Megan Kanka

Case background and investigation

Megan Nicole Kanka was seven years old when she disappeared from her neighborhood in Hamilton Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, on the evening of July 29, 1994. According to the New Jersey Supreme Court's 1999 opinion in State v. Timmendequas, she was last seen at about 6:30 p.m. and had gone to a house across the street, where a neighbor, Jesse Timmendequas, had a puppy.

Timmendequas, then 33, shared the house with two other men, Brian Jenin and Joseph Cifelli. Court records and news reports state that all three had previous convictions for sex offenses and that Timmendequas had met them while in custody. According to Wikipedia's summary of the record, he had been convicted in 1979 and again in 1981 of offenses against young girls and had served about six years at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. Megan's family said they had not known about the men's histories.

According to the court opinion, Timmendequas was questioned by police and confessed on July 30, 1994, telling officers that the child's body was in Mercer County Park and leading them to it. Prosecutors said he had lured her into the house with the offer of seeing the puppy, sexually assaulted her and strangled her. He was charged with capital murder, felony murder, kidnapping and four counts of aggravated sexual assault.

The trial was held in Trenton before Judge Andrew J. Smithson, with a jury drawn from Hunterdon County because of pretrial publicity, according to the court opinion. Time reported that the jury found him guilty on all counts on May 30, 1997. On June 20, 1997, the same jury returned a verdict of death, as reported by CNN and the Washington Post. The New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the sentence on August 11, 1999.

New Jersey abolished capital punishment in December 2007. CNN reported that Governor Jon Corzine commuted the sentences of the eight men on the state's death row, including Timmendequas, to life imprisonment without parole, and signed the abolition law on December 17, 2007. In June 2011, CBS New York reported that an appeals court allowed him to continue pursuing a claim that his trial lawyers were ineffective, while leaving his sentence in place. No source consulted indicates that his conviction has been disturbed.

Megan's parents, Maureen and Richard Kanka, campaigned for communities to be told when convicted sex offenders move in. According to the New Jersey State Police, the state's registration and community notification laws were signed on October 31, 1994, about three months after the murder. President Bill Clinton signed a federal Megan's Law on May 17, 1996, amending the Jacob Wetterling Act so that states were required to release information about registered sex offenders to the public.