By Joe Klaas

The ugly salt-and-pepper-maned prisoner in a police car, hands and ankles chained, appraised his own situation to a Petaluma cop and FBI agent who followed the killer's phony directions along the dark backways south of Cloverdale where he has hidden Polly's corpse beside a toxic dump.

"I tried to get my life in order--after gettin' out," he complained after leading the lawmen to her dismembered remains. He chuckled. "Well I got it in order now."

True. It was the only kind of order the twice convicted sex-assaulted was use to: "back to the joint" for the kidnap, rape and murder of my beautiful 12 year old granddaughter.

Pitifully, the killer offers an un-substantiated alcohol-and-drug "haze" as his only excuse for kidnapping and fear of "going back to the joint" as his sole reason for child-slaughter. Davis now leads a bored-looking jury on the audio taped mad goose hunt he led the law on for the one proof he attempted to offer that Polly was alive and unresisting on the journey to where he discarded her the night of October 1, 1993.

Unique in the annals of crime, the prosecution now attempts to prove that a predator who admits to murdering at one location actually did it at another.

Clearly, on tape played for the jury by Petaluma chief investigator Mike Meese, Davis again today claimed Polly was unbound and alive as she waited only 50 feet away in the darkness of Pythian Road. Meanwhile her kidnapper conned two naive Sonoma County Deputy Sheriffs into pulling his car from the ditch after he drank beer in front of them while trespassing on private property.

"I thought you weren't going to come back for me," Davis claimed she said when he drove back to get her after the deputy has chased him off the property.

"I untied her on the way before I got stuck in the ditch," Davis twice repeated on the audio tape played in court. "I let her out to go to the bathroom at a gas station on the way to Cloverdale. I got the restroom key from a woman who worked there."

Therein lies the lie that wipes out his last chance for life without possibility of parole rather than lethal injection. Davis could not lead the lawmen to that gas station in the endless taped search that followed his disclosure of Polly's horribly desecrated body. No such station exists. No woman worked at any gas station in Sonoma County the night of October 1, 1993 when Polly was snatched to her doom at knife-point from a slumber party with two girlfriends while her mother and little sister slept in the next room.

Meese twice asked Davis on the tape if he had sexually molested Polly before he admittedly strangled her, first with a piece of cloth and then with a rope "to make sure." Twice Davis answered, "I don't think so."

Wanna bet?

Day 10 and 11, May 2nd and 3rd, the jury goes by bus to the scenes of the crime in Petaluma, on Pythian Road, and at Cloverdale to see for themselves where Polly spent the last horrible hours of her life.

The defense lawyer objected to the jury traveling over the exact route that Davis took Polly.

Judge Thomas Hastings' gavel slammed down.

"Overruled!" he snapped at them. "We leave for Sonoma County in the morning."