One of the hardest things that Maureen had to do was to pack up Megan’s belongings. She could not bear to part with anything and has left everything stored in a safe place. There are certain things that were special to Megan that Jessica and Jeremy now have in their room as a memorial of their little sister.
We do not know what the future holds for our family now. It feels as raw as if it had happened yesterday. We want life, as it was, back and don’t know if it can ever be again. We worry about the impact Megan’s death has had on her brother and sister, and pray for their wellbeing every day. We grieve differently and take our frustrations out on each other.
Sometimes we don’t know if we will understand – withstand the pain as a family – or if we will be a family in the future.
We had a responsibility as parents to protect her from harm and feel that we have failed her.
The only peace that we have as parents are the moments during sleep when we don’t have to deal with the harsh reality of our everyday lives. And upon wakening when for the briefest of moments we think it was all a bad dream, only to have reality set in and know that it was not. She was – she is – the last thought on our mind when we go to sleep, and the first thought on our mind when we wake up.
We will never forget our little girl who gave so much to everyone around her. For her brief seven years of life she captured the hearts of everyone who knew her. We thank God for allowing us to have had the joy that Megan brought us.
It took Timmendequas only twenty-eight seconds to beg for his life, saying in his squeaky voice, ‘OK, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to Megan. I pray for her and her family every day. I have to live with this and what I’ve done for the rest of my life. I ask you to let me live so someday I can understand and have an understanding why something like this could happen.’
His miserable plea for sympathy was rejected and on 20 June 1997, on the jury’s recommendation and that of Megan’s parents, he was sentenced by Judge Andrew Smithson to be executed, as Maureen Kanka sobbed on her husband’s shoulder.
‘Maureen and Richard Kanka have endured a loss that is truly impossible to image,’ Smithson said. ‘They buried their child. They had to wait three years until justice was meted out to Megan.’
Timmendequas was taken to await his fate on Death Row in the maximum-security jail at Trenton, New Jersey, where he remains today, less than a dozen miles from where he murdered Megan, although it has been over twenty years since New Jersey has executed an inmate. He spends his days watching TV in his 10-foot-by-8-foot cell, occasionally being allowed exercise in a 12-foot-square chain-link cage.
Maureen and Richard Kanka still live in the same house on Barbara Lee Drive, from where they run the Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation. They travel frequently to lecture at conferences and political and legal seminars on Megan’s Law, the groundbreaking legislation born of their personal family tragedy.
They have met Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush. They have appeared on every major TV network. The result of their unceasing dedication is that each of America’s fifty states has now adopted some form of legislation to ensure the public is notified about the whereabouts of predators.
Maureen is the keeper of Megan’s flame. A tireless advocate for children’s rights, she will put everything aside if there is a legal challenge to Megan’s Law, travelling to the courtroom when the decision is delivered. By 2007, her name and that of her lost child had become bywords in the crusade to protect America’s children from evil.
The pressures have not been easy, and it was a ‘celebrity’ role that Maureen and Richard Kanka would have never wished for. They’ve received death threats from sex offenders and, in the months after Megan’s death, Richard slept with a baseball bat, fearing someone would kidnap and murder one of their surviving children. Maureen regularly takes antidepressants to stop her being tipped into the abyss of a grief that never seems to ease.
‘A lot of people think I like the Megan Kanka Foundation,’ she says. ‘I don’t. I hate the Foundation. I hate everything it represents. I do it because there is a necessity to do it. It’s not so much a love/hate relationship than a distasteful/hate relationship.
‘I hate everything about it. There will be a time when I walk away from it, but that time is not now.’
Maureen’s tireless campaign spread to Britain following the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000 by convicted paedophile Roy Whiting.
Her mother Sara got huge backing to press lawmakers to draft a ‘Sarah’s Law’, allowing the public to check on paedophiles. But the government backed down following warnings from police that they would be driven underground and would become harder to track.
Instead a heavily watered-down version was introduced allowing single mothers to investigate whether new stepfathers, lovers or their relatives were known offenders before taking them into their homes. The thrust of the law was designed to prevent child-sex abuse within the family, not from predators living nearby on school routes and overlooking playgrounds.
For the Kanka family, one grim landmark in their lives has gone. The house that harboured the bestial Jesse Timmendequas was bought for $105,000 by the local Rotary Club, which razed it to the ground. Grass and pink flowers were planted where it stood, together with a stone angel and the inscription, ‘One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth.’ It is called Megan’s Place.
Before the house was destroyed, Maureen Kanka took a walk through the rooms, the awful, scabrous rooms where Megan died, so that she could retain for ever a memory of where her youngest, the baby of the family, was to be propelled into the public psyche as the girl whose name was to be always associated with the protection of those like her – seized as they played their innocent, childhood games.
The Fireside Bar & Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming, was just the kind of redneck saloon you’d expect to find in the frontier ranch town whose very name evoked a lawless, Wild West past.
Posters of busty pin-up girls advertising foaming beer adorned the walls, and, above the DJ’s booth, smoke curled through the nostrils of a huge mounted buffalo head.
It was a Tuesday night and the popular locale was crowded with raucous men in baseball hats and jeans, downing pitcher after pitcher of cut-price beer and playing pool. The atmosphere when Matthew Shepard walked in around 10.30 p.m. on 6 October 1998, was rowdy, with a hint of menace in the air. Trouble was just a glance in the wrong direction.
The slightly-built, twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Wyoming was openly gay in a state where God and the gun ruled the high, flat plains. According to his friends, Matthew had been attacked in the past for his homosexuality and bore the physical and mental scars.
Wyoming was also a state where legislators had for three years in a row failed to enact hate-crime laws for fear of a backlash from right-wing voters steeped in the church, conservative politics and ‘traditional family values.’
Matthew’s mother, Judy Shepard, later summed up the demeanour of her vulnerable, troubled son. ‘He had the posture of a victim,’ she recalled. ‘He was the kind of person whom you just look at and know if you hurt him that he’s going to take it – that there’s nothing he can do about it. When he walked down the street, he had the victim walk.’
As Matthew sat drinking at 11.45 p.m., two friends, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, both aged twenty-one, pushed their way to the bar, where they threw down handfuls of loose change for beer.
They were edgily dangerous that night, having spent a week bingeing on highly addictive