Posted on 04/24/2006 2:24:21 PM PDT by NYpeanut
The man who shot William Elliott and Joseph Gray did so without a word, leaving their homes in northern Maine as much a stranger as when he arrived.
So far, police have come up with only one connection between the alleged gunman, Stephen A. Marshall, 20, of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia - who committed suicide after the attacks - and the two victims: Both were among 34 former sex offenders that Marshall had looked up using Maine's online sex-offender registry.
The killings have alarmed some defense attorneys and advocates for sexual offenders, who say this crime is among the darkest examples of the harassment and threats that have followed the rapid rise in registries that publicly identify offenders.
"We've spent a great deal of public and private energy demonizing these types of offenders," said William Buckman, a criminal-defense attorney in New Jersey who said the house of one of his clients was burned down, while garbage was thrown on the lawn of another. "So it's predictable that they will be the victims of violence and vigilantism."
The idea of public identification for sex offenders was popularized in the mid-1990s, after 7-year-old Megan Nicole Kanka was raped and murdered by a neighbor in New Jersey. Her parents had not known that the man had a sexual crime on his record.
Now there is some sort of sex-offender registry in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with many of the databases accessible online. The laws that established the registries have been celebrated as an invaluable tool for parents and have withstood several court challenges, including a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 2003.
But criminologists say an unintended result has been threats or harassment directed at the offenders whose photos and addresses are publicly available. A study by Richard Tewksbury at the University of Louisville found that 50 percent of all registered offenders had been harassed in person, and more than 25 percent had received threatening calls, letters or e-mail.
"It does indeed, inadvertently, give some people the message that these people are criminals, and even if they're free, they're still criminals," said James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
Violent attacks on offenders are rare. In 2003, a New Hampshire man stabbed one offender he located through a registry and started fires at two buildings where others lived. In August, a Washington man posed as an FBI agent to enter the apartment of three registered offenders near Seattle. He later killed two of them, authorities said.
Supporters of the registries said last week that they were saddened by the Maine case but noted that many states - including Maine - place warnings on registry sites that harassment or intimidation of offenders is illegal. They said that removing offenders' home addresses, as some critics of the registries suggest, would leave them less useful to parents.
In Maine, police said they had no idea why Marshall selected the 34 offenders he checked on, or why he chose Elliott and Gray from that group. Both men lived hours from Houlton, Maine, the town near the U.S.-Canada border where Marshall was staying with his father.
"They may have been the only ones he could find," said Sgt. Stephen Pickering, a criminal investigator with the Maine State Police, noting that police found the other 32 offenders safe.
Though the two victims were listed on the same registry, they had committed different crimes. Gray, 57, was convicted of the rape of a child. He assaulted the youngster over a period of three years, beginning when the child was 7, according to prosecutors. Elliott, 24, was convicted of sexually abusing a minor, which apparently stemmed from having sex with his teenage girlfriend, according to police.
Police said that Gray was sleeping on the couch in his home in Milo, Maine, at about 3 a.m. Sunday, April 16, when his dogs started barking outside. Gray's wife roused him, saying she had seen a man in a dark jacket outside, but then the man opened fire through the window, killing Gray, police said.
About five hours later and 24 miles away, Elliott was shot after answering the door at his trailer home in the town of Corinth. Police said his girlfriend noted the license plate on the gunman's pickup, which belonged to Marshall's father.
The trail eventually led investigators to the Bangor, Maine, bus station and to a 1:45 p.m. Vermont Transit Lines bus bound for Boston. Police pulled it over just minutes from its destination and asked the driver to turn on the overhead lights.
Marshall fatally shot himself seconds later, authorities said.
The murder left Elliott's father, Wayne Elliott, 61, wondering why his son, whom he called "my best friend," was chosen.
"Just picked him randomly, I believe now," Elliott said in a phone interview. "He didn't know a thing about my son."
To bad they don't add a bounty...and no bag limit. Sell hunting licenses. Plenty extra revenue for the state.
They demonized themselves.
If we were to provide more information on the sex offender registries to actually state what the crime was, that would be fine with me. That way vigilantes only go after the real child molesters and not the unfortunate few who were 17 and having sex with a 16 year old girl friend whose parents got angry and turned the guy in.
Another excellent reason not to mess with little kids.
I think these lists should be for people who mess with pre-teen kids. That is a vastly different crime than a boyfriend/girlfriend where one happens to be just under the legal age limit. (although, I still think that should be a crime!)
Gay rights groups, who else?
The victims- many of them children children- didn't like being on a sex offenders list, but they had no choice, did they?
These sickos do have a choice on whether they are on these lists. If they find themselves on these lists, then they've clearly made their choice.
It's ironic how these sicko's who stalk and victimize people complain when they become stalked by the people they victimized.
We may never know the motives of Stephen Marshall. Maybe he was a victim himself of perverts like the ones on these lists, but just never told anyone. If that is the case it his actions are understandable.
These perverts can't complain, because they themselves have created the situation in the first place.
-ccm
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