In the suburbs of DC, a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered.
911, which emergency?
We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer.
For the next 2 decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, Blood and Water. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Step into the 2020 True Crime Vault, where you'll hear our most gripping stories.
The last thing we said on our phone call was, uh, she said, "I love you, Daddy," and I said, "I love you too, baby." And those were the last words I spoke.
Around 10:30, Polly opened the door, and that's when there was a man standing in the hall, and he was holding a knife.
You're convinced he was stalking her?
Absolutely.
He said, who lives here? And Polly said, I do. And then he took Polly.
Bring her back. Don't hurt her. Just bring her back.
But did a crucial decision back then make all the difference? New revelations and an all-new look at the story that terrified the country.
I hate this part of it.
He came over to my car. He's— I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was sightseeing.
At midnight?
At midnight. I would say he was panic-stricken, and I smelled fear.
I literally grabbed him and pulled him close and said, Mark, you need to be strong for your daughter.
This was my test right here, right now.
It was like a boogeyman came in and stole her out of that house.
For 2 weeks, the town of Petaluma— virtually everyone who lives or works here has been consumed by the kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas.
The Polly Klaas case really changed everything.
The case has generated enormous local and national publicity.
I think it's so important that we just find her as soon as possible. Polly's case was huge because of how it happened, because of where it happened.
This is a small town coming to grips with the idea idea that the problems of the world have come to the front door. We should tell a story, not only about the case itself, about the crime itself, but the impact.
Polly's legacy is that, you know, she changed how the FBI investigates crime.
12-year-old Polly Hannah Klaas was in her own bedroom having a slumber party—
Polly Klaas was snatched at knifepoint from her bedroom.
Polly's kidnapping was a real wake-up call for a lot of parents that were so lulled into safety.
The suspect tied and gagged the girls while Polly's mother slept in another room.
How could this have happened when her mother was right there? How could this have happened? It's your worst nightmare.
It shocked the country. It happened here in Petaluma.
What was it like, like when— right before the kidnapping happened?
Just like this. A neighborhood community, people walking their kids and their dogs without any concern. It was just a typical American neighborhood, wholesome and robust.
So let's start by setting the scene a little bit. Tell me a little bit about Petaluma.
Well, Petaluma is rather a small rural community that is so all-American.
It's morning again in America.
It was featured in one of Ronald Reagan's campaign ads.
At that time, it was a very rural town, about 50,000 people. It was kind of an all-American town. You know, American Graffiti had been filmed in Petaluma.
I'll call you later.
Peggy Sue Got Married was filmed in Petaluma.
Really small-town Americana.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nestled between wine country and San Francisco.
Exactly. Yeah, 30 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. But it's an entirely different world, known for its eggs, known for its agriculture, known for its cattle farms.
I am Annette Nelson, and Polly was my best friend. We all felt safe in Petaluma. Everyone seemed to let, you know, leave the doors unlocked. Before cell phones, so we all just kind of left notes for our parents.
It must feel surreal that it's been 30 years.
It feels very surreal. I have no idea where any of that time went. I really don't. I can't explain it.
I'm sure in many ways it feels like yesterday.
Well, it does. I mean, just having, you know, these recurring thoughts that I'm having brings it even closer than yesterday.
It all began in 1981 when Polly was born to Mark Klaas and Eve Nichol.
Well, that was the greatest day of my life. The day that Polly was born gave me new meaning in my life. It taught me unconditional love.
The day you became a dad.
The day I became a dad. And I was really good at that.
She was daddy's little girl.
She was totally daddy's little girl. There's no question about that.
As parents, Mark and Eve were a great team. But as a married couple, not so much. Their marriage was faltering. And by 1984, when Polly was just 3, they decided to go their separate ways.
Where my marriage was really a total disaster with Eve, our divorce was quite successful. Paulie, she lived with, with my ex-wife up in Petaluma.
She adored her dad and saw him at least once a week. Her mother remarried and had a little girl named Annie. They shared a room in a very small Victorian cottage in Petaluma.
And you co-parented quite well?
I believe we did, yes.
I chose that area because I thought it was the most ideal place.
ABC News first spoke with Eve Nichol back in 1993. Eve, tell me about Holly.
She is an incredibly sweet and sensitive and charming kid.
She's a lovely kid.
Holly was the girl who reminded everyone of someone they loved, whether it was a daughter or a friend or a niece.
Polly was new at Cherry Valley in 6th grade, and she was in my class, and we met on the first day of school and just instantly had a lot of fun together.
Polly was on the cusp between child and adolescent. She was 12 going on 13. She loved to play the clarinet, and she loved to read, and most of all, she loved acting.
She's, uh, very musical. She loves to play her piano and her clarinet. She's really blossoming in terms of her friends.
If you look at pictures of her, you'll see she just sort of shines through the celluloid.
So on that morning, it was the first Friday in October, and Polly was really excited because her mother had said she could have a friend sleepover.
The plan for October 1st was hatched at lunchtime that day. We're all gonna ask our parents, and we're gonna have so much fun. And then I wasn't able to go that night.
I was getting over a cold.
In the early evening, around 6 o'clock or so, uh, Polly and I had our daily conversation. We pretty much talked every day. She was very excited about her slumber party. Yeah, she was having some girlfriends over. The last thing we said on our phone call was, uh, she said, "I love you, Daddy," and I said, "I love you too, baby." And those were the last words I spoke.
The two girls who ended up going to the sleepover were Polly's 6th grade classmates, Kate McClain and Jillian Pelham.
When Kate and her mother pulled up in the car, Polly and Jillian were poised on either side of the porch like two stone lions.
Typical 12-year-old girls talking about, you know, Halloween. And they were playing games and getting makeup on, just enjoying the evening, you know.
Since it was a sleepover, Annie was going to sleep in her mom's room so that the big girls could kind of have their own privacy. And they were playing around. They were playing a board game.
It's a Friday night, not terribly late, you know, 8, 9, 10 o'clock on a warm October evening. A lot of people are out.
Around 10:30, the girls were sitting or sprawled on the floor playing a board game. Polly stood up to go get the sleeping bags from the family room, and she opened the door, and that's when there was a man standing in the hall, and he was holding a knife.
It's impossible to imagine the utter fear and confusion that 12-year-old Polly and her friends must have been feeling in those moments. But what happened next? Would terrify parents across the country and catapult this case into the national spotlight.
Not only were the eyes of the volunteers at the center conducting the search for Polly Claff riveted on the screen, eyes across the country were focused on the missing child.
You just don't think about someone coming into your home.
911, Petaluma.
The family is asking anyone with any information about this kidnapping to please contact the Petaluma Police.
Agents had no connection to anyone who might want to kidnap Polly. They were really at a loss for where to even start.
When you look at the boldness of this kidnapping, that's why this one is so rare.
FBI agents and police spent today looking for evidence and canvassing the neighborhood.
It was like a boogeyman came in and stole her out of that house.
Polly Kless is having a sleepover with two friends, Kate and Jillian, from her sixth grade class.
That happens millions of times in this country on a Friday and Saturday night. It's like apple pie and baseball.
Around 10:30 that night, her mother, Eve Nickel, is asleep with Polly's younger half-sister Annie in another room.
Shortly after I fell asleep. An intruder came into the house, appeared at the door to their room as Polly opened it to take the sleeping bags into the front room. He had a large knife.
Initially, Kate and Jillian thought, is this a prank?
He said he would hurt them if they made a sound. They didn't.
He said, don't look at me, lie down on the floor. And so they lay down face down on the floor like little dolls, one by one. He bound them and gagged them. He used strips of white cloth, and over them he tied what they could feel to be electrical cord.
He said he was only there for the money, but it obviously had nothing to do with money.
He said, who lives here? Polly said, I do. And then he took Polly. He told Kate and Gillian to count to 1,000 and said that by the time that they had gotten to 1,000, Polly would be back.
They never got to 1,000.
Gillian was a gymnast, and she was flexible, and she was able to get her feet through her arms so that her arms were in front of her. And then she used her teeth to untie herself, and then she untied Kate.
And then they wake up your ex-wife.
The bedrooms were separated by a Jack and Jill bathroom, one that connected both rooms.
The girls said, "Polly's gone." "Who took her?" "The man." What man? So that's when Eve called 911. 911, hello?
Yeah, um.
What's the problem?
Hello?
Yeah. I think we need to get back into our house.
I think it's our daughter. You can tell when you hear it that she's very confused. She had a migraine, and she had gone to bed and taken a sleeping pill. And so she is surfacing through sleep to wakefulness and realizing this horrific reality that her daughter is gone.
It was hard to say the words, but I said, "My daughter has been taken." Where you're at?
Yeah. How old is your daughter?
She's 12 and a half.
At some point, Kate got on the phone and she told them exactly what happened.
I was expecting it. I thought it was a joke.
I had a note and she had a knife. Yes.
Big knife, big. Is he a white male?
Uh, yeah, and he has a dark beard, dark hair.
How old?
I don't know, 30 or 40, 30.
Okay, have you ever seen this man before?
The first people on the scene were detectives from the Petaluma Police Department.
They were there minutes later.
They came in and immediately started attending to the scene.
It was important that we make the girls feel safe. It was important that we preserve evidence. And it was important that we try to get as much information as we could so we could get it out.
We walked through the bedroom scene and saw clothes that were laying on the floor and items of clothing that had been used as bindings for the girls.
We had Nintendo cords that were cut.
We did photographs. Collected them and processed the scene for fingerprints.
But there really weren't any signs of burglary or ransacking the house.
There was no forced entry to the front doors, the back doors, or any of the windows.
Eve's purse was still on the kitchen table. Her money was in it. Everything was still there except Polly.
It was like a boogeyman came in and stole her out of that house.
Meanwhile, outside, officers start fanning out on the streets to ask if anyone in the neighborhood saw anything suspicious.
There was a small apartment behind where Polly lived, and some folks there had said that they had seen somebody walking around.
We had gone to get a pizza and a couple of videos, came home. We're watching the videos, nothing out of the ordinary.
Their front door is wide open, and it's only a few feet from the back porch, and they see at 10:30 this guy come down the driveway and go up in the back porch and go in. To the back of the house.
I didn't think twice about it.
Sometimes Eve had friends over or there was family.
Others report seeing an unfamiliar man dressed in dark clothing on Polly Street, possibly driving a small gray or black vehicle. And at 12:14 AM, a little over an hour after Eve called 911, the Petaluma Police Department issues an alert with some of the details they've learned.
It went out over what's called an all-points bulletin, an APB, or a Bolo, to let other agencies know, hey, be on the lookout for this kind of car, this kind of character, and whatever.
When the APB went out, it said not for press release, so it was not broadcast over certain radio channels.
They didn't want the media to get wind of this kidnapping. It wasn't an error per se, and it wasn't anyone's fault, but like, that was a pivotal thing. They decided if this is a kidnapping, the FBI needs to be involved immediately.
Bringing in the FBI was essential.
At the time, in 1993, my title was a senior resident agent in the FBI office in Santa Rosa. I was named the case agent on the night of the kidnapping.
When I got a call from Eddie Fryer from the FBI, uh, he asked me, what do you need? And I said, I need 100 agents right now. And he said, I'll have you 50 by the morning. And true to his word, he did.
When I look back on the night of the kidnapping and I met Sergeant Valbello, I think we, we all dedicated ourselves. We were going to do what's going to take to solve this case.
But even to an FBI team that has worked every kind of kidnapping case, this one does feel different when you look at the boldness of this kidnapping, a parent is home.
3 girls are having a slumber party. The lights are on. It's 10:30 at night.
There was no playbook for this. It just didn't happen like this. It defies logic.
Remember, this is 1993. So it's before so many of those other headline-grabbing cases, like JonBenét Ramsey or Elizabeth Smart, or baby Sabrina.
When you do everything you can as a parent to protect your children, and I'm a very devoted parent and always have been, you just don't think about someone coming into your home.
On the night that Polly went missing, Eve lit a candle and put it in the window of her home, and she would light it every night.
I think Eve wanted to feel hope that her daughter would return, and that was her way to shine a light, literally, and, and hope that Polly would come back.
Far beyond that light, the very same night Polly disappears, a single mom and her daughter have a frightening confrontation on a secluded country road.
When I pulled up and he came over to my car. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
He was disheveled. He had sticks and twigs in his hair, and he reeked, just reeked.
I smelled fear.
Polly Klaas vanished from her home in Petaluma, California on October 1st, 1993. For the 30th anniversary of her disappearance, Kim Cross sat down and told the story of the investigation from the inside for her book, In Light of All Darkness.
I am the daughter-in-law of Eddie Fryer, the FBI case agent in charge of the Polly Klaas investigation. We do not gather as a family and not talk about Polly. It's like part of our family DNA.
So is that what inspired the book?
I realized that I could get access because of my relationship to people who would not talk to another journalist. Detectives and FBI agents basically pulled their bankers boxes out of their garages and attic and just said, "Here you go." And one of the police reports details an incident that happened the very night Polly disappeared. About an hour after Polly was reported missing, a couple of deputies responded to a trespassing call on Pitthian Road. This was a woman's driveway in wine country, and the driveway is really, really steep and curved.
That particular evening, it was a full moon, I remember, and it was cold.
Dana Jaffe was a single mother who worked as a chef at one of Sonoma's celebrated restaurants, and she had just come home from working at the restaurant, and she had a 12-year-old little girl, and her babysitter had left. And on the way out of the driveway, she encountered a stranger. And he was in a white Pinto, and it was stuck in a ditch on the driveway.
A very fearsome, scary character. Somebody who looked like Charles Manson, as the babysitter described it.
And she kind of slowly pulls up, and this guy comes around and to her driver's side.
She had her door locked, but she sort of cracked her window, and he came over and stuck his fingers in the crack of the window and was saying, "Get out of the car.
You need to help me." I think she'd cracked it this far and she just rolled it right back up and took off. It frightened her.
So she drove out and called you?
The hair on the back of my neck stood up and, uh, I was aware that we were in a vulnerable situation.
And you felt vulnerable?
Well, no one had any business being up there at midnight. My daughter joked and picked up the baseball bat and the mace, and I said, sure, why not? And, uh, we were both dressed and out of the house in probably under 2 minutes. I mean, I really pushed her, get dressed now, we need to get out now. Got in the car cuz I knew I could lock my doors, and we headed down the road to see what he was doing. And by the time I got here to the gate and saw his car and saw that he wasn't in it, I became really concerned.
And she goes down and calls the sheriff's office. Hey, I got a trespasser on my property late at night, doesn't belong there.
Two deputies showed up from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, and they followed her up the hill to the gate inside which this car was abandoned. And the stranger, the trespasser, was sort of standing by his car casually as if he was expecting them to show up.
At this point, it's been more than 45 minutes since Dana's babysitter first encountered him.
He came over to my car. He sees— I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I was sightseeing.
At midnight?
At midnight. And he was disheveled and he reeked, just reeked. I would say he was panic-stricken and he— I smelled fear. I just told him, I said, well, these gentlemen behind you are going to take care of this. So I went ahead up to the house.
Two deputies start trying to figure out who he is, what's he doing there, and they're asking basic questions. They get his driver's license, it checks out.
They pat him down and they notice his pants are wet.
He's kind of sweating, you know, it's a cool night, you know, it's a cool October evening. They noticed he got debris in his hair and his clothes are all kind of messed up a little bit.
He said that he had been crawling around on the ground trying to free his car by putting brush under the tires. They didn't see any brush under the tires. Just things weren't adding up. When the babysitter came down, she saw him wearing a sweatshirt and she noticed that it was inside out. And when the deputies saw him, he was wearing a striped polo.
They search his car. He's got a duffel bag there, and they do a field sobriety test.
They had no way of checking whether or not he had a record. The only thing they could do is to see if he had a warrant out. That's all they could check, and he didn't.
At that point in time, there were issues with broadcasting criminal history information over the radio, so they just ran him for wants and warrants, which would be typical.
It's a Friday night. They're getting other calls backing up on the radio, you know, other hot calls. And what they have right now, as far as they know, is a trespasser.
At some point, when they could not unfree the car, they drove up to Dana's house and asked for a rope or a chain.
They asked me if I wanted to press charges, and I said, you know, I, I was thinking about it. And they said, well, it'll mean that he has to come back for his car, you know? And it's like, uh, no, no, just get him out of here. I want him out of here. When they pulled him out, they came back up at the house to drop off the chain, and they said they had followed him down to Highway 12 and watched him turn off. And I thanked them for their service, and we went to bed talking about, wow, that was weird.
This moment, this night, will haunt everyone for years to come.
They were completely unaware that a child had been kidnapped.
When the two deputies were with this trespasser, that APB went out, it was not broadcast over their radio, and so they did not know.
So you have to ask yourself, if they had known, would it have made a difference?
24 hours later, we had a call into Mark Classen's office.
It was a girl's voice, and she said, "It's Polly." And we were just like, "Oh my God, we found her." There you go, man.
It's going to be over in an hour.
This show is supported by Chime. Chime is changing the way people bank. It's a smarter way of banking that eliminates all the fees you're tired of paying to your traditional bank. That's right, no more overdraft fees or minimum balance fees, and they even offer thousands of fee-free ATMs, because why would you pay to access your own money? Chime members can benefit from up to $1,150 in annual rewards, all fee-free. They also have game-changing features like SpotMe, which lets you overdraft up to $200 with no fees. And with Chime Card, you can get 5% cash back on a category of your choice, like gas or groceries. Chime was built by humans for people like you, not the 1%. If you're trying to get a little more control of your money, it's worth looking at Chime today. Chime's not just smarter banking, it's the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. Head to chime.com/twenty, spelled out T-W-E-N-T-Y. It takes just a few minutes to sign up. That's chime.com/twenty.
Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for MyPay and Chime Card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield on cash back for Chime Prime only. No minimum Balance required. Checking account ranking based on a J.D. Power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on APY rates, myPay, SpotMe, and travel perks, go to chime.com/disclosures.
It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression.
From executive producer Mindy Kaling.
This is our sexual harassment training. Hands off your coworkers. Now sign this saying that I trained you or you're fired.
Yes, ma'am.
Work relationships are too messy.
I just met the woman of my dreams.
You gotta chill out and not come on too strong.
That goes against my entire personality, but I'll try.
Watch the new Hulu original series Not Suitable for Work, premiering June 2nd on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.
Worst nightmare in Petaluma. A child is missing, snatched from her bed last night.
We used to joke that if you walked out the the front door of the police department and you had a bunch of satellite trucks sitting out there, you were having a bad day. It became a reality.
When I showed up that morning at the police department, they were there en masse. It was intense.
The family is asking anyone with any information about this kidnapping to please contact the Petaluma Police.
It shook the town to its core, but it also brought them out in great numbers to bring Paulie home. I care.
I got grandkids out of him. I can help. Bill Rhodes owned Pip Printing, and he said, guys, give me a picture, give me some information on what you want on a flyer. And he said, I got 150 people down there, I'll get you—
I'll get some flyers made up and we'll wallpaper Sonoma People just start showing up and he starts giving them stacks of flyers, and kids and college students and doctors and parents are putting them all over town.
One of these posters is going to work. We don't know which one. We pray to God it's not the one sitting in the box waiting for a 29-cent stamp.
People wanted to help in any way they can. There were impromptu search parties all over town.
We could form a big line and move along like this just so we don't We don't miss any, you know, large areas.
The news report was that if anybody wants to come and volunteer because there's going to be searches, you can come to this print shop. I just literally said, "Honey, we got to go," and loaded my daughter in the car and we drove down there.
And she happened to have some skills, and she knew how to deal with the media. So she sort of put her own life and her work aside and started typing up press releases.
This doesn't happen here. And I think because this doesn't happen here, this is why we're all here.
There's someone called America's Most Wanted.
My name is John Walsh. I was the host of America's Most Wanted for 25 years. We would always get the first call because the cops would say, if you come, that big old white hot spotlight of AMW is going to get right there and people are going to go, this is serious. So we made it real serious. Now we need your help to bring Polly Klaas home.
Walsh says that over 25 years, his show has helped recover 61 children who'd been abducted by strangers.
The power of television and the power of a TV show that's popular— Winona Ryder was from Petaluma. She watched America's Most Wanted, and she jumped into action.
Long before she was the mom on Stranger Things— Winona Ryder was the star of '90s classics like Edward Scissorhands.
Somebody said, "Winona Ryder on line 4." I was like, "Okay." So I hit line 4 and I said, "Hello," and I didn't hear anything for a minute. I just— and then I started hearing crying. And I said, "Oh, honey, I know this is really hard." And she just finally was able to speak. And said, "I'm from Petaluma, you know, she looks like me, what can I do?" She came home with no entourage and showed up in jeans and a t-shirt.
I'm an actress, tell me what I can do. She did every interview she could.
My greatest wish right now is to meet her in person and to hug her.
Winona Ryder even put $200,000 of her own money up for for the reward.
She was dating Dave Perner, who is the lead singer for Soul Asylum. By coincidence, Soul Asylum had just months before released their video for Runaway Train.
We needed the media to keep the pressure on the cops so the cops would not step away from the case.
Police were working tirelessly, but they needed help. So the FBI sent in their newest innovation, a quick response strike force of forensic experts known as the Evidence Response Team.
Tony Maxwell, one of the ERT members, came in and he started dusting with fluorescent powder.
Annie's mother, Eve, brought Annie to me, and she says, she wants to help you look for her sister. If you read any forensic science handbook, first thing they tell you is never let anybody help you with the crime scene work. But you can't say no to a little girl. You can't say no to a sister. She's going to have to live with this the rest of her life. I says, okay, here's the fingerprint tape. When I need some, you pull some off the reel and you give it to me, and we'll lift some fingerprints. The FBI had technology that we didn't have. For example, was the alternate light source. We had never even heard of that. We use an alternate light source, and we started dusting with this fluorescent powder, which is 100 times more sensitive than regular fingerprint powder.
He lifted 48 prints that had been missed.
We found a partial palm print that appeared to be an adult print. On my log, I wrote the word bingo.
It came from an unknown person, so it was sent to the FBI crime lab to wait for a suspect to compare it to.
Investigators did a trap and trace on Mark's phone, and there was a call, and a little girl called.
And she said she was Paulie. And she said that she was with the kidnapper. There you go, man. It's going to be over in an hour.
We got the trap trace. And it came back to a house in Hayward. We quickly called down to our FBI office in Hayward. Get whoever you have sitting at a desk there. Get in some cars. Here's the address. And get over there. They busted through the door. Door, got everybody on the floor. It's like a normal family. Now they got a house full of FBI agents with guns drawn. We finally get the story from the young girl. She called impersonating Polly, that she was dared by her friends to call. This was a hoax.
As investigators dig in, they soon start to suspect that Polly's sleepover friends may have something to hide.
These are two 12-year-old girls who had been through an unbelievable trauma, who were being accused of being complicit in their own crime.
Jogging the same questions over in your mind, trying to trick you into saying something that's not true. I mean, who does that?
Polly, we love you. We adore you and we're very confident that we'll see you again very soon.
Mark was very visible before the media.
Bring her back. Don't hurt her.
Just bring her back. That caused a lot of people to call in and say, "I hope you guys are taking a look at Mark Laskas.
I watched him on the news last night." I can't even tell you the strength and the outpouring of love that we got.
That I get out of this.
For sure, he's the one that's involved in his own daughter's disappearance.
Mark Klaas volunteered to be polygraphed. I have to say, that clinched it for me. He wasn't involved.
Mark was just having a hard time and was just emotionally done.
Holly Klaas's father Mark was near collapse this morning.
I was whimpering. I said, I just can't do this anymore. This is This is too much for me.
I literally grabbed him and pulled him close and said, Mark, you need to be strong for your daughter.
He said, you see everything all of these people are doing, you see how hard we're working, and you're ready to give up? He said, you can't do that. You've always told her you'll be there for her, and she needs you now more than she's ever needed you before in her life. How did that hit you? I realized that he was right, and this was my test right here, right now.
Investigators have been focusing on Polly's girlfriends, Jillian and Kate, who'd been through that terrifying kidnap ordeal with her that night.
They definitely felt it was possible that Polly and her girlfriends did this as a prank And there was some discrepancies in the two girls' stories.
One saw a yellow bandana. One would say, "I was laying here." The other would say, "No, it was there." We started to look at those inconsistencies as a possible attempt of deception.
And is it possible that the girls know something that they're not telling us?
Now there are experts who are trained in child and adolescent forensic interviewing. but at the time that didn't exist, so they just reached into their toolkit and brought out the hammer.
They were accused of orchestrating Polly's disappearance with this theory that Polly had run away with a boyfriend and that the girls were complicit in that whole act.
I remember they threatened the girls to take them to juvenile hall.
They're just jogging the same questions over in your mind, trying to try to trick you into saying something that's not true. I mean, it's almost as if someone's saying, "You have to lie to me in order for me to leave you alone." We went back to the house.
We had him walk through the whole crime scene. In a way, you're grasping at straws, trying to grab something that can maybe free up some of these memories.
One key detail stood out: that the girls had been bound with power the cords from Polly's Nintendo.
What made me feel that this was a real kidnapping was the fact that the Nintendo cords were cut.
He's like, kids aren't going to cut their own cords. They're not going to do that for a prank.
But there was still some skepticism, and that's when the decision was made to polygraph the girls.
Jillian passed, but Kate's results were inconclusive. The polygrapher noted she was clutching her teddy bear and appeared agitated beforehand, which of course could affect the results. There are things that you grew to regret. Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely.
When you get a call from our two primary witnesses, their parents, and said, you can't talk to our, our kids anymore, you know, that's not handling young witness victims very well.
Investigators soon realized that the girls were innocent.
If I could say one thing to the girls, I would apologize for the way we treated them initially, and I just hope they know that we were trying to do the right thing for Polly.
In hindsight, we would not do that again.
We should have handled them more tenderly.
Everybody handles trauma differently, and that just because somebody isn't crying and sad and shaking doesn't mean they weren't traumatized.
Polly's two friends had never been happy with the original sketch of the kidnapper, so police police tried something different.
We learned about this forensic sketch artist who had a technique of getting detailed information from victims like this.
Her name was Jeanne Boylan, and she was hired by a show on ABC to work with Jillian and Kate. Please welcome Jeanne Boylan. Hello, Jeanne.
My job was to go in and to see if we could not sort of pull out from memory what an eyewitness may have seen.
What she brought in was just a very calm and reassuring demeanor.
They've been through a lot. They're 12-year-olds.
And they had high confidence in her approach that it wasn't going to traumatize the girls anymore.
More than anything, these girls just needed to speak, and they needed to be believed. I spent a total of 9 hours on the first day with the two girls. It took a little time. Because they needed to emote, and I happened to be a good listener, so I would listen to them.
How's the new sketch coming? The sketch is plated and ready to be released. I have them about 2:30 this morning.
Within minutes of its release, the new sketch of the man believed to have kidnapped Polly Klaas was being printed for distribution. It's amazing.
It's a face. It's a portrait. I mean, we have a definite person that we're looking for now.
A sketch is a sketch. She drew a picture. So when we released that second sketch on our flyers, people now could actually see a person.
And the FBI was working to come up with a profile for the kidnapper.
Mary Ellen O'Toole believed it was likely an experienced criminal comfortable taking big risks, especially a small house with thin walls with a mother who was asleep in the bedroom adjacent to the victim's bedroom.
She also felt that that this was not an impulsive kidnapping. This was someone that had likely targeted Polly.
It's hard to begin to think of anything else other than we're moving down the track of being a sexually motivated crime.
And then 10 days in, a promising new lead now may prove her right.
Vallejo PD calls and says, Friday night, we had a guy break into a house over here. The house is occupied by a woman and her 12-year-old daughter.
He had a rape kit with him— bindings, blindfolds, duct tape— and we started focusing on him, uh, you know, mid-November as possibly being our suspect.
That was Xavier Garcia, career criminal, a sex offender.
We spent well over 10,000 investigative hours on him, but we were never able to make the nexus between his crimes in other cities and the city of Petaluma.
But then a walk in the woods changes everything.
It was the pivotal moment in this case.
Evidence is uncovered. Could this be a clue to finding Polly?
Almost made me sick to my stomach.
Their jagged edges lined up like a puzzle. I said, you better get down here.
This could be it.
Polly's case was huge. There's just no question about it. It was huge because of how it happened. It was huge because of where it happened.
A lot of print, a lot of news media. The frenzy was national.
What did you find? There was a pair of little girl's tights that were red.
How did it dawn on you that these dots connected to Polly? A brand new book now bringing every detail of the Polly Klaas case together for the first time.
I kept telling the cops, it's a repeat offender. It's a repeat offender with a rap sheet this long.
You better get down here.
This could be it.
The hair on the back of my neck went up. You know where she is now?
I just exploded.
Describe that explosion for me.
I had to be held down.
Richard Allen Davis should be spinning on a spit in hell right now.
I felt like she called to me.
That she led me there.
Is she alive?
It's a parent's worst nightmare in Petaluma.
A middle-aged man slipped into this home and abducted 12-year-old Polly Klass at knife point.
If you're the man who has Polly, please just let somebody know that she's okay.
Hundreds of volunteers combed the area for clues.
I really miss her. I'm so worried.
We were so worried. Days and weeks go by, and some of it is a blur.
Volunteers and police say they will leave no stone unturned in the search for Polly Klaas.
We all prayed a lot. You always have hope.
We will never stop. We will never close until we have accomplished our mission and we get my little girl back.
Did you take a day off in those few months?
No, no. We put everything into this case. I mean, everything.
We had worked pretty hard, and it was discouraging not to have a solid lead. And then came the find on the 27th.
Dana Jaffe was a woman that lived miles away. 2 months after the kidnapping, she discovers a scene on her mountain property.
Her girlfriend had come up for a hike. And we went for a walk along the trails. What did you find? I found a man's sweatshirt. It was turned inside out and laid out with the arms extended. There was a pair of little girl's tights that were red, and there was a piece of white cloth, quite long, that had been knotted in several places. We found a condom that was used.
And at that point, did you think—
I thought, this is maybe a crime scene.
Oh, she called the sheriff's office. NSA, nothing. Call. We say it's just kids having a party up on the hillside, is what typically this stuff is.
Still, police come out to investigate, and then Larry Pelton is sent in to take a look. His attention is quickly drawn to the strips of knotted fabric.
Almost made me sick to my stomach. When I saw it, because I knew immediately that that is exactly the same stuff that I collected from Polly's bedroom that were used on the other girls to tie them up.
I get on the phone. Larry says, you better get down here. This could be it. The hair on the back of my neck went up.
The question now is, who left all this here? Dana Jaffe tells an officer that she had an encounter with that intimidating stranger nearby.
Just 2 months earlier. I realized that that was where the car had been parked, and I told him, I said, you know what, there was a trespasser on the property.
And then he pulled the calls for service for that night, and he found that there was indeed an encounter.
Finally, they have the name of a suspect, Richard Allen Davis.
There were striking similarities in his appearance to the sketch that had been done by Jeanne Boylan.
The characteristics were all there— the coarse hair, the width to the face, the bags around the eyes, the lines on the forehead. I got the full rap sheet.
It had everything you would think an offender would have on his record for somebody— a crime like that. And he'd only been out for about 6 months from his previous kidnapping charge. Didn't I commit our crime?
In 1994, ABC's Sam Donaldson spoke to 3 of Davis's previous victims.
Selena Varich says Davis and a woman companion told her if she didn't withdraw $6,000 from her bank, they would hunt up her father and daughter and kill them.
He hit me in the head with his gun.
And he hit me in the head about 5 times. He was laughing and smiling.
Marge Freeman was beaten by Davis in her bedroom. I woke up with this man standing over me beating me with a poker.
30 sutures were required to close the lacerations in my scalp.
Frances Mays says Davis forced her into a car at knifepoint and tried to rape her. I grabbed the knife by the blade and I hung on, and he was trying to take it away from me. I unlocked the door and I ran out. Davis later pled guilty to kidnapping, and prosecutors dropped the other charges.
What he inflicted on the victims was indicative of someone that really had no empathy or remorse, basically the traits of a psychopath.
They are pretty sure they have their man, but still they need forensic proof. So the evidence is rushed to the FBI crime lab in D.C.
The shards of cloth found on Danny Jaffe's property matched conclusively the shards of cloth that were found in Polly's bedroom.
Their jagged edges lined up like a puzzle.
When the fingerprint examiner called me, he goes, I have an identical palm print from her bedroom that was collected by the FBI the night of the kidnapping to Richard Allen Davis. I tell people I spent 30 years in the Bureau, and that was my best day.
But there is no time to waste. Even as investigators work to track down Davis, they quickly moved to search Dana Jaffe's property for Polly. It must have been the full force of federal, state, local law enforcement.
We felt very certain that she was there.
They throw everything they have into a desperate search but come up empty.
No human remains have been found.
I feel like I brought her home. I felt like she called to me, that she led me there.
Still, investigators haven't found Polly, but they are about to move in on Richard Allen Davis.
We got our warrants ready, had SWAT teams ready.
They have 3 SWAT teams, they have snipers, they've got surveillance, the whole 9 yards.
Petaluma police say they have significant new information in the Carly Kloss kidnapping case. No! Oh no! Welcome to Get Real.
I got something to say.
A weekly talk show for the reality TV obsessed. Oh my God, he's got to be deliciously desperate. Why do these girls forgive him?
Well, she has a soft spot for troubled men.
Boo, bloody boo! This is your show. Find Get Real wherever you get your podcast.
Love runs deeper than we know.
And stream new episodes Thursdays on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
This is what everyone's talking about.
Everything's on the table. This is what champions come to take.
This is what everyone came to see. And the slam!
No do-overs, no second chances, No more Mr. Nice Guy.
This is winner take all, and it's all happening now on the home of the NBA Finals.
Don't miss it, June 3rd on ABC and the ESPN app.
After the discovery on Dana Jaffe's property Investigators now know who they're looking for— Richard Allen Davis. They just need to find him.
We had found out where he was staying, at the Coyote Valley Indian Reservation, uh, just north of Ukiah.
We developed information that he was staying at his relative's house.
I had SWAT teams ready. We had evidence recovery team ready.
We went and staged on a hill overlooking the area where we thought Davis was housed.
I was in charge of our SWAT team at the time. My team secured part of the area.
We needed perimeter control. We hadn't established that. So I said, hey, we got to put some guys on the perimeter here.
So we hit the house.
3 SWAT teams simultaneously hit. Police!
144!
And so there's that moment of silence, and I get a little nervous because it's the moments of more than a minute or so. And finally it comes over the radio, he's not there. And I almost like screamed, what do you mean he wasn't there?
But then we got a radio call from one of the deputies who had been on the perimeter control and he said he thought he may have our suspect. There we encountered Richard Allen Davis in his van.
He shaved his beard off, which made it harder to identify him.
I actually unholstered my weapon and kept it to my side, but thought this guy could be armed and dangerous. He certainly was dangerous. I asked him to step out of the car, keeping his hands in plain view. And as I had holstered up, then I handed him off to Mike Meese, who handcuffed him. And then we put him back in that deputy's car.
We seized his Pinto. We shipped it down here to Petaluma for our evidence folks to go through it.
We knew we wanted to talk to him, but we didn't want to alert him immediately or other people in the area immediately that he was being arrested for potentially kidnapping Paulie Klaas.
After Davis's arrest, I was actually the first person to interview Davis. Felt a little bit sick to my stomach, butterflies, worrying about doing it right. I did not want to screw up this case. I needed to get a story, no matter what that story is. I need a story before he invokes his Miranda rights. Davis's story initially is that he had nothing to do with it.
He's arrogant, almost cocky, you know, in his denials of being involved.
In my mind, he's been thinking about this the whole time and coming up with an alibi. During the interview, Richard Allen Davis made comments that he's He's killed people like that, referring to child molesters and murderers. He's killed people like that in prison. But we had never talked about anything about possibly sexual assault of Polly.
It's like a TV scenario where the witness says something and the police say, hey, how did you know that?
He was starting to get angry at the time. Because of our questioning line had changed and he wasn't feeling as comfortable. So we got at least a little more interview out of him before he decided that, uh, he wasn't going to talk any longer without an attorney.
Do you remember first hearing about Richard Allen Davis?
They showed me a Polaroid picture— Eve and I— a Polaroid picture of Richard Allen Davis and they said, this is the guy. We know it's the guy. They asked me, do you know him? And I said, I've never seen this guy. I don't know who this guy is. And neither of us had ever seen him.
In Petaluma, California, police say they now have a prime suspect in the kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas.
The man who has been arrested for parole violations who may be connected to the Polly Klaas kidnapping is Richard Allen Davis of San Francisco. He is 39 years old.
A lot of print, a lot of news media. The frenzy was national.
Richard Davis is what you would call a career criminal.
Davis's rap sheet for San Mateo County alone dates back 20 years to when he was 19 years old.
I kept telling the cops, "It's a repeat offender with a rap sheet this long," and it was. Richard Allen Davis should have never been out. Move back!
People in law enforcement who I've discussed this with were stunned to realize that we routinely let people, these types of revolving door career criminals, out long before their time is served.
He was not closely monitored, and so the system's failures were that there were opportunities to take him off the street.
It turns out Davis has had contact with law enforcement twice after Polly's abduction. There was that encounter with police on Dana Jaffe's property, and he was arrested for DUI 18 days after Polly went missing.
Richard Allen Davis will be transported down here to be looked at by the two little girls who witnessed Polly's kidnapping.
Kate and Jillian are asked to come in to see if they can pick Davis out of a suspect lineup.
We had a process of making the different suspects read from a script basically some of the stuff that was said to the girls in the bedroom that night, just so they could hear their voices also.
But neither Kate nor Jillian could positively identify Davis in that lineup.
The girls only saw him for a couple of seconds. It was a stretch that they would actually pull him out of a lineup. 2 months later.
At the time I was deciding on the charges, I started out first by saying, can we prove this without Polycostas' body being recovered?
While law enforcement is deciding exactly how to proceed with Richard Allen Davis, they get a surprising message from the man himself.
The jail said, yeah, Davis wants to talk to you. And so they put Richard Allen Davis on the phone, and what he tells them changes the course of this investigation.
She alive?
Richard Davis was arrested for investigation of parole violations. He's not been charged with kidnapping.
A gentleman down in San Mateo County, he's reading the paper. Big paper. Davis's palm print discovered in Polly's bedroom. He goes, I know that guy. He came to work for me after he got released out of prison about 5 months ago.
He jumps in his car and he books it up to Mendocino County Jail.
They put him into the glass-in, you know, little room, visitor room, and on the phone.
He pointed to his palm and sort of mouthed the words, They found your print.
Davis gets up and walks away, has the jailer get him on the phone and says, hey, I want to talk to you guys now.
No, we'll take that off.
All right. That's it. I ain't going to try nothing.
Yeah, I figure let me get this thing back here.
And I was in the room outside the interview room where I could watch on a TV screen the actual interview taking place and listening listening to it to get information and take notes that might help us in locating Polly.
There's one thing about that interview that to me is so striking. If you didn't know who was who, if you didn't know that's an FBI agent, that's a homicide detective, and that's the offender. They were like 3 friends sitting around the table discussing this case as though they were all equals. You need some more coffee? Do you want a cup of coffee? Back then, people smoked. Hey, can I get you a cigarette? So you want them to feel engaged with you. You want them to feel like an equal because then they're going to contribute more.
With Davis now comfortable, investigators get right to the crucial question. First thing, let's get first things.
Is she alive? Can we go get her? She's not alive.
His story was he was in Petaluma to visit his mother and he couldn't get a hold of her.
Why don't you tell me what happened that night? So I was parked downtown. There's some park along some main street, so I went over to 7-Eleven, got a quart of beer, went back, sitting in the park, had my car parked around the corner. Which car did you have? I had the Pinto.
He says he gets a He smokes a PCP cigarette.
Things kind of got fuzzy after that. What do you remember about going in? I was just going in through the window. Which window did you go in? Through the front window. OK.
There was no forced entry to the front doors, the back doors, or appearance that anybody had come in or out of any of the windows.
Guess I went in and told them all to lie down or whatever.
I sat down with a number of investigators and had kind of a director's cut where we watched the confession tape together, and they said, see that? Body language, this is what— this is how we interpret that. See how he suddenly can't remember any detail once he goes into Polly's house? He's trying to distance himself from the crime.
He's trying to get away from the idea it was premeditated.
The next thing I basically remember is driving down the road, and I heard in the front seat Cut, turned off some road.
Davis tells investigators about the moment he got stuck in the ditch at Dana Jaffe's property on Pythian Road.
She was still alive, everything, you know, trying to figure out what the fuck I'm gonna do at that point. And the car got stuck. I had her get out of the car. I would sit up on the embankment. I tried to get the car out, couldn't get it out. The lady came down. Where was she?
She was sitting up on the embankment. Had she been alive on that hillside, I, I don't have any doubt she would have made some noise.
I don't have any doubt.
Davis then tells the investigators that once As soon as he left Dana Jaffe's property, he went to a gas station where he claims Polly asked to use the bathroom.
I was out of the car and, uh, what? That's when I strangled her. She was coming back to the car to get back in. Strangled her? Yeah. What'd you use to strangle her? Just cloth.
That's Davis's story of the night, but investigators say they believe there's far more to it than what he's admitted to.
What I felt was supported by the evidence was that Davis had singled out Polly Klaas to kidnap her maybe up to 2 months beforehand, and I feel very strongly that he knew where she lived by the night of the crime.
He stalked her. He prepared for the kidnapping. He went into the bedroom. He specifically wanted the girl that lived there.
And investigators believe there is a very specific reason he ended up stuck on Dana Jaffe's property.
He finds himself driving, looking for some way to get around Santa Rosa. I think maybe he thought Pythian Road was the way to get around the city and not get caught with a body in the car.
If somebody is being transported in the car and you don't want that person to be seen, the floorboard is going to be the spot for them.
My theory of the case was he killed her on the side of the hill because she was bound and gagged and all these things have been untied and found up on the hillside.
After the babysitter went down, he could have went up on the hill, assaulted Molly, and killed her. At that time.
He never confessed to sexually assaulting her. Did I believe he didn't? No.
In prison, it's a big difference between being a murderer versus someone that sexually assaulted a little girl and then murdered her. In my opinion, he did not want to admit to that.
I know I'm a piece of shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me, you know, this is hard, though. I understand that, and I appreciate you being man enough to own up to what happened.
Richard Allen Davis should be spinning on a spit in hell right now. That's how I feel about that. Feel better? Get off your chest.
No. Investigators now had Davis's story. They just didn't know how much of it was actually true. And they still didn't have Polly.
My focus then was to get closure for the parents by finding her body.
So would Davis answer the one question that everyone wanted to know? You know where she is now?
You tell me.
Richard Allen Davis is sitting in an interrogation room. He's admitted to being the person responsible for Polly Klaas's abduction and murder. But to ensure this is going to hold up in court, investigators know they need to locate Polly's remains.
Can you tell me about where it is, about where she is? Outside Cloverdale. Right outside Cloverdale.
Cloverdale is an odd place for something like this. From Petaluma, it's a straight drive up 101.
Sure somebody could walk up and find her?
And so they put him in the car, and then they They drove to Cloverdale.
Dave Alford, Sergeant Vale Bellow, the three of us got in a car and headed up north, and we met at Cloverdale.
I had mixed feelings. I don't trust suspects, and I don't trust information until I can verify it.
When Dave Alford and I walked out there and found the board and lifted it up and, you know, there's a body there, I mean, but it was advanced decomposition. You got Richard Allen Davis who's sitting there leaning up against the car smoking a cigarette like he doesn't have a care in the world. In the darkness is Lane Poli class. You have to suppress the rage that kind of builds up in you.
I started to kind of reach for my, my shoulder holster and thought I'd just put him down. I'll just say he reached for somebody's gun and we had to shoot him. And Eddie kind of caught my eye.
I had to put my hand on his that was going for his gun.
What a horrible place for such a beautiful girl to be. Put.
You know, I was convinced it was Polly Klaas, so I called down and said, yeah, tell the parents we found Polly Klaas.
It was that moment, it was again Eve and I being called into the police station, and they didn't have to tell us anything. Christ, we walked in and there were tears in their eyes. You know, there were tears in their eyes. And I'll never forget this. I remember that Eve started crying, the cops were crying, and I didn't cry. But we said, we need to tell our families. So I made a phone call and I said, you know, it's over. They, uh, she's dead. We are here to announce tonight that—
Cut it. —Polly Klaas is dead.
Marjorie Barling was one of the thousands who volunteered in the search for Polly.
Petaluma is an innocent town. And we don't have that innocence anymore.
And for the first time in 2 months, we went home. And it was there that I understood understood and realized and just exploded. Describe that explosion for me. I started screaming. I had to be held down because I probably was on the verge of trashing my condo. It was really difficult.
It's just the pain. It just poured out.
The pain just poured out. And I was like, thank God our family Paulie was with us.
Thank God.
What did you see in your husband's eyes in those moments?
Pain. It was pain. On the night Paulie went missing, Eve lit a candle and put it in her window and said it would burn until Paulie was found. And then on the night that her body was discovered, it was extinguished.
We were at my birthday party on my birthday, and, um, Jillian's aunt said, "You need to bring Annette to Jillian's house." The whole way, I was saying to my mom, "She probably wants to see us before she does a news conference." Um—
Sorry.
And then I remember hearing, um, Kate and Jillian crying inside the house.
And I was going around thanking my friends for being out there in the sun, you know, long hours, just to guard the crime scene. A friend of mine, he just looked at me, and before I could say anything, he said, "I'm sorry." And he I'm happy to welcome the world to our parish church, where tonight we continue to remember Polly.
A massive turnout. You know, there were people that weren't able to get into the church. So many people in Petaluma were invested in that whole case. We sat in the front row. Linda Ronstadt performed.
"Somewhere Out There" was Polly's very favorite song.
Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight.
We were all sitting together, all of Polly's friends. Her family was nearby, but just deeply sad that we wouldn't, um, be able to make any more memories together.
After the outpouring of grief, this story wasn't over. Now the people of Petaluma wanted justice for Polly Klaas, and the trial ahead would that once again transfix and shock the entire country.
It was my opportunity to look him in the eye and say what I felt and what I believed. This is the beginning of the end for Richard Allen Davis. He was 10 feet away from me, so I took my shot. Yeah, boy!
Crazy son of a bitch!
Hey, it's Lisa Ann Walter. My new comedy special, It Was an Accident, is now streaming on Hulu. I'm pissed off so often lately If I had known we were headed toward The Handmaid's Tale and I was going to be wearing that big red cape, I wouldn't have cut out carbs. I mean, I know what mindfulness is because my kids told me, but I've seen the way I eat and I'm pretty sure I don't practice it. I don't know why I can't find a fella. Don't miss It Was an Accident, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. Mr. Sugar, we've run out of places to hide our money.
We could do really bad things together.
On Thursday, May 28th.
Crime is on the rise in Philadelphia. Say hi to your wife for me.
Hulu's hilarious comedy—
we're in the middle of a crisis here—
Deli Boys is back with an all-new season.
You care more about the business than you do your own brother. Mo' money, mo' problems.
We rebuilt Darko on our own, no help from any man.
I'm a man.
Deli Boys Season 2 streams May 28th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. You may remember the murder of Polly Klaas.
The man accused in her death goes on trial next month.
The reason this case took almost 3 years to get to trial is not unusual in a capital case.
I was amazed by how many people had actually physically had gotten out searching for Polly Klaas.
I was convinced there's no way we could get a get a fair trial in Sonoma County.
They renewed their motion to change venue, and I said I agree. So the judge said, okay, Santa Clara.
And at the same time, there was another high-profile case heading to trial in California.
This came right on the heels of the O.J. Simpson trial.
If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
It seemed like that everything that could go wrong with the case went wrong.
Not guilty of the crime of murder.
The trial was a disaster. There will be no repeat of the O.J. case here. It just made me work harder.
Most people here in Petaluma say they're glad the trial is finally underway. What they say they'd like even more is to put all of this behind them for good.
What was it like to watch Richard Allen Davis walk into that courtroom every day?
Well, just being in that close proximity to that monster was It's kind of unbelievable. It's the devil that destroys your life. I mean, that's what he is. He's a devil that destroyed our life. We figured out that it would be in Mr. Davis's best interest not to plead guilty. In this particular case, there was robbery, burglary, kidnapping, attempted lewd act on a child were 4 special circumstances. The jury had to find one or more of those special circumstances true for it to become eligible for the death penalty.
Perhaps the most compelling story today was told by 14-year-old Jillian Pellum. She and another girl were with Polly for a sleepover the night Davis allegedly snatched Polly from her home. Kate and Jillian, they were allowed to have one adult of their choosing go up to the Stanwyck them, and they both chose Jeanne Boylan.
Jeanne's an incredibly talented and compassionate woman, and there's a lot of love in Jeanne's heart, and I think she was able to quickly convey that to both of the girls.
Long enough to be a part of the trial, I became extremely close, especially with the girls. I felt like I wanted to continue to be there in the event they needed me again.
I think they liked her because she believed them. She was just sort of quiet support.
I just remember sitting on the witness stand with them and having them grip my hand and getting through that with each of the girls.
After nearly a month and a half of the trial, the case finally went to jury. They deliberated for more than 20 hours before before returning a verdict.
We the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant Richard Allen Davis guilty of the felony.
Davis was found guilty, and the jury determined those 4 special circumstances to be true.
At the end of the guilt phase, he turned towards me and he looked at me and he flipped both middle fingers up. I always thought that was an opportunity for people to see into his soul. The other incident happened after the penalty phase. Mr.
Davis, do you have any comment you would like to make at this time on the report or the recommendation?
Judge Hastings allowed the killer to make a statement.
I would also like to state for the record that the main reason I know that I did not attempt any lewd act that night was because of a statement the young girl made to me when walking her up the embankment. Just don't do me like my dad. I had to pay my dues.
When that happened, my mother, who was sitting one person over from me, just— I thought you would die. I really did. He was 10 feet away from me, so I took my shot. I got nowhere. I was completely surrounded by bailiffs within a moment.
He made those statements to Mark Glass just to, to be malicious and hurtful to a father who just lost his daughter. If that doesn't tell you he deserved the maximum penalty, I don't know what, what does. It is the order of this court that you shall suffer for the death penalty, said penalty to be inflicted within the walls of the state prison in San Quentin, California. We found Polly, but— and we solved the case. That's some gratification. Not a lot, but some.
What made this case even more difficult is that it resulted in the the passage of the Three Strikes Law.
California enacted a Three Strikes sentencing law. It sets mandatory punishments including 25 years to life for any 3-time felony offender.
This basically says if you commit your third violent felony, you are going to go to prison without the possibility of parole. You get 3 chances.
There was such a sense of public outrage of how could this person, a repeat offender, had been let out to kidnap Polly. So that was used to rally support for the Three Strikes laws and get them passed.
Three Strikes was about enhancement. Criminals were leaving California because they didn't want to be faced with being accountable for, for their own activities.
Everyone felt a connection to her, and over the last three decades, those connections His actions have multiplied into something truly extraordinary. It's a pretty nice legacy.
He kept a candle burning in the window until Paulie was recovered.
Detective Pat Parks was so moved by the case that he wrote a poem for Polly.
We raced the darkness of the night, your face our only guiding light. We knew your love by a mother's candle, by a father's anguish too tough to handle. We assured ourselves that faith alone would be enough to bring you home. When you died, your love by millions multiplied. As we race the darkness of the night, your face remains our guiding light. We will run the race and endure each mile, encouraged by your enchanting smile. So that's the case. In a few words.
Her body was found out in that field in Cloverdale. I live here in Snohomish County. I drive by going one place to another. Every time I do go by, I stop by there. It's my way to kind of honor that hollow ground. Every time I go by there, there's a new addition. To this area. A new cross, a ribbon tied in a tree, quite often teddy bears, jewelry spread out, and rocks. And then people place rocks, and people will paint a message on there remembering some other missing child, usually a date. Could be a birth date or a date missing, some notation about that case.
Everyone felt a connection to her. When I see candles and rocks with things on it, I appreciate that she touched so many people.
Polly's case changed America.
She changed childhood in America. But she also changed how the FBI investigates crime. So many of the procedures, technologies, protocols for kidnapping that were used and tested and proven in her case are now used today to improve how we not only find missing kids but investigate crime.
Quite simply, my dream is to save a child and that the next family that has this kind of tragedy that'll have a happy outcome. I love children, and if anything I can do can help protect them, then I think Polly would be real proud of me.
If you were to look back on those 30 years now, what do you think is the lasting legacy?
I think the legislation I think the attention that we brought to the case, and I think that our very active, proactive work in search and rescue, I think of the work that we've done, those are the lasting elements of her legacy.
It's a pretty nice legacy.
Well, I think her legacy is strong. I, I do. But still, I mean, you know, I traded for a hug.
He would trade it all for one more hug. Richard Allen Davis, the man convicted of murdering Polly Klaas, remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison. In 2019, California's Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order declaring a moratorium on all executions in that state. That is our program for tonight. Thanks for watching. I'm David Muir, and from all of us here at 20/20 and ABC News, good night. Thanks for listening to the 20/20 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes. See you then. Star Wars is back on the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Gangsters, war criminals, I'll take out every bad guy in your deck of cards.
Now feel the Force on the biggest screen possible.
The old protect the young, and the young protect the old.
This is the way. Buckle up. Always wear your seatbelt.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, rated PG-13, may be inappropriate for children under 13.
Now playing in theaters.
A 12-year-old is kidnapped during a sleepover with her friends; authorities launch a cutting-edge investigation to find her. (OAD 9/22/23)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices