CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – Lawrence Trant thought people would praise him for attacking seven pedophiles, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

“I had this fantasy that I’d be getting lots of letters from people,” Trant told the Boston Globe. “Doesn’t anybody realize why I did this? I could have lived the rest of my life, become an old man, and lived happily ever after. But here I am, in … prison.”

Trant is serving a 10- to 30-year prison sentence 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.

“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.”

In April 2003, Trant stabbed one man and lit fires at two buildings where at least seven convicted sex offenders lived.

At his trial, three jurors refused to convict him of attempted murder. The judge declared a mistrial on that charge; the same jurors eventually agreed that Trant had committed first-degree assault.

Prosecutors offered Trant a plea bargain on the seven remaining attempted murder charges. Trant pleaded guilty to two charges.

“I think I’m a good guy; I don’t think I should receive this kind of punishment,” Trant said.

“I thought that people would accept it. But I was wrong.”

In Trant’s eyes, the penalties for sexually assaulting children are scandalously lenient, and the public is not adequately protected against pedophiles who return to the streets after prison.

“I hope I’ve done a service to the community,” Trant said. “These guys are sexual terrorists.”

Rights advocates were concerned he had downloaded the names and addresses of convicted sex offenders from a state Internet site.

Claire Ebel, executive director of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, said the list on the State Police site stigmatizes offenders.

Although 43 states post information on sex offenders on the Net, vigilante acts against them are rare, said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Weld said the warnings far outweighs the potential for vigilante crimes.

The registry has encountered some problems, including the posting of addresses where convicted offenders no longer live. Now, authorities are ordered to regularly check addresses, which convicted offenders are required to keep up to date.

Trant, who has spent 15 years in Massachusetts and New Hampshire prisons, said he was molested several times as a teenager by a youth worker at a Massachusetts church. The memory was tucked away, Trant said, until news surfaced about the clergy sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. At the time, Trant was on parole after serving a sentence for receiving stolen goods.

“I just freaked out when I started reading all that,” Trant said. “It tore my soul apart, and I guess I decided to do something about it.”

Trant said he saw Sheridan walking to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in his neighborhood on April 25, 2003. Trant returned to his home, grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and kitchen knife, and confronted Sheridan after the meeting.

As a bystander looked on, Trant stabbed Lawrence Sheridan in the back and then in the arm.

“I wanted to tell him . . . Stay out of my neighborhood,’ ” he said. “I started to say something, and then I just snapped.”

Police later discovered a manifesto in Trant’s apartment, which appealed for the help of like-minded people “genuinely committed, willing to sacrifice ourselves if necessary, to bring about the results that can 1/8ensure 3/8 that our children will be protected.” Police also found a downloaded list of sex offenders with check marks next to the names of residents whose apartments had been hit recently by fire.

“It’s scary when you have someone who has no conscience about inflicting violence on other human beings,” Weld said. “He wanted the limelight. He wanted the soapbox of the first trial.”