CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Vigilante groups are trying to expose online predators across the country. Now, a Cincinnati man is facing a felony after one of these groups caught him in Iowa.
Walter Conkright, then 27, was arrested this past fall in Cedar Rapids after police say he tried to meet up with a 13-year-old girl he was communicating with on a messaging app.
The user on the other end of the screen wasn’t actually a teenager. It was an adult woman posing as a child. The woman works with Bikers Against Predators, a nonprofit that attempts to catch and expose online predators.
The organization was founded in 2021 and leaders say they’ve exposed more than 250 online predators ever since.
“I was just curious, ‘How bad is this issue?’” said Boots, who helped start the organization. He uses a pseudonym for protection.
Boots decided to make a fake profile, posing as a child. Within about five minutes of launching that profile, he had an individual ready to meet.
“That's when I knew that this was going to be bigger than I ever imagined,” he said.
Boots said the organization has traveled nationwide to track predators, including in Florida, California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The rules are simple: Boots said the organization never targets individuals or messages them first. The group uses real adults who look like children, then edits their pictures to make them look even younger. Once the decoys tell the other user their age, it’s up to the other user to continue the conversation or end it.
“It’s up to that individual to then bring up the sex topic,” Boots said.
In October, the group tracked Conkright to a hotel. Police say Conkright had been messaging one of the group’s decoys who was posing as a 13-year-old girl. Once there, Boots said the group confronted Conkright and contacted police.
Conkright was charged with Enticing a Minor - Under Age 16. He pleaded not guilty and the court says his trial is set for April.
Boots told WCPO that the goal is to spread awareness about the dangers online.
“We, 20 years ago, made this a huge issue,” he said. “It was on Dateline NBC that grown men were talking to children on home computers. We got home computers walking around in our hand, kids walking around with them in their hands. How is this not still an issue?”
Criminologists told WCPO these groups might inadvertently jeopardize members’ personal safety, as well as ongoing investigations and the legal case against predators.
“I have respect for these groups,” said Dr. C. Jordan Howell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, who spoke on his own behalf and not on behalf of his university. “These are individuals that care about society.”
However, Howell said there are numerous issues that can arise from their work.
“They could interfere with an ongoing investigation that could tip off a criminal that their actions are being exposed, they are being monitored,” Howell said. “As a result, individuals go underground.”
Howell said there are other possible issues when it comes to how the work could impact court procedures.
“There's lots of laws concerning the chain of custody when gathering and analyzing and even handling digital evidence,” he said. “In one of the videos I saw of Bikers Against Predators, the individual actually handed the vigilante group his personal device. Now, that personal device was in the hands of the biker group. A defense attorney could argue that information was placed on the device, because now there's evidence that that device was in fact in someone else's hands.”
WCPO asked Howell whether the groups were doing more harm than good. He said he wasn’t sure there was a right or wrong answer.
“I’m not sure law enforcement in its current state has the capacity, the manpower or resources to continue investigating and prosecuting online predators and even child predators,” he said. “However, we need to make sure when we're doing this, we're doing so in a systematic way.”
Boots said the group’s goal is to expose the illegal activity, even if exposure doesn’t lead to an arrest.
“What surprised me the most about this is how many guys I've caught more than one time,” Boots said.
He noted that some of the individuals the group has caught have had illicit images on their phone of prior victims.
“I think we've really actually saved quite a few children from harm,” he said.
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