Polly Klaas was 12 years old when she invited two friends over for a sleepover at her house in Petaluma, California on October 1, 1993. The three girls were in Polly’s bedroom playing board games and having fun together. Her mom Eve and younger sister Annie were already asleep in the next room. Nobody expected that this regular Friday night would end in tragedy.
According to People, a man named Richard Allen Davis, who was 39 years old, broke into the house sometime after 10:30 at night. He was holding a knife when he walked into the bedroom where the girls were playing. Davis tied up all three girls with rope and covered the two friends’ heads with pillowcases. He warned them to stay quiet and count to 1,000 slowly. Then he took Polly out of the room and left the house with her.
The two friends managed to get free from the ropes after Davis was gone. They ran to wake up Polly’s mom right away. She called 911 immediately after hearing what happened. Police sent out an emergency alert about the kidnapping within half an hour. But there was a big problem with how the alert was sent out. It only reached some police radios in the area, not all of them.
The killer was literally in police custody and they had no idea
About two hours after taking Polly, Davis got his car stuck in a muddy ditch on a back road near Santa Rosa. Someone who owned property nearby saw him and called the police to help. Two officers showed up and looked through his car.
They even helped him pull the car out of the ditch. But they didn’t know anything about a missing girl because the emergency alert never reached their radios. Back then, police also didn’t usually check someone’s criminal background during a simple traffic stop. So they just let Davis drive away.
Almost two months went by before police got their next big break. On November 28, that same property owner went for a walk on her land.
She found some weird items lying around, including a pair of red tights that looked like they were made for a child, a sweatshirt, and some torn cloth. She thought these things might be important, so she called the police again.
When detectives looked into it, they connected the items to Polly’s case. They went back through their old reports and found the one about Davis getting stuck in the ditch that same night Polly disappeared.
Police matched a palm print found in Polly’s bedroom to Richard Allen Davis, leading to his arrest on November 30, 1993. Within two hours of questioning, Davis confessed to killing her, and on December 4 he directed officers to her body, which he had hidden beneath wooden planks in a forested area near Cloverdale, about 50 miles from her home.
He was convicted of murder in 1996 and sentenced to death, where he remains on death row at San Quentin Prison today. It turned out that Davis had been arrested many times before for serious crimes, including kidnapping other people in the past. The mistakes that happened during the investigation raised serious concerns about how police handle emergencies and share information, which led to better systems being put in place.
Published: Nov 21, 2025 08:09 am