Registered sex offender John Albert Gardner III, the 30-year-old man accused of raping and murdering Poway High School senior Chelsea King, appears to have complied with Megan's Law, the only statute governing where he lived and traveled.

Yet, when 17-year-old Chelsea disappeared in Rancho Bernardo last week, authorities checked the database of sex offenders registered in the San Diego area. Gardner was not among them.

And when a 16-year-old girl was attacked last year in Riverside County, authorities did a similar check of the sex offender registry. Again, no Gardner.

Gardner completed all the terms of his sentence from a violent 2000 attack on a 13-year-old girl in Rancho Bernardo that led to his designation as a sex offender. Many now say the reduced sentence he received allowed the dangerous man to return to society too soon.

That Gardner was free and eluded detection when Chelsea was killed illustrates that changes are needed to Megan's Law and other sex-offender sentencing laws, some say.

Megan's Law and Gardner

In recent years, Gardner apparently spent time at his parents' town house in Rancho Bernardo, an Escondido apartment where he lived about two years, and a home outside Lake Elsinore.

Megan's Law, enacted in 1996 in California, requires most of the state's sex offenders to register their address every year, or within five days of moving. A public database of sex offenders is supposed to let the community and police track potentially dangerous neighbors.

There is no indication from authorities that Gardner violated the law.

Escondido police Lt. Craig Carter said Gardner was a registered sex offender in Escondido for most of January 2008 until January 2010. Carter would not confirm Gardner's address and added Gardner moved out of the city at least once in that time.

Neighbors said Gardner lived in two different units at a Rock Springs Road apartment complex during that time.

In January, Gardner moved, registering his address at a home outside Lake Elsinore, Riverside County sheriff's officials said. Deputies never visited the home, officials said.

Seven weeks later, Chelsea disappeared in the Rancho Bernardo area of San Diego, and Gardner's name didn't turn up on the list of neighborhood sex offenders because he had already registered his Lake Elsinore-area address.

Megan's Law places no restrictions on travel or overnight stays of sex offenders, and authorities say Gardner was not restricted from traveling to North County once he moved.

However, the law requires offenders to register multiple addresses where they "regularly stay." If Gardner was regularly staying with his parents in Rancho Bernardo, as neighbors have reported, he was required to register that address with San Diego police.

The address does not appear on the Megan's Law Web site, indicating Gardner never registered it. San Diego police would not have seen it if they searched for local registered sex offenders during their investigations of the two crimes prosecutors now say Gardner committed.

Prosecutors say that Dec. 27, Gardner attempted to rape a jogger on the trails of Lake Hodges, about a mile from the Rancho Bernardo town house.

He is charged with killing Chelsea during a rape or attempted rape on the same trails where she headed for a jog after school Feb. 25. Her body was discovered Tuesday in a shallow grave at the lake's edge.

Gardner has pleaded not guilty to charges in both cases.

A flawed law

Defense attorney and former San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst said Gardner's case illustrates the flaws in the Megan's Law registry and monitoring program.

By requiring every sex offender to register for life, it creates a massive pool that makes it difficult for the police or the public to monitor those who are most dangerous.

The state has about 63,000 sex offenders listed in its Megan's Law registry, according to the state Department of Justice.

"It brings in dangerous characters with less dangerous characters," Pfingst said. "There's too much information, so it brings in useless information with useful information."

Police don't have the resources to track so many offenders, Pfingst said. If no one kept a close eye on Gardner, that's no surprise, he said.

Julie Stone, a Poway resident whose daughter is a senior at Poway High School, said the Megan's Law Web site doesn't help her protect her daughter.

"It shows there's a sex offender living on my street right now, but I don't know what he did," Stone said.

She said the registry shows the neighbor was convicted of lewd acts with a child under 14, but it is not clear how much of a threat he poses now.

Gardner's Megan's Law Web listing notes the same crime, but doesn't give any details.

Current law limits available information about registered sex offenders. It would take a legislative change to expand the amount of information available to the public.

Even local police have no easy access to detailed information about registered sex offenders living in their community, state Department of Justice officials say.

The Department of Justice compiles only a "rap sheet" for sex offenders that includes past arrests, charges and sentences. So police can't easily research what a particular offender has done and often must track down old probation and police reports to learn more, said California Deputy Attorney General Janet Neeley.

Police also have no access to the risk score the State Parole and County Probation departments assign to each newly released offender.

But beginning June 1, the Department of Justice will receive a "facts of the case" report for every sex offender released on parole or probation, along with the risk assessment score, Neeley said. Police will have access to that.

"We think that will be a huge step forward," she said.

Past offenses

It is not clear whether Escondido, Lake Elsinore or San Diego police knew the facts of Gardner's past offense.

Carter said every sex offender in the city is required to meet once with a detective to discuss past offenses and review the law.

He also said police visited Gardner at least eight times as part of its routine checks on the city's 192 registered sex offenders or as part of an investigation into missing Escondido 14-year-old Amber Dubois.

Police are investigating whether Gardner has any connection to Amber's Feb. 13, 2009, disappearance, about two miles from his apartment. But it is not clear whether he was a suspect before he was connected to Chelsea's killing.

Authorities also are investigating the case of a 16-year-old girl who reported that she ran away after a man asked her for directions, then tried to force her into a car at gunpoint Oct. 28 in Lake Elsinore, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said. At the time, Gardner was registered in Escondido.

The suspect was described as a man 30 to 35 years old with a squarish jaw, brown eyes and a blond crew cut. A sketch appears similar to Gardner.

Investigators checked out local sex offenders at the time, but not Gardner, Sgt. Patrick Chavez said.

"He had not come onto our radar until January," when he notified authorities that he was living in an unincorporated village near Lake Elsinore, Chavez said.

The first conviction

In 2000, John Albert Gardner III repeatedly punched and sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in Rancho Bernardo, according to court records.

Gardner, then 20, picked up the victim before school as she waited for her bus, court records show. He invited her to his Rancho Bernardo town house to watch a movie, and then began a violent sexual assault, pulling off the girl's pants against her protests, battering her face in anger and nearly suffocating her with his hand over her mouth, records show.

Many are questioning Gardner's sentence for the crime: six years in prison, of which he served just over five. He could have gotten 30 years for the original charges, according to court documents. The sentencing memo notes an agreement allowing the lesser charges ---- and a shorter sentence ---- will "spare the victim the trauma of testifying."

That memo includes psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Carroll's opinion that Gardner be sentenced to the "maximum sentence allowed by law" because he would be a "continued danger to underage girls in the society."

"It's bad enough we have predators out there who have not been caught do these horrible things, but to have one who we had every chance to keep behind bars be sentenced so leniently, it's just infuriating," said Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, whose 36th District includes Murrieta, Temecula, Bonsall, Fallbrook and Poway.

He and other local representatives say they have been flooded with calls and e-mails from people who are furious that Gardner went to jail for only five years, followed by three years of parole, and was free to strike again.

Such sentiments were clear Wednesday outside the San Diego Superior Courthouse during Gardner's arraignment, when protesters held signs calling for "one strike" and "no parole for sex offenders."

Jessica's Law

Since Gardner's conviction, 70 percent of voters in November 2006 approved Jessica's Law, which monitors sexual offenders by GPS for life and bars them from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park. So far, court rulings have said it applies only to those paroled from prison after its enactment so it did not apply to Gardner.

Had Gardner been released under Jessica's Law, he would have been subject to its restrictions.

But the reality is that Gardner probably would have been monitored by GPS only for the length of his parole, which ended in 2008. The 6,788 California sex offenders on active parole are the only offenders in the state monitored by GPS, according to a January report by the California Sex Offender Management Board, which advises the government and Legislature on sex offender policy.

And once sex offenders leave parole, virtually no local agency monitors them with GPS, the report notes.

Call staff writer Sarah Gordon at 760-740-3517.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.