Читать книгу Torn Apart - The Most Horrific True Murder Stories You'll Ever Read - Tim Miles - Страница 9

It was early on a warm summer evening that a popular little girl, nicknamed Miss Congeniality at school, slipped out of her comfortable suburban home to go cycling with a pal as her unsuspecting mother snatched a quick nap after an exhausting day.

Bright and friendly with blonde hair and wide blue eyes, chatty Megan Kanka, who would talk to anyone, particularly if they had a dog to stroke and cuddle, was just seven years old and personified the very essence of innocence.

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 they needed to find out, above everything else, was where Megan’s body could be found.

At 6.20 p.m., Timmendequas finally broke down and confessed: ‘She’s in Mercer County Park,’ he said.

‘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 scooped up Megan’s body, put it in a toy box and dumped her in the weeds. What did he do next? He went to a Wawa. He had just committed some of the most heinous acts a human being can commit. Did you hear in those statements one word of remorse? He dumped her body and his only concern was to get cigarettes and a newspaper.

‘After the Wawa, he proceeded home. He crossed the street and that’s where he encountered Maureen Kanka. Maureen is out, distraught, looking for her missing little girl.’

The sight that was to greet police, said the prosecutor, would for ever haunt them.

‘A little blue shirt was all that she wore, on her side, plastic bags over her head, covered in insects. It was a sight so tragic and perverse that every person who saw it will be haunted for ever. And we will be haunted as well. Just the photograph of her body outlined in the weeds was so deeply disturbing for each and every one of you, because this wasn’t TV, this wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t an actress who would get up when the scene was done. This had been a real, live, breathing child. And this was a real death at his hands.

‘We can’t say how long it was until Megan became unconscious. It could have been two minutes, three minutes, longer, shorter. But the defendant in his statement said the struggle in the door with the belt around her neck lasted five minutes. Five minutes, Megan in pain, in terror, the belt being wrapped around her neck. You can almost hear her gasping for air.

‘We will never know how long her conscious terror persisted. We will never know how long it took until the darkness overtook her. We will only know that the last face she saw on this earth was the face of the man committed to her destruction. However long it was, it was an eternity for Megan. We may not know the exact sequence of events, but we do know that, whatever the sequence, it was so repulsive, so disturbing, so unsettling, so horrific, that it permeates your very soul.’

The jury were not spared as Kathryn Flicker drew together all the strands of the killing into a final reproach to the man who sat staring into mid-distance, as though he were not playing any part in the proceedings.

‘Before this trial, I am sure that the image of a toy box was something that brought great joy. It conjured up childhood happiness, laughter, all of the treasures that would be found inside. Instead you will see in your mind’s eye Megan. It is no longer a toy box. It was a coffin, Megan’s crumpled battered body inside.

‘Before this case, you would think of a park as a place that was bucolic, idyllic, peaceful. A place where families would go to enjoy life, where children could run and play. Now it will invoke images of death. It was a place where the defendant chose to dump Megan’s body, a place now defiled by his despicable acts. Megan, cast aside like so much garbage.’

She concluded, ‘No one on Earth deserves to die as Megan did. In pain, in terror, in anguish. Megan died at the hands of a man who knew no mercy, who knew no decency, who showed no humanity. There are not words to express the outrage. There are no words that can express the disdain.’

On 30 May, the jury unanimously found Timmendequas guilty of Megan’s murder, kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault. Polled individually to see if each agreed with the verdict, some shouted an emphatic ‘Yes’ as they stared angrily into Timmendequas’s eyes.

Richard Kanka was called to give a victim impact statement. Shortly after Megan’s body had been found, he’d screamed in the direction of Timmendequas’s house: ‘They should burn that house down.’ Now he had the chance to address directly the man who’d taken Megan’s life, to try in some way to make him face the sheer magnitude of what he had stolen from their family.

Megan. Just moments old when I realised how special Megan was. This little girl battled to start her life, overcoming a difficult time during birth. As time marched on, Megan’s personality and strong will would bless our family.

Her ability to adapt to so many different situations around her was just amazing. She could be a real peacemaker during a brother-and-sister battle and a marriage counsellor when Mom and Dad had an argument. Her bubbly personality would make you forget your problems and make you just laugh.

Megan was gentle enough to have tea parties with her dolls and rugged enough to play in the mud with her brother’s Tonka trucks. Megan adapted and adjusted to the situation that presented itself.

As she matured, ever so gracefully, she not only blessed our family with her traits, she blessed our small community with her love for animals and children. When a neighbour’s child was in need of comfort, Megan was there. When several women in the neighbourhood were pregnant, Megan was there to see if she could help.

Megan was our little community newsletter with live broadcasts nearly every day at dinner time. Megan’s concern for her family was truly amazing. She not only considered herself, Mom, Dad, brother and sister her family, but the entire neighbourhood was hers to love.

Megan’s love for her mother was extra special. That special bond was not apparent with Jessica or Jeremy. But with Mom something special existed. Megan was Mom’s little homemaker, a little Mom at just seven years old.

Megan was a very popular little girl in school and at after-school activities. Megan was a leader at baton. Her personality blossomed everywhere. Named Miss Congeniality in baton two years in a row made me so proud. She was a focused little girl when it came to helping people, friend or foe. It did not matter to Megan when people were mean to her, she always gave a second chance to be friends. That was Megan.

During a Mom-and-Dad confrontation on some domestic issue, Dad didn’t stand a chance with Mom and Megan on the same side. She would tilt her little head to one side and smile and say, ‘You don’t have a chance, Dad.’ That little girl knew the right buttons to push with Dad. That smile will be sorely missed.

The moments that will be missed will be the constant interfering in our lives, the fifth place setting at the dinner table, the little head popping up and down in the rear-view mirror in the car, the constant love and affection for Abby, the family dog, the constant updating of community affairs, a true mediator between Mom and Dad, brother and sister, the bald-headed dolls that were everywhere around the house, the giving and sharing of love we all took for granted. These are a few things I observed as her Dad.

I noticed the bond immediately with Mom and watched it grow ever so strong. Megan was Mom’s little girl. Megan’s bond with Dad was there, but not like Mom, and I accepted that. Keeping an eye out on that future boyfriend, driving her on her first date, watching her prepare for her first prom, teaching her how to drive a car, walking her down the aisle on her wedding day, confronting her fears or anything that would arise – these are the things I will never be able to do with Megan.

Megan was the baby of our family. She was a little over four feet tall, deep-blue eyes and hair that had a mind of its own. She smiled most of the time and never hesitated to help out where she could.

Her favourite colour was pink, her favourite ice cream was mint chocolate-chip. Her favourite book was Good Night Moon. She loved to swim, ride bikes and play with her brother and sister.

Her sister Jessica has an emptiness inside that will always be there for the love she has for her little sister. She will never be able to grow up with Megan, share secrets and be there to offer advice as she thought she would always do as her big sister.

Megan and her brother Jeremy were eighteen months apart. Jeremy lost not only his sister, but his best friend as well. He will always remember how they used to rock on our rocking chairs for hours listening to music on the stereo, and how Megan would call him Joe when they would play, he would call her Sis. He always felt that he was her protector and now feels that he has let her down. His emptiness is great and he doesn’t understand why this had to happen.

It has been necessary for Jeremy and Jessica to undergo therapy sessions to deal with the loss of their little sister Megan. Jeremy still has nightmares and has been found screaming in his closet in the middle of the night.

Jessica, Jeremy and Megan had to share a bedroom because of ongoing construction in the house. After Megan’s death, they could not bear to return to the room they shared with her, so they slept out in the den. We realised after a month that we needed to have our children sleeping in their own room. They said it was hard to be in the bedroom with Megan’s empty bed and all her belongings reminding them that she was not there.

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.