Crime Junkie - PRECEDENT: Megan Kanka

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

When Megan Kanka went missing in 1994 her case exposed one of the holes in the sex offender registry. Yes, people were registered but that was only known to government officials, not to those living among potential predators. Had her parents known who was living right down the street from them Megan’s story might have ended differently. Instead, it set a precedent for community reporting.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/precedent-megan-kanka/

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And remember, this week is gonna be a little different. This is the second of two episodes we dropped today, so already winning on a Monday. And if you missed it, I have some pretty great news this month. I gave birth to my very own mini Crime Junkie.

Her name is Josie, she is perfect, she's everything. And you can actually catch a peek at her on my Instagram at Ashley Flowers. So because I literally pushed a baby out of my body a minute ago, I need a breather. But I also would never leave you guys hanging on a Monday. So instead of giving you no episodes, I'm giving you two stories told by yours truly.

Our partners at Sirius and Stitcher are amazing and they're letting me give you guys for free a series I did that was behind their paywall. It was a series called Precedent, and it's actually just like a Crime Junkie episode, but there's a little more meat behind it. Because not only am I gonna tell you a true crime story, I'm gonna specifically tell you the stories

behind the words and phrases that are integral to our true crime vocabulary. The cases that set a precedent for ever changing our criminal justice system. Sometimes it changed it for the better and sometimes for the worse. This is the second story we dropped this Monday, then me and Britt will be back.

Now in the other episode we dropped today, I told you how the sex offender registry became a thing. That was a giant leap forward for law enforcement, for public safety, for everyone. But sometimes when legislation is new, there are holes. Holes that can't be spotted until it's too late. The same year that the Wetterling Act was passed in 1994, one little girl fell through just such a hole

and into the abyss of evil. Because even though sex offenders were now required to register with law enforcement, in July of that year, there was no formal community reporting. No flyer in the mailbox, no media release, no publicly accessible database to tell residents that a convicted sex offender was now amongst them.

That the person who just moved next door might not be who they say they are. Before there was mandatory community reporting, there was Megan Kenca. This is her story. [♪ upbeat music playing Fuck you, Megan Kenca!" July 29, 1994 was the kind of East Coast summer day

kids in New Jersey dream of. And seven-year-old Megan Kenca was no exception. Her summer days were spent outside, riding her bike to and from her friend's houses until it was time to come home for dinner, or at least by the time the street lights turned on. According to legal documents, around 6.30 that evening, Megan's mom Maureen laid down to rest,

knowing Meghan was going to be outside with her friend Courtney, riding their bikes around the neighborhood. But when she got up a short time later, she was surprised to find out Meghan still wasn't back home. Her bike was out on the front lawn, according to history.com, but Meghan was nowhere in sight. Maureen knew right away that something was very, very wrong, and so she headed out right away to start searching for Meghan, going door to door and asking anyone she came across if they had seen her recently. One by one, the neighbors gave her hopeful but unhelpful news. They had seen Meghan riding her bike, but it was maybe an hour

or so before? No one had put eyes on her recently. One neighbor, a man named Jesse Tumendakwas, told Maureen he had actually spoken to Meghan when she and her friend stopped by to ask him about his boat, which he'd been washing outside in front of his house, but he hadn't seen her since. With no sign of Meghan on their street, Maureen wasted no time calling police, and they arrived at the Kanka house by 8.49 p.m. that evening. Armed with a photo of Meghan and a description of what she was wearing that day, investigators began to do their own canvassing of the neighborhood, talking to all the same people Maureen did. As they

tried to piece together a timeline of Meghan's last movements, one glaring discrepancy stood out. Jesse, the man who said he'd spoken to Meghan about his boat, said that she rode by him at about 2.30 p.m. that afternoon. Now, what catches police's attention about this is two things. One, every other witness placed Meghan on her bike between 5.30 and 6. That evening. Second, even Jesse had said he'd seen her later in the evening when he talked to Maureen the first time, but now that he was talking to police, his story was changing. Police wanted to know why. The investigator talking to Jesse pressed. Did you see her any other times?

Jesse added that he actually did see her on her bike between 5.30 and 6 as well. Now, clearly, when you have a missing girl and a grown man with a shifting story, that's every red flag you need to keep pressing. The investigator continued asking Jesse questions about his movements that evening. Were you with anyone else? Did they see Meghan? Jesse tells the officers that he has roommates and they're actually the ones who own the house, but they were all away between 5.30 and 7, so they wouldn't know much. But at this point, I mean, it's almost 10 p.m. now, all his roommates, including the owner of the house, were now there

and police were able to get access to the residents and permission to do a search. Based on a legal brief filed for this case, this first search was for Meghan herself. They looked through the house, the boat, and the property the house was on looking for any sign of the young girl, praying that they would still find her alive, but they didn't find any sign of her. However, they did find a few things that gave them pause, pause enough to prompt a second more detailed search of the home just a couple hours later at 12.30 in the morning. This time, they got written consent from the owner to look through

the house for anything that might lead them to Meghan or any sign that she had ever been there. They searched the house room by room, starting with the one occupied by the homeowner, a guy named Joseph Sefeli. And it's there under Joseph's bed that police found four pairs of women's underwear. At least that's what they thought at first. But one of the pairs of underwear had little teddy bears on them. They questioned Joseph about what they found, first reading him his Miranda rights, which he waived. And Joseph insisted that the underwear, including the ones with the little bears, belonged to

his ex-girlfriend and were not taken from Meghan or any child for that matter. He pointed out to police that they were adult sized. And besides, he had concrete proof receipts from a shopping trip that evening that he was nowhere near the neighborhood during the time Meghan went missing. They next interviewed Brian Jenin, who was actually out shopping with Joseph at the time Meghan went missing. It seemed their talk with him was just to verify Joseph's alibi, which he did. They hadn't found anything incriminating during their search of his room, nothing tying him to Meghan. Finally, the

officers talked to Jesse, a sweating, trembling Jesse. The officers later accounts in court say that from the get go, Jesse's demeanor was really off. His body language was defensive, and he was incredibly nervous any time police tried to push him on his alibi, which, by the way, wasn't much. He was home, and since his two roommates were out together, he was also alone. Based on the way he was acting, police knew something was up. They could feel it in their guts. So they asked Jesse to come to the station for more formal questioning while officers finished their search of the house, yard, and the

boat. The police's interest in Jesse had shifted, and so it was there at the police station just before 3 a.m. that they first read him his Miranda rights, which he waived. Jesse gave police an official written account of his day. In it, he said he'd gone out that day with his two roommates to purchase the boat, and when he got back, he set to work washing the boat in the front yard. That's when he saw Meghan. And wouldn't you know it? His story changed again. This time, he wrote that he saw Meghan even later in the evening, not between 5.30 and 6, which is what he'd said last time, not between

2.30 and 3, which is what he said the time before that. Now he was saying he saw Meghan at 6.30. Now that discrepancy might seem minor, something a person might do if they weren't keeping a close eye on time, if they were busy, you know, like head down washing their new boat, and truly didn't know for certain whether a little girl came by on her bike at 5.30 or 6.30. I mean, what's an hour, right? But here's the thing. Truthful people, they just say straight up, I don't know. They say I was washing my boat, so I don't know for sure, but I definitely saw a little girl on a bike sometime after dinner, but before my

roommates got home, something like that. And that's all they'll ever say. It's the changing story, the 5.30, the 2.30, the 6.30 detail, that's a classic tell for investigators that something isn't adding up here. But having a gut feeling someone is lying and knowing for a fact they are, those are two very different things. What police needed was to catch Jesse in a lie, and they needed to do it with some kind of physical evidence to back them up. At this point, Jesse was cooperating with police saying he just wanted to help in any way he could. And so police were like, you know it would be a really big help if we could search

your vehicle. So Jesse said yes. When they went to search, they were looking for something really specific, blood, and not Megan's blood like you might be thinking. That'd be a great slam dunk, but this isn't the movies. What they were looking for was Jesse's own blood. You see, he'd been complaining of a hurt hand, and police could see it was visibly wounded. He told them that he'd recently cut it on this curtain rod that hung across the back window of the cab of his truck, but police weren't buying it, and they figured if he cut himself on that curtain rod in his truck, well, they'd be able to tell. But of course,

that appeared to be another lie, because when they searched his truck, they found the rod, but no sign of blood or skin cells that would suggest someone had cut themselves on it. But they did find something interesting, a toy box, a clean toy box, but a toy box nonetheless, and that stuck out like a sore thumb. Even though they felt deep down, Jesse was somehow involved in Megan's disappearance police didn't have enough to arrest him, so they released him at four in the morning with a promise to be back in touch with him soon, and it turned out soon was much sooner than Jesse could have expected. A mere three hours later,

at 7 a.m., officers running on no sleep and adrenaline headed back to Jesse's house. They wanted to search his boat again more thoroughly this time, and they needed consent from Joseph to do it since the boat was on his property. Joseph consented to the search, and the officers climbed on board. But the boat actually became the least interesting thing to them, because as they were searching, they noticed something else, something that hadn't been there when they looked the last time, something that would turn out to give them everything they'd been looking for. While police were on the boat, what they noticed is that sometime

between when they got there that morning and when they were going to leave, someone had taken out the trash. They figured it was worth a shot to go through it. You can learn an awful lot about a person from what they throw away. You can tell what they've eaten, where they've shopped, what they did, and as it turns out, what was in the trash was everything police had been looking for. According to the legal brief on the case, inside Jesse's trash, the officers found, quote, a rope with some knots tied in it and a substance that appeared to be dried blood on it, the waistband of a small pair of pants appearing to be for

a child, and a piece of material that matched the waistband, end quote. Less than an hour after collecting this evidence, the police were at the Kanka's front door asking Megan's mother to do the unthinkable, to look at the small pair of pants thrown out with the trash and tell them if they belong to her daughter. They did. Detectives brought Jesse back into the station and continued to question him about his movements the previous day. Every time, whether he was writing it down or saying it out loud, his story evolved, but he continued to deny any knowledge of Megan's whereabouts or what could have happened to

her. They showed him the little girl's clothing that they pulled from his trash, but again, he denied having anything to do with Megan's disappearance. He said that the items that they thought were clothing were just rags he used at work. They asked if he'd take a polygraph and Jesse agreed, but he failed three times. By this time, police had been questioning Jesse for six hours and he hadn't left the room, but then something changed. Jesse asked if he could speak to one of his roommates, Brian. Police brought him in to speak to Jesse. Brian didn't ask any questions and didn't waste any time either. According to court docs, one of

the first things Brian said to Jesse was quote, you're going to need a friend on the outside. I'll be that friend. Then Brian said quote, they got you, they got you, they got you. Jesse defeated, put his head down and responded with five words. She's in Mercer County Park. Within an hour, Jesse led police to Megan's small body, just as he said they would find her, hidden in long grass and weeds in a park just a few minutes from her home with a plastic bag over her head. With nothing left to hide, Jesse finally told police the truth about that day. And as he did, the horrors of what Megan endured slowly came to light. Horrors the

public learned during Jesse's murder trial a little more than a year later in October 1995. During the trial, the jury heard how on that day Jesse lured Megan into his house by telling her she could see his puppy. And I know a puppy that is so cliche, but Jesse actually did have a puppy, one that he walked through the neighborhood on the regular. Jesse didn't know Megan, but he knew of Megan. According to court docs, the prosecutor told the jury quote, this was not the first time that the defendant had noticed Megan. To the contrary, you will learn that that man, the defendant, had been watching that little girl for months. He

had had his eye on Megan, his thoughts anything but pure. End quote. When he got her inside the house, a house that he had all to himself because his roommates were gone, he took Megan to his room and tried to kiss her and touch her. But when he did, Megan screamed and immediately tried to leave, but Jesse didn't let her he couldn't let her because if she told anyone about what he just tried to do, he knew he'd be going back to prison. You see, Jesse had done this before. According to reporting by John Goldman in the LA Times, Jesse had two prior convictions for sexual offenses against minors, a five-year-old and a seven-year-old on two

separate occasions. He had done real prison time but was let out early even after he had proven he would reoffend. He told police that he had been quote slipping for a while and getting those feelings for little girls. In that moment when Megan cried out and tried to run, Jesse said all he could think about was not going back to prison. In his later confession, he said quote, I was afraid she would tell her mother. I was afraid I would get in trouble and go to jail. End quote. He said he struggled with her. She hit her face and head on the door frame and on a dresser and when he hit her across the face she began to bleed.

That's why he put a bag over her head so that the blood wouldn't get everywhere in his room. Jesse said he used a belt to strangle Megan and that he sexually assaulted her multiple times. I won't go into graphic detail but he's told many stories which make it a little unclear when exactly Megan died before or after the sexual assault. And remember that toy box police found in his truck? Jesse used that to transport Megan's lifeless body out of the house and to the park where he eventually led police. He tried his best to clean up the mess but ultimately all the evidence police needed was right there. It was there in

his house. It was there in his car and right there on the palm of his hand because another one of Jesse's lies came back to bite him literally. That wound he said came from the curtain rod in his truck. Well it turns out that was actually a bite mark proof that Megan had fought for her life in Jesse's bedroom that day. A forensic odontologist was called in to compare the wound on Jesse's hand with impressions of Megan's teeth and it was a perfect match. They actually had to remove her lower jaw during the autopsy to get those molds. A fact that the prosecution made sure the jury heard but it sealed the

case. Jesse was found guilty of Megan's murder and sentenced to death though that was later changed to life without parole in 2007 when New Jersey abolished the death penalty. Jesse has tried to appeal his conviction and sentence. There are a number of bonkers claims in his appeal and not too much surprises me anymore but there was one claim his legal team made that was a first for me. They argued that the fact that he would be in prison for life should be a mitigating factor when considering the death penalty. Try and follow me here. They asked the court to consider that the fact that Jesse had been caught and

would be locked up for life is a mitigating factor that basically he shouldn't get the death penalty because he'd be locked up and no longer a threat to young girls. Here I'll read straight from the document when they ruled it was basically BS. Quote the fact that the defendant would not be a continuing danger to little girls also is not mitigating evidence. That argument is based on the premise that the defendant will be incarcerated for life and will have no contact with children. This court has repeatedly rejected the notion that the length of a defendant's potential non-death sentence is a

mitigating factor. Defendant cannot circumvent that conclusion by couching the same argument in different terms. End quote. It's honestly some ridiculous chicken or the egg stuff and the court was having none of it. For Megan's mom Maureen a guilty verdict was cold comfort. Nothing was going to bring her daughter back but Megan's death had highlighted one important thing the newly enacted Jacob's law the one requiring sex offenders to register left out and that's public notification. Maureen Kanka had no idea that there was a twice convicted sex offender living across the street from her one whose

victims had been little girls just like her daughter and Jesse wasn't even the only sex offender out on parole and living in the area. His other roommates were sex offenders as well and they all met while they were in the prison system. I'm sure Maureen thought surely if there was someone or multiple someone's who are a real threat to my family to my kids surely there is a system in place to protect us from that kind of evil or at the very least one that gives parents the information so they can protect their kids but there wasn't and how could they have known and so just a few months after her death and a year before

Jesse was convicted of her murder Megan's law was created as a subsection of the Jacob Wetterling crimes against children and sexually violent offenders registration act. Megan's law required states not just to have a registry but to notify everyone in a neighborhood if someone on that registry moves in. I mean you can't protect your kids against a threat you don't even know is there and Megan's law armed parents with the information they needed to keep their kids safe but nothing is perfect. The sex offender registry itself had its critics from the start. Critics who say that the criteria for being tagged a

sex offender is too broad. In some states people who have urinated in public appear on the registry alongside habitual sex offenders. They can all be treated equally in the eyes of the registry. According to a 2014 Slate article quote, in at least 29 states from Alabama to Wisconsin consensual sex between teenagers is a crime that can lead to sex offender status end quote but there is a difference between making a dumb mistake and committing a life altering violent offense against children or against multiple children. Yes we should absolutely have a registry for the Jesse Tmendakwases of the world

the kind of predator who steals innocence, who has been given the chance and who has proven over and over again they will not stop. We have a right to know who they are, where they are and what potential dangers they come with. Maureen should have been able to learn who was on her street, who was watching her young daughter. But in our haste to fill holes in our legal system did we inadvertently create more? If there's one thing I'm personally learning in my journey through this series it's that we didn't start with a complete system for justice. We've been piecemealing it together, one terrible tragedy at a time, sort of feels

like a game of whack-a-mole you know something pops up we stomp it down and then something else pops up right next to it and in our stomping down we keep leaving holes that don't quite have the intended effect. Next week we're back to our regular crime-genki episodes. But later in this year I'm gonna come back and bring you some bonus episodes and talk about some of these other precedent-setting cases. They might not always drop on a Monday so make sure you're following the show to get notified and I'll see you next week. To find all the source material for this episode you can go to our website

crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at crime junkie podcast and we'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?