Stephen Dean – KPRC Investigative Reporter

Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist Stephen Dean has been tackling the stories that other reporters shy away from since 1984.

The author of two nationally published books, he is now a highly sought-after expert on Internet crimes and culture.

Long before computers were a household fixture, Dean started breaking new ground on Internet crimes in 1996, and his extensive digging has been sending cyber-criminals to prison since joining the KPRC Local 2 Investigates team in February 2001.

In early 2004, he started exposing child predators by posing as a child online, a technique that is still used by other newsrooms and police agencies to this day.

Dean's reporting changed the World Wide Web overnight. In 2005, his expose of chat rooms geared solely toward indecent acts with children prompted hundreds of chat rooms to be unplugged.

His work is featured in the National Museum of Television and Radio in New York and in a news-writing textbook at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Dean started his career at his hometown radio station, shutting down a fertilizer plant as one of his first accomplishments while still in high school. Families credited him with saving their family farms and livestock from illegal pollution. That's when Dean fell in love with investigative reporting.

Dean has been married to the love of his life since 1997. He loves trail-riding with his friends, water-skiing and anything else on the water, along with traveling with his wife.