It’s been nearly a decade since Maureen and Richard Kanka lost their daughter to a killer who had quietly infiltrated their neighborhood.

In the years since, the couple have spent much of their time championing the bill named for their slain daughter. In large part, as a result of their efforts, there is now a version of Megan’s Law on the books in all 50 states. In several states, convicted sex offenders are now listed on the Internet, where anyone can learn about their crimes.

There are critics, like psychologist Dr. Robert Prentke, who insist that the law does little to protect children, and may in fact do more to drive sexual predators underground. The law, he argues, is designed to protect the community, but the problem he argues, is that “these people have no community.”

They lurk in the shadows, he says, and no matter how hard the government tries to keep track of them, there is always the danger that they will simply vanish, or slip across the county line to grab an unsuspecting child. One of the dangers of Megan’s Law is that parents will be lulled into a false sense of security, he says.

But Maureen Kanka maintains that Megan’s Law offers some protection, which is more than she had on that July night in 1993. As she said at the time, “If I had known that there was a pedophile living on our street, my daughter would be alive today."

It’s been nearly five years since Timmendequas was sentenced to death. He remains on death row -- the Capital Sentencing Unit at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, less than a dozen miles from the place where he killed Megan Kanka. He spends most of each day in an 8-by-10 foot cell, listening to the dull drone of  the dozen or so television sets that echo down the two-story cellblock that is Death Row. Every now and then, he gets to stretch his legs in the “cage,” a 12-square-foot chain-link box where the inmates exercise or play chess.

Most days are filled with mind-numbing boredom. But there are the occasional moments of excitement. A few years back, he had a scrape with a fellow inmate, Robert “Mudman” Simon, a hulking biker and convicted cop killer. Timmendequas claimed that the biker was intimidating him. After that, Timmendequas kept even more to himself, prison officials have said. In 1999, Simon was killed. Not by the state. Ambrose Harris, another death-row inmate, stomped him to death in the cage.

In August 1999, the state Supreme Court upheld Timmendequas’ death sentence.  But in New Jersey, the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow. Although the state’s capital punishment law is nearly 20 years old, not a single inmate has taken that long walk to the prison basement, to a room outfitted with a cross-shaped metal table, to die by lethal injection.

There’s no telling when Timmendequas’ sentence will be carried out, authorities say.

In the meantime, Megan’s Place, the park that now covers the spot where Megan died, continues to draw neighborhood children. Parents lounge on park benches near a fish pond while their kids play on the pink hopscotch court Maureen Kanka placed there.

A few years after Megan’s death, something kind of magical happened there. Maybe it was something in the soil. Maybe it was something in the air. Or maybe it was something else. But a young pine tree that had been planted there sprouted its first cone. The cone, according to newspaper reports at the time was pink. Megan’s favorite color.