Who Is Gerald Friend?

Answer 1

This true story has very little to do with Nirvana's song, "Polly," except to provide a source of inspiration perhaps. Kurt Cobain's references prove he had no knowledge of the actual events and he knew little of what actually happened to the girl kidnapped by Gerald Friend. I served on the jury that convicted Gerald Friend of the kidnap, rape and torture of this girl. Yes, a fourteen-year-old runaway girl in Tacoma, Washington, was kidnapped by Gerald Friend, but initially, she willingly got into his car with him. The girl had run away from home and had been secretly living in the closets of various friends. She was not kidnapped on her way home from a punk concert as related by Kurt of Nirvana. Friend picked up the runaway girl on lower Pacific Avenue, a known pick-up location for prostitutes at that time, and the belief was that she was turning tricks as she willingly got into his car late one night (later than any fourteen year-old girl would be out alone walking through the seediest part of downtown Tacoma, Washington). Friend first took her for for a hamburger at Frisko Freeze, then took her, with a knife at her throat to keep her silent, into to his single-wide trailer where the rapes occurred. Friend hung the girl upside down in ski boots from a pulley attached to the ceiling of his mobile home and raped and tortured her with a leather whip, a straight razor, dripped hot wax on her, used a hot roller glued to a stick on her, and a blowtorch. She never "flirted" with her captor to trick him into "trusting" her as reportedly mentioned by Cobain. After he was through raping and torturing her, Friend trussed her arms with a leather belt, gagged her with Duct Tape, and threw her on the floor of the back seat of his car for what could have been the last ride of her life. She escaped from his car when he stopped for gas as he was heading out on rural Highway 7 away from Tacoma. She jumped out of his car and ran into the gas station office and dove behind the clerk's desk, cowering behind the clerk's legs. Friend raced away from the gas station and abandoned his car in a K-Mart parking lot in Lakewood, Washington. Friend was later arrested in Yakima, Washington, and eventually convicted of these crimes. Prior to this particular kidnapping and rape, he had served 20 years for a similar incident where he kidnapped a brother and sister in Pierce County, Washington. He pushed the brother out of his car, took the girl Into the Woods, tied her to a tree, and raped the sister who also escaped from Friend by swimming across the freezing-cold glacier-fed Mashell River. Friend's parole officer at the time of this conviction believed that he was taking her out towards Mount Rainer where his family owned rural property, and that there are bodies of other girls Friend had disposed of in rural Pierce County.