The murder of a 12-year-old girl shook the country, inspiring far-reaching laws

Investigators at the scene of Polly Klaas’ abduction in early October 1993 did not believe the story. A bushy-bearded stranger entered a 12-year-old girl’s room while she was sleeping Friday night. He had a knife. He told the three girls that he would cut their throats if they screamed.

He bound their hands with ligatures and an electrical cord cut from the Nintendo game box in the room. He pulled pillowcases over the heads of Polly’s friends and told them to count to a thousand. Her mother was sleeping just down the hall in their home in Petaluma, California.

“Abduction by a stranger,” the head of the FBI immediately called it. But some researchers have doubts. Such abductions are rare, and this particular scenario—a child being taken from her bedroom by a stranger in front of witnesses—doesn’t fit their collective experience.

Day after day, as the story became national news and detectives piled on the pressure, they tricked the 12-year-olds who saw it. Was it some kind of prank? Did Polly have a boyfriend? Did she run away with him? Did they cover her up?

Detectives focused on small inconsistencies. One girl said the attacker wore a yellow headband; the other did not remember. One heard a knock on the door; the other does not. One passed the polygraph; the other showed inconclusive results.

“It (sic…) — it never happened,” one Petaluma police detective told another, as quoted in Kim Cross’ book In the Light of All Darkness: Inside the Kidnapping of Polly Klaas and the Search for America’s Baby.

“Interviewers were told to lean on them almost as if they were a suspect,” said Cross (a friend of this reporter) in a recent interview with The Times. “And they were threatened: “You know, Polly’s parents are suffering. You can stop this if you just tell us the truth. If you lie, you can go to juvenile detention.” And the stories of the girls have not changed.”

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

Thousands of requests came in, but at first “we had absolutely nothing,” Frayer told The Times. He said investigators hoped to get information by asking the girls questions several times in different ways. Their motives were “honorable but inappropriate, they put pressure on these two girls to the point where they really didn’t want to talk to us anymore,” Frayer said.

An army of volunteers searched the surrounding forests. Thousands of dead springs were summoned. Psychics have arrived to offer their services.

“Everyone was trying to get attached to the cause because of its growing popularity,” Freyer said. “People would like to visit the house, walk through the bedroom, read and stuff.”

The big break came in late November when a Sonoma County woman was walking in the woods near her home about 25 miles from Klaas’ home. She found discarded clothes, including a pair of baby tights.

The woman recalled how, on the night of the abduction, she encountered a strange, menacing intruder whose Pinto was stuck in a ditch.

Hours after Polly’s abduction, two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies arrested the man, freed his car and released him. They didn’t hear the general bulletin with a rough description of the hijacker—dispatchers didn’t broadcast it for fear of alerting reporters who might be listening in on the scanners.

“While the investigation is ongoing, we are not aware of this arrest because the two deputies never called us,” Frayer recalled. “It would save us a lot of heartburn and grief. Would it have changed the final outcome of the case? Probably not.”

The gunman was identified as 39-year-old Richard Allen Davis, a metal worker who had been paroled three months earlier for kidnapping from a state prison in San Luis Obispo.

It was strikingly similar to the composite sketch that the 12-year-old witnesses had helped create.

In scanning Polly’s bedroom, the FBI used a relatively new “alternative light source” technology that made fingerprints visible under special powders. They found a hidden palm print on her bunk bed. Now they matched it with Davis.

Police arrested Davis on a parole violation and held him in solitary confinement at the Mendocino County Jail. He did not admit anything. A friend who visited said what was in the news: The police had Davis’ palm print. Then he began to speak.

He said he was smoking weed and drinking beer the night he went to Polly’s house. He admitted that he strangled her. He took the police to where he dumped her body in a nearby farming town.

However, he told a credible story about the night of the abduction. He said while deputies questioned him near the ditch where his car got stuck, Polly waited on a nearby hillside where he left her alive.

Freire does not believe. Nobody does.

“The attack happened up there and most likely he killed her there,” said Frayer, now 73 and retired.

Freyer traveled the world lecturing law enforcement agencies about the case and the lessons it taught, including the need for rapid evidence gathering, cooperation and communication between agencies and professionals trained to interview child witnesses in a safe environment.

Why did Davis choose this house and this victim? Investigators theorized he had been near Polly earlier, perhaps lingering at a nearby park, and spotted her walking down the block to buy ice cream.

Davis’ extensive criminal record and the leniency he received over the decades sparked outrage. Back in 1977, a probation officer called him a menace to society who could not work outside of prison. He admitted that he heard voices telling him to rob and rape.

He escaped from psychiatric wards twice. His convictions include kidnapping a woman at knifepoint in her car in 1976, for which he served five years, and kidnapping a woman at gunpoint from her home in 1984, for which he served eight.

At Polly’s murder trial, Davis’ attorney did not deny that his client was the killer, but denied that he had sexually assaulted the girl. A jury found Davis guilty of 10 felonies, including attempted lewd acts on a child.

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

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

That case, along with the 1992 slaying of 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds, who was shot by a parolee while trying to steal her purse, prompted California’s perennially controversial three-strikes law.

The law provides a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison for felons with prior violent felony convictions, treating even non-violent crimes such as burglary as a third sentence.

Mark Klaas initially supported the law, but feared that its impact would “turn on young black dudes” because of harsher punishments for crimes less serious than murder.

At the time, Klaas told the public, “I had my stereo stolen, I had my daughter killed, and I know the difference.”

In 1994, Gov. Pete Wilson signed the three-caveat law into law, and California voters approved it, voting in favor of the proposal by an overwhelming 184 votes. Two years later, when the state Supreme Court gave judges the discretion to overturn convictions so they could not be used against defendants at sentencing, Klaas was convinced the fence was enough. He dropped his support again for three strikes.

In 2012, Proposition 36 changed the law, requiring all three felonies to be serious or violent. But for critics of mass incarceration, it remains only a nurt. (Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon told his prosecutors not to seek an enhanced sentence under the law, which sparked the California Supreme Court lawsuit.) Klaas continues to support the law despite his earlier doubts.

After his daughter’s murder, Klaas founded the KlaasKids Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to victims’ rights and child protection. He championed bills such as Megan’s Law, which notified the public about registered sex offenders and coordinated search and rescue operations for missing children and youth.

“They said (Polly’s friends) lied because they knew Polly ran off with her boyfriend,” Klaas said. “We’ve been aggressively doing everything we can to stop that thinking.”

He adamantly demanded the death penalty for his daughter’s killer. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom invited him to Sacramento to speak, then announced a moratorium on executions, saying he had consulted with victims’ advocates. Klaas felt cruelly used.

“We just had a heated conversation that lasted about 45 minutes,” Klaas told The Times. “The governor of a state called the father of a murder victim and made him drive 200 miles to be able to say, ‘I spoke to him.’ I can’t imagine what else it was for because there was no substance to the meeting.”

Klaas joined Newsome’s 2021 recall efforts, which failed. Newsom dismantled San Quentin’s death row, and Davis was transferred to a less rigorous facility. Klaas doesn’t think he’ll live to see Davis executed.

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

Klaas, 75, said he would retire at the end of the year and close his foundation. He failed to find a successor.

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