Reality TV goes one step further as judge turns gun on himself

When police and a camera crew pulled up at the home of Louis Conradt in the town of Murphy, the neighbours must have thought it was for a traditional Texas barbecue.

Mr Conradt had a high profile as county prosecutor and a veteran of countless arrests and stake-outs. But what happened next was to shock the wealthy community and raise serious questions about the antics of the broadcast news media which has turned criminal investigations of paedophiles into a reality television show watched by millions.

In this case the veteran prosecutor was the target of a sting by the police, an online watchdog called Perverted Justice and NBC's top-rated show Dateline: To Catch a Predator. Working hand-in-glove with the police, the programme targets paedophiles who cruise the internet trying to solicit sex from children.

For the show in Murphy, near Dallas, NBC rented a house in a well-to-do area and installed hidden cameras throughout. To bait the trap, it brought in professional actors to impersonate underage teenagers.

Before the police came pounding on Mr Conradt's front door, officers had already arrested 24 men, among them a teacher, a retired doctor, a travelling salesman and a member of the armed forces. Unlike the other suspects in the show, Mr Conradt never made it to Dateline house, but he did use an internet chatroom to talk dirty with an actor posing as a 13-year-old boy.

With the cameras rolling Mr Conradt refused to come to the door or answer his phone. The police then smashed their way in to find the prosecutor standing in the hall with a semi-automatic pistol in his hand. "I'm not going to hurt anybody," he is said to have told the police, before blowing his brains out.

The incident caused hardly a ripple in the US, least of all at NBC News. Chris Hansen, the show's presenter, has taken over from Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes as America's most feared journalist. He is unapologetic about the prosecutor's death on live television. "If you're asking do I feel responsible," he told the Columbia Journalism Review, "no, I sleep well at night".

It has since emerged that the operation was so badly botched that it would have been thrown out of court. The search warrant had the wrong date and listed the wrong county. There is also the question of why the police forced their way in when they could have arrested him at work the next day.

It appears that the police were in a rush to pick up Mr Conradt because the Dateline crew had airline tickets for that afternoon and wanted to get the high-profile bust on that week's show.

The prosecutor's sister, Patricia, says Dateline killed her brother. "I will never consider my brother's death a suicide," she said. "It was an act precipitated by the rush to grab headlines where there was no evidence that there was any emergency other than to line the pockets of an out-of-control group and a TV show pressed for ratings and a deadline."