Megan had been missing for just a few hours when the cops zeroed in on the rented house diagonally across the street from the Kankas where Jesse Timmendequas lived with three other men.

The neighbors may not have known for sure about the men’s criminal histories, but they had their suspicions. One neighbor later told police that she trimmed the branches of the tree in front of her house, the better to keep an eye on the comings and goings at the men’s house. But, as police would soon learn, the neighbors had good reason to be suspicious. Joseph Cifelli, one of Timmendequas’ roommates, was a convicted sex offender. So was Brian Jenin, another resident of the house. He was on parole.

And then, of course, there was Timmendequas.

It didn’t take long for investigators to pull together his sordid history. The product of a gravely dysfunctional and abusive family, he had bounced as a child from rented house to rented house in New Jersey. By the time he was in his late 20s, the records showed, he was already exhibiting signs of becoming a sexual predator. In 1979, he confessed to the attempted sexual assault of a 5-year-old girl in the blue-collar suburb of Piscataway. He was given a suspended sentence, on condition that he undergo therapy. He didn’t, and was subsequently sentenced to serve nine months in a county jail.

Not long after his release from jail, he was arrested again, this time in connection with the sexual assault of a 7-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault and attempting to cause serious bodily injury to the girl. He spent six years at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. It was there that Timmendequas struck up a friendship with Cifelli and Jenin. When he was ultimately released, he accepted Cifelli’s offer to move in with them in Hamilton.

It had been almost 24 hours since Megan had vanished, and the army of cops and firefighters and volunteers had turned up no trace of the missing child. Nobody wanted to say it out loud, but secretly, the cops knew there was almost no chance they would find the girl alive. As they scoured Timmendequas’ record, and the records of the other men who lived at the house, they became convinced that sooner or later, the trail would lead back to the rented house where the three sex offenders lived.