By Marc Klaas

After court today I took a walk by the river, unconsciously picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. The stone skipped three times, and each time it contacted the water it rippled concentric circles that extended outward until they intersected. These intertwining ripples symbolize the connection of lives that resulted from Richard Allen Davis vicious attack upon little Polly. He has touched all of our lives in some way and made connections that otherwise would not have been possible.

Darlene Schwarm took the stand to plead for his life. She probably cares more for her damaged brother than any other living person. When he is in prison she visits and writes and when he is free she helps. Darlene is trying to repay her brother for the care he showed her when they grew up together in La Honda California. I do not doubt for one second that she truly loves her brother and fervently hopes he escapes the death penalty. She desperately holds onto the belief that he did not work alone on that fateful evening in October 1993 when Davis skipped his rock of destruction, rocked our world and ended Polly’s life.

Like Francis Mays, Hazel Frost, Serena Faust, Polly Klaas, her family and numerous others Darlene Schwarm is also a victim of her brother’s mayhem. He will not and cannot reciprocate the obvious love and concern Darlene poignantly displays for her brother. When he made his infamous gesture in front of the television camera it was directed at Darlene as surely as it was directed at us all. He forced his closest relative to open her heart against her will to the whole world and expose personal scars that are nobody’s business but her own. Her children sat in the back row of the courtroom and watched their mother twist in torment as she begged for the life of a damaged soul that cares not for her life.

I empathize with Darlene’s sorrow. I, too, understand deep personal loss. I, too, know what it means to have your family dissipate before your eyes. I, too, realize that loss is forever. That is the finality of death. However, Darlene was mistaken when she answered the final question posed by the defense attorney. She said that, “He is all that is left of my family.” She forgets that sitting in the gallery is her husband of nineteen years and the four children she is determined will receive what she did not receive in her unhappy childhood; a stable home life and a mother, ”Whether they like it or not.”

Like the ripples in the river, the mayhem created by Richard Allen Davis, the vampire, will fade with time. But, unlike the ripples in the river, the sorrow will never disappear.