A Baltimore deacon charged with sexually soliciting a minor was discovered in a partnership between local sheriffs and a streaming predator investigation television program.
“We heard that there are rumors that Chris Hansen of ‘Takedown’ was back in Harford County,” Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler wrote in an Aug. 7 Facebook post.
“Well, the rumors are true.”
“In partnership with Chris Hansen’s team, we just completed a week of filming here, and what our joint operation uncovered should concern every parent in our community. Throughout this effort, investigators encountered multiple individuals from within Harford County attempting to communicate with who they believed were children.”
Among those arrested, Gahler wrote, was Kenneth Goedeke, “who was taken into custody after engaging with an undercover deputy posing online as a 15-year-old boy. This case highlights exactly why these operations matter. Individuals continue attempting to approach children, and our investigators are confronting them directly.”
Goedeke, 45, is a deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, ordained in 2023, who has been both employed since 2005 at several Catholic parishes and — from 2020 until February 2026 — at a local Catholic high school.
“Pursuant to Archdiocesan policy, the Archdiocese removed Goedeke’s faculties to function as a deacon and suspended him from ministry and employment, pending the results of a full investigation,” the archdiocese wrote in an Aug. 7 statement.
The deacon was arrested Aug. 6 and charged with two counts of sexually soliciting a minor.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the deacon contacted a detective posing as 15-year-old “Aiden” on a website designed for sexual “hookups” between men — accessing the site and messaging the detective from his office at St. Ignatius Parish in Baltimore.
Charging documents indicate that the deacon arranged to meet at “Aiden’s” house on Thursday while the boy’s mother was at work, and that he both sent a sexually explicit image, and solicited photos of the boy in the shower.
The Baltimore Sun reported that the deacon arrived at the designated residence a few minutes before the meeting time, waited a few minutes, and then placed his car in reverse to drive away. Police arrested him in a nearby Walmart parking lot.
Harford County law enforcement agents said their sting operation was a collaboration with the “Takedown” television program hosted by Chris Hansen, who popularized predator investigation programs with the 2004 launch of NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.”
In additional to criminal charges which could see the deacon face up to three decades in prison, Goedeke is likely to face a canonical case that would charge him with numerous canonical crimes, and likely laicized — though the canonical case will not likely be processed until after his state criminal case is resolved.
The risk of clerics using hookup apps to facilitate sexual contact with minors, sometimes inadvertently, has been repeatedly raised by a number of cases in recent years.
In 2019, South Carolina priest Fr. Raymond Flores was arrested after exchanging sexually inappropriate photos with a minor. But because the priest believed the minor was actually 18, he was not charged with a crime.
In an especially notorious case, in 2022, Fr. Robert McWilliams of Cleveland died by suicide in prison, soon after he was handed a life sentence after being convicted on federal charges of sex trafficking, child pornography, and sexual exploitation of minors.