Advertisement

A 12-year-old girl’s murder shook the country, inspiring far-reaching laws

Flowers and candles on the ground surround a photo of a girl.
Flowers and candles surround a photo of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in December 1993. She was kidnapped from her home in Petaluma, Calif., and killed,
(Associated Press)
Share via

To investigators at the scene of Polly Klaas’ abduction in early October 1993, the story strained belief. A thick-bearded stranger had entered the 12-year-old girl’s room while she was hosting a Friday night sleepover. He had a knife. He told the three girls he would slit their throats if they screamed.

He tied their hands using ligatures and electrical cord cut from a Nintendo game box in the room. He pulled pillowcases over the heads of Polly’s friends and ordered them to count to a thousand. Her mother was asleep, just down the hall in their home in Petaluma, Calif.

In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.

“A stranger abduction,” an FBI supervisor called it immediately. But some investigators had doubts. Such abductions are rare, and this specific scenario — a child taken from her bedroom, by a stranger, in front of witnesses — defied their collective experience.

Day after day, as the story became national news and pressure mounted on detectives, they grilled the 12-year-olds who had seen it happen. Was this some kind of prank? Did Polly have a boyfriend? Had she run off with him? Were they covering for her?

Advertisement

Detectives fixated on tiny discrepancies. One girl said the intruder had worn a yellow headband; the other didn’t remember it. One had heard a slamming door; the other did not. One passed a polygraph; the other showed inconclusive results.

A smiling girl.
Polly Klaas in 1993.
(Associated Press)

“This is [bull—] — it never happened,” one Petaluma police detective told another, as quoted in the book “In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child” by Kim Cross.

“The interviewers were told to lean on them almost like you would a suspect,” Cross (a friend of this reporter) told The Times in a recent interview. “And they were threatened, ‘You know Polly’s parents are suffering. You could make this stop if you just tell us the truth. If you’re lying, you could go to juvenile hall.’ And the girls’ stories never changed.”

Eddie Freyer was the senior agent in the FBI office in nearby Santa Rosa when he was called to the scene. He worked closely with the Petaluma Police Department.

Thousands of leads poured in, but at first “we had absolutely nothing,” Freyer told The Times. He said investigators hoped to elicit information by asking the girls questions multiple times in different ways. Their motives were “honorable but misplaced, pressuring those two girls to the point where they really didn’t want to talk to us anymore,” Freyer said.

Advertisement
A white tent in a wild area, with vehicles near it.
Authorities work around the crime scene south of Cloverdale, Calif., where the body of Polly Klaas was found in December 1993.
(Lacy Atkins/Los Angeles Times)

An army of volunteers searched the surrounding woods. Thousands of dead-end leads were called in. Psychics arrived to offer their services.

“Everybody was trying to attach themselves to this case because of its ever-growing notoriety,” Freyer said. “People would want to go visit the house and walk through a bedroom and get a reading and all these sorts of things.”

The big break came in late November, when a Sonoma County woman was hiking in the woods near her home about 25 miles from the Klaas home. She found some discarded clothing, including a pair of child-sized tights.

The woman remembered how, on the night of the kidnapping, she had encountered a strange, menacing trespasser whose Pinto was stuck in a ditch.

Hours after Polly’s abduction, two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies had detained the man, freed his car and let him go. They had not heard the all-points bulletin with a rough description of the kidnapper — dispatchers had not broadcast it for fear of alerting reporters who might be listening to scanners.

Advertisement

“As the investigation unfolds, we do not know about that detention, because the two deputies never called us,” Freyer recalled. “It would have saved us a lot of heartburn and grief. Would it have changed the ultimate outcome of the case? Probably not.”

A man.
Richard Allen Davis in a San Jose courtroom in February 1996.
(Associated Press)

The trespasser’s name was Richard Allen Davis, 39, a spottily employed sheet metal worker who had been paroled three months earlier on a kidnapping conviction from the state prison in San Luis Obispo.

He had a striking resemblance to the composite sketch the 12-year-old witnesses had helped create.

Scanning Polly’s bedroom, the FBI had used relatively new “alternate light source” technology, which made fingerprints visible under special powders. They had found a latent palm print on her bunk bed. Now, they matched it to Davis.

Police arrested Davis on a parole violation and held him in isolation in the Mendocino County jail. He admitted nothing. A friend who visited revealed what was in the news: Police had Davis’ palm print. Then he started talking.

He said he’d been smoking weed and drinking beer on the night he entered Polly’s house. He admitted to strangling her. He took police to where he had dumped her body in a nearby farm town.

A woman and a man hug and put their heads together.
Joe and B.J. Klaas, grandparents of Polly Klaas, hug each other as Richard Allen Davis testifies in a San Jose courtroom in September 1996 during his sentencing.
(Associated Press)
Advertisement

He gave a credulity-straining story about the night of the abduction, however. He said that while the deputies were questioning him at the ditch where his car was stuck, Polly was waiting on a nearby hillside where he had left her, alive.

Freyer doesn’t believe it. Nobody does.

“The assault occurred up there, and he more than likely killed her up there,” said Freyer, now 73 and retired.

Freyer has traveled the world lecturing to law enforcement agencies about the case and its lessons, including the need for quick evidence-collection teams, cooperation and communication between agencies, and specialists trained to interview child witnesses in a nonthreatening setting.

Why did Davis pick that house and that victim? Investigators believed he had been in Polly’s neighborhood before, maybe lingering in the nearby park, and had spotted her walking down the block to buy an ice cream.

Davis’ extensive criminal record, and the leniency he had received over the decades, aroused outrage. As far back as 1977, a probation officer had called him a threat to society who could not function outside prison. He admitted that he heard voices telling him to rob and rape.

Twice, he had escaped from psychiatric wards. Among his convictions: abducting a woman in her car at knifepoint in 1976, for which he served five years, and kidnapping a woman at gunpoint from her home in 1984, for which he served eight.

Advertisement

At the trial for Polly’s murder, Davis’ attorney did not dispute his client was the killer but denied he had sexually assaulted the girl. A jury found Davis guilty of 10 felony counts, including attempting a lewd act on a child.

A man in a black robe raises his right hand.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Thomas Hastings during the trial of Richard Allen Davis in February 1996.
(Associated Press)

At the sentencing, Davis directed a vile remark at Marc Klaas, the victim’s father, who lunged at him.

“Mr. Davis, this is always a traumatic and emotional decision for a judge,” Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Thomas Hastings said, sentencing him to death. “You made it very easy today by your conduct.”

The case — along with the 1992 murder of 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds, shot by a parolee trying to steal her purse — gave impetus to California’s enduringly controversial “three-strikes” law.

The law imposed mandatory sentences of 25 years to life for felons with two prior violent crime convictions, treating even nonviolent felonies, such as residential burglary, as a third strike.

Marc Klaas initially supported the law but came to fear that its impact would “skewer toward young Black dudes” because of harsh punishments for crimes less serious than murder.

At the time, Klaas told the public: “I’ve had my stereo stolen and I’ve had my daughter murdered, and I know the difference.”

Advertisement

In 1994, Gov. Pete Wilson signed three-strikes into law, and California voters approved it, casting ballots for Proposition 184 in overwhelming numbers. Two years later, when the state Supreme Court gave judges discretion to remove strike convictions so they could not be used against defendants at sentencing, Klaas was convinced the guardrails were sufficient. He threw his support behind three-strikes again.

In 2012, Proposition 36 modified the law to require that all three offenses be serious or violent. But it remains a bête noire for critics of mass incarceration. (Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascon told his prosecutors not to seek sentencing enhancements under the law, spawning a lawsuit now before the California Supreme Court.) Klaas continues to support the law, despite his earlier doubts.

Tips

If you have information on old crimes, famous, once-famous or obscure, contact christopher.goffard@latimes.com

After his daughter’s murder, Klaas launched the KlaasKids Foundation, a victims rights nonprofit with an emphasis on protecting children. He championed bills such as Megan’s Law, which notified the public about registered sex offenders, and coordinated search and rescue operations for missing kids and young adults.

“They said [Polly’s friends] were lying because they knew Polly had run away with her boyfriend,” Klaas said. “We aggressively did everything we could to stop that mind-set.”

He was steadfast in demanding the death penalty for his daughter’s killer. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom invited him to Sacramento for a conversation and then announced a moratorium on executions, saying he had consulted with victims’ advocates. It left Klaas feeling cruelly used.

A woman and a man side-hug outdoors.
Marc Klaas, father of Polly Klaas, hugs his wife, Violet, outside Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose, Calif., on May 31, 2024. A judge declined to recall the capital sentence against Richard Allen Davis.
(Nic Coury / Associated Press)

“We just had a bull— conversation for about 45 minutes,” Klaas told The Times. “The governor of the state called the father of a murder victim and had him drive 200 miles for the express purpose of being able to say, ‘I talked to him.’ I can’t imagine what else it was for, because there was no content to the meeting whatsoever.”

Klaas joined the recall effort against Newsom in 2021, which failed. Newsom dismantled San Quentin’s death row, and Davis was transferred to a less restrictive facility. Klaas doesn’t think he will live to see Davis executed.

Advertisement

“I gave that up years ago,” he said. “So many good people that worked on Polly’s case have died. This guy Richard Allen Davis has been able to live on.”

Klaas, 75, said he will retire at the end of the year and close down his foundation. He could not find a successor.

“There were people I tried to mentor, to move the whole agenda forward, but nothing ever stuck,” he said.

Advertisement
seductrice.net
universo-virtual.com
buytrendz.net
thisforall.net
benchpressgains.com
qthzb.com
mindhunter9.com
dwjqp1.com
secure-signup.net
ahaayy.com
tressesindia.com
puresybian.com
krpano-chs.com
cre8workshop.com
hdkino.org
peixun021.com
qz786.com
utahperformingartscenter.org
worldqrmconference.com
shangyuwh.com
eejssdfsdfdfjsd.com
playminecraftfreeonline.com
trekvietnamtour.com
your-business-articles.com
essaywritingservice10.com
hindusamaaj.com
joggingvideo.com
wandercoups.com
wormblaster.net
tongchengchuyange0004.com
internetknowing.com
breachurch.com
peachesnginburlesque.com
dataarchitectoo.com
clientfunnelformula.com
30pps.com
cherylroll.com
ks2252.com
prowp.net
webmanicura.com
sofietsshotel.com
facetorch.com
nylawyerreview.com
apapromotions.com
shareparelli.com
goeaglepointe.com
thegreenmanpubphuket.com
karotorossian.com
publicsensor.com
taiwandefence.com
epcsur.com
mfhoudan.com
southstills.com
tvtv98.com
thewellington-hotel.com
bccaipiao.com
colectoresindustrialesgs.com
shenanddcg.com
capriartfilmfestival.com
replicabreitlingsale.com
thaiamarinnewtoncorner.com
gkmcww.com
mbnkbj.com
andrewbrennandesign.com
cod54.com
luobinzhang.com
faithfirst.net
zjyc28.com
tongchengjinyeyouyue0004.com
nhuan6.com
kftz5k.com
oldgardensflowers.com
lightupthefloor.com
bahamamamas-stjohns.com
ly2818.com
905onthebay.com
fonemenu.com
notanothermovie.com
ukrainehighclassescort.com
meincmagazine.com
av-5858.com
yallerdawg.com
donkeythemovie.com
corporatehospitalitygroup.com
boboyy88.com
miteinander-lernen.com
dannayconsulting.com
officialtomsshoesoutletstore.com
forsale-amoxil-amoxicillin.net
generictadalafil-canada.net
guitarlessonseastlondon.com
lesliesrestaurants.com
mattyno9.com
nri-homeloans.com
rtgvisas-qatar.com
salbutamolventolinonline.net
sportsinjuries.info
wedsna.com
rgkntk.com
bkkmarketplace.com
zxqcwx.com
breakupprogram.com
boxcardc.com
unblockyoutubeindonesia.com
fabulousbookmark.com
beat-the.com
guatemala-sailfishing-vacations-charters.com
magie-marketing.com
kingstonliteracy.com
guitaraffinity.com
eurelookinggoodapparel.com
howtolosecheekfat.net
marioncma.org
oliviadavismusic.com
shantelcampbellrealestate.com
shopleborn13.com
topindiafree.com
v-visitors.net
djjky.com
053hh.com
originbluei.com
baucishotel.com
33kkn.com
intrinsiqresearch.com
mariaescort-kiev.com
mymaguk.com
sponsored4u.com
crimsonclass.com
bataillenavale.com
searchtile.com
ze-stribrnych-struh.com
zenithalhype.com
modalpkv.com
bouisset-lafforgue.com
useupload.com
37r.net
autoankauf-muenster.com
bantinbongda.net
bilgius.com
brabustermagazine.com
indigrow.org
miicrosofts.net
mysmiletravel.com
selinasims.com
spellcubesapp.com
usa-faction.com
hypoallergenicdogsnames.com
dailyupdatez.com
foodphotographyreviews.com
cricutcom-setup.com
chprowebdesign.com
katyrealty-kanepa.com
tasramar.com
bilgipinari.org
four-am.com
indiarepublicday.com
inquick-enbooks.com
iracmpi.com
kakaschoenen.com
lsm99flash.com
nana1255.com
ngen-niagara.com
technwzs.com
virtualonlinecasino1345.com
wallpapertop.net
casino-natali.com
iprofit-internet.com
denochemexicana.com
eventhalfkg.com
medcon-taiwan.com
life-himawari.com
myriamshomes.com
nightmarevue.com
healthandfitnesslives.com
androidnews-jp.com
allstarsru.com
bestofthebuckeyestate.com
bestofthefirststate.com
bestwireless7.com
britsmile.com
declarationintermittent.com
findhereall.com
jingyou888.com
lsm99deal.com
lsm99galaxy.com
moozatech.com
nuagh.com
patliyo.com
philomenamagikz.net
rckouba.net
saturnunipessoallda.com
tallahasseefrolics.com
thematurehardcore.net
totalenvironment-inthatquietearth.com
velislavakaymakanova.com
vermontenergetic.com
kakakpintar.com
jerusalemdispatch.com
begorgeouslady.com
1800birks4u.com
2wheelstogo.com
6strip4you.com
bigdata-world.net
emailandco.net
gacapal.com
jharpost.com
krishnaastro.com
lsm99credit.com
mascalzonicampani.com
sitemapxml.org
thecityslums.net
topagh.com
flairnetwebdesign.com
rajasthancarservices.com
bangkaeair.com
beneventocoupon.com
noternet.org
oqtive.com
smilebrightrx.com
decollage-etiquette.com
1millionbestdownloads.com
7658.info
bidbass.com
devlopworldtech.com
digitalmarketingrajkot.com
fluginfo.net
naqlafshk.com
passion-decouverte.com
playsirius.com
spacceleratorintl.com
stikyballs.com
top10way.com
yokidsyogurt.com
zszyhl.com
16firthcrescent.com
abogadolaboralistamd.com
apk2wap.com
aromacremeria.com
banparacard.com
bosmanraws.com
businessproviderblog.com
caltonosa.com
calvaryrevivalchurch.org
chastenedsoulwithabrokenheart.com
cheminotsgardcevennes.com
cooksspot.com
cqxzpt.com
deesywig.com
deltacartoonmaps.com
despixelsetdeshommes.com
duocoracaobrasileiro.com
fareshopbd.com
goodpainspills.com
hemendekor.com
kobisitecdn.com
makaigoods.com
mgs1454.com
piccadillyresidences.com
radiolaondafresca.com
rubendorf.com
searchengineimprov.com
sellmyhrvahome.com
shugahouseessentials.com
sonihullquad.com
subtractkilos.com
valeriekelmansky.com
vipasdigitalmarketing.com
voolivrerj.com
worldhealthstory.com
zeelonggroup.com
1015southrockhill.com
10x10b.com
111-online-casinos.com
191cb.com
3665arpentunitd.com
aitesonics.com
bag-shokunin.com
brightotech.com
communication-digitale-services.com
covoakland.org
dariaprimapack.com
freefortniteaccountss.com
gatebizglobal.com
global1entertainmentnews.com
greatytene.com
hiroshiwakita.com
iktodaypk.com
jahatsakong.com
meadowbrookgolfgroup.com
newsbharati.net
platinumstudiosdesign.com
slotxogamesplay.com
strikestaruk.com
techguroh.com
trucosdefortnite.com
ufabetrune.com
weddedtowhitmore.com
12940brycecanyonunitb.com
1311dietrichoaks.com
2monarchtraceunit303.com
601legendhill.com
850elaine.com
adieusolasomade.com
andora-ke.com
bestslotxogames.com
cannagomcallen.com
endlesslyhot.com
iestpjva.com
ouqprint.com
pwmaplefest.com
qtylmr.com
rb88betting.com
buscadogues.com
1007macfm.com
born-wild.com
growthinvests.com
promocode-casino.com
proyectogalgoargentina.com
wbthompson-art.com
whitemountainwheels.com
7thavehvl.com
developmethis.com
funkydogbowties.com
travelodgegrandjunction.com
gao-town.com
globalmarketsuite.com
blogshippo.com
hdbka.com
proboards67.com
outletonline-michaelkors.com
kalkis-research.com
thuthuatit.net
buckcash.com
hollistercanada.com
docterror.com
asadart.com
vmayke.org
erwincomputers.com
dirimart.org
okkii.com
loteriasdecehegin.com
mountanalog.com
healingtaobritain.com
ttxmonitor.com
nwordpress.com
11bolabonanza.com