Sex Predator | Glamour

Over the next few days, the image of Todd sitting in jail played in her head. But another memory kept surfacing too. When Dianna was 15, she'd been sexually molested by an older man. She'd told her mother, who had confronted the abuser, but charges were never pressed. Dianna couldn't accept that Todd was like this man. "I knew what a sex offender looked like. Todd seemed like the furthest thing from that," she says. "I wasn't OK with what he did, but I wasn't OK with him staying in jail, either."

Dianna decided she'd gather the $7,000 to bail Todd out—but not without trepidation. "I loved Todd, but I wasn't sure about my decision," she says. "I kept asking myself, Am I a lunatic for putting this man near my children?"

While Todd waited in jail, Dianna kept a low profile; outside of Todd's family, the only people who knew what had happened were a few trusted friends. She didn't initially tell her daughters, but later that week, when she picked them up from their father's house, she had to face a question from 13-year-old Rachel. Why, she asked, hadn't Todd been around?

"Todd is in trouble, baby," Dianna replied. "He did a bad thing. He went to visit a girl your age for an indecent purpose."

Rachel fell silent, then asked, "What's that?"

Dianna carefully explained and told her daughters that though she wasn't sure about the future of the relationship, she was going to get Todd out of jail and take him to his home. As Jessica and Rachel sat quietly in the back of the car, it dawned on Dianna how much Todd's arrest would affect them. Her thoughts turned to Dateline; their lives would change dramatically when the episode aired in a few months. "The whole world was going to think my girls had a creep for a stepdad. They were going to go to school with that on their shoulders every day," Dianna recalls. Suddenly Rachel broke the silence. "Please don't leave Todd," she pleaded. "You love him, and we love him."

The next night, Dianna posted Todd's bail.

"Thank you," Todd whispered when she arrived. He looked cowed and broken. On the drive to Todd's apartment, Dianna listened to his side of the story. He told her he'd started chatting online with the girl because he was scared of getting married. He hadn't believed she was 14—her language had been too sophisticated, and when he saw her in person, he'd sized her up as being of legal age. (He was right; Dateline's decoys are always 18 or older.) Todd knew he'd made a stupid mistake, he said, but it wasn't anything twisted. He would never, ever do anything bad to a child.

Then Todd told her something that gave her hope: When he'd set out to meet the girl, he said, he'd had second thoughts and turned around. As his car headed in the other direction on the highway, the girl called his cell phone and coaxed him back. Dianna softened. He'd tried to do the right thing, she told herself. Maybe he was the man she'd fallen in love with after all. (When Glamour asked Perverted Justice about Todd's claim that the decoy lured him back, a spokesperson said, "A decoy will often call the suspect to ensure he's not lost on the way to the home." The organization also said, "That's what [predators] do, they blame everyone but themselves. It comes with the territory of dealing with people who are, at base, uncaring, self-serving individuals more concerned with f—king kids than being decent human beings.")