By Seamus McGraw

April 20, 2006

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HOULTON, Me. (Crime Library) — The vigilante-style slaying last week of two men whose names and addresses appeared on Maine's sex offender registry — one of them a 24-year-old who had been jailed for four months when he was 20 for having sex with his teenage girlfriend — is raising questions, not just about the wisdom, but also about the effectiveness of community notification laws across the country.

"This a tragic occurrence," said Jill Levenson, a professor and nationally know sex crimes researcher at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fl. "People have been talking about the potential for vigilante violence because of the registries for many years, and luckily it happens relatively infrequently, but it does happen, and it may happen at about the same rate as the child abductions that spur these laws."

Though rare, there have been several cases in recent years of vigilante violence targeting men whose names appear on state-sponsored sex offender registries, the list adopted as part of Megan's Law, a series of bills designed to let communities know when sex offenders are in their midst. Only a handful, however, have reached the level of violence seen in last weekend's double slaying in Maine.

According to authorities, Stephen A. Marshall, a young man from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, had apparently looked up the names and addresses of the 34 sex offenders listed on Maine's registry, and then traveled across the US border, armed with a handgun, where he is alleged to have hunted two of them down, 57-year-old Joseph Gray, and 24-year-old William Elliott.

Gray, a Viet Nam veteran, had been convicted in Massachusetts in the early 1990s of sexually abusing a child over a period of three years. The girl was just seven when the abuse began. After serving his time, Gray married and moved to Milo. There is no evidence to suggest that Gray had offended again in the years since his release from prison. Still, authorities have said, at about 3 a.m. Sunday, while Gray was dozing on his living room couch, a man later identified as Marshall, came to his window and shot him to death.

A few hours later, and 24 miles away, the same suspect allegedly shot Elliott to death. Elliott, by all accounts a troubled young man, had spent four months in jail four years ago after he admitted to having sex with his then fifteen year-old girlfriend. There was no indication that Elliott was a dangerous sexual predator.

A few hours after that, Marshall shot himself to death when police tracked him to a Boston-bound bus. So far, authorities have found no link between Marshall and the two men he is believed to have killed, nor any connection between the two victims other than the fact that both appeared on the state's sex offender registry.

In response, state officials briefly shut down the online registry. It has since resumed operations.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net