l followed him inside, he led her to an upstairs bedroom, strangled her unconscious with his belt, raped her and asphyxiated her to death with a plastic bag. Timmendequas then placed Megan's body in a toolbox, drove it in his pickup truck to a soccer field and dumped it in some bushes. (For a complete description of events, see: Jerome, 1995).
When it was learned that Megan's killer was a registered and convicted child molester who had moved in across the street from the Kankas---without their knowledge, Megan's parents embarked on a national crusade to change federal and state laws to allow for community notification of released sex offenders (Mader, 1996). At the state level, New Jersey responded by drawing up Megan's Law which mandated that authorities notify residents when sex offenders move into their communities by distributing flyers, alerting local organizations, and by door-to-door canvassing (Bernstein, 1995). Three months after Megan's death on October 1, 1994, the Governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, signed into law an eleven-bill package known as Megan's Law (Aseltine, 1995).
Efforts were also successful at the federal level resulting in Public Law No. 105-145. The law amended subsection (d) of section 170101 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103 322, 108 Stat. 1796, 2038 (codified at 42 U.S.C. ? 14071), which contains the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, hereafter referred to as the "Jacob Wetterling Act."
In a brochure put out by the Department of Justice (1997), it was noted that the provisions of the Jacob Wetterling Act amended by Public Law No. 105-145 relate to the release of registration information on sex offenders. Specifically, P.L. 105-145 made two changes in the Jacob Wetterling Act:
(1) it eliminated a general requirement that information collected under state registration programs be...