Disclaimer: As the individuals in question have not been proven guilty in a court of law and are presumed innocent, names have been changed and identifying information removed.
It was noon on a cold Saturday in Ohio, and Henry the Demon was waiting for the little girl to appear in his yard. Her name was Sally, and Henry's been messaging her on Facebook since September. He was happy when she replied. He told her he loved her. He told her he dreams about making love to her. And he told her he wanted to impregnate her. Henry is nearly 60. Sally is 12.
She lived within walking distance of Henry's sisters-in-law’s house. He lived in the basement.
Today, Sally told Henry that her parents would be gone for a while, and she wanted to meet in person. He planned to meet Sally in his yard and then walk in the daylight to her house.
Sally walked slowly up the sidewalk on Grace Ave. towards Henry. She was small with long black hair. She wore a Minecraft backpack and held a baby doll. She paced back and forth a few times before making it all the way to Henry's.
He stood between the homes on the quiet street. He wore his only pair of jeans and a light blue jacket. His gut hung over his waist, and his fly was unzipped. He was clean shaven and had no lips. When he saw Sally approaching, he moved closer to the sidewalk.
Sally stepped into the yard and handed Henry her baby doll. He held the doll against his chest.
He gave the doll back to Sally and placed his hand on her arm. He told her she better put the doll away, so no one sees them. Then he guided her onto the sidewalk, and they walked toward her house. She seemed even smaller at his side.
There was a low grey sky. One of the neighbors hung Christmas lights. A playground down the road. Jack-o'-lanterns on some porches and turkeys and reindeer on others. Thanksgiving was in two weeks. President William McKinley’s grave was just across town.
But this was the thing: Henry didn’t suspect that Sally was a decoy. “Sally” was an alias used by a woman in her mid-twenties whose real name was Ash, who volunteered herself to help capture demons who like to harm children. This was all part of a sting operation put together by Alex Rosen of Predator Poachers—a band of roving civilians who go undercover as minors to capture child predators and hand them over to the police. Well, at least that’s the plan. Today was Ash’s second time being a decoy in the field. She happened to be a petite woman with a speech impediment. She used this to her advantage to help lure these demons off the streets and hopefully into jail.
As soon as Henry and “Sally” walked past us, Alex and his two cameramen confronted him. One of the guys streamed the situation live while the other filmed with a camera for higher quality.
“We just want to have a conversation,” Alex told Henry.
Alex is 23, and he started doing this in 2019. He’s wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt that read, "RUB, SMOKE, EAT, REPEAT." He had a red beard and was built like a football player. He towered over Henry, who tried to hide his face from the cameras. Maybe it was the consequences of a life lived in a basement, sitting at a computer sending depraved messages to children with a head filled with evil fantasies, but up close in the daylight, Henry looked like a giant earthworm. If he were somehow sliced in two, I wouldn’t be surprised if both halves would squirm independently before burrowing back down into the dirt.
Alex filmed these confrontations for his audience who tune in whenever he goes live—but the cameras are also a form of security should anything go down. He never knows how these confrontations will turn out. One time, in Oregon, a demon pulled a gun on him, but it quickly deescalated.
Every time Alex approached these demons, he told them that these conversations are voluntary and that they are free to leave at any time. He’s not police. He’s a civilian—but he’s got a folder of everything the demons have said to the decoy. When Alex shows the demons that he has these conversations, it upsets them, but more often than not it also seems to paralyze their fight or flight capabilities. On average, Alex will spend one to two hours with these demons who consume child pornography and intend to hurt children. The confrontations ebb and flow between hostility, lying, small talk, and confessions.
Henry walked up the street away from his sister-in-law’s house. We followed.
There were little children playing in their yards as Alex replaced Sally’s spot at Henry's side. He held print outs of every dirty message Henry had sent Sally over the last few months.
We walked Henry into an empty field surrounded by dead trees and brick chimneys.
Alex asked him why he was meeting a twelve-year-old child.
“I was just wanting to meet her in person and that was it,” Henry said. “I just wanted to be friends.”
He assured us that he wasn’t planning on taking any action. He said Sally actually told him there was an accident up the way and she wanted him to see it. And, he said, he wasn’t planning on staying very long—he wanted to get back to work on the fuses in his car to get the cigarette lighter working again. He said he would’ve only spent maybe an hour at Sally’s house while her parents were out.
“Come on, Henry,” Alex said. “Unless we get the exact truth, we can only assume the worst.” Alex spoke with a friendly yet firm tone. “It seemed like a mutual thing, man,” Alex continued—assuming his good cop routine. He had learned that the best way to get an admission out of a demon was to get on their good side. Make them comfortable. Alex’s main goal today with Henry was to get him to admit to being in possession of child pornography. In Ohio, a suspect must be in possession of it to be arrested.
“I don't think you plan on hurting anybody or molesting anybody,” Alex said. He didn’t believe this, but it’s part of the dance to getting the confession. Henry shoved his hands in his pockets. He had all sorts of excuses. His nephew stole his phone and sent those messages. He thought Sally was older. He just wanted a friend. It’d been 26 years since his last sexual encounter.
“I want to turn this around for you,” Alex said. “Get some help for you.” He did not believe this to be the case. And it was hard to hear Alex offer the demon any slack. But Alex knew this was the best way to interrogate demons. Downplay their involvement. Make them calm. Put the blame elsewhere. Give them false hope.
“I’m trying to figure out if Sally didn’t want it, what would’ve happened?” Alex asked, alluding to the thought of the two of them alone in her house.
“Nothing would’ve happened,” Henry said. “I’m not gonna be accused of that shit again,” Henry said—alluding to molestation. “I didn’t do it the first time, and I’m not gonna do it this time.”
Supposedly, his sister’s youngest boy accused him of molestation, but Henry claimed that Child Protective Services put that idea in the boy’s head. He did ten years in prison for it. He got out in 1996 and enough time had passed that he’d been dropped off the sex offender registry.
“What did you think about with Sally?” Alex asked, trying to get a straight answer.
“She’s pretty. I’m not gonna deny that,” Henry said. “But I’m not gonna force her into shit. I’m not going to get her into trouble and get myself into trouble again... for something that I didn’t do before.”
We had messages from him asking Sally for pictures of her underwear. He’d been enthusiastically explicit.
“I’m just not hearing the truth,” Alex said.
“To me it’s the truth,” Henry said. “I just wanted to be friends. I wanted to see where it goes, but not sexually.”
“But, Henry, every single message is sexual… Outside [your house], we saw you grab her arm... I know you’re a guy with hormones,” Alex told him, maintaining the good cop routine to extract information.
“It wouldn’t have gone that way,” Henry said.
“How far do you think it would have potentially gone… if she was OK with it?” Alex asked.
“Maybe just a hug or a kiss… It wouldn’t have went any further than that,” Henry said.
“Are you taking me as stupid?” Alex asked. His tone dropped an octave.
“I’m tellin' you the damn truth,” Henry said.
Alex read some of the messages out loud. Henry had told Sally he wanted to bend her over. He said he never wanted to lose her.
“We’re just friends!” Henry said. He exclaimed it as if that made the situation any better. The old man befriending what he believed to be a 12-year-old girl.
“Well, after you found out her age you still said you wanted to get her pregnant.”
“That there was just stupid talk,” Henry said.
“How much of it was stupid talk versus reality?” Alex asked.
“It’s all stupid talk.”
“OK, Henry, you’re just fucking lying right now.”
“No, I am not. It was all stupid talk. It wasn’t going to be realistic anyway.”
He reiterated that he just wanted a hug and a kiss in the little girl’s empty house. And then he performed a hug with an invisible person in the field in front of us.
He made eye contact with me as he answered Alex’s questions.
On the way to hunt down Henry the Demon, we drove past deer carcasses blown apart by 18 wheelers. Red splattered across the highway. I saw that gore when I looked at Henry's hog-shaped face. I am not ashamed to say that as I stood in that field, directly across from the demon, I imagined a bullet falling at high speed from Heaven and landing bullseye in the middle of his forehead. I wanted the ground to split open and swallow him unceremoniously. And the angels would swing down and sing “This is what you’ll get.”
Alex asked Henry if he really thought he would’ve controlled himself should he have actually made it into “Sally’s” house.
“I would’ve controlled myself,” Henry tried to say with a straight face.
“That’s bullshit,” Alex said. “Stop lying. Henry, do you really think that I'm the person to lie to about this? Do you think that you're going to convince me that that was the plan wasn't to just go walk over there and have some stuff happen?”
“I don't know because I wasn't thinking that far,” Henry said. “I was just saying the stuff to see how far it went… not in a real way…”
“The real way is meeting her in person… You were walking with her towards her house,” Alex said.
“She told me there was an accident up that way… That’s why I walked up that way with her… I wasn’t planning on nothing. I’m not thinking of nothing ahead of time. I just take it as I go.”
“Realistically… what’s the farthest it could’ve gone?” Alex asked.
“I would let her make the decisions on what she wants,” Henry said.
A small child cried in a yard down the street.
After an hour of questioning, Henry grabbed his stomach in pain. His gut was rumbling.
Alex asked if he’d like to walk back to his house to use the bathroom.
But before Henry could make his way out of the field, he defecated himself. He shook his pantleg, and it fell into his shoe. He took a small leaf and tried scraping it off. It got in his fingernails.
Henry decided to remain in the field. Alex continued questioning, hoping to get to a point where he could get an admission of having child pornography. Then he could call the cops.
“Is there something that happened to you as a kid that we should know about?” Alex asked.
“I guess my aunt’s one daughter sexually molested me. I was probably seven or eight…”
“Do you think this trauma gets lived out online?” Alex asked. He liked to find ways to take the blame away from the demon to get them to let their guard down more. This has proven effective for Alex in getting the confessions. In Alex’s experience, demons sometimes like to try and appeal to your sympathies to writhe their way out of the interrogations. Maybe Henry was molested. Or maybe he just said that in an attempt to illicit sympathy. Either way, it didn’t matter.
Henry said he guessed it was possible he projected his childhood trauma into the internet.
“Is there anything on your phone that we can get rid of right now that could get you in trouble, like images… of younger ladies under 18?” Alex asked. His tone now softened.
Henry said no and was adamant. He admitted to having a photo of a naked woman in her 30s. And he had some photos of the neighbor’s young kids in their swimsuits—which he told us the neighbor sent to him.
After about two hours, Henry would not relent. Even though we had all the messages between Henry and someone he thought was 12, it would not be enough in Ohio to arrest him. He had been honest about his intentions with Sally, but unless he admitted to having child pornography on any of his devices, we could not call the cops. There was nothing more we could do.
“Well,” Alex said, disappointed. “I recommend you walk back to your house now.” He stared down at Henry 's hog face. “Stop messaging and fucking with kids,” Alex said. “Get out of here.”
We followed Henry back to his house. My car was still parked outside. I expressed my own disappointment to Alex. It seemed insane that this demon could go back to his life without consequences.
Right after Henry walked back into his house, Alex decided to knock on the door. He wanted to tell Henry's sister-in-law what was happening. She answered the door as Henry walked back down into the basement, reeking of his own feces.
“Ma’am,” Alex said, “Henry was messaging a 12-year-old girl.”
He handed her all the messages.
“I’m not his keeper,” she said. She seemed more upset that Alex was standing on her porch than about what she’d just been told about Henry.
“Well,” Alex said, “Do what you want with these [messages] and realize the monster that lives in your house. If I were you, I’d kick him out because he’s just going to bring trouble here… He’s messaging underage kids… willing to rape them… If you read these messages, you’ll see the monster that is your brother-in-law.”
When we left Henry's, Alex asked me to drive by another demon’s house to see if he was home. We knew what kind of car this one drove. This demon had offered “Sally” $20 for sex. This would have made for an immediate arrest, but when I drove by his house—the car was gone. The demon wasn’t home.
We put in the coordinates for the next one on the list.
*
Franklin the Demon sat at his computer flipping back and forth between his favorite online bingo game and sending Sally sexually explicit messages on Facebook. He’d filmed himself masturbating and sent that too. He told her he could teach her about sex.
His computer was in the middle of the house, and there was a folder on the desktop where he kept his stash of child pornography.
He was messaging Sally this evening. He typed with one finger. The place smelled like an ashtray. The occasional roach crawled across his desk. A flyswatter and a calendar hung on the wall just above his head. Franklin had taken his Facebook profile picture while sitting at this desk, the same desk where he also consumed child pornography.
Although he has a bad heart, he still chain-smoked. Every day, he wakes up and takes eight pills for the heart and seven at night. He likes to tell people, “Don’t have a heart attack.”
Sally’s Facebook bio says she likes Paw Patrol and Dora the Explorer. Recently, Franklin left a comment beneath one of Sally’s latest selfies. He wrote “sexy.” They’ve been talking since October.
Sally had told him where she lived, and Franklin had driven to her neighborhood before just to get an eye on the community. He kept telling Sally how eager he was to meet her.
She messaged Franklin that her parents would be out for a while tonight. He told her he’d like to put his face between her legs.
Franklin figured he had to go to town to pick up his wife from her job at the pizzeria anyway, so he would stop by to see Sally first. Ohio State Route 666 was between his house and Sally’s.
He lived about 25 minutes away.
As Franklin took the ride toward Sally’s apartment, I was staked out at the apartment complex’s entrance, waiting for him. Alex and his team waited by the vestibule where Ash, in her Sally costume, waited as bait for Franklin. They picked a random place to tell Franklin. This seemed to have good lighting and was still rather public—nothing too isolated. It was already dark.
I was watching for a blue truck, but he could be in any vehicle. Once I see him, my job was to tell Alex so that Ash can be ready.
I stayed on the phone with Alex so that when I identified Franklin I could immediately tell him so Ash could get into position.
“Have any of these guys ever killed themselves?” I asked Alex on the phone while we waited.
“We had one person do that,” he said. “He had about 15,000 images of [child porn] and it was on his company devices. And the cops didn't even show up for that catch in Missouri. But the next day, I got in touch with the Feds about it, and apparently his boss came to his house confiscated the devices and turned them over to cops. He knew it was about to come crashing down. And he killed himself.”
“I can't imagine Henry living much longer,” I said.
“Henry 's not gonna kill himself,” Alex said. “He has nothing to lose. The guy that killed himself had a pretty damn good job and a nice house.”
“What about this guy, Franklin, do we know if he has a family?”
“Married with two kids,” Alex said.
It was getting to be past 25 minutes. Franklin should have been here by now. Alex and I pulled up the maps on our phones to make sure there’s no other entrance into this place. I’m parked at the only one.
A dark truck entered, but it wasn't Franklin.
A few minutes later, there was one car that drove in and started circling the community suspiciously. Everyone has the potential to be suspicious when you’re staking a place out, but this car made a few laps around the complex, stopping every so often to look at each building. It looked like he was reading addresses, trying to figure out which was the right place he was looking for. The trunk was tied down with a bungee cord. When it drove by me again, I saw an older man behind the wheel. I told Alex I thought it might be Franklin.
They had eyes on the car. It eventually parked near them. The man got out and walked towards the address they gave Franklin. He wore a bright orange hoodie and had a little bit of white hair left around the ears.
Alex said, “That’s definitely him.”
Franklin approached Sally in the vestibule, and Alex and the team hopped out of their car to confront him.
This interrogation took place in a stranger’s yard. They kept peeking out from behind their blinds to see what was going on. TVs flashed various colors from every window around us.
Franklin kept telling Alex that he only came here to see if Sally was real. He was just curious, he said.
Over the course of an hour, Alex has flipped from some small talk to questions about the type of sexual fantasies Franklin has. Eventually, after some obvious flaws in Franklin's logic, he began to tell us some truths.
When Alex feels like he’s close to an admission, he’ll sometimes use the image of planes crashing into the Twin Towers. He will ask the demons if they’ve seen that footage. They will say yes. Alex will say something to the effect of I’m sure you didn’t like watching that video, but you still watched it—it doesn’t mean you enjoyed it. This loophole in logic can help keep the interrogation moving towards an admission.
First, Franklin admitted to having videos of grown men hooking up with young women. He eventually conceded that he’s watched pornographic videos of children as young as six. He described the expressions of the children’s faces. He said the videos are typically short, ten to thirty seconds. As soon as he finally admitted to watching these videos, he spoke about it casually, as though this wasn’t profoundly sick.
Alex asked Franklin questions to see if he could find who Franklin got the videos from—who was the seller? Either Franklin didn’t remember names or won’t share them.
Franklin's nearly incapable of finishing any thought without trailing off into “blah blah blahs.”
Alex reiterated to Franklin that his intention was to track down the “real bad guys. Who’s making and selling this stuff? What I can learn from you is basically how to go after those guys.”
Franklin said he got most of these videos through Facebook.
“What was your goal for coming here?” Alex asked.
Franklin said he just came here to be friends with Sally. That he had no intention of having sex.
“I just wanted to see if she was real,” Franklin said.
Alex got him to admit that he would’ve walked into her apartment. He wanted to touch her.
After some time in the cold, Franklin started to grab his chest. He told us he had a bad heart. He had bypass surgery not too long ago.
He grabbed his chest again and looked like he was about to collapse down the little hill we were standing on. Commercials and movie scores carried through the thin windows.
“Want to sit in the car?” Alex asked.
Within minutes of taking a seat in the car, Franklin admitted to having at least 40-50 videos of child pornography on his computer at home. Alex has done this long enough to know that when they say 40-50, that typically means 400-500. A demon’s confession is never the entire truth—on many occasions, at least during the first round of confessions, the demon will downplay the truth. Regardless, this admission is enough to call the cops, and Alex planned on calling them once we pulled up to Franklin's house. He'd invited us over to help delete all the child porn.
His house was between a playground and the fire station. One of the neighbors drove by with a bunch of heads of taxidermy deer in the bed of his truck.
Franklin invited Alex and the team inside. Alex called the cops while sitting in the house.
His wife seemed more worried about losing the schedule that’s on the computer. But Franklin assured her that her schedule was on her own computer, not his. As they waited for the police, Alex and Franklin discussed football and the hours local restaurants kept.
Franklin sat nonchalantly at his computer. He drank Genesee beers. The moment he finished one, he cracked open another. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. He paid no attention to the roaches crawling across his keyboard.
Franklin played bingo on the computer as he waited for the cops. He rested his head against the wall as he looked at the computer.
He talked to Alex about a brain injury he claimed to have received in a football game when he was much younger. His grandpa died during his freshman year of high school. Said his life went downhill after that. When he turned 17, he said he went to a mental health place. He had suffered from terrible migraines. They told him it was from smoking weed. They put him on medication and he said he got better.
Franklin said his older brother and sister were both brutally raped and he claimed that because of this they both became gay—and this, he said, was why he never makes jokes about gay people.
“Anything happen to you?” Alex asked.
“No, thank God,” Franklin said.
The level to which he was relaxed, considering the situation, made it all the more sinister. There were strangers in this man’s house because he’d just been caught trying to meet up with a 12-year-old girl and rape her. And there was child pornography on his computer. Meanwhile, his wife and adult son went about the night as though it were no different than the last. Maybe they weren’t surprised? Maybe this was their way of handling the gravity of the situation? Maybe they were just mindless and didn’t comprehend Franklin's absolute degeneracy?
The police announced themselves and entered the house.
Alex told Franklin to tell the police about the child porn on his computer.
“Do you have child pornography on your computer?” the officer asked with a trace of reluctance.
“Yeah,” Franklin said.
“Why do you have that, sir?” the officer asked. He sounded urgent now. “You know that’s illegal?”
“Yeah, I know,” Franklin said.
“Why do you possess child porn?” the officer asked. His tone grew angrier.
“Just some things on Facebook people sent to me,” Franklin said.
“Why are you messaging children?” the officer asked. “That’s not good. You can’t be doin that. It’s awful.”
Since Alex had maintained his good cop routine throughout most of their exchange tonight, while the rest of us kept a straight face, I felt a great sense of relief hearing the first person all night announce openly the degree to which Franklin was depraved and insane and disgusting.
The cops confiscated the computer and arrested Franklin.
Franklin's wife was most concerned about having wi-fi since the cops took the computer, but the cops assured her they left the router.
It was about 1 a.m., and the street seemed darker than all the other streets in the neighborhood.
As Franklin sat in the back of the patrol car, there was a sound outside that I couldn’t quite discern. It sounded like fire crackling or dead branches scraping against each other.
I stared into the dark trying to figure out what was making the sound. I scanned the house to see if something was climbing it—like many claws against siding.
*
Alex and his team finally grabbed some food at a gas station at 1:30 in the morning. They had to drive three hours in the opposite direction to drop off Ash and then drive deeper into Ohio.
They wouldn’t be using a decoy later today. We were just going to show up to the next guy’s house.
I asked Alex about the next demon.
He looked at me with a smile and said the next one’s a fireman… and a firearms instructor.
*
Josh the Demon was 23, and newlywed since July.
Witch hats still hung from the porch from Halloween. Red letters taped to his front door said: KEEP OUT. Josh grew up in this town. Most of his family was here. His house was on the side of a busy road. Amish horse carriages frequently passed by.
Josh recently sent a picture of his penis to Sally, who was posing as a 13-year-old. He told her he wanted to take her virginity. He sent her emoji face kisses when she told him she’s in school. He told her he had other photos of 12-year-old girls and expressed how badly he wanted to meet her in person.
He has considered telling his best friend about his fantasies, but he knows his best friend wouldn’t understand.
We drove right up to Josh's house, parked in the driveway, and Alex knocked on the door. No answer. Alex walked back to the car, but just as he was about to get in, Josh emerged from behind the house. He was shaped like a large toad—all torso and little legs.
Knowing he was a firearms instructor, I took note of his hands in his pockets and what he might be concealing. He had a “We the people” tattoo on his right forearm. He wore a baseball cap down low making it difficult to see his eyes. Alex walked him into the pasture behind the house where two horses grazed.
Josh admitted fairly quickly to having viewed and collected child porn. He said he gets it through massive Dropbox folders. He compared it to trading baseball cards. He paid for it using Cash App.
He said he knows he needs help. He blamed these urges on stress. It was bright in the backyard, and the sun cast upon Josh like bleach on blood at a crime scene.
He occasionally glanced over at me and the cameramen. Hands in pocket. One hand was on his phone, but I couldn’t tell what the other hand was holding. It could’ve been a knife or a flashlight—it was long and silver. Alex and his team were calm.
Josh told us about the menus from which the porn can be purchased. Depending on what you want: images, videos, or special requests, prices can start at $5 and go up to $30 and higher. He purchased most of it through his Instagram which is linked to his Cash App. He’s seen infants and toddlers and breast-feeding porn and a six-year-old Indian boy receiving oral sex from an adult woman. His eyes kept shifting left and right as he answered Alex’s questions.
“I don’t care about the buyers, I care about the sellers,” Alex said, attempting to disarm Josh into giving names. He didn’t have names, but he was willing to give Alex access to whatever’s on his devices to be deleted. The cops had already been called.
Alex saw the cops arrive from over Josh's shoulder. He asked Josh to open his phone so he could help delete the porn for good. Just as Josh unlocked his phone and handed it to Alex, the cops approached from behind.
There was a look of concern in Josh's face. Now it was real. It wasn’t just two 23-year-old dudes chatting in the yard. Now he would be revealed to his entire town as a demon who sought the company of children. His wife was still inside the house—though I couldn’t tell if she’d been watching us through the windows.
Josh told the police what he told Alex, and as they walked him up to the patrol car to be arrested, I saw a single witch hat in the backyard. He watched us from the backseat of the cop car as I asked Alex if he thought these demons could be redeemed.
"No,” he said without hesitation.
I told him I believed these demons must be completely removed from society forever. There was no rehabilitation for this.
One of the other officers went into Josh's house to tell his wife what happened. She might’ve been peeking through the window this whole time, but I am not sure. If she had, she would’ve seen her husband surrounded by the demon hunters in their backyard. Maybe she felt relief. Maybe she’d hate us for fracturing what seemed like a nice and quiet life.
When the cop came back outside, he told me that she was surprised but remained calm. He seemed a little bothered by the calmness. He couldn’t tell if she was in shock or if she had her own suspicions.
When we were about to leave Josh's, the old man next door walked out onto his porch.
When he was told what happened, he asked the police if Josh was allowed to come back.
“I got grandkids myself,” the man said. His wife joined him on the porch. They were visibly disturbed.
When the cops drove away with Josh, we were the last thing he saw. This gang of strangers that just derailed his life. Soon, his hometown would know about the demon that’s been hiding underneath Josh's human mask.
*
This weekend's hunt started at 10 a.m. on a Saturday in a Wal Mart parking lot. The American flag on the roof was at half-mast.
As we prepared for the first hunt, I imagined the face of the demon and how the banality of evil could be behind the face of any man in that parking lot. Was it the young guy in the red Volkswagen? Was it the old man hunched over the steering wheel with the callous face? The twenty-something with the backwards hat? The man at the store’s entrance looking at the children’s Halloween costumes on the clearance rack?
“What does this do to you?” I asked one of Alex’s cameramen.
“We’re used to it at this point,” he said.
Running with the demon hunters for a weekend made every other urgent news story fade into the recesses of things I cared about.
I asked Alex how he got started doing this. It began in 2019, when he was 19. He wanted to be a policeman but had to be 21 to graduate from the police academy. Around that time, he saw videos of people catching child predators and decided he wanted to give it a try.
There’s a respectable yet unhinged fearlessness to him that I think is a prerequisite to do this work.
One criticism I’ve heard about Alex is that they only catch old mentally ill men. But it’s also young men. It’s unemployed men, and it’s men with good jobs. Men in positions of authority, and men who exist in the gutters on the fringes of society.
Alex has confronted demons parading around as elementary school janitors and caring fathers of toddlers who won custody (who they then molested and offered up to other men).
I told Alex I was surprised at the number of younger predators he’s caught.
“The younger ones have the most warped mind we've seen,” he said. “We got a 19-year-old in Wyoming who’s convicted now. He wanted to rape an 11-year-old and an infant, and he brought a knife to go chop up both of them.”
I told him I wish there was a way to assemble an army of people like him.
“It takes a lot of work,” he said. “There’s a lot of waiting around, a lot of planning. We just planned a trip from Houston to Maine to Vermont to Ohio."
“What's the solution to this scourge?” I asked.
“The way I look at it is if you have a room full of trash, you know, removing some of it is better than removing none of it… It would be nice to see more people doing it, but it should be done with the intention of putting them in jail. You should research state laws and chat with [the demons] in a way that will get them convicted, not just caught,” Alex said.
They were so busy that it became more apparent than ever that Earth was populated with a terrible number of these demons. Alex could do this 24/7 if it was humanly possible.
These demons don’t just hide in the shadows where, I think, a lot of people would like to prefer they prey. (If they have to even think about this level of evil at all—it’s too easy for many people to scroll past these headlines about monsters in skin suits who hurt kids.) But the demons don’t relegate themselves to the periphery of society. They step confidently into the daylight to go about their deeds. They might live next door. They might teach your children. They might appear completely well-adjusted and interact with all the appropriate social cues. They might also be the quintessential piles-of-flesh that you’d inherently know to avoid in public—but even these demons can gain access to your children through the internet.
“Evil has no limits,” Alex told me with a calm and steadfast this-time-it's-war look on his face. Then we were off to stake out a gas station. Our plan was to nab a guy who offered $20 to a 12-year-old for sex.
These are vampire stories. The demons feed off destruction. Their fetishes are built upon nightmares.
I think you must adopt a healthy paranoia about this population of demons. Especially if you’re a parent. You need to be hyper-vigilant, hyper-aware, and don’t let the Internet or schools or government or anything become your child’s surrogate parent. There are monsters looking to step in where you are absent. You can't rely on the cops for protection, and Alex can only drive so fast across the American wasteland.
