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American Morning

Interview with Marc Klaas

Aired July 17, 2002 - 08:01   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Now back to California, where the family of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion is praying that the search for their missing girl is not over. As we have been reporting this morning, the body of a young girl was found last night. The site is about 75 miles away from Samantha's home, where she was kidnapped on Monday.

Yesterday her mother made an emotional plea for the girl's safe return.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIN RUNNION, SAMANTHA'S MOTHER: Baby, I love you. You are such a good girl. You are so clever. Please ask your captor to let you go. We love you. She is my siolita linda (ph). Please let her go. She is such a sweet child. We don't want vengeance, we just want our baby back. Please.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And Marc Klaas knows what is going through or what that family is going through. His daughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered in 1993.

Marc joins us now from San Francisco.

Thanks for being with us this morning, Marc.

MARC KLAAS, KLAASKIDS FOUNDATION: Sure, Paula.

ZAHN: I guess you can probably imagine better than any of us what the Runnion family is going through as they wait for police to make a possible connection here.

KLAAS: Well, I suppose if there's been an identification made they already know what the answer is. And if, in fact, it is their daughter, they're in a state of utter despair and they will have a veil of grief over them with no joy for many, many years to come.

ZAHN: I know you went through a period of time when, when you got your bad news you felt tremendous guilt. The circumstances surrounding this kidnapping are pretty clear. Both parents were at work. The grandmother was home and the child was playing very close to her apartment.

KLAAS: Yes.

ZAHN: Walk us through some of the emotions that the whole family has to deal with right now.

KLAAS: Well, certainly they're going to be second guessing this whole decision to let her play outside, probably for the rest of their lives. But I think that we all have to understand that that grandmother and those parents weren't doing something that millions of other parents in America don't do every day.

I think what we have to do is understand the fundamental lessons of situations like Polly's, Danielle van Dam's and Elizabeth Smart's, and that is that if they can get those children out of their bedrooms, every child in America is a child that is at risk. And we have to take whatever steps are necessary on every level of society to protect our children from these determined predators.

ZAHN: What are some of the first steps you think we should take?

KLAAS: Well, first of all, we have to dispel this whole notion of stranger danger and substitute some other rules. Certainly one of the things that I think aided this situation was the fact that there were two girls outside together. So we were able to get an eyewitness account of what this guy looked like and hopefully that will help bring resolution.

But children should trust their feelings. They should fight abductors. They should put distance between themselves and whatever is making them feel badly. And then certainly they should also understand that there are certain kinds of strangers that they can go to.

But that doesn't really address what happened to this little girl. We're going to find that this guy either has a criminal history or some kind of a history of molesting children, most likely, and that he's probably been in prison and he probably never should have been let out of prison.

So we have to address it all the way from the kitchen table when we talk to our children to the cabinet table and, in fact, to the Oval Office and the decisions we make and the kinds of choices that presidents and certainly legislators make regarding what we're going to do with predators in our society and how we're going to address this issue.

ZAHN: I guess the initial part of this investigation would suggest just that. I guess based on the description of Samantha's playmate of who this predator was, apparently he was a man that wasn't familiar, at least so far, to anybody in that apartment complex.

Were you struck by the level of detail Samantha's playmate was able to give to police? She gave a description of the vehicle, the H on the back of the vehicle and police say a very good description of the suspect.

KLAAS: You know, little kids have wonderful powers of observation and they're able to see through a lot of the things that sort of cloud our vision sometimes. So I think that in situations like this we have to really listen to them and really, really hear very clearly what they have to say.

Let me give you an example. We're hearing all of this stuff in the Elizabeth Smart case, but there's one question that can be asked of the little sister that has not been asked that I think can clear things up a lot and that is, despite the fact that she didn't see a full frontal of the guy that took her little sister, she was able to detail a lot of things. Somebody has to ask that little girl if the guy who took her sister had a mustache, because if he didn't have a mustache, it wasn't Richard Ricci. We just don't give the children the kind of credit they deserve for their powers of observation.

ZAHN: Marc, you're saying you don't believe police have asked that obvious question of this little girl?

KLAAS: It certainly hasn't been asked nor answered in public, has it? Think about it. I mean we, there's all kinds of speculation going on on a regular basis, but neighborhood has said whether Mary Catherine saw a mustache on this individual or not. And quite frankly, if she didn't, it's not Richard Ricci. It's somebody else. If she did see a mustache, perhaps it is Richard Ricci.

But I think that that whole case, the direction that it's going could be cleared up very quickly if that question was answered. We don't know. Maybe the police do.

ZAHN: Yes. Yes, we'd the know if it was asked. We don't know whether it's been answered. It certainly hasn't been shared with us.

Before we let you go, you talked about what needs to be done at the cabinet level.

KLAAS: Yes.

ZAHN: What needs to be done at the tables at home. I mean the one thing we all wrestle with as parents is how to make them aware of the potential danger out there without paralyzing them. A closing thought on that, given...

KLAAS: Well, sure...

ZAHN: ... what seems to be just an increase of these kinds of incidents within the last several months.

KLAAS: You know, I don't know that there's an increase or we're just paying a lot more attention. But really the kids want the information that's going to enable them to protect themselves. What we have to do as parents is get over our fears and address the issue and talk to the kids.

Finally, I would say that one thing that we should really seriously consider for children that are 10 years of age and over is to get them their own cell phone so that we can have 24-7 contact with them at all times. And I'm not shilling for any cell phone company. I truly believe that this is one of the answers that we're seeking.

ZAHN: Marc Klaas, you always have good advice for us.

Thank you very much for joining us as we await more information from the California police here.

KLAAS: Thank you. Sure.

ZAHN: Appreciate it.

KLAAS: Thank you.

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