The Kidnapping and Murder of Jessica Lunsford

Jessica Lunsford was a nine-year-old Florida girl abducted from her bedroom in Homosassa, Florida, in the early morning hours of February 23, 2005. Her grandfather, with whom she lived, found her missing that morning. An intensive multiagency search failed to locate her for weeks. On March 18, 2005, convicted sex offender John Evander Couey — who lived in a trailer about 150 yards from Jessica's home — confessed to abducting her. He told investigators he had kept her alive in his trailer for several days while a massive search was underway nearby, then buried her alive in two plastic garbage bags in a shallow hole on the property.

Couey was a registered sex offender who had failed to properly register his new address. The search of the neighborhood in the immediate aftermath of Jessica's disappearance had missed his trailer because of record-keeping failures. When his confession led police to the burial site, Jessica was found with her hands bound, having suffocated. Her fingers had broken through the plastic bags as she struggled. The circumstances of her death were among the most harrowing in the modern history of child abduction cases.

Couey was convicted of kidnapping, sexual battery, and first-degree murder in 2007 and sentenced to death, though his execution was delayed by legal proceedings. He died of cancer on death row in September 2009 before he could be executed. The case exposed serious failures in the sex offender registration and monitoring systems and immediately generated political pressure for reform.

Jessica's law — formally the Jessica Lunsford Act — was signed into law in Florida in 2005 and subsequently adopted in various forms by 42 other states. The law imposed mandatory minimum 25-year sentences for those convicted of lewd or lascivious acts against children under 12 and required GPS electronic monitoring for those released. It represented one of the most significant expansions of sex offender management legislation in American history, directly triggered by the preventable nature of Jessica's death.