Suspected shooter found sex offenders’ homes on website
The killings of two convicted child molesters in Maine prompted authorities to briefly remove the state’s online sex-offender registry and revived concerns that such websites may encourage vigilante-style justice.
The Maine Sex Offender Registry’s online search was taken down Sunday morning after two convicted sex offenders were shot and killed in their towns about 25 miles apart, said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Stephen Marshall, identified by Maine State Police as the only suspect in the shooting, killed himself Sunday night as police boarded the bus he had taken to Boston.
Marshall had logged onto the site sometime before the two men were shot several times, McCausland said. While on the site, Marshall also sought information on 32 other sex offenders.
The site provides photos, names, ages, addresses and conviction histories of about 2,200 registered sex offenders in the state.
“In order to get an individual profile, you have to register,” McCausland said. He said Marshall had signed up to get access to the data.
Joseph Gray, 57, of Milo, was shot about 3 a.m. Sunday while sitting on his living room couch. He was convicted in Massachusetts of sexually assaulting a child. About five hours later, William Elliott, 24, of Corinth, was killed when he answered the door. He was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor in Maine.
Marshall, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, had been visiting his father in Maine, McCausland said. Police identified him from a license plate spotted at the scene of the second shooting and traced him to Boston.
“There’s no known connection between the three men,” McCausland said. “We have a lot more questions than we have answers.”
Maine restored its sex-offender website Monday afternoon.
Most states post their sexual-offender registries online, says Charles Onley, a research associate for the Center for Sex Offender Management, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Early on, he says, critics of the online registries warned that readily available details about sex offenders could spur widespread vigilante-style killings. That did not happen, he says.
However, registered sex offenders have been affected in other ways: Neighbors have badgered them and put signs on their lawns. Governments have passed laws preventing sex offenders from living within a certain distance of schools, playgrounds and other places frequented by children.
“The drift has basically been to tighten everything up, making it tougher on sex offenders,” Onley says.
He says he knows of only one other case of lethal vigilantism linked to a website: In August, Michael Mullen killed two sex offenders in Bellingham, Wash., after finding their addresses on a sex-offender website.
Bellingham police briefly shut down the city’s sex-offender website but put it back online shortly afterward and made no changes to its content.
“The value to the community far outweighs the risk,” says Don Pierce, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.
Fred Berlin, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says online registries may create unforeseen problems.
Most sex offenders and their families, he says, want a new start. But the killings in Washington and Maine, coupled with the more pervasive harassment of registered sexual offenders in their own neighborhoods, may make them angry and bitter.
“They want to be able to be employed. They don’t want to be disenfranchised from their neighbors,” he says. “They and their family don’t want to be stigmatized.”
Jake Goldenflame, a registered sex offender in San Francisco and author of Overcoming Sexual Terrorism, agrees.
He supports registries because they provide important information to the public and remind sex offenders of their past. But if sex offenders continue to be murdered, he says, others will be less likely to register, and some officials may choose to remove the sites.
“Anybody who chooses to use these websites as a vehicle to take vengeance against us is killing these websites, too,” he says. “You kill us, you’re killing the websites.”
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