One Sunday in July 2021, I ushered two retired FBI Special Agents into my basement. We’d never met in person, but I’d been studying their work for more than six years for my book. Both had played pivotal roles in finding Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old girl kidnapped at knifepoint in 1993, during a sleepover with two friends.
One of them had lifted a latent palm print from Polly’s bedroom in Petaluma, California. The other had interrogated the killer, who had confessed to the murder of Polly Klaas and led them to her body. But their names were missing from everything I’d seen published about the case.
We settled into my living room to study the videotaped confession, pausing the tape repeatedly to analyze interrogation techniques and signs of deception. For me, it was like a “director’s cut,” narrated by deep insiders.
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Larry Taylor, the agent interviewing Richard Allen Davis on the tape, was now eighty years old, a barrel-shaped Texan with a dry sense of humor and a Dallas drawl. He had not seen this tape in almost three decades. Tony Maxwell, a lead forensic agent on the case and a member of the FBI’s first Evidence Response Team, had never seen the confession.
I’d spoken to Tony by phone for years. But I’d never been able to locate Larry. Tony easily found him—living across town from me in Boise. “I’ll talk to her,” Larry told Tony, “but only if you’re there.” Tony (bless him) bought a plane ticket to Idaho, picked Larry up, and drove him to my house. (I’d passed his background check.)
When I first interviewed Tony in 2016, he’d wept openly, recalling the impact that Polly had made on his career, his profession, and his heart. Over the next seven years, he supported my quest to ensure the book was comprehensive and accurate. He sent me primary sources, helped me understand documents, and tracked down other insiders, “greasing the skids” by convincing them to speak with me. (I call him “The Fixer.” He loves that.)
Last month, Tony flew back to Boise for the funeral of an FBI colleague. Together we visited Larry, now 84, at his home a few miles from mine. His wife served us homemade strawberry lemonade as we caught up and reminisced.
“Everything I learned about kidnapping, I learned from Larry,” Tony told me.
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Larry Taylor (left) and Tony Maxwell (right)
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At the time of Polly’s kidnapping, the Bay Area was facing a series of unsolved kidnappings. Kevin Collins. Amber Swartz-Garcia. Ilene Misheloff. Jaycee Dugard. Larry was involved in many of these cases. His expertise would be integral to the FBI’s kidnapping protocol, written by FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, their colleague on Polly’s case.
But the case that haunted him all his life was the 1988 kidnapping of Michaela Garecht, a nine-year-old girl abducted in broad daylight outside a grocery store in Hayward, California. In December 2020, the Hayward Police charged 59-year-old David Misch with her murder. The break in the 32-year-old cold case came when fingerprints found on a scooter were matched with Misch, who has been in State Prison since 1989 for another murder.
Larry Taylor had also played a key role in the kidnapping case of Adobe CEO Charles Geschke, who was kidnapped at gunpoint from the parking lot when he got to work one morning in May 1992. Two twenty-something men held the CEO hostage in a bungalow in Hollister and demanded a $650,000 ransom.
Mary Ellen O’Toole coached Geschke’s daughter on how to handle the money drop-off. The daughter drove the money to a beach just north of San Francisco, with an armed FBI agent hiding in the backseat.
After the dropoff, the kidnappers fled a team of FBI SWAT team members sprinting after them down the beach. In the pre-dawn, the assailants buried the money in the sand and vanished into the water, using scuba equipment and “dive scooters” to cross San Francisco Bay. But the FBI tracked them to the bungalow in Hayward. In a SWAT raid, Larry opened a closet door and found Geschke, blindfolded and chained to the floor. Alive.
On the wall of Larry’s office, amid other awards, is a special plaque that Geschke had made for Larry. It features the first conversation in a lifelong friendship:
“Hi, I’m Larry Taylor with the FBI.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Really—I’m Larry Taylor with the FBI.”
“Let me see your badge.”
You can read Geschke’s first person account of his kidnapping in Angels Wear Black. Larry is in his 80s now. Tony is in his 70s. Both were pioneers whose investigative work changed the way the FBI solves crimes. If you’d like to send a question or note to either of them, send me an email and I’ll pass it on.
Don’t forget to lock the door.
Kim
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By Ezra Marcus & Jen Wieczner for New York
As a writing instructor, I’m always on the hunt for the perfect example of a particular element of craft. This nut graf is my new gold standard. If it doesn’t make you want to read the story, I’ll eat my cryptocurrency.
“There have been at least 33 crypto kidnappings around the world this year; this would be the first known occurrence in New York. The appeal is irresistible. Over the past few years, as the value of crypto has ballooned, its millionaires and billionaires have lived heedlessly, some blithely filling the space left by mafia bosses and drug kingpins before them, publicly posting pictures of their Brickell penthouses and courtside Chrome Hearts outfits. These very suddenly, very flashily wealthy people have found themselves contending with the downsides of having chosen to release their fortunes from the grip of banks. Even the most successful crypto investors tend to hold their vast digital fortunes on their own devices, and their money can be taken from them almost instantly. All a thief needs is access to the right device, like a hard drive, or the password to an online account. Once a crypto fortune has been stolen, there is often no regulator or bank security department a victim can ask to reverse the transaction.”
Bonus: The Bizarre True Story of “Bitcoin’s Bonnie & Clyde” in Netflix’s Biggest Heist Ever (contains spoilers, so skip it if you haven’t watched the series)
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By Ellery Weil for Switchboard
Speaking of nut grafs, the magazine that brought us The Great Butter Fire has delivered a true crime story worthy of a Ben Stiller comedy: a nut heist. In 2006, 135,000 pounds of almonds—nearly half a million dollars worth—marked the biggest food-theft in US history. As the SLR Editor of True Crime and Paranomasia, I found Ellery Weil’s story about (ahem) a tough case to crack surprising and delightful. I love a story that’s just a little…crazy.
Bonus: The “Grate Cheese Robbery,” in which 22 metric tons of rare Cheddar is stolen in Britain (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Rachel Dodes for Vanity Fair
The 1974 murder of 19-year-old Charlotte Cook, whose body was found beneath a bluff in Daly City, California, became the city’s oldest “active” cold case. It was solved by a convicted murderer incarcerated (alongside the killer) in San Quentin. In his 36 years on death row, this story’s pro(?)tagonist, William A. Noguera, has spent more time with murderers than most FBI profilers and calls himself “the Jane Goodall of serial killers.” If, like me, you loved the moral dilemma of rooting for Dexter, you’ll enjoy this one.
Bonus: To hear directly from William A. Noguera, you can listen to Death Row Diaries, “the only podcast hosted from life from death row” or read Through the Lens of a Monster, a book about his relationship with Naso (forthcoming in September).
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By Chris Sweeney for Globe Magazine
The world’s first forensic ornithologist, Roxie Laybourne peered through a microscope at bits of feathers to help the FBI and other agencies investigate murders, kidnappings, and poaching cases. This excerpt does its job in making me hungry for the whole book: The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Foxie Laybourne, lauded on a number of summer reading lists this year.
Bonus: For a “book cocktail,” pair it with The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson.
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By Sarah Treleaven for ELLE
File this one under: Can’t make this shit up. Olga Tsvyk, a Ukrainian immigrant in New York, is working at a salon in New York and awaiting a green card due to arrive any day when she meets an eyelash-extension client who looks a lot like her. “Both women had long brown hair, full lips, manicured eyebrows, and a polished appearance, like an Instagram filter come to life.” The doppelgänger plots to kill Olga and steal her green card—and her life. Her weapon of choice? A killer slice of cheesecake. (There’s a terrific karmic plot twist at the end.)
Bonus: The story of Erin Patterson, an Australian triple-murderer who killed three relatives with beef wellington laced with poisonous death cap mushrooms.
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By Eric McHenry for The American Scholar
In many (if not all) indigenous cultures, history is passed down through oral storytelling and song. Such accounts often sound like legend, but often align remarkably with science. So I'm fascinated by Eric McHenry's story about "an obscure murder that keeps resurfacing in Black story and song." McHenry takes us on a deep dive into the song "Charlie Idaho," written and performed by Mike Mattison, a songwriter and musician with degrees in English and American Literature. He learned about the murder from The Land Where the Blues Began, by Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist who recorded folk music after World War II to preserve it before it was subsumed by pop culture.
Bonus: Listen and watch Mike Mattison perform "Charlie Idaho," then Google yourself down the rabbit hole of Alan Lomax and watch Lomax the Songhunter, a documentary available on Amazon Prime.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser reveals the dark inheritance of the Pacific Northwest. Charting over 100 years of parallel toxins, Fraser masterfully weaves the narrative of lead poisoning and violent crime together. Few true crime books dare to be this exacting. Fraser pulls back the curtain, exposing the cultural rot beneath the serial killer spectacle of the Pacific Northwest.
—Meg Levi
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This is where I share something I dig that’s completely unrelated to true crime.
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I'm headed to the Sawtooths next month to lead a writing retreat in the mountains where Hemingway died and is buried, so I’ve been thinking a lot about his elegant art of omission. When I ran across The Erasure Notebooks by poet and essayist Mary Ruefle, it made me think about the art of deletion. A few of them are on display at the Poets House in Downtown Manhattan until Sept. 6, and poet Mark Wunderlich will give a craft talk on Ruefle’s work on Sept. 4 at 7 pm. (If you go and send me a photo, I’ll snail-mail you a snapshot of Hemingway’s house in Idaho, which I’m not allowed to share online.)
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