Jake Brennan (28:55)
The police did find Polly Class, but they didn't find her alive A cool breeze whipped across an abandoned mill yard, an overlooked eyesore in Cloverdale, California, right off Highway 101, 30 miles from Petaluma. Richard Davis trudged through the empty field. Dry grass crunched under his boots. The police followed close behind him. He was taking them directly to Paulie. This time, Davis wasn't hiding anymore. He couldn't. The secrets he stashed in the woods were out in the open now. Davis was sloppier than he realized on that night two months months ago. The police made him panic on the night of the kidnapping, and his heart pounded. The sound drowned out his careful calculations. His attention to detail slipped away. Kidnapping tools slipped out of his grasp and left a trail of evidence in the forest. A piece of silk fashioned into a hood. Strips of packing tape perfect for binding. A pair of girls tights tied into a knot, complete with a tangle of human hair. A resident of Santa Rosa uncovered the clues when loggers cleared a portion of the woods on her property in December of 1993. She was familiar with the class case. By now most of California was after hearing about Paulie's disappearance for weeks on end. And now it was her turn to dial the information hotline. But there was something else. The jarring discovery in the world woods jogged the woman's memory. There was a man stranded on her property not too long ago, sweaty, panic stricken, roughly two months prior, right around the same time Paulie went missing. When the police came to retrieve the items from the woods, she reminded them about the trespasser. They summoned the Santa Rosa police records for good measure on Oct. 1, police called the tow truck for a man named Richard Davis. And they knew that much to be true. But back at the station, there was more information about this man than just a flimsy printout of his driving record. Davis was an ex con. His criminal record never seemed to end. Burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with intent to rape, auto theft, kidnapping. Kidnapping. Richard Davis did eight years in prison for kidnapping. He was paroled in June of 1993 after serving only half of a 16 year sentence. Three months before Polly went missing on October 1, police had their prime suspect in the kidnapping of Polly Klaas right there standing in front of them. And then they escorted him to his escape route. Investigators pored over his criminal record. Police even wrangled Davis a second time later in October. Arrested for drunk driving, Davis then violated his parole by failing to appear in court. A warrant was out for his arrest. Bingo. Police had their in. They weren't letting Richard Davis slip away a third time. They found him cruising around town in a van not far from where he was staying on the Coyote Valley Indian reservation, about 75 miles north of Petaluma. Police booked him on violation of his probation, cuffed him, tossed him in the clink. And then they took his palm print. It was an exact match for the print found on Paulie's bed frame. Investigators shared a knowing glance. The search for Paulie's kidnapper was over. Davis knew it was over, too. He cracked after a few days. I screwed up big time, he told the police. And now Davis was retracing his steps with the police by his side. He paused at a collection of weathered lumber. Mushrooms sprouted from the heat. He thrust his chin towards the rotting pile. Investigators overturned the pile, board by board. They found Paulie resting underneath, haphazardly tucked into a shallow grave. Polly's family had prayed their search would end soon. They just didn't imagine it ending like this. And the closure shattered the class family, now one member too small. It shattered Winona Ryder, too. Her heart shriveled up and shrank. It reverted back to being 12 years old, beating at a ragged pace like she was a preteen, tortured by the undertow, once again barely clinging to life. Maybe Polly once felt the same when she was tied up in Davis's sedan. Winona would never know. She would never get the chance to facilitate Polly's happy ending. Winona struggled through the premiere of her new film, reality bites, in February 1994. The irony of the title sunk its teeth into Winona's soul. She successfully convinced Universal Pictures to make the Los Angeles debut of the movie, a benefit for the Poly Klaas Foundation. But her work still felt unfinished, woefully inadequate. Polly's greatest wish had been to meet Winona in real life, and that couldn't happen now. So Winona did the next best thing. She reached for Polly through fiction. Winona accepted the role of Jo March in a new movie adaptation of Little Women. It was Polly's favorite book. Winona brought the story to life and dedicated her performance to Polly's memory. The role was a breath of fresh air for Winona. For once, she wasn't the weirdo. She wasn't bewitching. She was the strong female lead, determined and dependable, just like she had been for Polly's family. For two months. Winona used Little Women to shoo away the darkness crowding her life, the same shadows that housed her fears and lingered by her side when she couldn't get any shut eye. Life didn't have to be a big, dark room all the time. Maybe through her performance in Little Women, directors and casting agents would see that, too. And if they didn't, Winona had to escape on her own before that big, dark room caved in on her completely. She would have added it all up if she could think clearly. Winona Ryder's hands made quick work on the floor of a Beverly Hills fitting room. A Marc Jacobs cashmere sweater, $760. These Saint Laurent blouse, another 754 handbags. Those were at least two grand. A handful of expensive hair bows and bands worth about $600, and six pairs of of socks just for good measure. And those were 80 bucks. With a snip of each security tag, Winona snuck her contraband into a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. The same bag from earlier that afternoon, her first shopping spree already gave her credit card a $3,000 workout. But if all went as planned, the second round was going to be on the house. Winona crinkled a handful of tissue paper in the bag to cover the sound of her sniffs. When space ran out in the Saks bag, she stuffed the stolen clothes into bags she brought from home. A shopping assistant knocked on the door. Winona froze in her position, bent over on her hands and knees, scissors in one hand and a pair of cashmere Donna Karan socks in the other. The clerk asked if the A List client needed anything. A Coke, winona said. A Coke from the Saks Fifth Avenue cafeteria. Apparently shoplifting made her thirsty. The assistant's designer heels clicked on the tile floor towards the cafeteria. Fuck, she used that distraction once already, didn't she? Winona rubbed her forehead. Now where was she? Right, the bags. Fill the bags, blend in, then bust out of there. Winona loaded the bags onto her arms. She walked towards the exit with confident strides. Her gait spoke for her. Why yes, of course I already bought all this. I'm a celebrity. Why would I shoplift? Security didn't buy her charade. Instead, they wanted to know when she planned on buying the designer goods visibly stashed in her armful of bags. First she played dumb, insisted her assistant had already paid for the clothes. Then she switched stories and claimed the employees were keeping track of her massive haul and would just add the items to her first bill. As if designer department stores let you keep an open tab like a By the time the police arrived, Winona confessed to the crime. Using a uniquely Hollywood excuse. She explained that a director instructed her to shoplift as research for her upcoming role in a movie called Shop Girl. Or was it called White Jazz? Winona's web of incoherent tales impressed no one. She left the Beverly Hills department store in handcuffs on December 12, 2001. They wanted strange and unusual. She would show him strange and unusual. It was a new century now. A new millennium even. But pop culture still wanted the winona of the 90s. A dark haired goth girlfriend to tantalize them in Tim Burton films. A cute, cuckoo like girl interrupted her most recent Smash hit from 1999. Winona's heart thudded with fear as she ducked into the back of a cruiser. Yet a snicker spread across cross her lips. She could be a felon now. She was still the outcast. Still the weirdo. Typical. One year later, Winona Ryder was not snickering. She was sweating. Her dark eyes darted across the courtroom from one stone faced lawyer to another. She understood about half this legal jargon they were spouting off. But she knew two things to be true. One, she was already guilty. She was a felon. It was right there in the shoplifting charges. Felony grand theft. There would be repercussions. Two, one of those repercussions could be jail time. Apparently her lawyer's 100% real defense that Winona was too fashionable to shoplift and carry any weight in a Beverly Hills courtroom. Winona uncrossed her legs for the seventh time that day. Fidgeting didn't speed the sentencing up. This was one story she couldn't flip to the end of the script and spoil the ending. She had to sit through a bunch of men in suits bickering over her character? Not a character. Her character. Not just another dark haired beauty throwing smoldering glances across haunted mansions at movie sets. The people gathered in that courtroom had to see Winona. For Winona, her actions, not her acting, would determine her future, which may or may not involve trading her pile of stolen designer booty for an orange jumpsuit. Winona's defense brought forward her extensive involvement in the poly class kidnapping as the clearest example of her sterling character. Sure, she had donated a fat stack of cash to the polyclass foundation, but she rolled up her sleeves alongside other regular volunteers, too. It was a tender, egoless gesture that Winona repeated for weeks. Maybe her help hadn't brought Polly back, but her murderer, Richard Allen Davis, was on death row and that was the second best case scenario. The prosecution refused to soften. Instead, they snapped. What's offensive to me is to trot out the body of a dead child, the opposing lawyer retorted. Winona sprang up from the bench, her eyes welled with tears. Her lawyer objected before she could defend her involvement and before she could explain why that case still rattled her to this day. How seeing her worst fear, the fear of being kidnapped, come to life in a little girl not unlike herself, shattered her heart. Maybe no one really knew Winona at all. She plopped back into her seat with a sigh. Winona sighed again when the judge announced her penance. 480 hours of community service and nearly $10,000 in fines and restitution. No prison sentence. The judge emphasized that if her sticky fingers ever stole again, she'd undoubtedly be pouting behind bars next time. The happy ending to her trial also created a happy ending for Winona's winning streak at the box office. For most actresses, an acting hiatus would be devastating. For Winona, it was a relief. She actually called her arrest the best thing that could have happened in court that day. December 6, 2002 Winona was 31. She started acting in films when she was barely 16, and she never stopped. Winona Ryder performed more than 20 movies in the span of 15 years. A break was long overdue. After her sentencing, she veered away from her strict regimen of back to back leading roles, took a step away from movie sets and set new boundaries for herself, ones that would keep acting burnout at bay. She broke her newfound bliss sporadically for her special roles, a hilarious turn as Commandment Breaking Puppet loving Kelly LaFonda and David Wayne's The10 in 2007, JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot in 2009 Tim Burton's claymation creation Frankenweenie Darren Aronofsky's noir thriller Black Swan, which involved Winona repeatedly plunging a steel nibble nail file into her cheeks. But another script came across her desk years later that contained the real comeback gold. Something happened to Winona when she took that break. Something inevitable. She aged. By the 2010s she was in her 40s. Casting agents couldn't picture her as a 20 something love interest in movies anymore. That's when Netflix called. They gave her a shot at a role that would be more age appropriate. A mother. Your average suburban mom in the early 80s. Totally normal, a little nervous perhaps. But with the stranger Danger panic at the time, what parent wasn't? They needed her to portray a woman who would be tested. A woman who could portray gut wrenching fear and grief in her eyes without uttering a word. A woman whose son would vanish without a trace. It's an uncanny coincidence, but stranger things have happened. And that is anything but a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland.
