Robert Williams

Williams' 2023 inmate mugshot

**Robert Curtis Williams**, also known as **Brandon Williams**, was a predator involved in the Long Beach, California edition of **To Catch a Predator.** He is best known for soliciting a decoy posing as an eleven-year-old girl which made her the youngest posed in the history of Chris Hansen’s predator-catching programs.

## Biography

Robert Williams was a 26-year-old truck driver shortly before Perverted Justice began preparing the Petaluma sting. He began chatting with a girl he believed to be eleven years old that went by the screen name “La’Lilya”. He sent her a webcam invite, which showed him masturbating. At 5’10”, Williams misrepresented his height as 6’6” and solicited the girl for pictures. Knowing her age, he continued to show his genitals on his webcam, saying he wanted the girl to be his “secret” and told her he was looking for a girlfriend, as well as suggesting she help him masturbate if they met. The decoy told him she was living with her father and stepmother (who she calls 'the bitch') in Santa Rosa, with an elaborate story about how she's not allowed to see her mother or her mother's pets because of her grandmother and father. Williams displayed grooming tactics as opposed to being explicitly sexual, comforting her over the situation. He solicited her to ride with him to Las Vegas while her relatives were gone so they could play games and go to the movies.

As the chat continued, Robert declared "La’Lilya" to be his girlfriend and started to make plans to come to see her while he was on a trucking run as he chats with her at various points on his trip, speaking to her on the phone at one point when she manages to "slip away" from her family while staying at a hotel. In a subsequent phone call, he could be heard talking to a dispatcher he was dropping a trucking load off to. He and "La'Lilya" cotinued to speak, with Robert continuing to display grooming tactics without being explicitly sexual with the decoy. When the Petaluma sting was set in motion, "La'Lilya" claimed she had gone to live with her grandmother for some time in the area while her father and stepmother were away. Williams claimed he could only stop by if he wasn't working, which he ended up doing, making him unable to make the trip from Nevada to Petaluma.

When the sting in Long Beach was set up, the decoy claimed she had moved back in with her father and stepmother conveniently closer to where Williams lived, allowing him to come visit after his latest trip in Utah. At the end of the three-day trip, after much planning, he arrived at the sting house a little after midnight, attempting to convince the decoy to come to his truck near a stop sign. Getting no response, he left his truck and briefly talked to the decoy in-person, telling her to "hold on" while he went to get something from his truck (although he may have been attempting to lure her out of the house). While the decoy tried to get him back to the house, the police took no chances and arrested him on-site, not giving him a chance to be interviewed by Hansen.

Williams originally pled No Contest to one count of Attempted Sex With a Minor. Despite the age of the potential victim and the grooming tactics he put on display, he was instead convicted on a lesser charge of Indecent Exposure for masturbating on his webcam. Williams was given what Perverted Justice dubbed the “Long Beach Special”: time served, five years probation, sixty days roadside cleanup and sex offender registration.

In 2016, ten years after his initial arrest and eight years after his release for time served, Williams was charged with and convicted of two charges of Kidnapping and Assault with Intent to Commit a Specified Sexual Offence. Although his sentence is unknown, he was denied parole in 2019 and remains incarcerated as of 2023. He is considered a Well Above Average Risk sex offender, meaning he is considered to have a strong possibility of committing future sex crimes.

## Trivia

* His profile on Perverted Justice isn’t immediately accessible through regular navigation. His profile can only be found through a search engine on the site.
* Although Williams' chat was not explicitly sexual beyond the webcam masturbation shot he shared, his chat is one of the most disturbing in the sense he was straight-up grooming the decoy in a romantic way, even posting on her MySpace outside of the chat calling her his girl. Given his later conviction, it can be assumed he intended on abducting and raping the decoy.
* According to his sex offender information, Williams also goes by three different aliases, presumably to avoid connections to his TCaP appearance. His 'Brandon' alias is not listed, meaning he likely stopped using it following the sting.

## Gallery

One of the suave photographs Williams sent his eleven-year-old gfWilliams' MySpace profile picture at the time of the sting
## Links

* Williams’ phone conversation
* Williams' chat log

## References

1. ↑ https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17016218
2. ↑ http://www.perverted-justice.com/?con=wi11s\_atm