Crime Junkie - PRECEDENT: Polly Klaas

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Polly Klaas was taken from her own home in the middle of the night back in 1993. But had the legal system worked like it was supposed to, the man who took her never should have been walking free that night to enter her home. Her case went on to spark an outcry in the country for harsher punishment on repeat offenders. But when her case set the precedent for the three-strikes rule there was backlash no one anticipated.  Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/precedent-polly-klaas/For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. 

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And if you missed it, we did a big announcement in the feed the other day. Britt is out for a while due to a pretty serious brain surgery. She is doing well. She's out of surgery. She's recovering, but she's going to be out for a while. And you can get all the details in that message that we dropped in the feed, but at least for this week, we're taking this week off, but I didn't want to leave you hanging. We are going to give you a precedent episode, and you are still going to hear Britt's voice for a little while through the end of May. We got pre-recorded on some episodes that are being edited now, so you will get to continue to hear her voice for a while, but we just needed the

week to kind of catch our breath. I've spent a lot of time in South Bend with Britt and just get our bearings. This was, it was a week, you guys. So let me tell you about another precedent setting case. Here's a previously recorded episode of precedent. After two decades of increasing crime rates, violence hit its peak in the US in the early 1990s. You couldn't open a newspaper or turn on the evening news without hearing about a murder, an assault, a robbery, and people weren't just scared, they were angry too. If locking up habitual criminals wasn't going to do it, maybe it was time to throw away the key. Today, more than half of the US states have what's called a three-strikes law, meaning if you've got two felony convictions under your belt,

the third is going to get you an automatic life sentence, three strikes, and you're out. But that wasn't always the case. Before there was a three-strikes law, there was polyclass. This is her story. On the night of October 1st, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Glass was having a sleepover with her two friends, Kate and Jillian. The girls were primed and ready for a night of too much ice cream and not enough sleep, typical seventh grade stuff. And Polly was a pretty typical seventh grader. She lived with her mom Eve and her younger half-sister Annie in Petaluma, California, which is a small town outside of San Francisco. She played piano and clarinet, she loved acting,

and like most 12-year-olds still straddling that line between little kid and teenager, still just a little bit afraid of the dark. Halloween was just around the corner and the girls spent most of the early evening trying on costumes in Polly's room. At around 9.45, Polly's mom Eve poked her head into the room. She had a migraine and she was planning to head to bed a little earlier than usual, so before she did, she asked the girls to keep it down and not stay up too late, and then she and Annie headed to bed. Eve knew it wouldn't take the girls long to ratchet up the noise again, so according to an episode of FBI Files, she took some prescription medication to help her sleep, and she dozed off. The girls played video games and board games for

a while, and around 10.30, they decided to get their sleeping bag set up. Polly stood up to grab her sleeping bag from the next room, but when she opened her bedroom door, she was shocked to find a bearded, middle-aged man, a complete stranger standing on the other side. At first, Kate and Jillian thought this must be some kind of practical joke, that is, until they saw the knife in his hand. The stranger told the girls to lie down on the floor, face down, side by side, and he started to bind their hands. He said that if they screamed, he'd slit their throats. He asked them which of the three of them lived there and who else was in the house, and he seemed kind of surprised to hear that Polly's mother was home sleeping just down the hall. All three girls

were of course terrified and crying by this time, but the man told them he was only there for money, and that if they kept quiet and listened to what he said, he wouldn't hurt them. Polly spoke up and told the man where he could find some cash she knew her mom kept hidden in the house, but instead of going to find it, he gagged them before taking the pill cases off Polly's pillows and putting them over the girl's heads as hoods. He then told Polly to get up and come with him, to show him where the valuables were, and he told Kate and Jillian to start counting to a thousand, and by the time they were done, Polly would be back on the floor with them and he would be gone. Then he picked Polly up and carried her away. According to the Polly Class Foundation,

the girls didn't even bother to count, and once they knew he was gone, they just got to work right away trying to free themselves of the bindings. It took them 20 minutes, but they did it, and then they ran to Polly's mother's room to tell her what had happened. Eve sprang into action, searching every nook and cranny of her two bedroom house, but Polly was nowhere to be found. Neither was the strange man, so Eve called 911 and police were at the house within minutes. What police found when they arrived was two terrified 12-year-olds with a story straight out of a parent's worst nightmare, and looking around Polly's bedroom, they could see that nightmare in full color right in front of them. Littering the floor, they see the items the kidnapper had used to bind Polly and

her friends, strips of cloth, a cord from a Nintendo controller, a strap from a purse. Police knew from the start they were going to need support from the FBI because they had the technology to find and gather more precise physical evidence than local police. And, according to one of the agents interviewed in 1998 for FBI files, they also had more experience investigating abductions. By this point in the 1990s, they handled about 800 kidnapping cases a year, so by midnight, the first team of agents were already on scene. Unlike most of the stories we've heard about child abduction, this one had witnesses. Kate and Jillian had seen Polly's abductor and could describe him, a tall man with dark hair and a full beard. From those descriptions, law enforcement

was able to create a composite sketch of their suspect, one that they would continue to refine as the case went on. This was their first look at the man who had invaded the class home and abducted Polly while her mother slept. The FBI's crime scene experts went through Polly's bedroom looking for any evidence to take to their state-of-the-art crime lab. From that sweep of the scene, investigators had pulled four dozen usable fingerprints, but every single one they were able to link back to Polly's family and friends, prints they'd expected to find in Polly's room. But forensics experts identified a few things they didn't expect to find, things they think had been left behind by their suspect, carpet fibers from the interior of a car, a hair with the roots still attached,

and those long strips of silky fabric the man had used to both bind and gag Polly and her friends. According to court records, the other items that bound the girls, the purse strap and the Nintendo controller cord, had come from Polly's own room, items of opportunity. But the strips of cloth police believe those were brought in by their suspect, which suggests that this guy had come prepared. But there is one other piece of evidence pulled from the scene, the most promising of all, a palm print, and unlike all those fingerprints, this one couldn't be ruled out by someone who lived in the house. At this point, you're probably thinking bingo, that's it, run the prints and let's get this guy. But back in 1993, the only database investigators had was AFIS, and it only

tracked fingerprints. It didn't include palm prints yet. And DNA technology was really just getting off the ground. CODIS, the FBI's DNA database wouldn't be around for another five years. So while the palm print and the DNA from that one hair certainly could help them tie a suspect to the crime scene, it wasn't going to generate a suspect or a list of suspects. They would have to do that the old fashioned way. And I know you've heard it before, the first 48 hours of an investigation are the most important. And when it comes to stranger abductions and missing children, it's actually even more pressing than that, because it's actually the first three hours that are most critical. Research by the US Department of Justice in 2006 showed that nearly three quarters

of abducted children who are murdered are killed within those first three hours. So time is not on an investigator's side. In Polly's case, law enforcement had a search effort underway within hours, one that would grow to include close to 4,000 volunteers. According to court records, there were as many as 50 local police and another 75 federal agents calming the neighborhood the morning after Polly's abduction, knocking on doors, searching with dogs, flying helicopters, looking for anything that might help them find Polly. The community came out in full force too, prepared to do what was asked of them to help bring Polly home. Volunteers quickly set up what was called the Polly Class Search Center, staffing phone lines to take tips from the public 24 hours a

day, handing out tens of thousands of flyers and supporting the ground search. FBI files called it an unprecedented grassroots operation, easily the largest search effort in the nation at that time. But despite the searches, despite the tips, the flyers, the media coverage, by mid-October, police still weren't any closer to a suspect or to bringing Polly home. Now, we've already talked about the genesis of the sex offender registry on this show in our previous episodes. When Polly Class was kidnapped in 1993, California already had legislation in place at the state level that required sex offenders to register with local law enforcement. So as the search for Polly continued, detectives investigated and ruled out all registered sex

offenders one by one, starting in Sonoma County where Polly's family lived and then moving out to the surrounding areas. And every day, volunteers at the community search center took hundreds of calls, resulting in more than 12,000 actionable leads for police to follow up on. Polly's parents, Mark and Eve, dealt with their share of ups and downs during their search for Polly, including two prank calls that pulled teams of agents off the investigation to storm homes looking for Polly, only to find nothing. But then, in late November, nearly two months since Polly was taken from her home, police got their first breakthrough in the case. On November 28th, a woman named Dana called police to say that she was out walking around

on her land that morning when something caught her eye. Some things caught her eye. It was a pair of small red tights, child-sized tights knotted at the knees, a sweatshirt, this silky piece of cloth made into a hood, and some other debris. I mean, those things alone would have been interesting enough to police, especially in the midst of what was now a nationwide missing person investigation. But Dana also had a story. Dana told police that two months earlier, on the night of October 1st, the very night that Polly went missing, she'd caught a trespasser on her property. She lived about 30 minutes outside of Petaluma, and it had actually been Dana's babysitter who ran into him first that night at the bottom of the family's long driveway.

You see, the man had gotten his car stuck, and he wanted the babysitter to get out of her car and help him, but she'd gotten sketchy vibes right away, so instead she drove to the nearest pay phone and called Dana. And Dana, who I guess is a no-fear kind of woman, hopped in her car and headed down to see what was going on. When she got there, she saw the car, stuck in the ditch, just like the babysitter had told her, but the man who owned it was nowhere to be found, so she too drove past and headed to town to call police. It was a few minutes after midnight when two Sonoma County Sheriff's deputies arrived at the foot of Dana's driveway. By this time, the guy was back, but now he seemed agitated. They noticed leaves and stuff in his hair,

kind of like he'd been crawling around in the woods, and he was super sweaty, both of which he said were because he crawled under his car to try and get it unstuck. They asked him what he was doing there in the first place, and he told them he'd been out sightseeing and realized he was on private property, and when he tried to turn his car around, he'd gotten stuck. Yeah, sightseeing at midnight, right. Police ran his license through their system, but his driving record, which was all they could access at the time, came back clean. They searched him and his car, but aside from a few cans of beer and a small duffel bag, there was really nothing to write home about. He did smell boozy, so they gave him a roadside sobriety test, but he passed.

With no flags on his driving record, no desire from Dana to press trespassing charges, and no knowledge of the kidnapping that had just happened an hour before, police had no reason to keep him, so they pulled his pinto out of the ditch and sent him on his way. And no one really thought about it again, until Dana came across these things in the woods, not far from where the guy's car had been stuck that night. The local sheriffs knew right away when they saw the scene in the woods that they were looking at something important, so they called in officers to gather the evidence. According to court records, that included the tights, sweatshirt, and hood I mentioned, along with a torn condom wrapper,

an unrolled condom, a couple pieces of packing tape, a beer bottle, and a book of matches. So police tracked down the full report from that night on Dana's property, and with it, the name of their first real suspect, Richard Allen Davis. According to reporting by Matt London for Fox News, Richard was a career criminal, who had been in and out of prison for almost his entire life on charges that included kidnapping, assault, and attempt to commit rape, just to name a few. He also had ties to Polly's hometown, Petaluma. His mother lived there, and the photo in his police file, it was a dead ringer for the composite sketch. Despite how promising this all sounds, police didn't have

enough evidence at this point to arrest Richard in connection with Polly's disappearance, but he did have an outstanding warrant for a DUI, and frankly, police didn't care what the charge was, they just wanted to get Richard behind bars ASAP while they gathered more evidence and continued their search for Polly. So they tracked Richard down and arrested him for the outstanding DUI on November 30th. That same day, they confronted him about Polly's kidnapping, an accusation he flatly denied, but police weren't about to take his word for it. They want to hear from the only two people who'd seen Polly's kidnapper, Kate and Jillian. They looked at a police lineup, and without hesitation, picked Richard. Then two days later, police matched his palm print to the

one they found in Polly's bedroom. It was another two days on December 4th that Richard called detectives from prison and said he was ready to talk. Richard told them he'd been living in a halfway house at the time, but was granted an overnight pass to visit his mother, who, like I said, lived in Polly's town. He was hoping to borrow some money, except he couldn't find her house. So he said he just ended up walking around town drinking. Someone offered him a joint, which he smoked, but unbeknownst to him, he said it was laced with PCP. He told officers everything was a blur from there, that he remembered crawling into a random house through an open window and grabbed a knife once he got there. Conveniently, his memory of what happened while in the house,

he said, was pretty hazy. He said he kind of vaguely remembered tying the girls up, but his next real full memorable moment was him sitting in his car realizing there was a girl sitting next to him in the passenger seat. He said he didn't know what to do, so he just drove, trying to figure out what he'd done and what he was going to do next. And that's what he was doing on Dana's property, which he didn't know was private property at the time, when he got his car stuck in the ditch. When he realized he wasn't going to be able to get his car out of there on his own, he carried Polly about 90 feet away into the woods and planned to leave her there till he could figure out a plan. He told detectives that when police arrived that night

and questioned him for 45 minutes, that's where Polly was, still alive. Richard said he waited about a half an hour after the deputies pulled his car out before he went back to get Polly. By then, he'd realized that if he was caught, if anyone found out he was the one who kidnapped her, he'd be going back to prison. Richard told police that Polly's murder wasn't planned, none of it was planned. According to John Douglas' book, Journey into Darkness, in Richard's mind, killing Polly was the only option, the only way to control the situation. On December 4, 1993, two months after the kidnapping, Richard led police to a field about 30 miles outside of Petaluma, where the body of 12-year-old Polly class lay,

buried in a shallow grave. She'd been strangled with a piece of knotted cloth and hidden under some wood boards. Richard insisted that he didn't sexually assault Polly, nor was it a motive for the crime. While police had pulled an unrolled condom from that crime scene in the woods, according to court records, it didn't reveal any DNA, and her remains were too badly decomposed to discern, well, anything really, including whether or not she'd been sexually assaulted. When her body was found, the nightgown she was wearing, one that belonged to Gillian actually, was pulled up under her arms. The blouse she'd been wearing was untied, and her skirt pulled up to her chest, and the position of her hips and legs suggested to police that

she hadn't just been thrown there haphazardly. There was enough truth in Richard's story to match up with the series of events as they knew them to unfold, the statement given by Polly's friends who witnessed the abduction, the police report from the night his car got stuck in the ditch, but it wasn't the whole story. You see, Richard insisted that the whole thing was super spur of the moment, totally unplanned. But investigators didn't believe that for a second. Not only were there several eyewitnesses who saw him lurking around Polly's house hours before the kidnapping, but remember those strips of cloth used to bind the girls, and the hood Dana found in the woods? Those were found to be from the same material,

and had been cut out in advance and packed into a duffel bag that he brought with him to Polly's. Police and prosecutors were not about to let Richard claim that he was impaired the night of the crime either. There was too much foresight involved, too much planning. People don't prepare in advance, arrive with materials, and soak around outside before they commit a crime on impulse. The news of Polly's death hit everyone in California, and across the country really, in a way nothing had before. The search for Polly came just as internet technology was gathering steam, and according to the Polly Class Foundation, people everywhere were tracking

the search for Polly and the hunt for her abductor online. She was not just Mark and Eve's child. In the months since her kidnapping, Polly had become America's child, which is why, as details about what happened that night spread across the US, so did the outrage. Because while Richard may have acted alone the night he killed Polly, as far as Americans were concerned, he'd done it with the entire justice system's wind at his back. According to reporting from Thomas Fields Meyer for People magazine, by 1993 when Polly was kidnapped, Richard had spent 14 of the last 20 years in jail. His crimes had grown increasingly violent, burglary, robbery, kidnapping, assault. Polly's father Mark told Fox News that by the

time Richard Davis walked into Polly's bedroom, the man responsible for her death had already been sentenced to more than 200 years in prison. And that's where he should have been that night, except that each time he was jailed, he was released or paroled early, only to reoffend and end up back in prison again and again and again. You know the saying, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. Well, Richard Davis made no move to hide who he was, from anyone, but especially not from the justice system. Not only did he show zero remorse for his crimes, he showed that he was violent, that he liked to terrorize people, women specifically, and hold them against their will, and that when given the chance, he would always offend again.

So the question quickly became, why was he given the chance? That's the same question another California dad, Mike Reynolds, had been asking too. In June 1992, just over a year before Polly's case made national headlines, his 18-year-old daughter, Kimber, was home from college, staying with her parents in Fresno for the weekend to stand in a wedding. She was climbing into a car on a downtown street when two men driving a stolen motorcycle tried to steal her purse, and in the process, they shot her in the head at point-blank range. What turned her father's overwhelming grief into rage was finding out that both of those men had been career criminals with long records freshly released on parole. Mike lobbied hard for a change in the law that would keep

repeat felony offenders, habitual criminals, from being released from prison. It was known as the Three Strikes in Your Out movement, and the idea was, if you've already got two felony convictions under your belt, the third one will get you a life sentence. No more at bats, no more chances. But Mike's advocacy as a grieving father fighting for change didn't gain a ton of steam, until Polly. Kimber's death lit the match, but Polly's, but Polly's, it poured gasoline on the fire and had everyone fanning the flames. For a community in mourning, it was simple. If we'd listened to Mike after Kimber's death and enacted the Three Strikes law, Polly would still be alive, because Richard Davis would have

been behind bars where he should have been all along. So with widespread public support, the law passed in California in 1994. And by the time Richard Davis went to trial for Polly's murder two years later, it was in 24 states. According to a New York Times retro report documentary, in most states, all three strikes had to be serious offenses, violent offenses. But California's Three Strikes law, the original Three Strikes law was much less discerning. What Three Strikes dictated in terms of sentencing, according to the California Court's website, went something like this. One felony conviction, typical sentencing. Second felony conviction, double whatever the standard sentence is for the crime.

Third felony conviction, automatic 25 to life. And that can sound reasonable, right? Why give someone a third chance to do what they've already proven they'll do twice? But here's the thing. Not all felonies are violent crimes. But the original Three Strikes law didn't really differentiate between the two. And what that meant 10 years after the law was enacted was that half, I repeat, half of all Third Strike convictions were for nonviolent crimes. Half of the people sent to prison for automatic life sentences were there on other charges. People like Jerry Dwayne Williams, a 27 year old from Compton, California, who got 25 to life under the Three Strikes legislation for stealing a slice of pizza. And you're probably thinking

that's gotta be an exaggeration, Ashley. Come on. Well, it's not. Eric Slater covered this issue for the LA Times, and he wrote that Jerry and a friend were a little drunk this one evening when they walked up to four young people sharing a slice of pizza, and they asked for a slice. Of course, the kids said no. And so Jerry just helped himself. The friend did too, by the way, but he was never prosecuted. Jerry, on the other hand, he was tried before a jury, and because of his prior felony convictions, got the mandatory Three Strikes sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years. Now, petty theft was usually a misdemeanor, but because of Jerry's prior convictions, which included robbery, attempted robbery,

and drug possession, it was bumped to a felony. Jerry was hardly the only person in this vote. There's Dwayne Silva, who got 30 years to life under the Three Strikes legislation for stealing a video camera and a coin collection. None of his prior convictions were violent. Michael Garcia, who faced a life sentence after stealing a $5 package of meat. Eddie Jordan, who stole a shirt from J.C. Penney to wear to a job interview. Kendall Cook, who shoplifted a single can of beer from a 7-Eleven. Three Strikes legislation had its critics from the very start who said it was an overreaction. That crime rates were already starting to fall, and that Three Strikes wouldn't help deter violent crime anyway. According to Jane Gross's reporting for The New York Times, critics of the

law said it would mostly just lead to prison overcrowding. And if those prisons were overcrowded with violent offenders, that would be one thing. But they weren't. Most were petty criminals, and in addition, many who ended up behind bars for a Third Strike would have been better served in addictions treatment or employment support programs. Over the years, as crime rates continued to drop, so did support for Three Strikes reform. And in November 2012, California passed an amendment to the law so that only serious or violent offenses count as Third Strikes. The amendment also allowed offenders who'd been sentenced to life in prison under the original Three Strikes law to apply for resentencing, though resentencing wasn't guaranteed. But the spirit of the law,

the one created to protect victims like Polly from predators like Richard Allen Davis, it remains in place today. In 1996, Richard was found guilty of murder. He was found guilty, but he didn't feel guilty. Because after the jury returned its verdict, one that carried an automatic death sentence, by the way, he didn't address the class family or weep or hang his head in shame. He turned to the TV cameras, put up both middle fingers, winked and blew a kiss. Richard Davis appealed his sentence many times over the years, but those appeals have been denied because the prosecution's case against him was airtight. That isn't always the case. Sometimes the prosecution finds holes in their case, things that would actually help the defense

get acquitted or get granted an appeal. And if they don't share that with the defense, there are big problems. I'm going to tell you more about that on the next precedent crime junkie episode about John Brady. So don't forget to follow crime junkie so you don't miss a single bonus episode. To find all the source material for this episode, you can go to our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at crime junkie podcast. And we'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled episode. Crime junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?