Kenneth Johnson "It's an all or nothing law, either commitment or they walk out the door," said Ted Shaw, a Gainesville psychologist. "It's almost a set-up to send them out with no supervision at all." Photo by Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald

When authorities finally caught up with Gary "Catfish'' Mitchell in June 2004, they found two rolls of duct tape, marbles and a canvas sack in his van along with computer disks loaded with child pornography.

	Mitchell "Catfish"

Three months earlier, Mitchell left the secure treatment center that holds Florida's most dangerous sexual predators and hopped a bus to Pensacola to serve the rest of his parole and begin a new life.

He was a changed man.

But the grizzled, 56-year-old pedophile proved far from rehabilitated.

Within two weeks, he began downloading lurid snapshots of children -- including photos of a sobbing 11-year-old girl being raped by a man. He hid copies of the pictures in transistor radios and sent them to friends who remained at the treatment center.

Then, the man who claimed to have molested more than 60 children, fled Florida, parole officers and the state's sexual offender registry and found his way to Nashville, where he landed a job with a traveling carnival, the Cumberland Valley Shows.

His case highlights yet another failure in Florida's program for dealing with the most dangerous predators.

He's among hundreds of predators set loose from a civil commitment program with no halfway houses, no outpatient facilities and no ankle bracelets to ensure men who were dangerous enough to be held beyond their prison sentences are kept in check once they're released, an investigation by The Miami Herald found.