‘Could she still be alive?’ the detectives asked, hoping against hope.
‘No, she’s dead,’ he replied. ‘I put a plastic bag over her head.’
Twenty-four hours after Megan had gone missing, at 7 p.m. on 30 July, a convoy of police vehicles drove into the park, where they were led to the body of Megan Kanka.
The sight was one that the officers will never forget. Dumped among the high weeds, she lay on her side, naked apart from a blue shirt, plastic bags tied over her head. Insects crawled over her discarded, defiled body. Cops hardened by years of crime blinked back tears.
Was he in a blind panic after he dumped the body? No, Timmendequas brazenly conceded, he left the park and drove to a local convenience store called the Wawa (one of a chain in the eastern USA) to buy cigarettes and a newspaper. On arriving home, he ripped up Megan’s shorts and then went outside – where he came face to face with Maureen Kanka desperately seeking news about her missing child.
‘I’ll help you look for her, I’ll hand out fliers,’ he admitted telling the distraught mother. ‘I know we’ll find her.’
A post-mortem examination carried out the next day testified to the terror endured by Megan Kanka. A ligature mark around her neck was consistent with the leather belt found in Timmendequas’s room. Megan had received a blow to the eye, caused either by a fist or her striking her head against an object. Severe bleeding was caused by three separate blows to the head with a blunt object. There was bruising to her back, arms and legs, together with friction burns, indicating she had been held down on the carpet. Further bruising was caused to her colon and right kidney from someone pressing down on her. Her hymen had been torn, and there were tears in her anus. Death was caused by strangulation with the belt.
In the days that followed, a wave of outrage and revulsion swept across first the state, then the nation, finally lapping at the doors of the Oval Office. The seething anger was not only over the savage murder but the fact that prison officials knowingly released prolific sex predators into the community without the need to inform residents of the threat unleashed on their children.
Timmendequas’s background, and that of the two offenders he shared the house with, was kept a fatal secret, filed away in the archives of the Department of Corrections, whose only legal requirement was to inform the county prosecutor where a past crime had been committed and the sexual predator’s scheduled release date.
Timmendequas had been placed directly on the streets of Hamilton Township. Every day he left his house, someone’s child was a terrible risk. Yet everyone who should have known of his lurking presence was kept in the dark about his past record.
That he was an ever-present threat to children since his release from prison was confirmed by Timmendequas, who would later admit to ogling Megan frequently as she played outside in her summer shorts and dresses and fantasising about molesting her as he scoured the pages of pornographic magazines.
He had twice been convicted of sex offences against children. In 1979, he had been convicted of attempting to assault a five-year-old sexually, and was handed a suspended sentence on the basis that he receive counselling. In 1981, he landed himself with a ten-year jail sentence – cut to six for ‘good behaviour’ – for assaulting a seven-year-old child, Leanna Guido, who was eventually to attend court alongside the Kankas as he stood trial for Megan’s murder.
This was the demon who was to settle down opposite Megan Kanka’s home. And Maureen and Richard Kanka were determined that it would never be allowed to happen again to any other child.
In the days after Megan’s murder, almost eight thousand people held a rally at Hamilton’s Memorial Park, led by an impassioned and grief-stricken Maureen, to demand new laws making it a mandatory requirement for parents, neighbours, police, teachers and town hall officials to be told immediately a sex criminal moved into their district so their whereabouts could be publicly registered.
Pink ribbons were tied around the town’s trees – Megan’s favourite colour – as the campaign for the public’s right to know about the monsters in their midst gathered strength.
‘If I had known that there was a paedophile living on our street, my daughter would be alive today,’ Maureen said. ‘We knew nothing about him.’
The seeds of what became known as Megan’s Law were sown, and were to grow into a movement for dramatic and lasting changes in legislation governing the release of sex offenders into the community.
New Jersey’s leaders, urged on by moving testimony from Maureen and a hastily gathered 460,000-strong petition, pledged to review the ‘public notification’ laws while adding a raft of new measures, including lifetime supervision of sex offenders.
In an unprecedented speed of seventy-one days, a package of legislation was rushed through the state government – nine Bills known collectively as ‘Megan’s Law’.
The names, faces and addresses of the men whose very existence threatened children’s lives were to be publicly posted on the Internet and circulars so that they could never again hide in the shadows, toxic strangers in their adopted community.
With lightning speed, an angered President Bill Clinton followed New Jersey’s lead and signed a Bill that required every state to adopt Megan’s Law to warn communities about sex offenders in their neighbourhoods.
Jesse Timmendequas had not even stood trial by the time national legislation had been drawn up and enshrined to reflect national repugnance at the secrecy granted to paedophile attackers.
On 5 May 1997, Timmendequas arrived in a packed courtroom to answer charges of rape and murder as Megan’s parents, electrical contractor Richard Kanka and Maureen, glared at the rabbity-looking man who had so cruelly snatched their daughter from them in his shabby, rented room.
The prosecutor, Kathryn Flicker, painstakingly delivered to the jury a damning package of forensic evidence that, together with Timmendequas’s own dramatic confessions, presented a clear-cut case of how Megan met her end.
One of the detectives, Robert O’Dwyer, was so overcome when reading Timmendequas’s confession to the court that he cried.
But the defendant’s attorney, Barbara Lependorf, did her level best to muddy the waters. She dropped the bombshell that Megan could have brought the murder on herself. A gasp went up in court as Lependorf said, ‘Megan approached Jesse and asked to see his puppy. He didn’t suggest it. He was minding his own business. He was washing his boat and she comes along and asks him. Jesse walked into the house first. She followed him. They went into Jesse’s bedroom and the question is, what happened?’
The prosecutor did not spare the jury in a graphic summing-up of the case against Timmendequas. ‘What kind of man could do such awful deeds?’ she asked as the trial drew to a close. ‘What kind of man could commit such evil acts? The kind of man who could cavalierly dump a child’s body and make his next stop at Wawa. The kind of man who could, after executing her daughter, look Maureen Kanka in the eye, within minutes, and not flinch. The kind of man who had the unmitigated gall to offer to hand out fliers for the child whose life he had just snuffed out. The kind of man who, over the course of two days, could talk about the rape and murder and the brutalising of a child and never show a shred of emotion. The kind of man who could talk about Megan’s death and blame her because his hand hurt.
‘The defendant killed to protect his own self-interest. He killed because he didn’t want Megan to get loose. He didn’t want Megan to tell on him. He didn’t kill in a rage. He didn’t kill in a panic. He didn’t kill by accident. This killing was so cold and so calculating that it is chilling in the extreme.
‘He killed Megan because she posed a threat to him. And, as a threat, he had to exterminate her like you would step on a bug. He proved he would connive, manipulate, lie, deceive and even kill if he thought it would help him.
‘He