Klaas Family Tells Jury of Pain Over Murder

As several jurors wept, the father and grandfather of Polly Klaas testified Wednesday about how their lives were shattered the night the 12-year-old was kidnapped and murdered in 1993.

The emotional testimony came as prosecutors seeking the death penalty for the man convicted of killing Polly rested in the penalty phase of the case.

Marc Klaas, at times smiling as he described his vivacious daughter and at other times struggling to fight back tears, told about their close relationship and how her death has left him unable to work, sleep or think of anything but her.

“I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate . . . everything’s in ruins,” Klaas said. As he spoke, his wife, Violet, sitting in the courtroom’s front row, collapsed sobbing into the arms of his father.

The same jury that last month found Richard Allen Davis, 42, guilty of kidnapping and murdering Polly must recommend whether Davis should be put to death or sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole.

Davis sat impassively as Klaas and Polly’s maternal grandfather, Eugene Reed, painted a picture of a highly intelligent, warmhearted and humorous girl.

“She liked to tell jokes,” the Austrian-born Reed, a retired engineer, recalled of his firstborn granddaughter. “She was particularly good at imitating foreign accents, including mine.”

Reed, a Jew who said he had suffered through traumas such as fleeing Austria in 1938 after the Nazi regime was installed and surviving the blitz in wartime London, said none of those experiences compared to the pain of learning about Polly’s death.

“It was just about the worst time we ever had in our lives,” he said of the 65 days that the family waited before Davis led detectives to Polly’s body. “In our old age, to be hit by this devastating nightmare and catastrophe of the death of our beloved granddaughter.”

All Reed and his wife, Joan, have of Polly today, he said, are the photos taken during her frequent visits to their Pebble Beach home and a bench they installed in her name facing the ocean.

But if Reed’s quiet testimony was heartbreaking, Klaas’ barely restrained fury and anguish was searing.

Ever since Polly was abducted from her Petaluma home at knifepoint on the night of Oct. 1, 1993, Klaas focused his life first on his daughter’s disappearance and then on avenging her death.

Klaas, who owned a Hertz rental car franchise in San Francisco, told the jury that he never returned to his business after he got the phone call telling him that Polly had been taken.

Instead, he organized a volunteer army to search for her and spearheaded what became a nationwide effort to find her. After her body was found, Klaas helped establish the Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing crimes against children.

Although Klaas split with the group shortly after it was founded, saying it was not activist enough, he subsequently started his own Marc Klaas Foundation, also aimed at eradicating crimes against children.

He and Violet, his second wife, run the foundation out of their Sausalito home, but have never been able to attract enough donations to pay him a salary or hire a staff. They publish a newsletter with a tiny circulation, and Klaas has a web site where he publishes his daily reactions to Davis’ trial. The couple lives on Violet’s secretarial salary.

Facing the jury Wednesday, Klaas told them that he and Polly had remained close even after he and her mother, Eve Nichol, divorced in 1984, when Polly was 3.

“We had a bad marriage but an extremely successful divorce,” Klaas said, explaining that he had unlimited access to his daughter, spent most weekends and holidays with her, and frequently served as a volunteer in her schools.

Choking back tears, Klaas said Polly was so afraid of the dark that he would sometimes sit with her until she fell asleep when she visited his house on weekends.

“We would talk about her fears,” he said. “I assured her that everything would be all right. That I would always be there to protect her.”

Klaas said he has been in therapy since the murder, describing it as “something that I couldn’t live without at this point.”

“I have nightmares about this case, as do many people,” Klaas said. “The only way I can visit my daughter is in my sleep.”

Even when he is awake, Klaas said, there is little else but Polly, including “every time I see a pretty little 12-year-old girl. . . .”

The penalty phase of the trial is set to resume July 10. The defense is expected to spend about two weeks calling expert witnesses and Davis’s relatives, who they hope will create sympathy by portraying him as a man damaged by a troubled childhood and his years in prison.