WOONSOCKET -- In May 2004, Detective James F. McLaughlin, a New Hampshire cybercop with a national reputation, was trolling Web site chat rooms posing as a young boy when he came across "RuffRyder2560," an alleged Internet predator.

RuffRyder, thinking McLaughlin was a 14-year-old boy, engaged him in sexually charged conversation and sent him sexually explicit photos of juveniles.

A month later, Woonsocket police went to the apartment of Cory D. Pero, 22, to arrest him and seize his computers. They found Pero there with an adolescent boy who told the police they'd been looking at pictures of naked girls on the Internet together.

Pero was charged with three counts of distributing child pornography and held at the Adult Correctional Institutions.

At a court hearing, a state prosecutor successfully argued that the court not reduce Pero's bail, saying he worried that Pero, if released, would again try to set up meetings with young boys. "The danger to the community is obvious," Assistant Attorney General Kevin Hagan said.

The story made statewide headlines and sparked questions about the rise of Internet predators in Rhode Island.

Then Pero disappeared from the spotlight and his case slid into obscurity.

Until last month.

On July 20, the Woonsocket police went looking for two young boys, 9 and 11, who had been reported missing hours earlier; they found the children riding bicycles on a city street with Cory Pero, the subject of the high-profile child pornography case of two years earlier.

He was arrested and sent to the ACI, but why was he on the streets?

As it turns out, the state failed to take the pornography case to a grand jury within the legally prescribed time so, on Dec. 10, 2004, the charges were dismissed; Pero was released from prison the same day.

But, the pornography case is "still being screened and reviewed," Alan Goulart, chief of the criminal division at the attorney general's office, said on July 27.

Still being reviewed after more than two years? he was asked.

He said that child pornography cases are complicated to begin with, and jurisdiction of those cases changed from Family Court to Superior Court while Pero was incarcerated.

When would the review be completed? Goulart said he didn't know.

On the same day, the Woonsocket police say they received a call from the attorney general's office requesting a copy of the Cory Pero file.

The next day, July 28, the state went to Superior Court and obtained a warrant for the arrest of Pero, charging him with one count of distributing child pornography on or about May 3, 2004, and with one count of possessing child pornography on the same date.

On July 31, Pero was arraigned in Superior Court, Providence.

It wasn't the first time Cory Pero benefitted, at least temporarily, from a legal system in flux as it relates to sex offenders.

Months before the 2004 child pornography charges, the police arrested Pero on charges that he molested a 14-year-old boy that he met while working the carnival rides at Autumnfest, Woonsocket's fall festival.

Detectives found that boy, along with another child, at Pero's apartment on Christmas Eve, 2003. They allege that Pero had sex with the victim on several occasions.

Within two months, however, state prosecutors concluded that the police had mischarged Pero. Molestation charges involve victims younger than 14; Pero's alleged victim was 14, so the charge should have been sexual assault.

The boy and his family refused to cooperate with the police; the attorney general's office said it had no choice but to drop the case.

What no one realized when Pero was arrested in 2003 or, again in 2004, was that he was supposed to be registered with the local police as a sex offender. As a juvenile, he had been found guilty in Family Court of commiting a sex crime in Providence.

The Parole Board's Community Notification Unit is reponsible for telling the police about sex offenders who are required by law to register with the police department in the community where they live. Failure to do so is a felony. Failure to tell the police of a change in address is also a felony.

But coordinator Paula Kocon says the notification unit was unaware that Pero was supposed to register because Family Court didn't report it. Kocon says that used to happen often as juveniles, whose cases are treated confidentially in Family Court, become adults.

"They're still required to register, but they have no probation officer to oversee them, so the only way we know about them is if they get into trouble," Kocon said.

With no knowledge of Pero's registration status, Police Chief Michael L.A. Houle said the Woonsocket police had no "red flags" in the department's police files when he was arrested in 2003.

By the time Pero was arrested in 2004, communication had improved and Houle said the Woonsocket police were aware that Pero should be registered as a sex offender. It didn't matter. For reasons Houle said he was unable to explain, the police neglected to charge Pero with failure to register as a sex offender.

The only way the attorney general's office would have known about Pero's sex-offender status, Goulart said, is if the local police had told them. "There can sometimes be a disconnect and we are taking steps to change that. Our information is only as good as the police department," he said.

Pero was charged for the first time with failing to register as a sex offender two weeks ago when the police found him riding bicycles with the two young boys. He was sent to the ACI to await trial.

In the past decade, sex-offender laws in Rhode Island have been revised and expanded almost every year as more safeguards are added. Just this summer, the Jessica Lunsford Child Predator Act, named for a Florida girl who was allegedly killed by a sex offender, was signed into state law requiring lifetime electronic monitoring of those convicted as first-degree child molesters.

"The sex-offender laws in this state are so convoluted, if you ask ten people the same question, you'll get ten different answers," said Woonsocket Police Lt. Timothy S. Paul. "It's so confusing, there's so much bureaucratic red tape, it's ridiculous."

The problem is not unique to Rhode Island, says Madeline M. Carter, director of the Center for Sex Offender Management project at the Center for Effective Public Policy in Maryland.

"There are lots of agencies and individuals involved in managing this process and often what happens is that the laws change every legislative session -- state laws change and federal laws change -- and it's a lot to keep up with when you have individuals who are under different statutes," she said.

With help from that center, Rhode Island has convened a task force made up of doctors, anti-violence advocates and law enforcement officials, including Goulart, who are looking at ways of improving every step of the process, from notification to adjudication.

"We're trying to answer those questions, how can we make the system better?" Goulart said.

cneedham@projo.com / (401) 277-7374