12-5-2004 New Hampshire:CONCORD, N.H. -- Lawrence Trant sees himself as a righteous crusader who put muscle behind his boiling outrage against pedophiles.
The state of New Hampshire sees Trant differently. He is serving a 10- to 30-year sentence in New Hampshire State Prison after pleading guilty to attempting to murder two convicted sex offenders whose names and addresses he found on an Internet registry posted by the state.
"I don't want people to steal the souls of little kids," Trant, 57, said in an interview in prison last week. "I'm doing 30 years for something I think is morally justified."
But prosecutor John Weld says Trant is one of the most cold-blooded criminals he has encountered. If Trant had not been arrested, Weld said, the native of Cambridge, Mass., probably would have killed someone convicted of a sex crime against children.
"He doesn't seem to have any conscience about violence to other people," Weld said. "These people have as much right to justice as anybody else."
The case has become more complicated than a simple question of right and wrong. The sordid histories of Trant's victims, his impassioned testimony on the witness stand, and his use of an Internet list to track down his targets have infused the case with controversy and conflicting senses of justice.
He is not considered the hero he thought he would become in April 2003, when he stabbed one man and lit fires at two buildings where at least seven convicted sex offenders lived. But he was able to persuade a Superior Court jury not to convict him of attempted murder in his trial on the stabbing charge, even after he took the witness stand and admitted he used a kitchen knife to assault Lawrence Sheridan, who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a child in 1999.
