The air was filled with the cries of children playing, the soporific hum of mower blades sweeping across the neat front lawns, and on the stoops of the houses people sipped cool drinks and chatted. Smoke rose from backyard barbecues being lit, and, through the open windows, the flicker of TV screens threw soft shadows on the walls.
Here was a picture postcard of prosperous America, a friendly neighbourhood where parents had a step-up on the property ladder, with access to good schools and friendly locals who would always go out of their way to help.
Yet secreted in the very heart of this American dream, at 27 Barbara Lee Drive, Hamilton Township, New Jersey, virtually opposite Megan’s house at number 32, lurked a monster: a paedophile sex killer whose name was to become a byword for the ultimate in depravity.
The house was occupied by three men whose odd, shifty behaviour had caused a ripple of concern in the street. Residents did not know how they had arrived there and what had brought them together to share the untended, weed-strewn building.
They kept themselves to themselves, keeping their distance, spending most waking hours behind closed curtains. Rumours spread through the locality they may have been in prison, but nobody really knew the depths their dark secrets harboured.
Had the residents known – had they been informed by the police or the local authorities of their background – then the chances are the events that took place on 29 July 1994, and were to wrench the community apart, would never have been allowed to pass.
Jesse Timmendequas, a thirty-three-year-old street sweeper with oversized glasses and a pasty face, was a twice-convicted sex offender with a long history of molesting children.
He had met his housemates, Joseph Cefelli and Brian Jenin, at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center – a jail for persistent sex offenders – where he served six years of a ten-year sentence for attempting to assault a seven-year-old girl sexually. With painful irony, the centre’s motto is ‘No more victims.’
Behind the green gates and white-painted cinderblock walls, with its cells and group-therapy rooms, they had struck up a friendship, forged by their shared fascination with young girls. On their release they decided to room together in the rundown, empty house once owned by Cefelli’s mother.
Timmendequas was cleaning up an old 24-foot cabin cruiser he had bought that day with his friends when Megan Kanka passed by. Drawing her into conversation, he told the trusting little girl that he owned a black puppy and offered to show it to her.
Giggling with excitement, Megan followed him inside and was lured into his upstairs bedroom. She was never seen alive again.
Newly awake and frantic at her daughter’s sudden disappearance, Maureen Kanka called the police just before 9 p.m. As the hours slipped away, the street was filled with officers, neighbours and local firemen as a huge search for Megan got under way. The night was splashed with the revolving red and blue lights of police cars and the hot, white dazzle from TV camera lamps.
More than three hundred volunteers gathered as news spread, fanning out to search backyards, outhouses, wasteland, anywhere Megan might have been hidden. ‘Please, please, help us find our daughter,’ pleaded Maureen to the TV cameras. ‘She’s a wonderful girl… she’s only seven. Let her come back.’
Among those who calmly offered his services to parents Maureen Kanka and her husband Richard in the door-to-door search for Megan was none other than Timmendequas. Maureen took a moment to scold herself for having been suspicious of the man who stood before her, appearing genuinely concerned. She barely noticed the raw and livid bite mark on his hand as he offered to take a photo of Megan around the area and show people in case someone recognised her.
Officers on the scene, however, were way less impressed with his solicitous offer of help and asked to search the house occupied by the three men. Then, shortly after midnight, three detectives again called at No. 27, where they obtained a signed consent form to carry out another search.
Summoned to give a statement, Jesse Timmendequas started shaking and sweating. He wouldn’t look them in the eyes. He sat nervously in his chair, arms folded across his chest. Suspicious, the cops asked him to accompany them to headquarters, where he was questioned until dawn, only to be released after promising to return later that day.
Unsatisfied with their findings, police undertook another search of the house, where, in a rubbish bin, they found a rope with apparent traces of blood, and the waistband from a child’s pair of shorts. The scrap of torn clothing was shown to Maureen Kanka, who, horrified, immediately confirmed that it belonged to Megan.
Timmendequas was formally arrested and again hauled down to the police HQ, where he was interrogated at length until he finally broke down and told the whole story in all its horrific, unsparing detail to detectives.
According to his confession, he lured Megan into his bedroom with the promise of seeing his puppy. As he started to molest her sexually, pinning her to the floor, she started to scream in a desperate bid to escape his clutches and run back home.
Only a few yards separated her from the sanctuary of her own home, which she shared with her mom, Maureen, aged thirty-three, father Richard, who was forty-three, elder sister Jessica, aged eleven, and eight-year-old brother Jeremy.
Determined that his victim would not escape, Timmendequas grabbed Megan and, in the tussle, she bit him hard on his hand. Grabbing a trouser belt, Timmendequas looped it hard around the terror-stricken little girl’s neck to drag her back into the room, slamming her head against a chest of drawers.
By now, Megan was bleeding from a gash, so her attacker put a plastic shopping bag over her head to stop the blood spattering onto the floor, then used a second bag to tie off the first around her neck. Finally, he wrapped the belt tightly around her neck.
Her life ebbing away, Timmendequas stuffed her into a large toy box that had been converted into a toolbox and carried her downstairs to his van. Megan was heard to cough from inside the box as he hauled away his prey.
‘What was your intention of bringing her into the house?’ a detective demanded to know.
‘My intentions were to just feel her up and kiss her and try to get her not to say anything. I didn’t want to hurt her physically, but I knew I was hurting her mentally by what I was doing,’ replied Timmendequas.
‘What do you mean “feel her up”?’
‘Rub my hands up and down her legs and feel her butt. I learned that my main attraction to younger girls was the softness of their skin,’ admitted the sick paedophile.
Asked just how he killed Megan, Timmendequas admitted, ‘I grabbed her by the back of the pants to pull her back into the room and her pants ripped. I grabbed a belt off the door and threw the belt around her. It ended up around her neck. I twisted my arms and she just fell to the floor. She was just lying on the floor and she was not moving. Blood was coming out of her mouth.’
He added, ‘I just didn’t want her to get loose. I was afraid she would tell her mother I put my hand on her butt and tried to kiss her. I was afraid I would get into trouble and go to jail.’
He described how he pulled her shorts down and had tried to penetrate her with his penis but used his finger instead as she lay unconscious but breathing. He also clumsily attempted anal penetration.
All the time, as he spoke in a flat, unemotional tone, the killer showed no remorse. He delivered his chilling account of snuffing out Megan’s life in an uninterested fashion, as though calmly discussing a day out at the New Jersey beach.
His main concern was for himself – the bite Megan had inflicted in her desperation to escape was badly hurting Timmendequas, and he asked police for a Band-Aid.
However sickened they felt, whatever horrors they were experiencing, lead investigators Martin Ingebrandt and Robert O’Dwyer kept the persistent questioning measured and unemotional.
What