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American Morning

Interview with Marc Klaas

Aired August 21, 2002 - 07:32   ET

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

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: A 10-year-old girl kidnapped from her California home has now been found unharmed. Nichole Timmons was taken from her bedroom either Monday night or early Tuesday morning. And police have captured her 68-year-old babysitter in Nevada.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHIEF RUSS LEACH, RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA POLICE: Finding out where this suspect was headed and putting it altogether to bring the California Highway Patrol and the FBI, the Riverside Sheriff's office together to make sure the Amber Alert system worked not only in our state, but went out to the Western states.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: An Amber Alert was issued, Amber Alert was issued, but some say that that system is in danger of being over used.

Marc Klaas' daughter Polly was kidnapped and killed back in 1993. He has some very strong thoughts about all of this. He joins us now in person for a change.

Good to see you.

MARC KLAAS, KLAASKIDS FOUNDATION: Hi, Paula.

ZAHN: Thanks for joining us this morning.

KLAAS: Sure.

ZAHN: It's much better being on the East Coast. Usually we have to wake you up in the middle of the night when you join us from San Francisco.

KLAAS: You had to wake me up today. Come on.

ZAHN: Tell us a little bit about why you would not have issued an Amber Alert in this case? I mean here, after all, little Nichole was found 350 miles away from her home.

KLAAS: Yes.

ZAHN: Didn't that work?

KLAAS: It worked and I'm very glad, as everybody is, that the little girl was returned home, just as I'm very glad that little Jessica Cortez was returned home recently. But these situations with the Amber Alert have to be for the most critical situations of all, children in situations like Polly, where you know for a fact that the child has been taken by a predator, that it's been done within the last couple of hours so that you can create a perimeter around these kidnappers so that they won't escape the perimeter.

The problem is that if every time a child disappears you activate an Amber Alert, you're going to be doing it 350,000 times, if it's a parental situation, every year. You're going to be doing it four and a half -- I'm sorry, 450,000 times every year if it's a runaway situation and countless millions of times if it's a child that comes home late for dinner.

And what we end up doing then is getting it into over use so that every time that the Amber Alert then gets activated, people will not pay attention to it. These have to be for the most critical cases and you have to follow the criteria.

The criteria is very simple. The child has to be, I believe, 17 years old or younger, based on the situation that happened recently in Lancaster. You have to have very, very credible information that the child has been taken by a predator and you have to believe that that child's life is endangered. If you break that criteria, you're going to over use the system and when it's really necessary, when it is a situation like Polly's, then you're not going to be paying attention.

You can always get the information out on regularly scheduled newscasts or utilizing the incredible services of the cable news networks. I mean they're almost a walking Amber Alert at this point. I mean, every time one...

ZAHN: Unfortunately.

KLAAS: Yes, it's true. But every time -- well, not unfortunately. I mean these things have been happening for years and years, Paula, and people just haven't been paying attention. Now that people are paying attention, now that the cable news networks are making these alerts and letting people know, I think we're getting a real sort of handle on what's actually going on in this country.

ZAHN: I hear what you're saying about setting up some very specific criterion before you set off the Amber Alert.

KLAAS: Yes.

ZAHN: So you are saying in the case of Tamara Brooks and Jacqueline Marris, in that case it was justified to issue the alert?

KLAAS: Absolutely, because it happened immediately. They know exactly what happened to these women, young women. They know, they had information that could have been utilized to help return them. They had a description of the kidnapper. They knew the vehicle the guy was in and they even had a license plate number. I mean they had everything they needed in that particular instance.

ZAHN: But what about the case of Jessica Cortez? Because it became abundantly clear how little investigators knew from the time she disappeared and it was because of the Amber Alert, I guess, that was issued then withdrawn and issued again, that many of the folks at the clinic, who ultimately identified her, would not have known who she was had it not been for those alerts.

KLAAS: Well, first of all...

ZAHN: And the news coverage.

KLAAS: ... it doesn't look like her life was endangered at all. And somebody would have ultimately turned this woman in because that child did not belong with that woman. And you could have easily just gone into a regularly scheduled news broadcast with the information that that child had been taken. But to activate an emergency alert such as the Conellrad alert (ph), the kinds of things they used to do, all the kinds of things they use for emergencies, for natural disasters, I think, is really over stepping the situation.

ZAHN: Let's talk about another case, Jennifer Renee Short. She's been missing now for seven days. They've gone into the pond. They don't believe she's there. Both of her parents were killed. I guess investigators believe that she was taken after they were killed. How likely is it that police will find this little girl alive?

KLAAS: What a horrible situation. It looks like whoever took her doesn't want to leave anybody alive, doesn't it? I mean that's really the problem in that case. And you can't, you can't overreact in a situation like that. That poor child. It's absolutely heart breaking.

ZAHN: A final thought on the van Dam case? The Westerfield trial continues to go on and on and on. No one expected the deliberations to drag on as long as they have. What does that suggest to you?

KLAAS: Well...

ZAHN: And have you had any conversations with the van Dams?

KLAAS: Yes, I spoke to Brenda the other day. And it's a terrible situation for them. They're wondering if the jury was in the same trial that they were in because it's very, very clear to people who have been paying attention that Van Dam did this crime. Everything points to Van Dam. There's blood, there's hair, there's fiber. It's everywhere. It is. It's absolutely everywhere.

ZAHN: But it's obviously not a slam dunk case, is it?

KLAAS: It isn't and they never are. Even in our situation, where they had a confession and he led them to my daughter's body, it took four days for the jury to come back with a guilty verdict. This particular jury is probably the most scrutinized jury since the O.J. Simpson case and because of everything that's gone on in the last several months in this country with the missing children, I think they completely understand that everybody is totally focused in on what they're doing and they will be very deliberate and they will come in with, hopefully, hopefully they'll come in with a guilty verdict, because if they don't, if it gets hung up -- and they're certainly not going to let this guy off.

But if it gets hung up, they're going to have to go through it again and the van Dams will have to sit there and have their character and their lives just undermined and assassinated one more time.

ZAHN: Well, we've got a number of reporters on the ground there tracking every movement of the jurors and family members.

We appreciate your coming along and sharing some of your insights with us.

KLAAS: Sure, Paula.

ZAHN: Very nice to see you in person for a change.

KLAAS: Nice to see you, too.

ZAHN: And not to see you on a monitor across the country.

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