The Boundaries of Justice

He said he would issue a ruling "shortly" and adjourned the court.

For his part, John Leroy Kroll listened attentively in his orange jail uniform, handcuffed, flanked by two sheriff's deputies. He has spent roughly 33 years, since he was 18, in penal institutions. He has been deemed a "sexual sadist," a "monster," and, going back to his youth, a "defective delinquent."

He's also a legal whisker from his version of justice -- freedom. "I will get on my knees and beg if I have to, to get you to give me one more chance," Kroll wrote the judge in 1980.

His prayers, as it turns out, were answered.

Cases like this drive people crazy. They want justice and they want it now. There are the two cases down in Florida, where convicted sex offenders are alleged to have killed two little girls. Legislators are already talking up new laws. After New Jersey's 7-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and killed by a sex offender, there was Megan's Law. When John Walsh's 6-year-old son Adam was abducted and killed in 1981, there was Adam's Law, and Walsh went on to host the television show "America's Most Wanted."

This case hit particularly hard 25 years ago in a little down-at-the-heels Appalachian spot, Cumberland, with the railroad tracks and the tumbling waters of Will's Creek running through the center of town, the church spires still here but almost all the factories long gone.

It was here that John Kroll grew up, on the spinelike ridges of mountains that divide one community from the next. It was the postwar era of quiet yards and long summers, when it was safe to play until the streetlights flickered on and your mother opened the screen door and called you in for supper.

Certainly there was nothing about young Johnny Kroll to raise much worry. His dad, Elmer, a World War II vet, worked at Kelly-Springfield tire plant for three decades. His wife, Doris, raised the two boys, and the family faithfully attended church. (Elmer died last month and Doris Kroll is in a nursing home, says John Kroll's attorney. Kroll's brother, Floyd, lives in the area. Repeated calls over the past two weeks to his apparent residence were not answered.)

But John Leroy didn't do well at school. He was terribly shy and unpopular, according to later psychological reports, and his mother's protection was overbearing. She even waited with him for the school bus when he was a senior in high school. Kroll was 6-foot-3 and about 180 pounds at the time. Kids razzed him. He had stomach ulcers.

He graduated almost dead last among the 197 students at Beall High School.

It was about this time that he began to scare people -- he was dismissed from his job as an orderly at the local hospital because of "his marked interest in staring at female patients in the delivery room and the intensive care unit," according to a diagnostic report from the Patuxent Institution, a psychiatric prison where Kroll did time. Female co-workers said he followed them home. A neighbor said he prowled around at night.

According to Twigg, Kroll was arrested for trying to pick up a 12-year-old girl, then released. He was also found guilty of knocking a 16-year-old girl over with his car, then accosting her, but the conviction was overturned, Twigg said.