Reliving a ‘horrific nightmare’: Sierra LaMar retrial could look very different

Sierra LaMar’s body was never found. But her family had found a measure of peace in the years since a jury convicted Antolin Garcia Torres of kidnapping the 15-year-old Morgan Hill teen from a bus stop and killing her.

Friday’s startling appellate court ruling overturning that murder conviction reopened wounds they had tried not to revisit.

Her mother, Marlene LaMar, who had helped organize hundreds of volunteers for years to search through fields and gullies after Sierra vanished in 2012, said Saturday she was too devastated to speak about the ruling. But in a text message, she explained her pain.

“Just when we thought we had peace and were able to move forward with our lives,” she wrote, “we now have to relive this horrific nightmare.”

The ruling underscores the tension between defendants’ rights and the anguish families endure when convictions are overturned, legal analysts say. It also opens the possibility of a retrial, but with limits. The appellate court barred prosecutors from pursuing certain first-degree murder theories and first introducing prior kidnapping allegations. If jurors were instead to convict Garcia Torres of second-degree murder, he could face a sentence as low as 15 years to life, they said.

“I absolutely agree with the family that this is awful, but that’s the way our laws read, and they do make sense,” said East Bay lawyer Michael Cardoza, who consulted with the defense in the Scott Peterson case. “For first-degree murder, a jury has to find that it was willful, deliberate and premeditated. In this case, the court said it’s too speculative to come back with that type of verdict, because you don’t have a body.”

Perhaps no one understands the devastation of the LaMar family better than Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was kidnapped during a sleepover at her mother’s home in Petaluma and killed 33 years ago. The man convicted of murdering her, Richard Allen Davis, is now arguing he should be released from prison on the presumption he is no longer a threat to society.

“We try to put our lives together. We try to move on with our lives, and then at some point this ugly specter continually raises its head and drags us right back into the agony of losing our loved one,” Klaas said.

Friday’s ruling in Sierra’s case, he said, is “a travesty of justice.”

Despite the higher court ruling, Garcia Torres, 34, remains at Corcoran State Prison while Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen decides a path forward. Rosen declined an interview Saturday. But he may ask the California Supreme Court to review the decision or seek a new trial.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office issued a statement late Friday defending its investigation and expressing disappointment in the ruling.

“Our detectives have continued to diligently pursue new information and remain unwavering in their commitment to this investigation,” the statement said. “They will not rest until Sierra is found and closure can be brought to her family.”

In its 50-page ruling, the 6th District Court of Appeal determined that the trial court erred and that the jury was prejudiced by allowing three attempted kidnapping allegations from 2009 — three years before Sierra’s disappearance — to be tried alongside the murder charge. It also concluded that insufficient evidence supported certain murder theories presented to the jury and barred prosecutors from pursuing those theories in any retrial.

Prosecutors will still be able to argue a first-degree case if they convince a jury the death occurred during a kidnapping and that Garcia Torres was “an active participant,” legal analyst Steve Clark said.

“But the court cut off one aspect of being able to argue that it was premeditated and deliberative,” Clark said. “The court said it was too speculative to say that, without a crime scene, without a body, without a murder weapon.”

Prosecutors had also argued during the trial that the prior kidnapping allegations constituted a “training ground” for Sierra’s abduction and killing. If granted a retrial, prosecutors would not be allowed to introduce those prior allegations or pursue theories of willful, deliberate and premeditated murder, according to the ruling.

Messages left with Garcia Torres’s defense lawyer, Danalynn Pritz, weren’t immediately returned Saturday.

Although Sierra’s body was never found, her school backpack was discovered days later in a field; inside were extra clothes, makeup and her phone. In the trunk of Garcia Torres’ Jetta, detectives found rope with a 12-inch hair consistent with Sierra’s DNA profile.

The disappearance of Sierra, a cheerleader who hung posters of Marilyn Monroe in her bedroom and talked about makeup with her girlfriends, made national news. It brought out more than 750 volunteers who plastered photos of the teen with a broad smile and long dark hair across Santa Clara County. Schools were opened on weekends as base camps for search parties, with groups cooking meals for volunteers. The effort drew San Jose Sharks hockey players, including Logan Couture, to help search and raise money.

A full year later, when search efforts were still attracting 40 volunteers every weekend, one of the missing posters still clung to a telephone poll at the rural bus stop at Palm and Dougherty avenues.

By then, Klaas was a well-known advocate for tougher sentencing laws and had helped propel California’s three strikes legislation. He had also created the KlaasKids Foundation and helped organize the search parties for Sierra and, along the way, bonded with her mother, her father Steve and her older sister Danielle.

“Unless you’ve been through it, you can’t really understand the nightmare of it — the loss of control and the anger and the loss of hope and the questioning of your spirituality and your humanity,” Klaas said. “That’s where the bond is.”

Midsi Sanchez, who was 8 when she escaped her kidnapper three days after being abducted in 2000 on her way home from school in Vallejo, and the family of Michelle Le, who was killed in 2011 by a jealous friend after leaving her nursing class in Oakland, have also supported the LaMar family through the years.

All of their support for the LaMars, Klaas said, was to “demonstrate to them that it’s not always going to be hideous, that at some point, you’re going to have an opportunity to try to put your life together again.”

Indeed, Sierra’s parents, who had been divorced at the time of Sierra’s disappearance, have found new partners. Her sister graduated from college and married a year ago.

In 2023, Marlene LaMar joined Klaas at a reception to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Polly’s murder.

“Even though we never found her remains,” Marlene said of her daughter at the time, “knowing that everything possible that could be done was done, that gives me peace.”

Sanchez also attended the commemoration near Klaas’s home in Sausalito. She struggled for years with nightmares and addictions before finding relief and freedom in her faith. But the 251-year sentence imposed on Curtis Dean Anderson helped her cope.

“I felt safe and I knew that he would never be able to do the disgusting things that he did to me, to anybody else,” said Sanchez, who is now married with three children, “and I got boldness from that, knowing that no other girl would ever be hurt.”

That Sierra’s parents and sister still have to consider the prospect that Garcia Torres might be released if a retrial doesn’t produce another guilty verdict is “shocking,” she said.

After Garcia Torres’s lawyers made their appeal based on numerous issues they raised, including the admission of certain DNA evidence at trial, the appellate ruling concluded that the conviction was improper and prejudicial.

Clark, the legal analyst, said it is still possible the California Supreme Court could reverse the decision. There is another possibility, he said.

“This is going to put renewed attention on the case, and maybe more tips will come in,” he said. “And maybe new developments will happen that could lead to her body being discovered, and that would be the game changer.”

But to Klaas, the ruling shows that “the only thing that seems to matter anymore are the rights of the killer.”

Sierra’s family, he said, must now be thrust back into stress and anguish.

“It opens them up to the reality,” he said, “that it will never end.”