Host Ken Meyer interviews author Kim Cross about her book "In Light Of All Darkness: A Look Inside the Polly Klaas kidnapping", the bone-chilling manhunt story, how this case advanced law enforcement procedures and technology, 20/20 coverage of her book and the case, how the book changed Kim's life, and more!
Author website: kimhcross.com On Instagram: @Kim Cross Where you can find the book: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kim-cross/in-light-of-all-darkness/9781538725085/ Where you can read The Alchemists: https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a62503930/afghanistan-cyclist-evacuation-taliban-us-troop-withdrawal/WBCA Podcasts
City Talk with Ken Meyer (Kim Cross)
(upbeat music) - WBCA radio is proud to present City Talk, where fascinating conversation is alive and well, with your host, Boston radio veteran, Ken Meyer. - Every once in a while, the book comes across your desk that you feel is important and that the public should know about. There is a book out called In Light of Hall Darkness, and it's the story of the Polycloss Kidnapping, which occurred in 1993. And the author, Tim Cross, has agreed to come on the air with us and talk about it. Let's talk about how a night that started out as a sleepover turned into a night of horror. - Okay, so on October 1st, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was having a sleepover with two friends in her home in Petaluma, California, which is a small, sleepy town, north of San Francisco. And the girls were playing a board game and probably stood up and started to go get their sleeping bags out of the family room. And when she opened the door, there was a strange man standing in the hallway, dressed all in black, and in one hand he had a bag, and in the other hand he had a knife. And he came into Polly's room, told the girls, "Don't scream or I'll slit your throats." And made them lie down on the floor. He found them and gagged them and blindfolded them and took Polly away and told her 12-year-old friends, Kate and Jillian, to count to 1,000. And by the time they got to 1,000, Polly would be back. Meanwhile, Polly's mother and little five-year-old sister were a plea in the room next door. And the two girls managed to untie themselves and ran and woke Polly's mother. And she immediately called the police. The police were there in four minutes. And what followed was the biggest manhunt at the time in FBI history. So Polly Glass was a 12-year-old girl. She was not considered an at-risk victim. She was in her house. It was the rarestable abductions, which is a stranger abduction from the home. And the case went, gosh, nationwide, even worldwide. Most people who were a certain age in 1993 remember seeing it on TV, I did. And, you know, she was on the cover of People and it just became one of those cases that changed America and American childhood. - I remember seeing it too, but also what struck me was that the gentleman who did the kidnapping kept saying that all he wanted was money and he didn't want anything else. - Right, yeah, he kept saying to the girls, I'm just here for valuables, I don't want to hurt anyone. And the girls in their early interviews seemed to believe him. They said he kept saying he doesn't want to hurt anyone. And, but he made no move to go and opened the jewelry box where Polly said she had $30. He didn't really act on those words. - All right, talk about how the whole thing got started with the police and the FBI and what ensued with the two girls. - So when, when Eve Nicole Polly's mother called 911, the first deputy was there within four minutes and closely followed by others from the Petaluma Police Department. And they quickly thought this sounds like a real abduction. And so they immediately called the FBI, which was a really good move because otherwise the FBI would have to wait to insert itself into the investigation. And so the FBI was there that night and the girls were questioned separately by detectives from the Petaluma PD. And initially they had a couple of minor discrepancies in their recollection and those two minor inconsistencies caused detectives to wonder if maybe the girls were telling the story and making things up. Maybe Polly had a boyfriend and was, they were covering for her or maybe something else was going on. Maybe this was a prank. And so what, what that turned into was a series of interviews that increasingly felt like interrogations. And the girls were questioned pretty harshly using the same kind of questioning methods that might have been used on a suspect. And it was, it was very traumatizing to the girls. And at some point their families said, we're done with this. We don't want to put our girls through this anymore. And the investigators almost lost them as witnesses. So at that point they realized what they had done that this was one of the biggest mistakes in the case. And they went and apologized to the girls and a key forensic illustrator came in and sort of helped rehabilitate them. - One of the discrepancies as I recall was the fact that he wore a bandana. - Correct. One of the discrepancies was one of the girls remembered that he had a neon yellow bandana tied around his forehead which is a pretty, you know, remarkable thing. The other girl did not remember that even when specifically asked about headwear. And so this seemed a little odd to them. And then the other one was that one girl had remembered hearing a screen door slam. And the other didn't remember that. And they looked at the doors and the screen door was on the front porch and it was still propped open with a bicycle so it could not have slammed shut. So they thought maybe the girls were lying and treated them as if they were lying. - Now, one of the ironic things is that the gentleman who did it was spotted very early in the investigation and they didn't even know that he had done something at the time. - Are you talking about the trespassing call? - Yes. - So interestingly, this was happening, you know, not long after Polly was kidnapped, there was a trespassing call. And this is really outside the investigation and it might have been called in, but a series of really unfortunate events were such that the connection wasn't made. So that night, there was a trespassing call in another area close, not far from where Polly lived. And there, a woman who was a chef came home to let her babysitter go home and on the way out, the babysitter was driving down this long dark driveway in a wooded area and she came across a man who was acting really erratically and he had his white pinto stuck in a ditch. And he was trying to get it out and he lagged her down and tried to get her out of the car and the babysitter said, no way, drove into town and used to pay phone to call Dana Jaffe who was the chef who would come home and who she babysapped for. And said, there's a really creepy guy on your driveway and he might be headed to the house, you need to get out of there. So Dana Jaffe got her 12 year old daughter in the car, grabbed a baseball bat and a can of mace. And on the way down her driveway, she saw the car but she didn't see the man. And wondered what he was doing. And so she drove into town, used to pay phone to call the police and the police said, it's really busy. We'll send a couple of sheriff's deputies out but you're gonna have to wait a little while. So she waited on the highway 'cause she did not wanna go home. And when they got there, she escorted them back to her property where the man was sort of leaning against his car smoking a cigarette as if he was expecting them. And so the women went back to her house and two sheriff's deputies spent more than 40 minutes with this trespasser trying to get his car unstuck and get him off the property. And they didn't have any legal means to arrest him or detain him. And so the only thing they could do was get him gone. And the course of doing that, they filled out a field incident report. So they ran his license and the car was not stolen and he didn't have any warrants out for his arrest. So, but they had that on record, which would come in handy two months later. But they did not hear the all points bulletin or the bolo, the be on the lookout broadcast that might have gone out. So the Petaluma PD issued an APB, which is sort of like an internal fax that rolls out in different law enforcement offices around, you know, in the area. And it said not for media release at the top because at the time reporters were known to carry police scanners and listen and try to, you know, get to the crime scene. And so knowing this, they chose not to broadcast a lot of things that were sensitive. And so when this bolo, you know, scrolled out of the machine in the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the dispatcher read not for media broadcast and said, I'd better not read this over. You know, I better not dispatch this over the radio. And so that APB went out during the time that the the trespasser, which we later learned in Stavis, the kidnapper, when he's with the two sheriffs, they might have heard it, but it wasn't broadcast. So they didn't know there had been a kidnapping. So they let him go. - One of the questions I should have asked you earlier is, this happened in 1993. What, what took so long to get you interested? - Well, I was 17 in 1993 and, you know, it wasn't until, so one of the reasons I wrote this book, I'm not really a true crime consumer or writer. I don't really, the only true crime book I ever read before this was in Cold Blood. And the reason I wrote the book is that I had the skills of an in-depth journalist, but then also access that probably no other journalist could get. Because Eddie Fryer, who was the case agent, the FBI agent in charge of the case, is my father-in-law. And it wasn't until, sometime after I published my first book in 2015, I got to thinking about what my next book would be and my son, I'm sorry, my husband said you might think about telling the public class story. And initially I was really set back on my heels because I thought this isn't my kind of story. I don't, I don't do true crime. It kind of creeps me out, it's sad. Why would I drag a reader through a really sad story if I, you know, didn't have some, you know, some reason for that? And then I started doing my homework and I looked into it and I realized that there were two books written about this case right around, I wanna say 1994, 1995, before the 1996 trial. And they were riddled with errors and holes and gaps and they were not complete histories of the case by any means. And then I realized that my father-in-law had been teaching this case in investigative classes for the past 30 years. He gives his poly class kind of case study talk at least once a month and has been doing that for 30 years. And so have a lot of the other investigators who participated in this historic case. And then I realized that the case actually changed a lot of things about how investigations were conducted, including as one FBI agent put it how it changed how the FBI does business. And so I realized that there really ought to be kind of a book of a record about this case and that if I didn't write it, I didn't think anyone else could. - If I remember right, there's a passage in there about where you had several people that volunteered to help with flyers and everything else. And it turned out ironically that one of the people was a sex offender. - Correct. One of the really the first volunteer who stepped up to lead the volunteer effort, which was part of what made this case remarkable is that the community of Petaluma said no, not in our town, this does not happen in our town. And they came out of the woodwork to help distribute flyers and literally walking the fields and by the river looking for Polly. I think as many as 4,000 volunteers came out of the woodworks before it was all said and done. But the one who was leading them was a man named Bill Rhodes and he had a print shop in town called Pip Printing. And he opened his print shop and Xeroxed all of the missing person flyers for free and organized the volunteers. And the volunteers became a really important liaison with law enforcement officials because they kept the media interested in the case when law enforcement officials had no new leads to talk about. And they also ensured that people were out there actively searching for Polly and they showed how much the community cared about a missing child. And it turns out that Bill Rhodes had had, he had molested a girl who came out of the woodwork when she saw the publicity he was getting. He was sort of heralded as this local hero. And so she came out of the woodwork and said he molested me years ago. And so they had to pivot directly and they quickly established that he was not involved in the Polly class kidnapping, but it really stunned everyone in the community in the investigation. - Was there good cooperation between the FBI and the panel of the police? - There was, you know, there is a stereotype, not for wrong reasons that the FBI has a reputation for coming in and sort of taking control and trampling all over the local law enforcement teams. But in this case, this was an exception to that. And I heard it from people at all levels of the investigation that in a joint investigation they were partnered at every level. So if there was someone on the ground, a detective, he would be paired with an FBI agent and they would go together to conduct an interview or chase down a lead. And then their managers would be paired. And then the people above them would be partnered. And what's interesting is the relationships between those two, the partners, a lot of them last to this day. A lot of them are lifelong friends. Where the dissension in the case happened was often between leadership and it was internally on both sides. Our guest is Kim Cross. We are discussing the book in "Late of All Darkness", the behind the scenes and true story of the polycross plus kidnapping. I'm also curious, there's a bit in there too about a palm print that they found in the bedroom of poly and how that eventually helped to catch the gentleman who did it. Take all the time you need and tell us about it because it took a long time before they were able to put it together. - Right, so in 1993, there was a new technology that was so new at the time that the FBI didn't even own it. And it was called fluorescent powder and alternate light source. Today it would be called a forensic light source. At the time, one of the evidence response team members for the FBI had borrowed one and was teaching himself how to use it in his living room where his wife ran a daycare. And he was practicing lifting latent prints of kids which are harder to lift than adult fingerprints. And so he had this new technology with him when he went to respond to the scene on the night of the kidnapping. Now, poly's room had already been fingerprinted and dusted with standard issue black powder, which is what most police departments used. And so they had lifted a bunch of prints already, but Tony went back in and went over the room again and found a number of dozens of latent prints that had been missed with the standard black fingerprint powder. And he was able to lift those with his fluorescent powder and alternate light source. One of those prints was not ruled out as belonging to someone who belonged in poly's room. And it was a partial palm trend of an adult on the upper rung of her bunk bed. So her bunk bed was this wooden frame and the upper slat that would have kind of kept the person on the top book from rolling out of bed, that's where it was found. And at the time there was no kind of searchable database of fingerprints. So a fingerprint or a palm print was not of use until you had a suspect to compare it to. So this palm print sort of sat there for two months while they chased down various leads and followed red herrings and came very close to arresting the wrong suspect. And then through a sequence of almost astonishing events, they had suspect and when he was in custody, they matched the latent print with his inked print and confirmed that Richard Allen Davis, a multiple offender who had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life had been in poly's room. - How did they catch him? How did they get involved with Davis to begin with so that they could find that the palm print matched? - Well, like I said, it was the sequence of almost extraordinary events that had to fall into place for this to happen. And it really comes down to one of the things that made this case unique was the partnership between law enforcement and the media and the volunteer group. And the volunteer coordinators realized that they needed to keep this in the news because the investigators had no new leads to tell the media and the media would eventually kind of go away if they didn't have anything new to share. So the volunteer coordinators kept the media attracted to the volunteer stories and hoping that by keeping it in the news, they would keep leads coming in from the public and people would keep their eye open for a perpetrator and then the leads would help the investigators. And in fact, during the course of this whole investigation, investigators had 60,000 tips and followed 12,000 leads in two months. And one of those leads was the right one and it came from Dana Jaffe who was the woman who had had the trespasser on her property on the night of Polly's kidnapping. Now she lived in the woods on a big piece of wooded land and she was walking through, looking at some work done by woodcutters who were coming to thin the trees and she stumbled across some suspicious items that were in the woods on the ground. It was a man's black sweatshirt, a pair of girls, tights that were tied in a knot with hair in the knot, some white bindings that looked like ligatures that had been used maybe to bind someone and a condom and a condom wrapper and then some other things. And so she immediately thought this looks like a crime scene and she didn't think it was a 911 call. So she called the sheriff's office and they were closed that night. So she called again in the morning and immediately a deputy came out and looked at the items and thought, oh, this does look suspicious. It had started to rain and so he was worried that the rain would spoil the evidence so he gathered it, took it to the police station or the sheriff station and then called Petaluma Petting. Petaluma sent Larry Pelton, a detective out who had been in Polly's room on the night at the kidnapping and he took one look at the items and saw that the white ligatures looked just like the ones that had been found in Polly's room and used to bind the girls' wrists on the night of the kidnapping. So he thought, this does look like it's related. So they meanwhile went back and looked up that field incident report from the trespassing call. Now from that they got a name and it was Richard Allen Davis and they were able to then look up his rap sheet and he had this multiple page rap sheet and with numerous attempts to kidnap grown women, a lot of violent offenses. And he had gotten out on parole just a few months before Polly was kidnapped. So they looked him up and he had been living in a halfway house in San Mateo and they tracked him down to his sister's house which was in Yukaya and they staged a SWAT raid and interestingly he wasn't there but they apprehended him shortly afterwards and then took him into custody. He was in jail and he was not able to see the news when the news broke that the palm print was a match. So they had suddenly a picture of Richard Allen Davis along with the news that his palm print matched the one found in Polly's bedroom on the night of the kidnapping and he didn't know this. And it turns out that someone who employed him when he got out of prison, a sheet metal worker named Marvin White saw his picture, said, I know that guy and decided to go drive to Mendocino County Jail to try to talk to him and see if he could talk him into telling everyone where Polly was. So Marvin White drove to Mendocino from San Mateo which is probably, I don't know, an hour and a half drive got there and they allowed him to talk to Davis and he told Davis, he pointed to his palm and said they found your palm print. So in this extraordinary situations, Davis suddenly knows they haven't and he had already invoked his Miranda rights in the previous interview, which meant that investigators would not be able to question him anymore about the case or about the kidnapping. Well, after learning that his palm print had been found, he actually asked to speak with the investigators again and he waved his Miranda rights, which is really, really unusual, but he basically waved his Miranda rights and opened up the conversation and they were again a lot to question him. And in that subsequent interview, he confessed to killing Polly. - Did he show any remorse? - No, no, there's a point in the confession tape where he cries. But as I was watching it with investigators, including my father-in-law and also other FBI agents, they said what we're seeing here is most likely an emotional release and not actual remorse. He calls her that little expletive fraud and dehumanizes her in that and he doesn't ever show any remorse. But this took a long time. This wasn't solved in a week. This whole thing dragged on for quite a while. - Right, from the kidnapping until they had him encusted, he was about two months, I think, 64 days. - Were you frustrated when you found that out? - I was. - Yes, I thought about how much anguish her family went through, how just, I mean, you really can't imagine anything worse, right? Then something happening to your child and something like this. Imagining what they went through, it's unfathomable. And to think that they went through it for that amount of time, it makes me really sad. - Talk about the trial itself. - Well, no, before we do that, how did they get him to show them where Polly was or body? - Well, during the interview, he made an admission that he killed her and he said, "I'll show you where she is." And so they got in a car. He got in a car with an FBI agent, Larry Taylor and Detective Mike Meese and drove them to a really sad and horrible spot on the side of 101 freeway in Cloverdale. And it's this horrible field, the kind of place where people dump tires and metal and it's one of the saddest places I've ever been. And that's where he had put her body and he had covered it with a piece of plywood. One of the things that I remember and that will always stand out is that Mark just went outside one night during this whole thing and just screamed. And that just gave me chills when I read that. - Yeah, he wrote about that moment on a blog and it's hard to imagine being in his shoes. - Talk about the trial itself. You were a reporter, I believe at that time, covering the trial. - No, no, I was not. - You were not. - No, I still would have been in college at that time. - Oh, okay. - So I did not cover the trial. I was journalism script student in college, but what I know is from Greg Jacobs, who was the district attorney who prosecuted Davis and who was really, really instrumental in bringing this book together because he gave me unlimited access to his archives and his files. But Greg was an attorney at the top of his career, the top of his game, and he had a remarkable array of evidence. He had physical evidence, the palm print. There were fibers that connected the pinto to Polly's bedroom, to the defendant, to the Cloverdale recovery site. He had a hair that was found in Polly's rug. And even though DNA was still pretty nascent at the time, the hair had a little bit of root sheath on it, which had a little bit of tissue, and so that was useful. He had eyewitnesses in the two girls. I mean, and he had a confession. Or actually, he will correct me. It was technically an admission, but no one says admission tape, so. And so he was able to get the conviction, and then the jury voted to give him the death penalty because there were special circumstances. - But he's still alive? - He's still alive, yes. Executions in California have been stayed, or I can't remember how many years. So he's still in death row and will likely die of old age. - Have you tried to communicate with him at all? - I wrote him two letters, and gave him the opportunity to talk to me by phone, or I offered to go in person, and I never heard back. - You will also write about another kidnapping in this book, and the young girl that was involved managed to escape and get away. - Yes. - Do you want to tell us about that? - I do. And I want to back up and say, you know, when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to take on this book, I knew it would be heavy. I knew it would be really hard, and I didn't really want to do it unless I could show at least one girl who had survived because of what was learned. And I heard again and again from investigators that what we learned from this case, both from what went right and what did not go right, was used to improve the systems and procedures and protocols and tools for investigating crimes and also catching kidnappers. But I really wanted to be able to show you a person who survived because of what Pauli went through. Otherwise, it just didn't seem worth dragging all of us through such a heartbreaking story, unless we could show that look at what we learned from this and look at what it did. And so Pauli was found in December of 1993 and in February of 1994, the investigators who worked on our case put together a symposium, a post-mortem where they shared all of the lessons learned from this case. And they opened it up to investigators from, you know, from all over who wanted to come. And one of the investigators who came to that, it was something like a two-day, it was a one-day or two-day symposium, was a police chief, Larry Hanson, who was the chief of low-dye. And Larry sat through these presentations and wrote down four things that he should do on a little piece of paper and tucked it in his drawer, like if this would ever happen on his watch. And then in July, six months after Pauli was found, he got a call and said there was a 12-year-old girl in low-dye who was kidnapped from her house. She was home with her sister and a 12-year-old friend and a man with a knife had come and kidnapped her from her house and taken her away. The parallels to Pauli are chilling. And so Larry pulled out that piece of paper from his desk and he got on the phone and immediately called Pat Parks at Petaluma PD and said, Pat, I've just had a kidnapping. It sounds just like Pauli Glass. What should I do? And Pat said, call the FBI immediately, start getting the word out immediately to all other law enforcement agencies, mobilize all of your resources, throw everything at this, time is up the essence. And so they did that. And within 24 hours, they found Katie Romanak and brought her home safely and caught the kidnapper and sent him to jail. And Katie, go ahead. - But she got away. She escaped. It wasn't like there was a SWAT team or anything that went and got her. She, as I understand it, just managed to get away. - Not exactly. They put so much pressure. So she was driven away in her, the man who the kidnapper took her sister's car and Katie was wearing nothing but a pair of socks. And he drove them away and drove them into this field and got his car stuck in the field. And when the car was stuck, I think it must have been the carburetor, something on the car started a brush fire from the brush under the car. And so the fire sent this plume of smoke up and they, the fire department responded, had seen the bolo immediately knew that the car belonged to Katie's sister. The doors were open, which gave them hope that, you know, because the passenger door was open, the Katie was still alive. The kidnapper actually took her into this, this area and buried both of them in mud because he had heard in prison that that could shield them from the heat-seeking kind of radar in the helicopters that were flying over. So there were dogs, there were helicopters with lights. And there were search parties. They put a lot of pressure up all night, knowing that if they kept the heat up all night, he was less likely to flee and might kind of hunker down, which is exactly what they did. And then in the morning, the kidnapper realized like, you know, I'm not gonna get out of this. And so he let Katie go. And he ran off the opposite way. So Katie went one way, he went the other. And she sort of comes, you know, walking down this hill wearing nothing but socks and finds the people who are searching for her and they wrap her up on the blanket and, you know, take her to safety. And meanwhile, they catch the kidnapper who was trying to flee. - And did he show any remorse? - That, I don't know. I don't know as much about that case. I did not try to contact him. But yeah, I can't speak to that. - What about the girl? Did you talk to her? - I did. In fact, I'm so grateful. Katie shared her story with me as did Larry and they actually came to... I had a book event in Petaluma on the anniversary, right around at the anniversary of the kidnapping, 30 years. And Katie and Larry both came and spoke. We did a symposium that was two and a half hours long and I invited 20 primary sources from the book, including FBA agents, the DA, also the public defender, Barry Collins, my father in law, a number of the ERT members who were part of the first FBI's first ERT team who worked on this case. Some of the witnesses, some of the volunteers, they all came and shared their story directly with Petaluma and what I really hoped would be something of a healing moment to understand that what this town had gone through, which was really traumatic and scarring for really everyone, had not been for nothing. Nothing will change the tragedy of how Polly was lost. But I hope that we'd be helpful to know that so much good was done with what was learned from that tragedy. And so Katie and Larry came and they closed the show and it was really touching because Katie, Katie became good friends with Larry and he became a mentor who helped her through college and helped her in several times in her life when she was struggling. And she has a button that I think someone gave her of Polly that was one of the buttons that was worn during Polly's search. And she sometimes talks to the button and says, like, I know I'm here because of you. And so she stood before the audience and turned to Larry and said, Larry, I love you and you saved my life. So it was a really touching moment and hopefully a meaningful end to a really sad story. But kidnapping still occur despite all this and the publicity that was garnered from what happened. - They do, they do. But I think that all of the things that were learned has at least aided the speed with which law enforcement agencies and volunteers can respond. And one other interesting part of the legacy is that the volunteer coordinators had a lot of money from donations to try to find Polly and when she didn't survive, they created the Polly Class Foundation, which has for 30 years been supporting the families of missing kids and getting them through the search and giving them tools and teaching them how to liaise with law enforcement officials. And they've supported something around 10,000 families of missing kids and they're still around today. - Now, I know 2020 has done one or two specials. How do you feel about their coverage? - Well, they came to me and I, you know, helped connect them with the primary sources. And I felt good. I was really nervous, honestly, that I didn't want it to be, you know, gratuitous or exploitive. I wanted them to really focus, you know, talk about the legacy. And I thought that they did a really respectful job. They had a lot of the, you know, the people who were in my book on the show. Mark Gloss also participated. And I had one mother of one of the girls reach out to me afterwards and say, I didn't think I was going to be able to watch this. But not only did I watch it, I watched it twice. And it's the first time I've seen everything in the story told accurately. And I was so grateful for that. - Every once in a while, you get a book that you don't forget. How has it, if it has, how has it changed your life? - Oh gosh. - You know, it really shook me. I really love to tell stories of resilience and kind of, you know, the human condition when the human condition wins. And this really shook some of my core beliefs in the world. I think I like to believe that people are generally born good and that when bad things happen to them, it causes them to act in bad ways. But I couldn't find any evidence in Davis's background. I really searched for a point where maybe he was a good kid and then something bad happened. He had a horrible childhood, but so did his siblings and they didn't kill people. And I looked for, you know, some example that he, you know, was deep down, maybe an injured, decent human. And I couldn't really find that and that really bothered me. You know, I don't know why things happen the way they do. You know, I hate it when people say, "Oh, things happen for a reason." 'Cause like this didn't happen for a reason. Some, you know, positive things happened despite it and maybe because of it, because of what we learned. But my gosh, you know, this is so horrific. And so it'll probably always haunt me. On the, on the week of my book launch, I got admitted to the hospital with what they thought were. I just thought it was having a heart attack. And I think it literally just got into my cells and made me kind of sick. So this will be my last true crime book. - I was just going to ask that question. - Yeah. - And what are you working on these days? - I just published a story that I feel really great about. It's called "The Alchemist" and it's about two young women in Afghanistan who were starting to ride bicycles after this is, you know, after the Taliban were suppressed. They and their families moved back to Afghanistan after being refugees. And they started riding bicycles in a culture, one of the last countries in the world where it was forbidden for women to ride bikes. And as teenage girls, they convinced their culture to change its mind. And in doing so, they used the bicycle as sort of a means of empowerment and liberation for other women and girls. And, you know, if more girls could ride a bike, more girls could go to school, if more women could ride a bike, they could have access to more jobs. And they created the first co-ed cycling club and co-ed cycling team and co-ed cycling race in the country and really had this incredible revolution. And then when the Taliban came back, they found themselves hunted because they were considered infidels. And so they had a pretty harrowing evacuation to an uncertain future in different countries. And it's been, you know, three years now and they are still out there. And it's not exactly a happy ending, but they're still out there, you know, existing and hoping one day to return to the country and ride. And so that just came out and it's making the rounds on social media. And I'm really, really glad because I feel like their story needs to be told and appreciated. And it's raising money for some girls who are still stuck in Afghanistan who need to be evacuated. So that's the latest. - Well, I wanna thank you for giving up some of your time and talking about something that was very difficult. I know it was difficult for me to read it, but it was something that I just couldn't put down. Is there anything in closing you'd like to say to our audience? - I just wanna thank you for paying some attention to it on the East Coast. It sometimes is seen as a West Coast story, but I think it's an important case for people to remember and to appreciate that, you know, poly class, really it was a girl who changed the world and she continues to have an impact today. And I think that that's a really important thing to remember. - Well, again, thank you so much for giving up some time. I really enjoyed talking to you. The book is very compelling and I recommend it heartily for people to read and really gain an insight into human nature and some people. So I thank you again. - Thank you so much for having me. - And that'll do it for this edition of City Talk. - Thanks for listening to another great conversation with Ken Meyer and friends. You can contact Ken by email. He addresses KJ Meyer7@gmail.com. That's KJ-M-E-Y-E-R7@gmail.com. Tune in next time for more conversation with Ken Meyer on City Talk. (upbeat music)