Another Puke by Justice

[Brian R.]

The Boundaries of Justice
A Confession. A Life Sentence. Now, a Court's Mistake May Set a Child Abuser Free.

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 7, 2005; C01



CUMBERLAND, Md. -- Some things are worse than murder, and nobody wants to know about them. So when the pudgy mama's boy named Johnny Kroll did what he did to the 9-year-old little girl out by the lakes 25 years ago and the courts sent him to prison for eternity, everyone agreed justice had been done. Nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.

What the 30-year-old Kroll did was kidnap the child and brutally assault her.

However, here's a short list of people who blew it the day Kroll pleaded guilty: The prosecutor. The judge. The defense attorney. Read: Everybody.

He assaulted that little girl in the Appalachian hills, yes, and Maryland nailed him for it. The problem was and is that he did it in Pennsylvania, not Maryland. The Maryland court sentenced him for an assault committed in another state. It's a bone simple violation of jurisdiction, perhaps the most basic pillar of the legal canon.

"How dumb can a state's attorney be?" says John Henry Kroll, the inmate's older cousin.

"I just don't know what to say," says John F. Fader II, a judge in Maryland for 26 years and now a senior judicial fellow at the University of Maryland School of Law. "When you don't have jurisdiction, you just don't have it."

Now there is no justice to be had, either.

A Maryland circuit court judge has vacated Kroll's sentence and dismissed the sex assault charges against him. He's already served the agreed-upon 15 years for the kidnapping. In terms of Maryland law, he's been held illegally for a decade. And -- you knew this was coming -- the statute of limitations has expired on the crimes in both federal and Pennsylvania courts.

There's a perverse precision to it. The court managed to make the one -- the only -- error it could have made that would let Kroll out of the life-plus-15-year plea bargain. In the words of Judge James S. Getty advising Kroll of his rights in a 1980 hearing: " . . . On a plea of guilty you waive any right to any defect in the prosecution of any nature other than jurisdiction" [emphasis added].

Scrambling to keep the 55-year-old Kroll behind bars, the state's attorney for Allegany County, Michael O. Twigg, on Thursday asked a judge to vacate the plea agreement. Twigg is asking for a new trial -- on charges that his predecessor agreed to drop a quarter-century ago. His argument is that Kroll, by pointing out the state's error, has breached the original deal. It's clever. It's imaginative. It's a long shot.

"I don't know that I've ever heard of a case like this," says Fader. "There's just no precedent for it."

During the half-hour hearing, Circuit Court Judge W. Timothy Finan noted that prosecutors had failed to take the usual step of securing a written agreement with Kroll at the time of the plea, had not asked the judge for a specific term at sentencing, and produced no witnesses during Thursday's hearing to say that a life sentence was their intent.

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.

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.

[Brian R.]

(continued)

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.

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.

So a remorseful Kroll pleaded guilty that day -- sparing the 9-year-old from testifying -- and prosecutors dropped a charge for simple assault in her case, as well as the attempted kidnapping charges from the incident in the parking garage. Getty sentenced Kroll to spend "the balance of your natural life" in prison for the sexual assault, plus another 15 years for the kidnapping.

"We thought it was all over," says the girl's father.

In the intervening years, the case so faded from public view that most people in town scarcely remember it.

On a recent morning at Kline's Restaurant, a city institution for the older coffee-and-breakfast crowd, Brook Atkinson is explaining that the charm of Cumberland is that you know "two out of every five people walking down the street."

Stirring his coffee, furrowing his brow, he says he can't remember John Kroll. Neither can anyone else.

A few miles away, Michael Twigg, the new state's attorney, is sitting at his desk in a building just behind the courthouse. He is serving his first term as the county's elected prosecutor. He was 11 when the assault took place. He thought it was ancient history, too.

But as it happens -- this case has a million little pieces that have fallen just so -- a jurisdictional claim is the one basis for appeal that never expires.

So a year or two ago, Kroll hired local lawyer Raymond F. Weston to appeal, saying Maryland never had a right to imprison him for the sex assault. Judge Finan said there was no debate -- Kroll was right.

"An insufficient factual basis existed for the trial judge to accept the plea," Finan ruled on Feb. 8. "Territorial jurisdiction is never waiveable." He threw out the conviction and the accompanying charges.

Twigg was aghast. Kroll had already served the 15 years for kidnapping. The court had just ruled he had been held illegally in a Maryland prison for a decade. The statute on sexual assault had lapsed in other jurisdictions. John Kroll was about to walk out of prison.

Twigg immediately filed a request to try Kroll on the old charges the prosecution had agreed to drop so many years ago. He argued that Kroll had violated terms of the plea deal by seeking to overturn part of his sentence -- even if, as the court ruled, that sentence was improperly imposed.

Twigg also wrote that Kroll had craftily waited more than 20 years for several statutes of limitations to expire before appealing, to engineer his release. It's not clear that is true, but what patience it implies! What cunning, for a man to bide his time for two decades!

"All we're asking is to be back at square one," Twigg explained in his office. "Is it going to be a walk in the park to prosecute a case that's 25 years old? No, but I think we can do it."

Finan's ruling is due in coming days.

At best, from the state's point of view, there will be a new trial -- in Maryland, or, if the Pennsylvania authorities want to try to argue their way past the statute of limitations, perhaps there. The little girl, now 34 years old, will have to testify if they retry part of her case, or the woman Kroll grabbed in the parking garage may have to come forward.

Getty, the original trial judge, thinks the state is out of luck.

"I think you'd just have to let him go," he says.

So much time has passed since that awful day in 1980. So many things change, so many things don't, in a little town like Cumberland.

The railroad tracks are still there. The courthouse on the hill, too. Kids still play in the streets in quiet neighborhoods in the late afternoon. You look to the ridge where the 9-year-old's parents still live -- the child has moved away -- and you know that courts are courts and the law is the law, and it doesn't really matter, because some things are never going to be right.

A ridge or two over, there's the Big Claw, a bar where the evening's patrons knock back shots of schnapps and chase them down with a cold beer. Save for a brief story in the local paper, none of the Big Claw crowd has heard of the case. You walk back outside, letting the screen door slap closed behind you, the darkness falling, the wind whipping hard down from the mountains. There is a last ray of sun, a hard light, shining on the building just down the road, on the razor wire and ugly edges of the county jail, the Allegany County Detention Center.

John Leroy Kroll, after 25 years, is almost back home.

Washington Post

Note:
(He's not the only one who should go to jail)

[The PIT]

Now if the guy was dead theres nothing to appeal for.

Of course if this was in the EU they'd have been an infrigment of human rights of the accused.

[KvHagedorn]

Such an elegant solution for an overpopulated world that needs new energy sources.. make the criminals run treadmills until they drop dead, generating lots of gigawatts for all the fat couch potatoes and armchair dictators like you and me, while eliminating themselves in an economically positive way. No lawyers getting rich off our tax dollars for the sake of scumbag murderers and rapists. The world would be good! HUaah!