One of the many searches we ran on Terapon Adhahn over the past few days revealed that he has been a registered voter since 2002.

That doesn't make much sense - Adhahn was a legal permanent resident, according to the immigration folks, but not a U.S. citizen. Plus, he was a convicted sex offender, which should have barred him in another way.

Since it's the weekend, we can't call the bureaucrats at the county or the Secretary of State's office to get a clear answer on this one, but we're working on it. Meanwhile, I checked with Stefan Sharkansky, the blogger and voting issues watchdog who writes at the lively Sound Politics site.

"You absolutely have to be a U.S. citizen to register legally," Stefan said. I checked the state laws as well, just to be sure, and found the same requirement.

(Later addendum - I should have noted that Stefan posted the information about Adhahn's voter registration Friday on the Sound Politics site. I'm pretty sure he was the first to mention it publicly, though I haven't checked every media source. I spotted the registration info through a different source initially. The link to Stefan's invaluable voter database is here because it's more readily available.)

We won't know for a while where Adhahn slipped through the cracks in the registration process. That will take a bit of research. I did run one query, and I see no sign that Adhahn actually voted after his 2002 registration.

Stefan, offering cautious speculation, suggested that one possible route would be the motor-voter registration system: you renew your driver's license, and you get a registration form at the same time.

"It becomes just another piece of paper that people sign when they’re doing other things that they don’t have to think about," he said.

What we don't know is whether the 2002 registration form included an explicit question about citizenship. If it did, and if Adhahn said he was a citizen, well...

The registration forms changed slightly in 2005, following the dust-up over the governor's race. Stefan graciously sent me a copy of the 2004 registration form, and said he had no reason to think it had changed since 2002.

I meant to upload the thing, but my blogging experience amounts to about two hours, and I'm not quite up to speed yet. You'll have to trust me when I say the form includes a question in the upper left-hand corner that asks "Are you a citizen of the United States?" and boxes for yes and no.

One of our online readers, who goes by the handle jerrygarcia, raised a question about naming Terapon Adhahn, which we first did in web stories posted yesterday, before Tacoma police formally named Adhahn as a suspect in a news conference a little later.

The answer: high-level editors decided to go ahead with the name, which we had known for several days, because of the previous night's disclosure that information from Adhahn led to the discovery of Zina Linnik's body. Up to that point, we had relied on our general standard of not naming people before they are charged with crimes, though we were well aware of the possibility in this case (we were also the first to publish information about evidence recovered from the suspect's van and home.)

The disclosure by police came very late in the day, and we had to move very quickly to get the print version out. But we continued to assemble a followup story after press time, and went ahead with it the following morning.

When police announced yesterday that they were looking for links to Terapon Adhahn's possible involvement in other cases of missing or slain children, the timing of his arrival in Pierce County became a burning question.

A closer look at the court records from his 1990 conviction for incest provides the best answer I've seen so far. (Obviously, all the reporters looking at this case are reading the same set of records - it's a 133-page file. We're not posting the actual document, because it includes some private information about the victim.)

The jail intake form for that case was filed March 27, 1990, and filled out a day earlier. It gives Adhahn's date of birth, address, marital status and such. He was asked for his previous address. "Germany" is the answer written on the form.

Another question asks, "How long in Pierce County?" The answer: three and a half months.

Unless he was lying, that means he arrived in Pierce no earlier than December 1989. For what it's worth, I haven't found anything else in the various records we've compiled to suggest an earlier date.

Match that against the list of cases involved missing or slain children we published today, and the importance becomes obvious. Five of them date back to 1988 or earlier, including the cases of Michella Welch and Jenny Bastian.

If the timing of Adhahn's arrival is correct as written in the court records, a link to those early cases looks less likely.

This is Sean Robinson, pinch-hitting for the Lights and Sirens crew today.

We're still following developments in the Zina Linnik case, pursuing a a few stray angles. Tacoma Police spokesman Chris Taylor said there won't be any major announcements today. Five or six detectives are assembling their case for prosecutors. According to chief Don Ramsdell, that work will lead to charges against suspect Terapon Adhahn - but not until next week, perhaps a few days in.

More to come...