LEWISTON — Maeghan Maloney had only been on the job 3½ months when the call came in.

It was after midnight and on the other end of the line, a state trooper was talking about a man who had been living in the woods for nearly three decades — and who might have committed more than 1,000 burglaries in that time.

“It took a while to process what she was saying to me,” Maloney said Monday night at a presentation at the Lewiston Public Library.

What the trooper was saying, it turns out, was that Kennebec County’s new district attorney had an extraordinary case on her hands, the kind that comes around once in a career, if at all.

Maloney talked about her introduction to — and ultimate prosecution of — Christopher Knight, 47, the man who would become Maine’s most-famous hermit.

Also on hand before a crowd of two dozen was Andrew Robinson, district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties. By the time Robinson had heard about the Knight case in 2013, he had been a prosecutor for nearly 15 years.

By that point in a career, Robinson said, “You think you’ve seen everything under the sun.”

But no one had seen a case quite like this one, which ultimately became the focus of the book “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit.”

The book details the life and crimes of Knight, who lived alone in the woods in the North Pond area of Maine for 27 years, getting by on food, clothing and other items he stole from nearby cabins and camps.

The case was singular in many ways, said Maloney, who grew up in Lewiston’s Tall Pines housing projects. While the evidence against him was overwhelming, it was also remarkable in that so many people — including cops, prosecutors and even the victims of his crimes — became fond of Knight and sympathetic to the life he had lived.

Trooper Diane Perkins-Vance, who investigated the case, became uncharacteristically protective of the criminal suspect who conceivably could have spent the rest of his years in prison.

“She almost instantly had a connection with him,” Maloney told the library group.

The case was also unique, she said, in that the suspect never denied his crimes or sought to minimize nearly 30 years of burglaries and thefts.

“He was very forthcoming,” Maloney recalled. “He was apologetic almost immediately. Almost from the start, he wanted to apologize. He wanted to take responsibility.”

The case was so intriguing — and Knight himself so compelling — that media came from around the globe to cover the story. That made things difficult when Maloney got to meeting with the many victims of Knight’s thefts to explore what kind of criminal sentence she should recommend.

How did the victims feel?

“The range was extreme,” Maloney said.

One victim wanted to know if Maine had a death penalty. But that was a rare opinion, Maloney said. Most of the victims sympathized, including some who hoped Knight would be released from jail at once, even before the case was prosecuted.

For Maloney, it was tricky business. She had enough evidence to possibly send the man to prison for the rest of his life. Few people seemed to believe that kind of punishment was appropriate, but Knight had committed crimes, and a lot of them.

As a prosecutor, Maloney had to consider the impact Knight’s shenanigans had made on the people of North Pond, who had experienced mysterious thefts and break-ins over the years.

“He had stolen their peace and serenity,” Maloney said. “That was the most terrifying thing for them — to not know who was doing it. It was very frightening to a lot of people.”

The dilemma over how a person such as Knight should be prosecuted became the thrust of the Monday night talk. In many criminal cases, Maloney and Robinson agreed, harsh sentences are warranted. Some offenders are just too dangerous to be shown leniency.

“There are just some people,” Robinson said, “who need to go to prison.”

Conversely, Knight was described as a gentle man, full of remorse, who had stolen in order to survive the often harsh environment of the Maine woods.

In the end, Maloney, Knight’s lawyer and a judge came to an agreement that seemed to satisfy most involved in the case. Knight was allowed an alternative sentence in which he remained free, although his days were rigidly structured by the court.

That sentence was agreed on only after consideration of several factors, Maloney told the group. Knight had no criminal history outside the burglaries; he had never confronted any of his victims and in fact, had tried to minimize the impact he made on those he stole from.

“His goal was for people to not know that he had been there,” Maloney said. “He tried not to cause damage.”

Knight served out his sentence, reporting to court as required, and then he spent two years on probation. That ended in April and according to Maloney, Knight did everything that was demanded of him by the court.

“He never violated a single condition,” she said. “He is now completely done with his court requirements.”

Those who attended the Monday night talk had plenty of questions. Several of them wondered if the prosecutor had ever discerned why Knight became a hermit in the first place — why he had chosen to live in the woods and have no contact with anyone for so many years.

Maloney could not say, for sure. But she had some ideas about what drove Knight to a life of wilderness solitude.

“Life became just too overwhelming,” the prosecutor said. “We’ve all sort of felt that before in our lives. All of us have daydreamed, even if just for a minute, of going off into the woods.”

Many in the group also wanted to know what will become of Knight, now that he is free from the obligations of his criminal sentence.

Again, Maloney could only speculate.

“I don’t see him ever allowing himself to commit another crime,” she said. “He has connections with society now, but I think there’s a part of him that will always want to go back into the woods.”

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