The Boundaries of Justice

There were just two children still on the bus when it pulled up. The only kid going further, Charles Andrew Jackson, then 13, didn't like the look of the heavyset man sitting in the car.

"I asked her if she wanted to go on up the hill with me to our house, about a mile, and I'd bring her home on the dirt bike later on when her parents got home," he remembered in a recent interview. "She said, 'Nah, I'll just walk up the driveway.' "

When the bus pulled away, Kroll walked over to the girl and asked directions. There was nobody around, just him and her and the trees and asphalt roadway.

"I then placed my arm around her and walked her toward my car. . . . [She] started to yell," he told police the next day. "I placed my hand over her mouth and used more force to get her to my vehicle. . . . I opened the car trunk and placed her in the trunk and closed the lid. . . . She started to yell and scream."

Kroll drove several miles north, crossing the state line, and got the girl out of the trunk a spot near two remote lakes. He assaulted her in the woods. It involved a sharpened broomstick. He then drove her back home, dropping her off on the roadway.

"She was bleeding very badly," remembers her father. She underwent surgery and psychological therapy, but "she's had health problems ever since. She went for a long time being scared of every large male."

The criminal case was no mystery. Kroll was arrested the next day. He confessed in detail. He apologized.

This brings us to the Pennsylvania issue.

"I . . . drove to Naves Crossroad to the Bedford Road to Lake Koon and Lake Gordon, which is located in Pennsylvania," Kroll told police, going on to describe the site. The girl's account matched his. She even told police that he had let her ride on the front seat on the way home and that she'd seen a "Welcome to Maryland" sign on the way. And, just to make it perfectly clear, the chief detective confirmed at the sentencing hearing that was where the attack took place.

But, somehow, no one in the courtroom said the word "Pennsylvania" during the hearing, the transcripts show. The detective mentioned the lakes, yes, but there was no explicit mention of another state.

"I was under the impression that it was a Maryland crime," remembers Getty, now a senior judge on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. "I thought they were mentioning the lakes as the general direction, not the specific site. I'd been a circuit judge for 16 years at that point. I certainly knew better than to sentence someone for a crime in Pennsylvania."

Why the attorneys didn't hash it out isn't clear. Then-State's Attorney Lawrence V. Kelly is now retired and declined to comment. Defense attorney John F. Somerville Jr. is dead.