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That actually happened to a child molester in a small town in Kansas where I spent four years of my childhood. My father was Justice of the Peace for that town, a job he didn't ask for but whom the town folk called on because he was one of the few with a college education.

The state police came to our house one night to ask Dad if he had any idea who in the town might be involved in such vigilante justice. I was only 8 or 9 at the time but understood well that the state police were only doing their job and Dad wasn't going to tell them anything even if he did know.

Word got around quick in those days and I think it likely that Dad could have found out with a few discrete inquiries. But I think both he and the state police instinctively understood that even if they didn't condone vigilante justice, it was justified under those particular circumstances and we were a better society for it.

Needless to say the perp minus his family jewels left town shortly thereafter and was never heard from again.

What I find most remarkable in this Pedophile Priest story is not only how long it went on but how 99.9% of it involved boys and young men . . . and how the earliest cases date to the late 1960s and 1970s, when vigilante justice first went out of style.