COLUMBUS — Sheila Vaculik said Tuesday she doesn’t know whether her daughter, Sierah Joughin, would be alive today if her family had known someone with a violent criminal past lived nearby.

But she argued before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee that police should have had the tools to know that when Ms. Joughin of Metamora, Ohio, set out on her bicycle the evening of July 19.

“The sex offender registry that was put into place by legislators worked just like it was meant to that night,” she said. “Law enforcement had contact with the offenders in our area, within hours after Sierah went missing. 

“But unfortunately, the man indicted for this crime was not on any list or registry.”

Family and friends then asked for a list of violent offenders.

“We were told no such database exists,” said Howard Ice, Ms. Joughin’s uncle and her employer while she interned at Ice Industries.

“The information is out there, but it is in every courthouse across the state, listed by case number, not by criminal,” he said. “Unbelievably, even the FBI did not have access to this kind of centralized information.”

Senate Bill 67, sponsored by state Sens. Randy Gardner (R., Bowling Green) and Cliff Hite (R., Findlay), would require Attorney General Mike DeWine to develop such a database by the end of this year. “Sierah’s Law” leaves many of the list’s details to the attorney general.

It remains unclear whether Ms. Joughin’s alleged killer, James D. Worley, 57, would have needed to register under such a law. His prior abduction-conviction in Lucas County occurred 26 years earlier.

Five other states maintain registries of offenders with violent pasts. Ohio has registries for sex offenders and arsonists.

Worley of Delta, Ohio, faces trial Jan. 16 and potentially the death penalty. Ms. Joughin, 20, who was about to enter her junior year at the University of Toledo, was found in a shallow grave off Fulton County Road 7 three days after the abduction. She’d been handcuffed and died of asphyxiation.

The grave was found after someone formerly in law enforcement recalled the criminal past of a local “strange, reclusive man,” as Mr. Ice put it.

“Would my daughter have been found Wednesday alive instead of Friday in a shallow grave seven miles from our home?” Ms. Vaculik asked. “I will never know the answer to that question, and that is the subject of my nightmares.”

Worley faces charges of murder, kidnapping, abduction, aggravated robbery, possession of criminal tools, tampering with evidence, abuse of a corpse, and possession of weapons while prohibited from doing so.

Indiana, Illinois, Montana, Kansas, and Oklahoma have violent-offender registries, but they differ in which crimes qualify and how registrants may be removed.

Under the bill, Mr. DeWine would make those decisions.

State Sen. Peggy Lehner (R., Kettering), a committee member, questioned whether a registry accessible to law enforcement rather than the general public would meet the goal.

Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn said he would prefer that it be public “just from the standpoint that knowledge is power, and people should know.”

“It is, but sometimes people misuse that knowledge,” Ms. Lehner said. “It seems to me what your goal here is for law enforcement to actively search, and that would be served well by just having the registry without potentially causing isolation. ... You know what we could end up doing: We could be creating crime in and of itself.”

The bill suggests several crimes that could be included — aggravated murder, murder, voluntary manslaughter, kidnapping, abduction, and conspiracy or attempted conspiracy to commit such crimes.

In a letter to the committee, Lucas County Prosecuting Attorney Julia Bates suggested adding felonious assault.

“We have an arson offender registry, a sex offender registry, and it only makes sense to include offenders convicted of the most serious offense on our books,” she wrote.

Mr. DeWine supports the bill, and the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association voted to support the concept Tuesday.

In a letter to the committee, the attorney general said his office could piggyback onto the sex-offender registry system. He estimated it would cost $350,000 for the first year followed by an annual $175,000, plus personnel costs.

Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.

First Published March 15, 2017, 4:00 a.m.