WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Dumfries Police Detective John Chapman’s voice mail sounds like the cell phone recording of an 11-year-old boy, the better to trap the men he meets online.

When Fredericksburg police officers staking out a Fredericksburg hotel Thursday evening arrested Richard John Doucet, it marked the 16th arrest since Chapman started policing the online world of cyberpredators.

Doucet, a teacher in the Canadian province of Quebec, met Chapman in a Google chat room two days after Christmas, starting a dialogue that would run for four more months.

“He got me in a chat room and we conversed for probably four months before he said he could meet,” Chapman said. “He was a teacher from Canada. That was all we knew.”

Police charged Doucet with Internet solicitation, distribution of child pornography and attempted indecent liberties, the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office said.

In a southern Prince William County town with about 5,000 people, Chapman has made a mark turning his prior experience — as a police detective investigating juvenile-related cases — to the Internet, where his reach has seemed almost unlimited.

“We’re a small-town police department so we don’t have a lot of the manpower, and all of us work together, but we each have our specialties,” Chapman said.

Doucet was the second Canadian Chapman has met online, and investigations have taken him to Massachusetts, Ohio and North Carolina.

 Because Chapman is in Virginia, the state’s five-year-minimum sentence for talking to a child sexually online carries weight.

 “If we start talking in a sexual nature, if we chat alone, that’s five years alone,” he said. “When they start disseminating child pornography, that brings it to a new level, that’s when we need to lock ’em up.”

 The investigations have had a sweep from a federal official in Boston to a teacher in North Carolina. One New Hampshire man arrested last year after talking to Chapman online claimed during sentencing that he had been sexually assaulted by a sasquatch as a boy in New England.

dgenz@dcexaminer.com