Klaas Case Bolsters Flinders’ Theory

Like most of us, Carol Lee Flinders was horrified by the Polly Klaas case.

Remember Polly Klaas? The 12-year-old Petaluma, Calif., girl who, one night in 1993, was abducted from her home and murdered?

Three years after her murder, television cameras captured the drama that occurred when Klaas’ killer swapped courtroom insults with her father, Marc Klaas.

Unlike most of us, however, Flinders has a more personal connection to the case.

A 1961 graduate of North Central High School and co-author of the cookbook “Laurel’s Kitchen,” Flinders will show her philosophical tie to the Klaas tragedy by reading from her new book “At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Feminist Hunger and a Spiritual Thirst” on Friday at Auntie’s Bookstore.

The personal link comes from her being a resident of the Petaluma suburb of Tomales. On the night the girl was taken, Flinders had just given a lecture on how to reconcile the apparent contradictions between feminist theory and spiritual need.

It was only later, flush from having defended her viewpoint before a doubting audience, that Flinders realized something: On the way home, she had driven within two blocks of the Klaas house less than an hour after the girl’s abduction.

Flinders is a longtime student of Hinduism. In her lecture, as she does in “At the Root of This Longing,” she told the Hindu story of Draupadi, a figure in the Sanskrit text the “Mahabharata.” Her intent was to make a point about tackling cultural problems at their source.

An Indian noblewoman, Draupadi is lost in a bet made by one of her five husbands. As her new owner tries to disrobe her, Draupadi, says Flinders, “becomes united in prayer with the lord.” In answer to her prayers, her sari becomes an endless sheet of cloth. No violation is possible.

The point, according to Flinders: “Ultimately, feminism will achieve everything it wants when it can reestablish its connection with the feminine sacred.”

In other words, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. preaching active nonviolence, women will overcome by first reconnecting with each other, emotionally and spiritually, and then rooting out the real causes of society’s ills.

Flinders points to Polly Klaas’ mother as an example. While Marc Klaas has become a visible advocate for victims, Eve Nichol has gone about her duties quietly.

“She turned herself completely to working with at-risk kids,” Flinders says. “She saw that the man who had killed her daughter had himself been an abused child, and she just said, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to make sure this isn’t perpetuated.’

“To me,” Flinders says, “that represents something really exemplary.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING Carol Lee Flinders will read from her book, “At the Root of This Longing,” at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington.