Megan's
Law
Megan's Law, signed in 1996 by President Clinton, allows
states discretion in establishing criteria for disclosure,
but compels them to make private and personal information on
registered sex offenders available to the public. It is
deemed that such public notification:
- assists law enforcement in investigations,
- establishes legal grounds to hold known offenders,
- deters sex offenders from committing new offenses
and
- offers citizens information they can use to protect
children from victimization.
Megan
Nicole Kanka
In July 1994, 7-year-old Megan Kanka accepted an
invitation from a neighbor in Hamilton Township, New Jersey,
to see his new puppy. The neighbor, Jesse Timmendequas, was
a twice-convicted pedophile. He raped her, murdered her, and
dumped her body in a nearby park. Megan's parents said that
they never would have allowed her to travel the neighborhood
freely if they had known that a convicted sex offender was
living across the street. Megan's Law later became part of
the act in an effort to provide community notification.
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Megan Kanka,
victim (AP) |
It had only been three hours, three
hours since Maureen Kanka’s daughter Megan
had vanished after riding her bicycle with a
friend through a perfect summer evening.
Mothers always fear the worst. Maybe
Megan had just gone off to visit a friend,
she thought. Maybe her bubbly blonde
daughter had lingered too long chasing after
fireflies. This wasn’t a hard luck urban
neighborhood where there were potential
predators lurking on every street corner.
This was Hamilton, a small suburban
neighborhood -- not affluent but
comfortable, friendly and, above all, safe.
Whatever had happened, Megan would be all
right. Wouldn’t she?
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Maureen
Kanka (AP) |
Maureen glanced out the window of her
home. Her residential street had been
transformed. Police lights cast an eerie
blue and blood-red wash over the prim
post-war facades of the houses. Television
lights flared. Firefighters, cops and
volunteers, 300 of them, some from as far
away as Bucks County in neighboring
Pennsylvania, gathered into platoons,
waiting for the order to take their search
for the little girl in ever-widening arcs
through the backyards and weedlots of
Hamilton. It seemed like some horrible
nightmare. The lights. The sirens. The
television reporters carefully choosing
their words to squeeze every last drop of
pathos and panic out of the scene.
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| Maureen had almost been on autopilot
when she had spoken to the reporters
earlier. She had expressed what any mother
would under the circumstances: fear and
hope.
“Please, please help us find our
daughter,” she had told the reporters.
“She’s a wonderful girl ... she’s only
seven. Let her come back.”
Maureen stepped away from the window.
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Jesse
Timmendequas (AP) |
It seemed that everyone in the
neighborhood had offered to help. Even that
strange, pie-faced man who had just moved in
across the street. Jesse something. Jesse
Timmendequas. She had spoken to him earlier
that night, records would later show.
Immediately after Megan failed to come home,
Maureen had gone door to door, asking her
neighbors if they had seen her. She had run
into Jesse. He had told her, yes, he had
seen her, earlier that day, while he had
been out in the yard working on his car.
There had been rumors about Jesse and
the two other men who lived in his rented
house. Some said that the men had been in
trouble with the law, but no one knew the
details. Besides, this funny rag doll of a
man with his mop of unkempt blonde hair, his
glasses that seemed too big for his face,
and that strange little wound on his right
hand, a wound that resembled a bite mark,
wanted to help.
He offered to carry a picture of
Megan. He would put it on a flier, hand it
out, he said. Maybe someone would recognize
her. It was something.
How could she have known? How could
anyone have known that this odd little man
would, within 24 hours, lead the searchers
through knee-high weeds to the spot where
Megan lay dead? Raped. Strangled with a
belt, her limp body crammed into a toy box
and dumped in a lonely corner of a county
park.
How could she have known that Jesse
Timmendequas was a monster?
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