You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by author Kim Cross here to talk
about her book In Light of All Darkness Inside the Polyclass Kidnapping and the Search
for America's Child. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me go ahead and start by talking to us a
little bit of your professional and educational background. How did you get to be
a writer? I was lucky, and that I learned very early that I
wanted to be a writer. As early as high school. I started working
for my local newspaper in high school at the suggestion of one of my high
school teachers, went to journalism school, graduated, went out, and decided
to become a business writer, covering the new economy for a magazine called Business
two point zero during the dot com boom and bust. When the bust happened,
I lost my job, and I went back for a graduate degree that
I didn't necessarily need, but wanted to work on a book which I didn't
get published it was, wrote it all wrong, and then went briefly into
newspapers, worked for The Timespickyun in New Orleans, the Saint Pete Times in
Florida, and freelanced a little bit for other papers, and then fell backwards
into someone else's dream job at Southern Limbing. I was a travel writer and
editor at Southern Living, and I got to go and do things that other
people do on vacation and write about them. But I was fraud because I
felt like Cinderella's ugly sister, gimping around in the glass slider that didn't fit
and I really wanted felt like I would have been happier as a war correspondenters.
So I was at Southern Living, this other someone else's dream job,
when the idea for my first book surfaced. In this huge tornado outbreak hit
Alabama among twenty one other states, and I wrote a magazine piece about it.
The magazine piece turned into a book. I quit my job to write
the book and go freelance, and I've been freelance for ten years. Now.
Were you living down south at that point when you were working for Southern
Living. I was living in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was hiding in
my laundry room when the big tornado that was headed toward Tuscaloosa, where I
went to school, was headed on track to hit our house. And it
didn't hit our house, but like many people, I realized that could have
been us. And in the wake of that, I saw how people respond
to a tragedy with pretty beautiful things. And the name of that book is
What stands in a Storm. Now, somehow you ended up getting from Alabama
to where you are today, which is Boise, Idaho. How did that
happen? This has nothing to do with true crime, but it has to
do with mountain biking. My husband runs a statewide league that basically makes mountain
biking an interscholastic sport for fifteen hundred kids in Idaho. He started the league
in Alabama and then got recruited to Idaho to run the league here. And
in my other I'm a full time author and freelance writer, but I have
a side hustle as a mountain bike coach, and so I'm the head coach
of my son's high school mountain bike team, and then I have a little
coaching business on the side that is awesome. And before we turn to your
latest book, we were also having a little Admiration Society meet up regarding Catherine
Kate Miles, who's a friend of ours and has been on the podcast.
You two have a lot in common in terms of your interest in the outdoors,
women's athletics, and extreme weather. You've both written books about extreme weather,
which seems to be the topic of the day, and now you've both
transitioned over into a true crime book. Correct, Kate Miles. Huge shout
out of love for Kate Miles. Our careers have had this very strange parallel.
We've never actually met in person, but we have a lot of the
same friends in the narrative world, and in fact, her book is on
my shelf behind me. But yeah, she wrote about superstorm Sandy and I
wrote about a tornado outbreak. I think she reached out and I blurbed her
book. And then when this true crime book, when I started writing this,
I saw that she had written trailed and I reached out to her and
said, sheepishly, Hi, read your book. You did it really well.
I like that, how respectful you were. This is a really hard
and lonely place for me. I'm struggling with being in the true crime space,
which is for readers who don't know my work. I have never been
a consumer writer true crime and found myself very uncomfortable out of my element.
So I reached out to Kate and said, can we just talk. There
are so many things that are that I'm agonizing over and I feel like you
might understand, and she I said sure. So, as I was on
a writing retreat, going through the throes of getting this manuscript on paper,
she talked to me and counseled me and provided such a warm ear and an
understanding heart to what I was going through. I think she knew better than
just about anyone. And this is a very tough genre to try to get
into because you have to put your heart and soul into it, and you
are also dealing with some very uncomfortable material. My heart goes out to you
for that. It is rough. How did you decide on the Polyclass case
as being the subject of your first true crime book first and probably last?
Thank you. That's a great question. I like to say that my very
best stories end up choosing me instead of the other way around. The storm
book chose me. This book chose me in that I happened to have access
that no other journalist could get, and I happened to have the skill set
that could bring the massive amount of data and information involved in this very complex
case to life. So the access stems from the fact that I am married
to the son of the FBI case agent who oversaw the poly Class kidnapping.
We've been married for it'll be twenty years next week. The FBI case agent
who solved this case and oversaw its huge complexity is my father in law.
I had been married to a son for fifteen years when it even occurred to
me to write this book and It only occurred to me because my husband said,
after my first book, you should think about telling the poly class story.
You might be the only one who could do it. And I had
never even thought about it. Even though the poly class case is something like
a sister in law, it is just part of our family DNA. When
we gather with the Friar family, there's not a gathering that occurs where the
poly class name or case doesn't come up. It's just always there. It's
part of his legacy, it's part of his life. And so at some
point I thought, Okay, this isn't really my kind of story. My
work tends to focus on something with a redemptive message. Often it's the beautiful
things that come from our brokenness, and I didn't know if that existed in
this case. It just from what I knew about, it seemed like a
really sad ending with lasting tragedy for the people who lost Polly. So I
started doing my homework because I always reported out. The more I looked into
it, the more I realized this case has a really amazing legacy in that
it was a testing and proving ground for so many new forensic techniques within the
FBI. One FBI agent told me that this case quote changed the way the
FBI does business. I realized when I started interviewing the people involved in the
case that many of them have been using this as a case study to train
future generations of investigators based on what they learned, and they're still doing it
thirty years later. Even though technology has changed and the world has changed social
media. Everything's different now. However, the case still remains that relevant today
that it is still being taught. My father in law, Friar, still
teaches it an average of once a month, and he has been for the
past thirty years, so he has taught literally thousands and thousands of investigators,
and so have other people who worked on this case. So I thought this
really needs to be documented, and I wanted to write the book of record
so that when they retire, the story lives on and continues teaching people as
it has for thirty years. So the truth is Losing Polly is obviously a
tragedy, but there are some positives and there is some sort of light at
the end of the story in that some very good things came out of what
started and remains a tragic situation. Exactly, nothing will change the tragedy of
Poly's deaf. Nothing can bring her back, and nothing can make it less
sad and horrible how she died. However, I don't like it when people
say everything happens for a reason, because I think this didn't have to happen.
This didn't happen for a reason. But I do like the idea that
beautiful things come from our brokenness, and often sometimes in spight of things that
happen horrifically, and sometimes even because of them, those lessons learned are used
to produce transformative change in ways that echo and echo, and I do think
that this is true here this case has literally changed and saved lives. We
do have listeners who doubtless will not be familiar with the Polyclass case. Can
you give any of our listeners who have not heard of it just a brief
rundown of what happened? And I realize it's asking a lot because it is
a very complex case. Just in a nutshell, what happened to Poly Class.
On October one, nineteen ninety three, a twelve year old girl was
kidnapped from her bedroom during a sleepover with two friends by a man who was
wielding a knife and walked into her house and took her. Her mom and
sister were sleeping next door. It was a very rare stranger abduction from the
house, and what happened is at first summarize. Okay, The two month
investigation that followed was one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. Four thousand
fall in tears came in out of the woodwork to help search for Polly.
It was a huge outbaring of support from the community and really around the world,
where people posted flyers and walked the fields and streams and mountains around Sonoma
to look for her, and people really cared. They saw her as if
they were she was their own child. To a lot of people, Polly
represented the sister or niece or daughter or someone that they knew and cared about.
She really felt like America's child, and so America came out and cared
and did what they could defind her. After two months of really no good
leads, there was a break in the case that resulted because the investigators and
the volunteers had this arrangement with the media. The media kept the story alive
by writing about the volunteers when there were no new leads in the case to
write about, and those stories generated public leads and tips. There were sixty
thousand tips from the public and twelve thousand leads that investigators had to chase down
in these two months, and most of them led to a dead end or
red herring. Two months in, there was a woman named Dana Jaffe who
was walking her property. It was a wooded property in the Sonoma Hills,
and she stumbled upon some suspicious items that she might have just thought were trash,
but she had seen the coverage of police case and she thought this has
to be related. It made her remember that a two months earlier, on
the night of Polly's kidnapping, there was a trespasser who came on her property
in goddess car stuff. She called the authorities. Sheriffs came out and removed
his car. At the time, they didn't know that there had been a
kidnapping, and so they let him go. And that was, in fact
the kidnapper that lead from Dana Jaffe. I wonder if Dana Jaffe would have
made that connection if she hadn't seen the media response. So this case represented
the perfect storm between the media collaborating with the investigators collaborating with the volunteers,
and they all came together in a way that I think solved the case.
One quick observation, I would be willing to bet you a great lunch that
she would not have moved forward with the information had there not been the media
coverage. Kristin and I are both big believers in keeping stories alive, shining
the media spotlight. Using the media spotlight, people want to help, and
the polyclass case is a great example of that. Tell us a little bit
more about the case. So when Dana Jaffi found the suspicious items, she
brought it to the attention of the local sheriff's department. They contacted Pedalomapedi and
sent out a detective who had been in Polic's room on the night at the
kidnapping. He had seen white ligatures that were on her floor that were used
to bind her friends. Those ligatures looked exactly like the ligatures that were found
on Dana Jaffe's property, so he thought immediately, this has got to be
connected. Because the trespasser had been stopped, they did a field incident report
that captured his name, so finally they had a suspect, and his name
was Richard Allen Davis. They looked him up and he had been recently parole
about a few months before Pauli was kidnapped. He had been a serial offender
with a history of violent crimes over almost his entire adult life. He had
spent most of his adult life incarcerated, and he was out on parole,
and because of a parole violation, they were able to arrest him, and
they arrested him, brought him into custody, and that's where another series of
really crazy things happened that go back to the media interest and participation from the
public. He was incarcerated in Mendocino County Jail in isolation, unable to see
any media reports. When the media released news of a palm print that was
found in Polly's bedroom that matched his palm print from a previous arrest, and
so this was news in the paper, but he didn't know about it.
Someone who he had worked for when he was out of prison. He was
a sheet metal worker and he had worked for a guy named Marvin White who
saw Davis's picture on the news, saw the palm print news and said,
I wonder if I could go and convince him to lead them to Polly Marvin
White gets in his car and drives up to Mendocino from he lived on the
Peninsula in San Francisco, and he asked to see Richard Allen Davis. Interestingly,
Davis had not heard the news of the print match. Marvin White goes
in and informs him, and then Davis doesn't react and he just nods,
but he knows that they have him. Right after that, Marvin White leaves
and to a detective and an FBI agent go in to take his palm prints
because they needed a fresh set of prints. He had invoked his Miranda rights,
so they were not allowed to question him at all about the case.
But in a rare exception to the Miranda right law, which means you can't
ask a suspect anything about the case, you can talk to them about the
weather and about other things. And one of the detectives said, hey,
right now, it's just a kidnapping and if she's alive, you might want
to think about talking some more. So if you want to talk, have
them call me. They leave, and Davis thinks about it, and then
he calls and asks to speak to the detective and he invoked his Marnda rights,
but there was an exception to it. In reaching out to the investigators,
he basically waved his Maranda rights, did so on paper, sign a
form that said I waived my rights, and he confessed to the murder of
polyclass and told them he would lead them to her body, which he did,
and then they brought her home. That was probably oversimplified the body part,
but no, he led them to her body. And if he hadn't,
I wonder if they ever would have found her. Based on your description
of where they found her, it doesn't seem terribly likely that they would have
without that help. It is a massively complex case. And thank you for
that summary, because I know that there are going to be people out there
who don't remember it. The case, as you said, is thirty years
old. There are a couple of things about Polly's kidnapping that are very interesting,
and one of those things is that it is pretty rare for a stranger
kidnapping to take place. I know that facts and statistics change over time.
Probably getting into those is something that we're going to steer away from. But
what can you speak to about stranger abductions and kidnapping in general? Kidnappings in
general are pretty rare. Usually missing children are runaways or parental abduction piecees where
there might be a custody struggle. Sometimes they are misunderstandings someone they've gone off
with a boyfriend or something. But kidnappings in general are rare, especially stranger
abductions, and especially stranger of abductions from the home. That is the rarest
of all. It's a parent's worst nightmare and an agent's worst nightmare. It's
scary. Like I do remember, I am old enough to remember the Polyclass
case, and I remember hearing about it and just being terrified because this is
just an absolute nightmare. You're having a sleepover with your friends, you're hanging
out, you're doing the things that little girls do. You're popping around to
the music, you're singing, you're reading scary stories, you're doing whatever.
And suddenly there is a guy with a knife in your home. It is
just an absolute nightmare scenario. Can't imagine anything scarier. You did a wonderful
job, and this with painting Polly as a whole person with a complex life,
and painting to her friends who had to deal with this. And I'll
tell you, before I read your book, I hadn't given a lot of
thought to the fact that there were two probably very terrified young ladies who witnessed
this and then had to deal with this. Talk a little bit about the
way that the girls were treated by law enforcement when they went to give their
statements about Polly and her disappearance. Great question. Initially, when Kate and
Jillian were first interviewed by police, they seemed a little bit preternaturally calm.
They weren't acting like what investigators thought witnesses should act like after their best friend
has just been kidnapped by a scary guy who walked into the house of the
knife. They were probably in shock. They were very calm, and they
were very articulate, and they were interviewed separately by detectives who got the story,
and at first they both admitted thinking maybe this is a joke. Polly
was a wonderful actress and a very avid frankster. The girls loved pranking each
other. If you're in junior high, you remember what it was like to
do prank Paul's and play jokes on your friends. So pranking was a big
thing. That's what they did at slumber parties. And there was a slumber
party something like the week before, and they had read school scary stories,
scary stories, and they had someone's little brother come and knock on the door
at the spookiest moment possible to bodily effect. This is just what they did
when Kate and Jillian were Kate and Gillian and Pollie were sitting in a room
playing a board game when this man dressed in black comes in with a knife
and says, don't scream or I'll slit your throats. And he made them
lie down on the ground. He put pillowcases over their heads, and then
he gagged them first with kind of a white silky cloth and then with what
felt like electrical cord, and then bound their hands behind their backs, and
then he took Polly away. Kate and Gillian were thinking this is a joke.
This is a really good one at first, and then they thought,
at first he didn't seem that scary to him. He looks normal, they
said in their interviews, and so they thought this is probably a joke.
I think Jillian even giggled. And then when he took Polly, they told
he told them to count to a thousand and that when they reached a thousand
she would be back. But she never came back, and at some point
they untied each other and ran into the next room and woke up Polly's mother
and said, this is not a joke. Going back to your question,
when they were interviewed, they were very calm, very articulate. They were
counted almost identically what happened. But there were two minor inconsistencies. One was
that one of them had remembered a neon yellow headband like a bandana, tied
around the perpetrator's head. The other one did not remember this. And then
the one who didn't remember the headband remembered a slamming screen door, but the
door on the front door, the screen door was propped open by two bikes
and could not have slammed shut. So investigators really looked at these inconsistencies as
evidence that they were telling a story. They've had a lot of skepticism at
the beginning, and I think the skepticism was pretty much all around because also
Pedalimma was a town where this sort of thing didn't happen. It had one
murder a year, and it was a little quiet town where people moved so
their kids would have safe childhoods. So a lot of them had grown up
there and they thought, this doesn't happen in Pedalima, this is my town.
And they either didn't believe. Some of them even admitted maybe we didn't
want to believe that this was true. So there was a lot of skepticism
and the girls were interviewed repeatedly, and repeatedly with every subsequent interview, the
interviews went less from interview to and more towards interrogation. By I think the
third interrogation, they were grilled with the same tools that investigators would have used
for a criminal and it was pretty harsh, and it scared them and it
upset them, understandably, and it was very traumatic. So there were lasting
trauma effects from this that it still exists to this day, understandably. And
also some of the investigators themselves were traumatized because they were forced to play the
badcock role when they didn't want to do it. So one of the things
that was learned was that children should not be treated this way. Children can't
be interviewed and interrogated like adults. And back at that time, there wasn't
any special training for child and adolescent interviews and they just tools that they had.
Since then, there's now a specialist called the Child and Adolescent forensic investigator.
They are trained in gently interviewing children, especially witnesses or victims, in
a way that hopefully does not encourreg additional trauma on top of what they've already
been through from the crime. So that was one of the major changes and
lessons learned that came from this case. I could see parents being outraged that
their young daughters were treated so harshly, essentially treated almost like suspects they were.
The parents were upset, and after that late night interview they said,
we're done, no more interviews, We're done with you. FBI, and
my father in law, actually I think, realized what had happened and he
went and apologize to the girls. He took flowers and Teddy bears and apologized,
And at some point the investigators decided to do a video re enactment where
the girls were treated as we believe you, and we want a video you
describing what happened in police room, and they videotaped it so they could share
it with other investigators to understand what happened. But it was rough, and
I think there are lasting effects to this day all around from that. So
Kate and Jillian did work with you on the book. It sounds like you
were able to interview them, but the class family did not work with you
on the book. Is that correct? Correct? So let me start with
Kate and Jillian. I reached out to Kate and Jillian after I felt I
had learned as much as I could learn from the documents and the primary sources
and the interviews with investigators, and I felt pretty certain they would not want
to talk to me. I reached out, as I do to most of
the people that I write about who have gone through something traumatic, and then
I initially wrote a letter and send it through friend of a friend, someone
who they know and trust, who has had the opportunity to vet me and
say we know her, so that way I'm not coming out of the weeds
and being startling. And I didn't hear back, and so I assumed that
was a no. And it turns out that neither letter had reached them,
and I started getting towards the end of the writing and started worrying that the
letters hadn't reached them, and so I reached out again. It turns out
that they hadn't got the letters, and they did want to help me tell
a factual account. Jillian did talk with me on the record, and she
very generously talked with me for several hours on zoom and then in ongoing conversations
because she was committed to helping me get it right, and she did allow
me to interview her. Kate has asked to keep her adult life private,
and I respect her wishes, and so I'm going to say less about Kate,
but I will say Kate talk to me on background, which means I
don't want to be quoted, I don't want to be interviewed, but I
will have a conversation with you in which you can use the information to make
the story beat her. She really, through our conversations, helped me write
with greater sensitivity and nuance to some things that I might not have been aware
of on my own, and to both of them, I'm really grateful.
I did something that I don't normally do in that I let Gillian review the
chapters in which she was present, because you don't want people to rewrite them,
and she didn't try to rewrite anything, but she did catch a couple
of really minor errors, and I wanted her to be comfortable with what was
being written, and I wanted her to help me get it as accurate as
possible, so I was really grateful on both counts to them. Paully's family
declined to speak with me when I started working on this book seven years ago.
I reached out to Eve in an email through my father in law.
I think he forwarded my email to her, and she very politely declined and
said, I can't help you. This is still just too painful, but
I wish you the best of luck. And then I reached out to Mark
around the same time, and I didn't hear back. I had met him
at a class kids event where we had our son fingerprinted, and Eddie has
been introduced himself as Eddy junior son, and we tried to go out to
dinner. Plans fell through and so we didn't really get to know each other.
I reached out again by email closer to the time as the book was
being written, and he didn't respond, so I just figured he I would
respect his privacy and not push further. Now, Mark's done a lot of
very interesting things as an advocate since losing Polly. Can you talk a little
bit about that, Just think in general terms, he's really been pretty amazing.
In the years since he has, he's been a wonderful spokesperson an advocate
for child safety, everything from lobbying for laws that affect child safety to supporting
the parents of kidnap children. Whenever a child is kidnapped, he's usually one
of the first to arrive and try to be there for the parents because no
one can really understand what they're going through like someone who's been through it themselves.
So he's been a tireless advocate, and he started a foundation called Class
Kids, where I think they've ingerprinted about one million kids, including my son,
and he's always there to speak about the costs. You're listening to Mind
over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're
back here at mindover Murder. Before we get back to the podcast, just
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over Murder and specifically to push the Colonial Parkway murders investigation forward. We'd love
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pages. As always, thanks for your support. Now back to mind over
Murder. You had talked earlier about some of the changes that were made in
how law enforcement has handled or does not handle a kidnapping case. One of
them, of course, is the way that they work with child witnesses and
victims. What are some of the other changes that were made to law enforcement
when it comes to handling kidnap cases. One thing is I think the collaboration
and communication between different agencies at the state and federal level. And this was
a good case where the FBI were called in pretty early to collaborate, and
that was a great thing because the FBI can bring resources that local agencies don't
have. Interestingly, the detectives from the local agencies pt Aalomiped and the agents
from the FBI who worked on this case went out and did briefings on the
case to other law enforcement agencies. Sharing with this ever happens to you,
here's what you can do. Here are the steps to follow, And at
the end of the book, I don't want to completely blow the ending or
spoil the ending. But you will meet a girl who was saved because the
chief of police in her town had been to one of those briefings and followed
the steps and got the agencies involved. So I will say that communication changed.
Also at the time, the equipment that was in a patrol car didn't
give the sheriffs who responded to the trespasser they can look up whether the trustpasser
had a warrant for his arrest or was the car stolen. Neither were true,
and so they didn't have any legal means to detain him, so they
let him go, even though their spidery sent said something's up. So now
there are computers and cars where they can look up I think a full rap
sheet you can see a lot more information that might have changed what they could
do with it at the time. One of the things that I found very
disturbing and getting ready for this interview, going back and looking at just the
basics of what happened in Paula's case, and this idea that these deputies sheriffs
had this treuspasser and could have taken him into custody if they had only known
that. In an adjoining but very close by jurisdiction, there was a kidnapping
taking place, and it just breaks my heart to read about that kind of
stuff where these well meaning deputy sheriffs responded to the treuspassing call and showed up,
and as you said, they thought something was off. But when they
ran a wantson warrants, all they got was there's nothing for this guy,
and they had no idea that fairly close by there was the start of a
very important kidnapping investigation and it was a missing girl at that point. Polyclass
wasn't with the suspect when he was found with the broken down car off the
road. Do they have a sense of where she might have been had she
been murdered by that point or are they not certain? So this is a
part of the story where there's a law of misinformation out there and a lot
of assumptions. I really wanted to correct that in the book. People very
close to the case, not investigators, but relatives investigators said something I heard
over and over read over and over in comments like I can't believe she was
in the trunk and they didn't search the car. That's not true. It
was a hatchback, there was no trunk and they did search the car with
They asked how to ask his permission, because they didn't have probable cause,
they had to ask permission, and they searched it and they just found they
didn't find anything suspicious. He later said in the confession or the admission that
she was up on the hillside waiting, and that when the deputies escorted him
off of the property, she was just there waiting, and that he came
back and got her. This is a point of speculation that people will argue
about still, and we will probably never know for sure. That spot on
the hill is where Dana Jaffy found the suspicious items, and those items were
ligatures that matched the ones used to buy Kate and Gillian's wrists, and some
red tights, children's red tights that were tied in a knot with some hair
in it, and a men's black sweatshirt. Different people believe different things about
whether or not she was alive. I went there in my reporting and with
Dana Jaffie's permission, I went there in the daytime, and she showed me
where she had found the items, and then asked permission to go back at
night on a night when the moon was in a similar place to where it
was on October first, nineteen ninety three. I went back at about the
same time, and I stood there in that spot with my car parked in
the position that the Sheriff's deputies cars were parked in the photos of recreating that
night, and I left the car running as their cars were running, their
headlights were on, because I wanted to know how loud was it, how
bright was it. Now there had been a major fire that swept through the
area. I forget the name of the fire, but the foliage is a
lot thinner today than it was then. But that location on the hill was
much closer to the gate and the place on the driveway where the cars were
parked. I was really struck by at night how loud the sound of the
engine was and how bright the lights were. And I found it hard to
imagine that someone who was alive and conscious wouldn't scream for help, or if
they were gagged, rustle around and cause leaves to rustle on the ground.
But then you just don't know how you would behave in a situation like that.
We can't really assume. I went to a talk with Elizabeth Smart,
who was asked they paraded you around in public. Why didn't you scream?
And she said, I was just brainwashed to the point where I was raised
to do what adults told me to and I didn't. If that could be
true, it's possible that Polly was alive and didn't scream, But just knowing
that she was a pretty pretty spunky kid and her dad raised her to be
pretty alert, I had a hard time imagining that she could have been alert
at that moment and not alerted the deputies being that close. And Davis maintains
to this day that she was alive, even in a I read in one
of my files, my documents, I found a letter that he had written
to a prison girlfriend, and he maintained this letter that she was still alive.
But I find it hard to believe. But we'll never know. What
would you say? The distance would be roughly from the place where Polly was
supposed to have been left and where the police had pulled over. I counted
out paces, and if my memory serves me right, it was thirty paces
from the spot where the suspicious items were found, thirty paces from there to
the driveway, and from that point on the driveway thirty paces to the cars
not very far and if you figure one of my paces is probably two feet
it was a tough spot to visit. Yeah, you had to live and
breathe this case while writing the book. It's rough. It's hard to immerse
yourself in something like this. What did you do to try to distract yourself
or distance yourself from the material to avoid being completely overwhelmed by it? Gosh,
that's a great question. And this book took a huge toll on my
mental and physical health when I was writing it. I spent about six months
pulled up in a cabin by myself, away from my family to focus on
it. To pull together so many discrete details, you need uninterrupted time and
big chunks of it. And luckily it was not the cabin and misery.
It wasn't the a nice house in the mountains loaned to me by some generous
friends, and I would try to get out once a day and go for
a snowshoe and listen to a podcast or a book. I remember listening to
Trailed while snowshoeing through the woods. I do find that any kind of movement
that takes me out of my mind and gets me into my body and the
present moment really helps. So I'm on a lot of mountain bike rides,
and I did a lot of yoga, and I did some breathing exercises and
meditation, and that helps. And then talking to a lot of my writer
friends. I leaned on my community of writer friends a lot because they know
what it's like. Just writing a book is a really lonely and agonizing enterprise.
But writing a book about something like this, you have to look at
and process things that don't go into the book. You have to filter it.
And so if you think about what a filter does, it filters out
like pretty extreme stuff. I still feel like I'm trying to heal and cleanse
that stuff out. I had some nightmares, I didn't sleep very well.
I wrote through nausea a lot of days, and sometimes it wasn't nausea from
that particular subject matter, but I just was so emotionally stirred up that I
felt nauseous a lot. And that's hard. It's a hard place to be
for six months. I don't would I do it again. I feel like
this book really needed to exist and that it was worth it to write the
book of record, but it was not an enjoyable book. To write,
and it wasn't something that I felt like I was doing for me. I
felt like it was I felt at times like a midwife for a lot of
people who would live this, and that it was my job to help them
midwife their story into existence in a way that was meaningful to others. Because
of that meaning and that service to others, there could be healing and some
sort of processing that leads to something like closure. I know that there is
no closure for cases like this, but I feel like there was a lot
of pent up emotion and trauma that was released in the interviews that took place,
and I feel like there was some good stuff that came of that for
the people who shared it. Maybe not everyone, but for a lot of
them. I would say I interviewed somewhere around twenty five police officers and twenty
five FBI agents, and I would say at least fifty percent of them wept
in the interview. And am I don't know. I guess there's a word
now called mpath. I don't know. I just know that empathy is a
big It is my most valuable reporting tool for being able to write about pain
and trauma. And so I felt that pain and I carried it around with
me. So I feel like I've just been carrying a lot of other people's
pain around and I don't know if I will ever fade away or be replaced
by something else. But yeah, it's a big cost. So anyone who
wants to do this work and wants to do it ethically needs to feel that
pain and needs to be prepared for the cost of it. It's an extraordinary
book. I told you this off air, but I'm willing to say it
again on air. It is extraordinary, and it's one of the most powerhouse,
dynamite true crime books that I have read, and anybody listening to this
podcast knows I read a ton of them. There was so much emotion flowing
through it, and there were whole chapters where I sat and cried because it's
such an upsetting case. But there is also and I think this alludes to
your title, there is light that comes out of it. And there is
so much good that came out of this, including that a young lady who
was saved from being kidnapped because the law enforcement agency knew what to do,
and they knew what to look for, and they knew had to find her.
Oh, I cried. It was very impactful in a way that I
did not expect. The empathy flows not just between you and the people who
you interviewed for this book, but it's all through the book. It really
is just it's studying and moving. Thank you. That means a lot to
me, because if a reader feels it and doesn't just think about it,
but if a reader feels it, that's my litmus test for have I done
my job? Do you feel something and do you feel something profound that matters
in some way and that means something to you? And that's what I want
to do with all my books. What stands in a Storm It's about the
fact that the things that terror or world apart reveal what holds us together.
And I think that I don't want to drag a reader through a sad story
unless I have something redemptive to give them in the end that is hopeful and
not in a Pollyannish way, but hopeful and real in a way that makes
them maybe face something they're facing in their own life with a new perspective and
a new light. My I guest hope is that this story helps someone that
I will never meet in ways I can't imagine. My hope is that of
the thousands of investigators who have been taught by this case study in a class,
that there will be more people, investigators and just everyday readers who might
learn something that is helpful to them or someone else from this huge thing that
happened. Because there are beautiful moments in this tragedy, and most of all,
it's that people can weather the unthinkable and lift each other up. And
it's those acts of kindness and empathy that kind of make life endurable. Life
has horrible things to throw at us. But the belief that again, beautiful
things come from our brokenness. I think that is a hopeful message that I
would like to be at the center of all of my work. Will your
husband and father in law be toasting you or apologizing to you this thing giving
no no, I think they feel good about it. One thing I wanted
to say about my father in law. This book would not have happened without
him, and to his credit, he did not exert or try to exert
any editorial control at all over the book. He opened the doors that would
have been slam shut for any other journalist and basically just let me do my
job. And I did let him review the book, and he did not
try to make any changes other than one era. Oh this thing. It
didn't happen that day, It happened this other day. That is a wonderful
thing that I think I'm so grateful for, because I really worried that this
book. That I worried about criticisms of propaganda or being biased, and it
really worked hard to fact check everyone equally, including my father in law.
And interestingly, when I first pitched the book, I imagine that he was
going to be the central character, like in The Hero's Journey, and so
much of the book is based not just on interviews, but underneath the interviews
a layer of access to primary source documents that were generated in nineteen ninety three
were dialogue and facts and details were recounted very close to the actual event itself.
When you're interviewing people thirty years later, their memory just doesn't have that
kind of detail or that kind of accuracy. And as I'm going through these
primary source documents and starting to write the book, I realized that other characters
got a lot more airtime than Eddie, and I felt really bad about that
because I thought he's the only one who saw over every silo. He was
like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, knowing what's going on, pulling
the levers. But then it was the people who were doing the actual interviews
and writing the reports and leaving the paper trail who got airtime. And so
I felt really awkward about that, And I remember having to sheepishly talk to
my mother in law suits wonderful, and be like, do you think he's
going to be upset about this? Writing the book is not about it's not
about pleasing other people, But as a daughter in law, I didn't want
him to be disappointed. And she said no, and he said no,
But yeah, it just because of that access, I got to see things
that journal that are not even part of the public record for journalists to foya,
like most foyas can even get you federal documents. Oh we know,
yes, Yeah. It was an interesting kind of dynamic within this case.
Kim, you had said before we started this interview that you figured this was
going to be your last true crime book. First and last, you really
don't want to dig into this again. Is this is it for you?
This hurts so bad. I'm still not feeling well after this I'm still clawing
my way back to normal. It was so costly for me that I don't
think. I don't think I want to. I've already turned down a book
and a podcast. It just I don't know. It would have to be
the right kind of thing that that I felt like, if I don't do
this, it won't get done, and that'll be a travesty. And that's
how I felt about this book. Is if I don't write this, I
don't know if anyone else can because of the skills and the access that combination.
Yes, other people have the skills, but yeah, I don't know.
Please, I want to staunch the flow of offers to write the next
true crime story. I would like to write about fishing. Let me put
it out to the universe. Fishing and river trips. Okay, the fishing
doesn't have necessarily have a happy ending for the fish we catch and release.
That is true. Then they get to go home and tell their friends this
crazy thing happened to me, and I'm living to tell the tale. I
don't want to jump to any conclusions about how the fishing story ends. The
book is called in Light of All Darkness Inside the Polyclass Kidnapping and the Search
for America's Child out on October the third. Kim, thank you for joining
us, and really, more importantly, thank you for writing the book.
It's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for getting it. And
if you want to talk to Eddie, I can still. He's happy to
talk with you. You might not need to, but just know he's willing
and the poly Class Foundation is willing to. Oh, excellent, we would
love to talk to them. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us
for this episode of mind Over Murder. We'll see you next time. Mind
Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive
producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Our theme music is by Kevin mcleoud. Mind Over Murder is distributed in
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five six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.