Klaas Suspect Twisted Legal System Since ‘70s

Richard Allen Davis was a hardened career criminal who knew how to manipulate the legal system and who frequently got breaks from judges, prosecutors and the state prison system, according to court records dating to the early 1970s.

By the time Davis was 22, he had been arrested so many times for so many different crimes that authorities held out little hope that he could ever be rehabilitated.

Court psychiatrists concluded that Davis, now 39, had a sociopathic personality and derived pleasure from causing harm to others. Davis said he heard voices urging him to assault, rob and rape.

“Because of the obvious threat to the community, it is believed there is no alternative but imprisonment,” an Alameda County probation officer concluded in 1977. “He has proven that he cannot function adequately outside of prison.”

Such clear warnings came time and again--the reports spoke of his restless urge to commit violence--but he was repeatedly released from custody to embark anew on vicious rampages. Even when a judge sentenced him to up to life in prison, he was free in less than five years.

Today he is back in jail, where police say he has confessed to the crime of his life: kidnaping 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma home and strangling her. With this arrest, Davis has become the latest symbol of an out-of-kilter justice system that seems incapable of keeping violent felons from repeating their crimes.

Following the pattern of recently executed murderers David Edwin Mason and Robert Alton Harris, Davis became more violent in his crimes each time he was released from prison.

Davis, who set cats on fire as a boy and committed his first crime at age 12, was a cunning convict who twice escaped from secure mental hospital wards.

“One characteristic in the making of the sociopathic personality is they derive pleasure from inflicting pain on people,” said Michael Rustigan, professor of criminology at San Francisco State University. “They like to jerk the system around. They like to send shock waves through the community. They can cause a lot of suffering.”

As an adult, Davis was arrested at least a dozen times--including seven times for burglary--before he was ever sentenced to state prison.

When arrested, Davis usually struck a bargain with prosecutors, pleading guilty to one charge so that other charges were dropped and he received a lesser sentence.

Often, he was given probation or a suspended sentence by a court system that seemingly bent over backward in giving him a chance to rehabilitate himself.

Since his arrest Dec. 1, more than 100 police departments have contacted the FBI hoping to link him to unsolved crimes in their jurisdictions.

“Clearly, this is a man who should not have been on the streets,” said Jim Nielsen, chairman of the state Board of Prison Terms.

The third of five children born to longshoreman Robert Raymond Davis and his wife, Evelyn, young Rick had a “chaotic and unsatisfactory” childhood, as one probation officer termed it, resulting in “an understandably poor self-image.”

When he was 11, his parents divorced. Davis and his siblings spent the next several years being shuffled between their parents’ homes and those of their grandparents.

Eventually, Davis’ father obtained custody of the children because of his mother’s “immoral conduct in the presence of children,” according to court records. But his father was an alcoholic whom Davis had to bail out of jail more than once, according to his onetime neighbors in the small mountain community of La Honda in San Mateo County.

Davis later told authorities he had “no feelings for his mother and little for the rest of his family.”

At age 12, Davis began experimenting with drugs and alcohol, habits that would become lifelong addictions for him.

Along with the drug abuse came the first of his misdeeds: cashing checks he took from mailboxes, breaking into houses and, according to those who knew him, torturing animals. He is said to have soaked cats with gasoline and lit them on fire. He once laughed uproariously as his own dog snapped its neck and died while chasing a boulder down a hillside--a boulder he had pushed.

Later, he told a psychiatrist that committing such acts gave him a glowing feeling and tension release.

“He was always a pretty violent person,” schoolmate Zachary Beckett told reporters. “When he was little, it was animals,” Beckett said. “When he got bigger, it was people.”

At Pescadero High School there is little evidence in the record of his criminal future. He played soccer and was elected by his classmates sergeant-at-arms of his sophomore class. “Other than his academic record, which was very poor, those things made it look like he was like any other kid,” said the current principal, Roger Yohe.

By his mid-teens, Davis was feared by his friends and neighbors in La Honda, having plagued the town with a series of home break-ins and bizarre outbursts.

Although not the least bit apologetic, Davis recognized the mark he had left on the close-knit community: He told authorities his life would be in jeopardy if he ever returned to La Honda.

At 17, a San Mateo County judge gave Davis the choice of joining the military or being committed to the California Youth Authority. Davis chose the Army, but it did not take long before he was in trouble again.

In the service, he began using morphine and opium, fought with his fellow soldiers and gained a reputation as a management problem. Davis’ explanation for his troubles: He was mad because he did not get promoted.

He was discharged in August, 1972, after 13 months and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. After a brief series of $2.50-an-hour jobs, he began the first of his major crime waves.

Between February and October, 1973, Davis was arrested at least four times in San Mateo County on charges that included public drunkenness, resisting arrest, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, possession of marijuana, auto theft and burglary.

In most cases, the charges were either dismissed or Davis received a suspended sentence or probation as part of a plea bargain.

It was during this time that Davis began refining the art of manipulating loopholes in the criminal justice system: Charged with multiple crimes, he would frequently agree to plead guilty to one in exchange for the others--often sex offenses--being dropped.

The result: His penalties were never as severe as they could have been. He finally received his first jail sentence--a six-month term--in October, 1973.

If you believe Davis’ account, a critical event in his life occurred just before he went to jail, when a schoolmate he claimed was his girlfriend, Marlene Voris, was found shot to death Oct. 12, 1973, after a party at her parents’ home in La Honda.

It was ruled a suicide, but relatives and friends said they never believed that Voris killed herself and scoffed at Davis’ story that she was carrying his baby.

Davis was one of the last people to see her alive. Now the case is being reviewed by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department in light of his arrest in Polly’s murder.

Davis later told court-appointed psychiatrists that he heard Voris’ voice telling him things, “usually of a comforting nature,” wrote Dr. George Ponomareff, who examined Davis in April, 1977. “However, at times another voice would appear, telling him that (his victims) wanted to be assaulted or robbed or raped.”

When not locked up, Davis had a difficult time staying out of trouble. In the spring of 1974, a child was born to Davis and a girlfriend from La Honda. Probation reports later said that Davis had not contributed a dime to the support of the youngster, and that he “appears to have no interest in the boy.”

In March, 1975, three men he knew from jail shot him in the back and left him for dead in the Bay Area town of Brisbane. He survived only because a passerby drove him to a hospital. He later testified and helped imprison the gunmen.

Davis’ first state prison term did not come until August, 1975, after at least a dozen arrests for various crimes and more than a year after one probation officer predicted that it was unlikely Davis would ever change his ways.

“Mr. Davis lacks both courage and motivation to change his patterns,” San Mateo County Probation Officer David Mandell wrote in 1974. “There is no question in this writer’s mind that he will be in state prison within a few years unless the criminal justice system is able to make a more profound impression on the defendant than has been the case so far.”

Mandell noted that the 20-year-old Davis seemed almost to welcome prison. His only objections to being locked up was that “he could not ‘get loaded,’ meaning smoke marijuana or use other drugs. He also indicated that there was ‘not enough room to walk around’ and that ‘it’s boring.’ ”

His first stay in state prison was for a term of six months to 15 years under the old indeterminate sentence system. He was released less than a year later in August, 1976.

Less than two months after his release, he was arrested in Hayward on charges of kidnaping, robbery and attempted oral copulation. He had abducted a woman at knifepoint from a transit station and demanded sex from her.

Davis told court-appointed psychiatrists that he heard a woman’s voice telling him to commit the crime and said: “I had the feeling she wanted something done to her.”

After the arrest, Davis fell into a severe depression and attempted to hang himself in jail, records show. He was sent to Napa State Hospital, where he apparently experienced a quick recovery: Taking advantage of slipshod security, he walked out 10 days later.

Within days of his escape, he committed at least three felonies, including entering the house of a Napa woman and hitting her with a fireplace poker while she lay in bed. He was convicted of kidnaping, robbery, assault and burglary.

In her pre-sentencing report, San Mateo County Probation Officer Adele Shiells wrote: “It is obvious at this point, particularly in view of the extensive efforts of the past to alter his patterns, that this man should be removed from the community. His propensity for crime, and what appears to be an accelerating potential for violence, dictates a prison commitment.”

Her Alameda County probation counterpart, Ron Locke, said: “Because of the obvious threat to the community, it is believed that there is no other alternative but imprisonment. He has proven that he cannot function adequately outside of prison.”

For the brief holiday season crime rampage, he was sentenced by three judges to concurrent terms of six months to 10 years, one to 25 years and six months to life.

But when the Legislature changed the sentencing system to keep violent criminals in prison longer, Davis’ term was recalculated under the new rules to six years. He ended up serving less than five.

He was released on automatic parole in March, 1982--even after the state parole board had repeatedly denied him parole, saying he had a severe psychotic condition and that his assaults were most often aimed at women.

After his early release from prison in March, 1982, Davis went more than a year without an arrest. That peaceful interlude ended in March, 1983, with yet another burglary arrest in San Rafael. It is unclear what happened, but Davis was never prosecuted on that charge, nor on five other charges lodged against him between March and October, 1983, including possession of a weapon, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and resisting arrest.

Then, on Nov. 30, 1984, Davis and an accomplice, Susan Mavra, abducted a Redwood City woman at gunpoint and forced her to withdraw $6,000 in cash from her bank. At one point, Davis hit her with his pistol.

He was given a 16-year sentence, and was later given a concurrent three-year sentence for a March, 1985, attempted armed robbery in Stanislaus County.

This time, he was sentenced under the new rules and his release was not subject to review by a parole board. But with time off for good behavior, he was released after eight years.

“It was a no-choice deal,” said Nielsen, the Board of Prison Terms chairman.

Three months after his release, he allegedly took Polly from her bedroom at knifepoint. During the massive 65-day search that ensued, the justice system once again seemed unable to deal with Davis.

His parole officer, despite 21 personal visits, detailed knowledge of Davis’ criminal history and whereabouts--as well as the ubiquitous composite sketch of the suspect--never linked the most talked-about crime in recent Northern California memory to Davis.

On the night of the kidnaping, Davis talked his way past two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies while Polly, apparently alive, was stashed nearby in the woods. He escaped again Oct. 19 when, traveling alone, he was arrested for drunk driving and released after he sobered up.

After he was finally taken into custody, Davis confessed to the kidnaping and murder and directed authorities to Polly’s body, the FBI said. Already, Davis is prepared to strike yet another bargain with prosecutors, his attorneys say: He would plead guilty in exchange for not receiving the death penalty.

A Life of Crime

Richard Allen Davis, charged with the murder of Polly Klaas, has been in trouble since he was 12--a fact prompting calls for new parole and sentencing rules. To avoid a sentence at 17, he entered the Army but was discharged after 13 months for discipline problems. His adult record includes:

* Feb. 12, 1973: Arrested in Redwood City for drunkenness and obstructing a police officer. Fined $25 and placed on one year probation.

* April 21, 1973: Arrested in Redwood City for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Placed on probation.

* Oct. 25, 1973: Arrested in Redwood City for auto theft. Case dismissed.

* Oct. 26, 1973: Arrested in Redwood City for burglary. Pleaded guilty and got six months in jail and probation.

* May 13, 1974: Arrested in South San Francisco for burglary. Received suspended prison sentence and probation.

* June 17, 1974: Arrested for burglary. Committed for psychiatric evaluation.

* Sept. 10, 1974: Arrested in Redwood City for a probation violation involving possession of a dangerous weapon.

* Sept. 16, 1974: Given three years probation and six-year suspended prison sentence for probation violation and burglary.

* March 5, 1975: Arrested in San Francisco on burglary charge.

* March 15, 1975: Arrested in Redwood City for jail escape and burglary.

* April 7, 1975: Fined $500; probation extended to 1978 for burglary and probation violations.

* April 11, 1975: Arrested in Redwood City for probation violation. Was admitted to hospital for mental evaluation, then walked away.

* May 5, 1975: Walked away from Synanon anti-drug program where he had been admitted for treatment two weeks earlier.

* July 11, 1975: Arrested in Madera County for vehicle tampering and marijuana possession. Case dismissed.

* Aug. 2, 1975: Arrested in South San Francisco for burglary and probation violation.

* Aug. 13, 1975: Probation revoked. Sentenced to state prison for six months to 15 years.

* Aug. 2, 1976: Released from state prison after serving less than a year.

* Sept. 24, 1976: Arrested in Hayward for robbery, kidnaping and attempted oral copulation. Later sent to Napa State Hospital after jail suicide attempt.

* Dec. 22, 1976: Arrested for crimes in Napa, including attempted kidnaping, that followed escape from hospital.

* June 1, 1977: Sentenced to one to 25 years in prison.

* June 28, 1977: Received concurrent sentence of six months to 10 years in prison.

* May 5, 1978: Received concurrent sentence of six months to life in prison.

* March 3, 1982: Released on parole after Legislature changed sentencing law. His terms are recalculated to a total of 72 months.

* March 26, 1983: Arrested in San Rafael for burglary, petty theft and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

* Oct. 12, 1983: Arrested in Modesto for showing false identification to a police officer. District attorney declined to prosecute.

* Sept. 2, 1984: Warrant issued in Redwood City charging felon in possession of a dangerous weapon.

* Nov. 30, 1984: Kidnaped, assaulted and robbed woman in Redwood City.

* March 7, 1985: Attempted armed robbery in Stanislaus County. Later sentenced to three years in state prison.

* July 30, 1985: Sentenced to 16 years in prison for the Redwood City kidnaping.

* June 27, 1993: Paroled to San Mateo County.

* Oct. 1, 1993: Allegedly kidnaped Polly Klaas from her home in Petaluma. Was arrested two months later on parole violation.

SOURCES: Law enforcement and court records