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Detective masters the art of catching online predators
Laura Cook -
Turlock Journal
Send me your panties.
This is the kind of request that Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force Detective Ken
Hedrick gets on a daily basis. He spends his days looking for sex offenders on
the Internet.
He has arrested about 60 people, 10 from this area, in the last three years.
“When I arrest them, they are no longer able to molest a real child,” Hedrick
said.
He poses as normal children or adults who solicit sex from children.
“I can go online and have five or six people talking to me within minutes,” he
said.
He does not initiate the conversations or start to suggest anything sexual. He
does not even have to go into chat rooms often. He is the one who is contacted
and he follows the conversation in whichever direction it is taken. Many
people find his profiles in the America Online member directory, where he
lists average activities for whoever he is pretending to be.
“There is nothing suggestive about my profiles,” he said.
This makes him certain that normal children everywhere are being subjected to
indecency on the Internet.
“I’m sure it’s happening to kids everywhere, all the time,” he said.
That is why he continues to talk to the people who message him for as long as
it takes for a meeting time and place to be mentioned. People are frequently
willing to travel to this area to meet with children, he said. Once they
travel here, they may or may not be surprised to find Stanislaus County
Sheriff’s Department deputies ready to arrest.
The most recent arrest was July 22. William Eakin, a 55-year old Squaw Valley
resident, had mentioned that he was worried he was talking to an undercover
cop to the 13-year-old girl Hedrick was pretending to be. He is a registered
sex offender, but was not scared enough by the fact that his third offense
would put him in jail for life. He still pursued the girl for about a month
and then said he would meet her in Turlock.
“His desire to molest a child was stronger than his fear of getting caught,”
Hedrick said.
Hedrick enjoys getting criminals off the streets and how every case is
different than the last.
“They’ve all been so unique and so different. Every one seems to be more
amazing than the previous one,” he said.
People who have worked with Hedrick are impressed with his passion for the job
and his ability to find Internet predators.
“Ken Hedrick has a unique desire to protect our children, and he also has a
unique perspective with regard to his investigations. He’s very, very good at
what he does. He has a passion and desire to go after those who pray upon our
children,” Lt. Adam Christianson said.
Hedrick has worked as a detective for the Sheriff’s Department for about nine
years. He specialized in crimes against children for two years before
beginning his Internet crimes against children assignment.
“We had the opportunity to go to a computer crimes school and I saw the need
for this position,” he said.
Getting started took determination. The department did not have the money to
buy the technology necessary to do this kind of investigative work. Hedrick
made the best of what he had. He used computers that had been seized by the
courts for identity thefts to start his work.
“We actually used bad guys’ computers to catch bad guys for awhile,” he said.
Hedrick also investigates child pornography on the Internet. He does this by
searching for child porn and researching where it came from. He is able to
track down information about where the crime was committed and can get
officers from that area to make arrests. An officer in Wyoming developed the
program that allows detectives to find this information. The first person they
arrested through this kind of investigation was a child molester in Modesto,
Hedrick said.
Hedrick also educates people nationally with a program called Cyberspace. He
demonstrates how quickly children can become victims on the Internet. The
program makes parents, educators and others aware of the dangers of talking
online.
Hedrick plans to do this job until he retires. He likes many things about his
career, including that it is fun and challenging and full of surprises.
“One of the biggest surprises initially was the type of people committing
these crimes,” he said. “They are doctors, athletes, and professional business
men.”
No matter who he is arresting, he knows he is helping society.
“It’s just fortunate that they traveled to meet me and not a real kid,” he
said.
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