New Jersey State Police Detective C. Pukenas, detective on the case (AP)

“Somebody ought to burn that house down,” Richard Kanka hissed, as a few nearby reporters scribbled down his outburst.  No one could blame him for his anger. His precious little girl, his youngest child, had just been found after being raped and murdered inside that house. The terror of her last few moments of life were now glaringly public. Jesse Timmendequas, the landscaper who had previously admitted to preying on defenseless children, had confessed.

His confession was detailed and graphic. He told police he had been “getting those feelings again” for little girls. He had been out in the yard -- not working on his car as he had told Maureen in passing the night before -- but cleaning up an old cabin cruiser, “Sunsation,” that was parked there, when Megan happened by.

She was a bright, friendly kid who loved to chat with neighbors. There’s no indication that she had any trepidation about making small talk with this harmless-looking man. There was, after all, something that seemed almost childlike about him. He didn’t carry himself like a 33-year-old adult.

Megan loved chocolate-chip ice cream, cookies and milk. Most of all, she loved animals. Jesse told her he had a puppy, and he could see the light in Megan’s eyes when he offered to show it to her. The only thing was, the puppy was far too young to come outside. If she wanted to see it, she had to come inside with him, up to his bedroom, he told her.

But there was no puppy. Once Timmendequas had managed to lure Megan inside, he turned on her. He grabbed her and raped her, he told police. She tried to fight back, authorities would later allege. During the struggle, Megan bit Timmendequas hard on the hand, hard enough to leave a mark. But she was no match for him.

Timmendequs described the scene in his confession to police: “I grabbed her by the back of her pants to pull her back into the room and her pants ripped. I grabbed a belt off the door and threw the belt around her. It ended up around her neck. I twisted my arms and she just fell to the floor. She was just lying on the floor and she was not moving. Blood was coming out of her mouth."

Once he had raped her, Jesse didn’t want her telling anyone about what had happened, so he decided to kill her. As the little girl struggled, at one point banging her head against a dresser, causing a bloody gash, Timmendequas strangled her. Afraid that drops of her blood would point to him, Timmendequas wrapped her head in a plastic bag. And when he was done, he strangled her with a belt. He stuffed her in a wooden toy chest, and tossed it in the back of his truck. Maybe it was his imagination, but as he drove to a remote, weedy spot in a county park a couple of miles away, Timmendequas later told authorities, he thought he heard the little girl cough. She was certainly dead when he left her in the weeds. But, before he drove off, he sexually assaulted her one more time.

To make sure that no one, not even police dogs, could trace Megan’s last few steps to him, he followed her footsteps through his house and scrubbed each inch with ammonia.

It had been 24 hours since Megan vanished when Jesse Timmendequas led the searchers to that spot in the weeds where he had dumped Megan’s body.

Now everyone knew what had happened. “All I could hear was the crying and wailing from around the house,” Maureen would later testify. “I just sat there. I couldn't cry. I couldn't react. I was just numb. My little girl was dead."

But how could it have happened? How could a man capable of such horror have been allowed out of prison to blend into a quiet suburban neighborhood? How could a man whose every step since childhood seemed to bring him closer to murder have been permitted to slip quietly into Megan’s life and snuff it out?

“Somebody ought to burn that house down,” Richard Kanka hissed on the most awful day of his life.