Yes, the murderer was caught, tried and convicted. Currently, he is down the road, a ways, at San Quentin but I think he has a dath penalty conviction.

He is a very nasty type and after leading police to her body and confessing, as he was being led from the room he turned back at the father and said that the last words of his dead daughter had been her pleading, "Don't do me like my Daddy did". He said it out of pure spite. The father, who did not come across on television as being very warm or sympathetic (originally, many people were convinced he did it) was placed under a cloud of suspicion by the murderer!

When he finally was caught, his leading police to where he had hidden the body removed the last bit of suspicion from me but it added one more strange twist - I looked more like the police drawing than he did.

The case is a very interesting one for a number of reasons. First, the eleven or twelve year old girl was taken from her bedroom where she was having a sleep-over with two friends. The intruder got in without breaking down a door or climbing through a window. He convinced the two witnesses not to say anything which was important because the mother and another daugher were sleep in the next room.

She disappeared totally despte a search by literally thousands of people covering fields, streams, barns, houses, parks the river, etc.

The family got onto "America's Most Wanted" within a week and posters (that looked like me) went up all over the world because there was something about the story that caught people's attention.

Some people very close to the missing girl used this as a career opportunity.

It provided a big boost to the "Three Strikes and You're Out" movement so now California jails are filled with people who are not violent. I think the father has since changed his mind about the value of the law although he told me originally that three strikes was too much. A criminal should get one strike and them be jailed indefinitely.

A neighbor across the street had a history of child molestation.

The grandfather was the author of what was dscribed to me as an off-the-wall book about Amelia Earhart and many people felt that he seemed to enjoy the limelight once the immediate pain of the loss subsided.

The father was thrown off the Board of the Polly KLass FOundation which was formed to help in the search for missing children. He formed his own Foundation which I think was the Klaas Foundation to do similar work.

It goes on and on. Now, though, there are a variety of Polly Klass organzations and buildings in Petaluma.

To use an overworked term, the family has had closure. THe community rallied to help and with the discovery of the body and then the conviction of the killer, there is a sense of completeness about the killing. I would guess that even after a third of a century, the lack of a solution to your mother-in-law's murder must leave a hollow place in your psyche.

Sourdough