Retirement should be the time when you step away from the work world and relax. Retired police chief Jim Murray intended to do just that. And then he bought a personal computer.

From Yahoo:

[But] the 69-year-old retired police chief of this small Missouri town cuts a credible figure as a 13-year-old girl surfing the Web, looking for friends. He knows all the instant-messaging shorthand, the emoticons.

Murray’s retirement job from a rural home office has netted 20 arrests since he started in 2002. His latest catch was the biggest: four felony enticement charges against a town mayor, who after his arrest called Murray up and begged him to make the case go away.

Nineteen other defendants have included a Missouri furniture company executive, an Arkansas professor and a Tulsa, Okla., school security guard. Ten of those men have been convicted and sent to prison. One was deported. The other cases are still pending.

The defendants ranged in age from 24 to 62, with an average age of 39.4 years, and mainly come from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Diamond police said.

While the good work that Mr. Murray is doing is obvious, what drew my attention was the fact that, until he retired in 2000, he didn’t have any computer experience. When he discovered chat rooms, he was angered to be offered pictures of young girls.

Continued from Yahoo:

He contacted experts in the field of Internet sting operation and got training from the National White Collar Crime Center on basic computer data recovery.

Now, Murray patrols the Web from a cramped home office divided between his police computer and a personal computer ringed with photos of his six grandchildren and three adult kids.

Murray remains a detective on reserve status with the Diamond police but he donates his investigation time. He says he only spends about 30 minutes a week on average in chats but several hours more going over hard drives of arrested suspects looking for contacts with other potential victims.

It’s good to know that there is life after retirement. It is better to know that there are people out there thinking of the safety of children on the Internet.

As a technology professional, is this kind of work something that you would consider doing after you retire?