Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’
Annie Nichol was seven years old on 19 March 1994 when she was brought to the White House to talk to Bill Clinton.
With a stuffed dolphin by her side, the girl spoke to the president about her 12-year-old sister, Polly Klaas, who had been abducted five months earlier from the family’s home in Petaluma, California, while Annie was sleeping nearby.
Today, Annie is tormented by the memory. Polly’s kidnapping and subsequent murder fueled a host of “tough on crime” laws and a powerful victims’ rights movement, which pushed America to have the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.
The meeting at the White House, Annie said, was a reminder of how her family’s story was exploited to expand mass incarceration and racial inequality in America.
“I had just lost Polly and someone had given me that question to ask, and it was a message that wasn’t mine. I was a scared kid who had been through something I couldn’t even begin to process. Being put in the position of going to the White House to be on this television program and seeing Clinton start crying, the shame of that experience still overwhelms me. I was the perfect person to be used like that. What’s more compelling than seeing this scared little girl?”
Annie and her older sister Jess are now on a mission to reclaim their family’s legacy and undo the harsh legislation the tragedy that befell them sparked. They say they want a different criminal justice system, one that focuses on preventing violence; accountability, treatment and rehabilitation for people who cause harm; and care and services for survivors.
Their message is urgent, the sisters say, as growing concerns over crime in cities across the US since the pandemic have led to familiar calls for more punitive responses from pundits and some politicians facing midterm elections.
“There’s the trauma of losing Polly and then there’s the trauma of how her death was used to punish other people,” Jess said. “We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else … We’re on the precipice of repeating a really terrible history. And we don’t want people to make the same mistake.”
They’re not alone among survivors. The children of a murdered pastor in Tennessee recently opposed prosecutors’ decision to charge the 15-year-old suspects as adults, saying it’s not what her mother, an activist, would have wanted; the woman who helped create the sex offender registry after her son was abducted has since argued it has gone too far and is ineffective
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Meanwhile, Walsh and his son are doing the exact opposite – exploiting fear and hate for profit. I personally attribute John Walsh for normalizing the hate, spite and outrage against RSOs.
And of course, he’s grooming his soon to take over his paranoia-for-profit, outrage bait empire.
I hate when politicians/any public figure bring children around. Always have and for this very reason. And the child in me is resentful that my and other’s childhood experiences of drama and trauma are used in this way. It is another form of betrayal to the people you claim you want to help.
They should then team up with Patty Wetterling to undo some of the legal movement done in their names. Patty is not happy with the direction things took after the law in her son’s name was done. The name recognition of the three ladies could be huge in seeking a correction of these legal errors.