Lawyer Admits His Client Killed Polly Klaas

In an opening statement that lasted less than 15 minutes, the attorney for the accused killer of Polly Klaas acknowledged Wednesday that Richard Allen Davis slew the 12-year-old girl whose kidnapping caused a national sensation, but disputed a charge that he also sexually molested her.

“The evidence in this case will overwhelmingly show that Mr. Richard Allen Davis did in fact kill Polly Klaas,” said Barry Collins, a Sonoma County deputy public defender, surprising Polly’s family and many in the courtroom.

His statement, delivered in a soft voice, preceded testimony by Eve Nichol, Polly’s mother. Appearing pale and pained, she described her last hours with her daughter and identified color photographs of Polly’s bedroom on the night of the Oct. 1, 1993, abduction.

Two girls who were visiting Polly for a sleepover and who witnessed the kidnapping also testified Wednesday, describing how they initially thought the intruder was pulling a prank. They said they became scared when their bound hands began to ache and when Polly left the Petaluma home with her abductor and did not return.

One of the girls identified Davis as the bearded intruder with a knife. The other said Davis resembled the kidnapper. A third friend of Polly’s testified about their friendship and sobbed on the stand.

Collins, unveiling the defense case, made it clear that Davis’ battle will be fought in the penalty stage of the trial, when the jury will have to decide between death and life in prison without parole. He told reporters later that he had to admit his client was the killer because Davis, 41, had confessed in taped interviews with police.

Addressing the jurors as Polly’s family sat a few feet away, Collins vowed that the defense will “never lose sight of the tragedy” of the slaying. But he implored jurors to decide facts only on the evidence, not on speculation or inferences.

He said later that he was referring in part to suggestions by the prosecution that Davis plotted Polly’s kidnapping and murder and may have stalked her. Asking about the stalking, Collins said: “That is just not so.”

In front of the jury, Collins specifically denied only the formal charge against Davis of lewd conduct upon a child. The lawyer stressed that the best laboratories in the country failed to find semen or Davis’ hairs on Polly and that Davis repeatedly denied sexually assaulting her.

The lewd conduct charge is one of four special circumstance allegations against Davis, but the prosecution needs only to prove kidnapping and murder to make Davis eligible for execution.

Although Davis repeatedly denied to police that he raped Polly, the denials became more equivocal after he was pressed, the prosecution told the jury Tuesday.

“I don’t think so,” he said at one point. “Not that I can remember,” he said later.

Collins told the jury that some of Davis’ statements came only after an officer told him that semen had been found on Polly. A preliminary test indicated the possibility of semen, but it was never confirmed, and a condom found at the scene where police believe Polly was killed was unused.

Polly’s body was found about two months after her abduction--police said Davis led them to the scene after his arrest--and authorities said decomposition of the remains made it impossible to prove or rule out sexual assault.

Appealing to the jury to understand Davis when the prosecution shows his videotaped confessions, Collins noted that police had an FBI psychological profile of Davis and knew how to manipulate him.

Officers pretended to befriend him, offering coffee and cigarettes, promising to be straight with him and calling him “buddy” and “pal,” Collins said.

These investigators had gleaned from FBI interviews with prison guards, inmates and employers who knew Davis that he liked to talk and explain his crimes, Collins said.

Davis is “not like a regular person,” Collins told the jurors, because Davis had spent most of his adult life behind bars and had the personality and behavior of a “convict.”

Dressed Wednesday in a long-sleeved, button-down blue striped shirt, Davis generally kept his eyes averted from the jury and the witness stand. He occupied himself taking notes and, occasionally, whispering with his lawyers.

He did not look up as Nichol testified about the night Polly was abducted. The girl had come running to the car when Nichol picked her up from school that afternoon and had seemed to be having a wonderful time with her two girlfriends during the sleepover that night, her mother recalled.

Nichol has remained in the background since Polly’s body was found, declining to attend legal proceedings or become a public lobbyist for victims’ rights. Dressed in a blue jacket and calf-length flowered skirt, the dark-haired Nichol spoke with composure.

She told the jury that she and Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, divorced about nine years before the kidnapping. She remarried but was separated from her second husband and living with Polly and her younger daughter, Annie Nichol, in October 1993. She testified that she and Klaas had an “amiable” relationship, and that Polly spent at least one night a week with him.

She recalled going into Polly’s room at 10 p.m. on the Friday of the abduction and asking the girls to keep the noise to a “quiet roar” and to try to get to sleep by 11 p.m.

“I said good night to them, and Polly said, ‘Good night, Mom.’ And that was the last time I saw her.”

The mother and her younger daughter slept in a bedroom joined by a bathroom to the children’s room. But she closed both bathroom doors that night because of the noise.

Gillian Pelham, 14, one of the girls at Polly’s sleepover, recalled how the friends played with Gak, a gooey form of play putty, and how she and Polly waited on the front porch like stone lions for their friend, Kate McLean, to come. Polly wore a Mickey Mouse hat and Pelham wore antlers, she testified.

Later, Gillian said, she and Kate put makeup on Polly, testing out a possible Halloween disguise by giving her a white face and black eyes and lips. “We wanted her to look dead--just one of the weird things you do,” Gillian said, testifying without self-consciousness and even grinning occasionally at the prosecution’s questions.

At 10:30 p.m., when Polly went to fetch the sleeping bags, she opened the bedroom door and “there was someone standing in the hall with a knife and a duffel bag,” said the teenager.

“ ‘Don’t scream or I’ll slit your throats,’ ” she quoted Davis as saying. “I thought it was some sort of joke because I didn’t think that sort of thing happened. And he didn’t look menacing, like I should be afraid of him.”

He asked for money, and Polly pointed him toward her jewelry box, the witness said. But he tied up the girls instead, at first speaking calmly, then becoming more frantic as minutes passed. When Pelham complained that her wrists were bound too tightly, he apologized and loosened them, she said.

She said she and Kate, bound and gagged with pillowcases over their heads, began to count to 1,000 as the intruder instructed before he left with Polly. After finally deciding he had gone, Gillian said, she tried to untie herself while Kate stumbled around the room trying to get to Polly’s mother.

Asked if she recognized the man who took Polly, Gillian replied, “Yes.” She looked at Davis, whose head was bowed.

“He is sitting at the defense table, and he is wearing a light blue or purple striped shirt,” she said.

Kate McLean also described the scene at Polly’s and recounted that Davis had tried to keep the girls calm. After the girls freed themselves, she said, they looked around the house for Polly before waking up her mother.

Asked to look at the defendant, she said, “He resembles the man that I saw. I am not positive, but I am pretty sure.”

Kate’s mother, Alice McLean, testified Wednesday that she saw a man with hair that resembled Davis’ when she dropped her daughter off. A neighbor testified that he saw Davis three times, two of them in front of Polly’s house, on the night of the abduction.