Polly Klaas' Father Calls Woman Dating His Daughter's Killer An 'Extremely Disturbed Girl'

A familiar face?

​A few SF Weekly readers have sounded off about our cover story last week, remarking that Samantha Spiegel, the 19-year-old art student from San Francisco who says she'd consider having a baby with Polly Klaas' murderer, bears a troubling resemblance to Klaas herself.

Spiegel does have brown curly hair. Beyond that, Marc Klaas, Polly's father, doesn't agree in the least. "I don't think she looks like my daughter at all," he said, adding that Spiegel is "a ghoulish young thing who probably won't hit 25 the way she's playing life." 

Our story detailed how Spiegel has written murderers in prison for years, and currently considers herself in a "relationship" (on Facebook, at least) with pen pal Richard Allen Davis, Polly Klaas' killer, who sits on California's death row at San Quentin prison.

"This is an extremely disturbed girl," Klaas says. "I think it speaks to why we should be having the death penalty enforced in California. We don't need these goons influencing anyone. Anyone who wants to mess with guys like [Charles] Manson, [Richard] Ramirez, and [Richard Allen] Davis has a death wish."

Seventeen years after his 12-year-old daughter's murder, Marc Klaas is the director of the Sausalito-based non-profit Klaaskids Foundation for Children and lobbies for children's safety legislation. He says his hatred for Richard Allen Davis hasn't dissipated one bit from the day Davis was sentenced, during which Davis stated in court that Polly told him "Just don't do me like my Dad" before he killed her. Marc Klaas remembers standing up outraged at that moment before the judge ordered for him to be escorted from the courthouse.

Marc Klass says what he means and means what he says

​The wronged father recalls the moment with clarity. He says his mom started to groan in agony at the statement. "I"m like, 'the son of a bitch killed my kid and now he's trying to kill my mom.'"

"I'd kill him," Klaas says of his feelings towards Davis. "If they gave me the opportunity to do it, I'd do it. The depth of my hatred for Richard Allen Davis is incalculable. But I won't obsess over it or nurture it at all. Given the opportunity, I would inject him with death penalty drugs, or take a baseball bat to his head ... and do it without feeling any kind of guilt of moral compunction."

Klaas says his coping mechanism has been to ignore Davis. "I pay very little attention to Polly's killer. He had way too much influence on our lives for far too long. My hope is he just dies."

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