The Boundaries of Justice

Then, on April 30, 1970, when he was 20, Kroll drove his car, at a low speed, into another teenage girl. This one was 13 and she was walking in a city park. He dragged her into the woods, slashed her neck, scalp and forehead with a penknife, with such ferocity that the blade broke off. He sexually abused her. He beat her nearly to death with a tree limb. When police arrested him, he acknowledged chasing and cutting a 15-year-old girl a few months earlier, a case that had been unsolved.

The investigation was unsettling. Police found that Kroll kept a half-dozen six-inch wooden dowels in his bed. Some had girls' names on them. He had lain on top of them so often he had a callus on his belly.

"His behavior could be quite bizarre and potentially dangerous," a state psychologist wrote. "The patient apparently derives sexual pleasure by torturing his young victims."

Kroll did eight years.

Six of those were spent at a state mental institution. Psychologists, who found him to be both sane and of "average intelligence," didn't think it did much good.

Cousin John Henry Kroll saw him again in 1979, after he got out, when John Leroy and his parents came over to visit.

"Johnny was a big boy, but polite. He never worried me or the family," says Kroll, who had four daughters at home at the time. "He was meek. I think he was just so happy to be out of prison."

It didn't take long for Kroll to attack again. On March 7, 1980, in a parking garage, he tried to force a woman into his car. She got away easily, though, and Kroll ran off almost as fast as she did.

Three weeks later, he went back to smaller targets.

He had been following the local school bus up a twisting, isolated stretch of mountain road when he saw a pretty little girl get off at a remote stop. Her house was sharply uphill, out of view from the roadway.

"I thought she was a real nice little girl," he later told police.

On March 25, he pulled into a turnoff just opposite her driveway and waited.