US POLICE admitted last night that they missed an opportunity in 2006 to free a young woman held captive for nearly two decades, having been abducted at the age of 11. A convicted sex offender and his wife appeared last night in a California court, accused of kidnapping the girl and detaining her in a hidden backyard compound at their home for 18 years.
The couple face 29 felony counts stemming from the 1991 abduction of Jaycee Dugard (11) of South Lake Tahoe, in the El Dorado Superior Court in Placerville, California. The couple pleaded not guilty to the charges, including forcible abduction, rape, sexual assault and false imprisonment.
Ms Dugard, who was snatched on her way to school in June 1991, was reunited with her family this week as a 29-year-old woman with two daughters.
It emerged last night that three years ago police were called to the home where she was allegedly held but failed to find her. Sheriff Warren Rupf said officers were called to the home of convicted rapist Phillip Garrido after reports people were living in his back garden.
“On November 30th, 2006, we missed an opportunity to bring earlier closure to this situation,” he said. “A caller to our 911 dispatch offered that there were tents in the neighbour’s backyard, that people were living in them, and that there were young children. The caller also said that Garrido was psychotic and had a sexual addiction.”
The sheriff said officers went to Garrido’s home but did not go inside and said they found no evidence “of criminal behaviour”. He apologised for what he described as “not an acceptable outcome”.
In a case with eerie echoes of the crimes of Austria’s Josef Fritzl, who fathered seven children with his own daughter, Phillip Garrido (58) is accused of raping Dugard and fathering her two daughters, aged 11 and 15.
Prosecutors say that Garrido and his wife, Nancy, held Ms Dugard in a warren of sheds and tents hidden in “a backyard within a backyard” at their home outside San Francisco. One of the sheds was soundproofed and could only be opened from the outside. Police said Ms Dugard and her children were thoroughly cut off from the outside world.
“None of the children had ever gone to school, they’d never been to a doctor, they were kept in complete isolation in this compound,” said El Dorado county undersheriff Fred Kollar.
Garrido was convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1976 and has been on parole since his release from prison in 1988.
About the missed opportunity to rescue Ms Dugard in 2006, Mr Ruprf said: “I can’t change the course of events . . . There are no excuses. I am not offering excuses.”
Ms Dugard’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, said that she and her children were “doing great” but he said she felt “guilty” for bonding with her alleged abductor and never attempting to escape. “I don’t know if she was brainwashed, I don’t know if she was walking around on the street, I don’t know if she was locked up under key for 18 years, I have no idea,” he said.
Mr Probyn, who saw his step-daughter being dragged into a car as she walked to a school bus stop, was initially a suspect. He said yesterday the kidnapping had destroyed his marriage to Dugard’s mother, describing the past 18 years as “hell”.
Garrido, who ran a printing business from his home, was distributing religious leaflets with Ms Dugard’s daughters at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday when a campus police officer became suspicious. She ran a background check on him and called his parole officer when she discovered his record. Garrido went into the parole office the following day, accompanied by his wife, Dugard and her two daughters. After a brief interview, the authorities arrested Garrido and his wife.
In a radio interview from his jail cell yesterday, Garrido claimed he had “turned his life around” after the birth of Ms Dugard’s first child 15 years ago. “It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning. But I turned my life completely around,” he said.