 10 minutes after typing ‘hello.’
“A real gentleman,” scoffed Von Erick.
The organization’s vigilante methods trouble some critics, who charge PJ with “entrapment.” But like them or not, the tactics work: since June 2004, the Web site has helped jail 84 predators, and has never been convicted itself.
“In one sting in Riverside, 51 guys showed up in three days,” said Von Erick. “That dwarfs any sting done by law enforcement alone … Police, if they had the ability to do what we do, would be just as good as us. But a sex crimes detective has many more cases to deal with. We can work any hour of the day, and we can sit for three months [chatting online] with a guy, whereas a traditional detective has a high case load.”
Gilroy Police Detective Mitch Madruga agrees. He’s worked with PJ in the past, snaring Jason Robert Bell, a Gilroy man now serving a three-year sentence for attempted lewd acts with a child younger than 14 and attempted distribution of harmful material to a minor.
Madruga had been chatting with Bell via MySpace, a social networking Web site, in the guise of a 13-year-old blonde named Catrina, but he needed PJ’s help. On the Internet, Madruga could pass as a young girl: on the phone, he definitely couldn’t. The detective contacted PJ to supply a phone verifier, a female volunteer with a underage-sounding voice.
The sting worked. Bell arrived at a rendezvous point Feb. 4, 2005, with a hotel room key, Malibu rum and vanilla Coke, rope, tape, a rag and knife, and was arrested. His hotel room was stocked with sex toys and condoms.
The scenario is – frighteningly – not so rare. Last summer, Bruce Randal Tebo, then 45, traveled almost 300 miles with condoms, lubricants and vibrators in tow, intent on a night with a 13-year-old Gilroy girl. He was arrested June 3, 2005 and sentenced this March.
A third man, Renato Rashidally, was arrested July 27, 2005, at Del Rey Park, on suspicion of soliciting a 12-year-old girl; a fourth, Mark Muhn, of Morgan Hill, was arrested in May on similar charges.
“The Internet can be a great resource,” Madruga said, “but it can also be a dark, scary, dangerous place,”
Madruga tracks predators using Myspace, where he posts faux profiles of teenage girls. He started using the site this spring, when a Gilroy 13-year-old skipped town to meet a 20-something Nevada man she’d chatted with on Myspace.
In May, Madruga said that every profile he’d posted was solicited by older men.
“They search for me,” he said. “They hunt me.”
Muhn was among those lured by Madruga’s fake profiles. The detective posed as a 13-year-old girl on Yahoo! Personals, a dating Web site, and posted a photo of a young girl, dressed in a short skirt and belly-baring top. In a few days, his teen profile received 500 hits, mostly from men who claimed to be in their 20s.
Von Erick says not all detectives share Madruga’s Internet know-how. Myspace, Yahoo and other sites popular with teens are foreign to some older investigators. Though Myspace prohibits people younger than 14 from joining the site, kids sometimes lie about their age to post a profile.
“Detectives now know that there’s a lot of predators on the Internet,” he said, “but some detectives are savvy, and some aren’t.”
