The Scar of Injustice: Home, Polly, and Georgia.
On January 7th, 2021 my partner and I, as two thirds of a volunteer coalition that has been bringing masks to under-funded communities in Sonoma County, California since the pandemic began, were asked to donate masks to a memorial for a girl named Georgia Leah Moses. She would have turned thirty-six that day. Instead, at age twelve, Georgia was kidnapped from her hometown of Santa Rosa on August 13th, 1997, the same town where I was raised. Her body was found a week later by a CalTrans worker, dumped in the overgrown brush on the side of Highway 101 in Petaluma, just seventeen miles south.
Before her disappearance, Georgia was known to her little sister, Angel, as a loving protector who fed her and taught her how to swim and tie her shoes — bunny-ears first, then the single-loop way. To her classmates, Georgia was a caring, strong, funny, and intelligent girl who stood up to bullies and loved sunflowers. As with many children, her home life was not always stable and at the time she was living with a friend. Despite this, she would go to her mother’s house to check on Angel and braid her hair nearly every day. For various reasons, it took a week for Georgia’s disappearance to be reported to authorities, and then only by happenstance when a police officer visited Georgia’s mother. Angel, age seven at the time, was worried about her big sister and told the officer that she hadn’t seen her in a week. After that, it just was a matter of time before the connection was made; the coroner had to use dental records to identify Georgia due to the advanced decomposition of her body.
A formal inquest found that a friend of Georgia’s had accompanied her to meet a man at a gas station on the evening of August 13th. She got into his small white sedan and they drove off. Georgia was never seen alive again.
There was very little reporting on her death by local media. A short blurb in a local paper outlined the incident as if describing a petty theft. There were no vigils or memorials outside of those held by close friends and family. A crepe myrtle was planted in her honor by her classmates at their middle school, and a steel sculpture of a winged angel, welded by two firemen in her honor, was placed on the spot where she was found. But it didn’t take long for the case to go cold. If mention was made of Georgia’s murder thereafter, she was mostly relegated to a one dimensional character in a brief and sad tale that made no mention of her bright personality, or how much she was loved. Famously, the celebrated songwriter — and resident of Sonoma County — Tom Waits wrote a song about Georgia. Despite his efforts, this, too, falls woefully flat, and leans on textbook descriptions of anonymous, tragic dead girls used by poets and writers since time immemorial. The spark of Georgia herself does not exist there.
I’m thankful for the efforts of those who knew Georgia to find ways to bring her to life. Georgia Leah Moses was a daughter, a big sister and a little sister, a friend, a guardian, a teacher, a student. Many friends recall a girl who was constantly smiling and who loved to dance. As I read through these descriptions, I can construct a portrait of her in my mind, and begin to see Georgia rise from the flat sheet of newsprint where her story was tossed like a discarded candy wrapper, and she is whole, real. It’s clear that her spirit made an impression, and it is now being seen. It is a map of the incredible ways in which children can thrive, even when adults fail them time and again, and can do so with compassion, strength, and grace.
Georgia’s incandescent spirit left behind an illuminated trail through the darkness for her loved ones to find her again.
Georgia Leah Moses was loved.
And Georgia Leah Moses was Black.
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Petaluma, where Georgia was found, is well known for certain things: a thriving dairy industry; being the home of the Phoenix Theater — which regularly hosted the bands Greenday and Sublime when they were starting out; and for being the town where my friend Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her home on October 1st, 1993. Like Georgia, she was twelve years old. Her body was recovered on December 4th of that year, 49 miles north on the outskirts of the town of Cloverdale, in the overgrown brush 200 feet from Highway 101.
I had known Polly since we were both ten and our mothers worked for a children’s clothing company in Petaluma. When we were introduced we hit it off immediately. People always mistook us for sisters and we didn’t correct them. We both liked to do funny voices ad nauseum (to the dismay of everyone around us) and watch An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and play Mario Bros. on her Gameboy and eat pizza. In March of 1993, she invited me to go with her to Disneyland, where I’d never been before. This proved to be the last time I would see her.
The morning after Polly’s kidnapping, her parents were interviewed by local and Bay Area media. Flyers were immediately printed with a reward for information leading to her safe recovery, and it was soon published on national news. Within a day an impromptu “command center” was set up in an abandoned storefront and volunteers poured in to help fold flyers and stuff them into envelopes, working in rotations. Within a week, search teams were organized throughout the county, and her parents were being interviewed on national television programs. Donations came in from all over the world to bolster the reward money and celebrities including Robin Williams, Winona Ryder, members of Jefferson Starship, and more donated or held fundraisers; before long, the reward was at $200,000. My family, among others, took turns manning the tapped phones at Polly’s mother Eve’s house and we were instructed on how to talk to the kidnapper if he called. Two standard poodles, donated by a breeder and trained to protect Polly’s family, waited near the door in patient silence. Food, supplies, gifts, massages, and fun, distracting trips for Polly’s little sister Annie were donated nearly every day.
When her killer, Richard Allen Davis, led authorities to her decomposed body nine weeks later, the outpouring of anger and grief was sustained for months afterward. 1,500 mourners attended her funeral, including Governor Pete Wilson and senator Dianne Feinstein. Joan Baez and Linda Rondstadt sang. It was so crowded that they had to place viewing screens outside. Celebrities who’d never met her were ushered front and center in the pews while reporters from all over the world arrived to record the moment. A local newspaper published a poem written by a Petaluma cop about the search for Polly, which was then reprinted in syndicated publications.
Foundations, scholarships, and a playhouse were named in Polly’s honor. Policies regarding communication between police, sheriff, and highway patrol were changed to ensure that emergency bulletins reached all departments at the same time after it was discovered that the deputies, who questioned a drunk Davis on the side of a country road on the night of Polly’s kidnapping, did not know of her disappearance. FBI Files, Investigation Discovery, and countless other programs went over and over the details of her case and offered words of solace for the loss of such a young, pretty, intelligent girl with a bright future ahead of her — though they never knew her.
I knew her. She was hilarious, goofy, loving, and smart. And sometimes a jerk, and sometimes annoying. Like any kid. And she, like Georgia, was loved.
Polly Hannah Klaas was loved.
And Polly Hannah Klass was white.
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Of course, we can pick apart the reasons for the discrepancies between these two cases and the public’s reactions to each, and people certainly have. Polly’s case was startlingly horrific from the beginning. After all, she was pulled out of her middle-class bedroom window during a slumber party. She was not snatched from the street as we had always read about in the paper; nor, as in Georgia’s case, had she gotten into a strange man’s car. People will point to these facts and to the home lives of both girls as some kind of indication as to why each child was kidnapped in the way they were. But none of these aspects deals with the fact that someone chose to kidnap, rape, and murder them; rather, it sets the onus of a child’s murder on something other than her murderer. And that is undeniably wrong.
I used to wonder how people could calculate the worth of children’s lives along these parameters. However, as a lifelong resident of Sonoma County who had to deal directly with the inner workings of the judicial system — albeit as a white girl — I know intimately the ways in which adults can invent reasons to ignore the truth and to avoid addressing their own complicity in systemic injustice. Sonoma County operates on a surface level to ensure that nothing stirs the pot of cold, hard prosperity, the kind that’s brought about by wine tourism spearheaded by international investors, and by being a mostly unchallenged agricultural Eden presided over by white, conservative judges.
I remember when Georgia was murdered. I was sixteen, and Polly’s death was still fresh to me; I woke with her in my head every single day for years. I remember wondering why we weren’t holding vigils and wailing over the very idea that a child like Georgia could be harmed, as with Polly. I distinctly remember a weeping stranger grabbing me at a memorial and dripping fat tears on my preteen head, telling me God would look out for me (but not my friend, apparently). Yet, after Georgia’s death, no one wanted to talk with me about the inconsistencies between these two cases. Somehow, for so many people, the situation became complicated by outlying and unrelated facts, such as Georgia’s home life. How this could factor into how much we should care or not care about her death — or finding her murderer — wasn’t clear to me, and sometimes I felt defeated, maybe crazy. Then I got older, and I realized that the truth lay in the fact of Sonoma County’s entire social structure: in its deep-rooted racism, classism, and that owing to these realities there was simply no sensationalism that could be applied to Georgia’s dead body equal to how it was applied to my friend’s.
If nothing else can convince you of this, I will leave you with these last two facts: 1) Media still insists on referring to 12-year-old Georgia as a “woman”. This almost never happens to white girls, yet here, 23 years after her death, she is still being held to a standard that should be reserved for actual adults. 2) Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, her name. When Georgia’s little sister, now an adult, came back to Petaluma to retrieve her protector’s remains and take them home with her to Texas, she was given Georgia’s birth certificate, whereupon she discovered the horrifying truth: fact-checking was so irrelevant to the police in charge of this little girl’s case that they had all been calling Georgia Leah Moses by the wrong name. That name was given to the media, and it was told to Angel herself as she grew up. Even on the small bronze plaque placed in her honor on the lawn at the City Hall, her name was spelled “Georgia Lee Moses.” And in 26 years, not one city or county official, not one detective or journalist, in one of the richest counties in the sixth largest economy on the planet, had ever bothered to correct it.
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In the ensuing years, the memory of Polly and her death were weaponized to uphold the power of lawmakers — particularly, Governor Pete Wilson — to imprison criminals for life based on the number, and not the severity, of crimes they committed. The “Three Strikes Law” quickly developed into what its detractors knew was inevitable: an imbalanced, inhumane policy that disproportionately targets poor, Black and Brown people, leading to an influx of long term prisoners, many of whom have never committed a violent crime. Meanwhile, little girls and boys who are Black and Brown receive little to no attention when they go missing.
I think about my friend Polly all the time. I was given a ring of hers by her mother and I wore it every single day, twisting it like a worry stone until the silver band was rubbed paper-thin on the back and finally split. I now wonder if Angel or any of Georgia’s classmates have trinkets to remind them of her. For many years, I visited the site where Polly’s body was found — a lonely, dusty patch of brush and rock trailing from the rusted shell of an abandoned lumber mill — until the day they removed her makeshift memorial and flattened the ground in preparation for development. I still wonder what the last thing she saw could have been and I still always hope that it was the stars. I still hope that she was able to remember something good as her spark passed from this reality into the next. And I hope this for Georgia, too.
I think all the time about how anyone who bore witness to that time couldn’t possibly allowed such terrible things to happen again in the place I call home.
And then I remember Georgia.
Please read the words of her sister Angel Turner, who has begun the fight for justice for her sister. You can also learn about the reopening of the case in this interview of Angel with Andrea Cavallier of NBC or on the Sonoma Sheriff Facebook page.
