Two girls freed, pillowcases on heads, one still gone

The slumber party was three girls in a bedroom, a Friday night in October.

An intruder came through the house in Petaluma.

He tied up the three girls.

He placed pillowcases over their heads.

He took 12-year-old Polly Klaas.

Her two friends freed themselves.

They ran to another room and alerted Polly's mother, Eve Nichol.

The pillowcases are the detail that lingers.

A specific, unresolved image from the first report.

Who was that intruder?

What did he want?

Why those girls?

That would require evidence.

The record does not establish his identity here.

THE MANHUNT

The manhunt began before dawn.

By morning, over 2,000 volunteers were searching the hills and orchards around Petaluma.

The Petaluma Police Department and the FBI worked the case jointly.

The lead detective coordinated the search from a command post that never went dark.

A neighbor reported seeing a suspicious car near the Klaas home that night.

The make and model of that car are not in the record.

Neither is what the driver looked like.

The tip line rang with thousands of calls.

Each tip was logged, each tip was checked, each tip went nowhere.

Weeks passed that way.

The volunteers searched in grids, then searched again.

They found nothing.

Police interviewed the two girls who had freed themselves, again and again.

The girls described the intruder, the pillowcases, the knife.

Their descriptions did not match any name in the local files.

The lead detective kept the case open on his desk, the stack of tips growing.

Not because the tips were useful.

Because there was nothing else.

The car sighting stayed at the top of the file, an unanswered question.

It is a question the record still does not answer.

The manhunt was one of the largest in California history.