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#STRANGER ON THE BLOCK - A special report. At Center of Megan s Law Case, a Man No One Could Reach.

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Published: May 28, 1996

HAMILTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. Her name was Megan. Most people do not know his name.

He confessed to strangling and raping her in 1994, the police say. She had just finished first grade. He lived across the street. His is the story of what the country fears.

He had pleaded guilty twice before to sexually assaulting small children. In 1981, a judge had labeled him a "compulsive, repetitive sexual offender." Then, after he had served more than seven years for his two crimes, he and two other convicted child molesters quietly moved here, into a neighborhood of split-level homes where people tend their gardens and their children well. Not long afterward, Megan Kanka was killed.

Megan's death has become part of the national psyche. A dozen states have passed laws named for her requiring that communities be notified when sex offenders move in. President Clinton signed a national "Megan's Law" on May 17.

The courts and the public have begun a long debate about whether such laws will work and are constitutional. This spring, the Random House Webster's College Dictionary added "Megan's Law" as a new term in the language.

His name is Jesse K. Timmendequas. He turned 35 last month. He is a slight man with the same dirty blond hair and the same nervous preoccupation with himself that people who knew him as a teen-ager in Piscataway remember.

Mr. Timmendequas (pronounced tim-MEN-duh-qwas) is in jail in Mercer County, N.J. awaiting trial for the killing. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty. He pleaded not guilty. He did not respond to a request for an interview, and his lawyer declined to answer questions for this article.

But public records across New Jersey and interviews with people who knew him and with psychologists, detectives, lawyers, a judge and other professionals who dealt with him fill out a picture as never before. It is a picture of the type of sex offender who defies efforts at rehabilitation, one who, because of Megan's death, has become a catalyst for a national change in the laws.

At a restaurant off the Garden State Parkway one recent afternoon, one of his victims described the bitter memories he left behind. She is a bubbly 22-year-old college student. It has been 15 years since Mr. Timmendequas attacked her.

She described the turmoil she felt when she heard who was accused of killing Megan Kanka.

"I wanted to kill him myself," said the young woman, who spoke on the condition that her name not be used. "They didn't stop him the first time."

She was attacked in 1981 after Mr. Timmendequas lured her into the woods with the promise of firecrackers. Yellowed police records include Mr. Timmendequas's admission that he ran away afterward, thinking he had choked her to death. "After she turned blue, I became scared," he said, according to a police transcript. "I dropped her and I thought she was dead."

The young woman was attacked when she was 7, the same age as Megan Kanka when she was strangled with a leather belt 13 years later. Both girls bit down on their tongues as they struggled for breath.

The stranger in the neighborhood had appeared pleasant, if ineffectual, over the years to people who did not know about his secret thoughts. He helped an elderly man next door move furniture. "He was one of those quiet kids," remembered Mark Ciardi, a classmate in the Piscataway High School class of 1979.

Cases against him stemming from assaults in 1979 and 1981 were routine in the legal system. He benefited from plea bargains in both cases. Because children often make poor witnesses, prosecutors can be reluctant to take molestation cases to trial.

There is no evidence that he benefited from treatment offered him through the years. At one point, he failed to go to counseling even though a judge had ordered him into therapy as the only way to avoid jail. Some who knew what little he would reveal about his thoughts believed there was a danger he would attack children again.

"I didn't think he would kill someone," said Rashmi Skadegaard, who was director of psychology at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel, N.J. where Mr. Timmendequas served six years. "But I certainly thought somebody was going to be his victim."

State law-enforcement officials have repeatedly said that, without a notification rule, the state has no role after any sex offender like Mr. Timmendequas completes a sentence.

The First Attack

Two Little Girls, And a Stranger

If anyone had been watching at about 4:30 on a fall afternoon in Piscataway in 1979, nothing would have seemed unusual. Two kindergarten girls were playing a few doors down from the modest but neatly kept suburban house where one of them lived. Jesse Timmendequas, 18, rode by on his bicycle.

He later told the police he was heading toward the apartment he shared with his mother, Doris Gorman, and her four other children in a rundown building three blocks away, on William Street in the New Market Pond area. Across William Street from where the girls were playing, a wooded embankment led to a stream.

To the extent that people remember Mr. Timmendequas at all from those days, it is as someone who seemed not to fit in. "Jesse was just there," said a Piscataway school administrator who would only speak with a promise of anonymity. "He occupied a space. Nobody even really knew him."