Jaycee Lee Dugard's story contains many disturbing details of her 18 years of imprisonment, but also of a system that made it easier to keep her and her daughters hidden. LARA MARLOWE, Washington Correspondent, reports
PHILLIP AND NANCY GARRIDO, the California husband and wife charged with kidnapping Jaycee Lee Dugard and imprisoning her for the past 18 years, are accused of forcing their victim to participate in their fantasy that she, Starlet and Angel – the daughters to whom Jaycee gave birth after being raped by Garrido – formed a cohesive family unit. The Garridos called Jaycee “Allissa” and employed her in the printing business they ran from their house. Dugard’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, has said that Jaycee feels guilty for having “bonded” with her captors. Starlet (now aged 15) and Angel (11) believed that Jaycee was their sister and Nancy Garrido their mother. They wept when their “parents” were arrested.
Jaycee’s mother, Terry Probyn, had kept the girl’s description of herself as a lover of cats on the wall of the child’s bedroom in South Lake Tahoe, California. In the ramshackle collection of shacks, tents and tarpaulins that was Jaycee’s backyard prison in the Garridos’ residence in Antioch, police found a shelf of cat books and magazines and a cat jigsaw puzzle – gifts from her tormentors and would-be “parents”.
After his arrest, 58-year-old Phillip Garrido gave a telephone interview to Sacramento TV station, KCRA. “In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story, one in which you’re going to be really impressed,” he said. “It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning . . . The last several years I completely turned my life around and you’re going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim . . . It is a story about turning a person’s life around and having those two children, those two girls, they slept in my arms every single night. I never touched them.”
Nancy Garrido’s lawyer, Gilbert Maines, has received death threats for defending her. He said the childless 54-year-old woman “misses the girls . . . Her feeling was they had become a family. They acted like a family. It seems strange given the circumstances, but that’s it. She’s distraught, frightened, and appeared to be a little lost.”
Ally Jacobs, the security officer on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, whose intuition led to the Garridos’ arrest and the liberation of Jaycee, Starlet and Angel on August 28th, gave a haunting description of the girls when she spotted them walking on the campus with their father.
“The younger daughter was staring directly at me, as if she was looking into my soul, with this eerie smile on her face,” Jacobs told ABC News. “I just got a weird, uneasy feeling.”
Jacobs wanted to make sure the girls were all right. "It was like a wall, like talking to a robot almost. It was more like they were programmed. The older one almost had pride in her father, she was just looking at him like he was a superstar. They had this weird look in their eyes like brainwashed zombies. Their clothes were almost like Little House on the Prairie-type attire. They were very pale, with long hair, bright blue eyes. I commented that they had the same blue eyes that he had, intensely blue."
JACOBS FOUND GARRIDO'Sname on the government register of sex offenders. She called his parole officer and said she had seen Garrido with his daughters. "He doesn't have any daughters," the parole officer said.
Garrido became increasingly unstable in the run-up to his arrest. On August 26th, he delivered a rambling letter to the FBI office in San Francisco – it was filled with Biblical quotations and purported to reveal a secret cure for “sexual predators”. Then, by taking Jaycee, Starlet and Angel with him and Nancy to an appointment with his parole officer on August 28th, Garrido virtually turned himself in.
His victims were united with Jaycee’s mother, Terry Probyn. Probyn’s ex-husband, Carl, who witnessed the kidnapping and had long been considered a suspect, said his step-daughter looked almost as she had at the age of 11, as if she’d grown up in a time warp.
Tina Dugard, Jaycee's aunt, told the Orange County Registerof her emotion at seeing her sister brush and plait her niece's long blonde hair after 18 years. Dugard, a schoolteacher, said Jaycee is a "fabulous, beautiful" woman of 29, and that her daughters seem normal for their ages. "It's clear they've been on the internet and know a lot of things," the aunt told the newspaper. "It's clear that Jaycee did a great job with the limited resources she had and her limited education."
Garrido was in his teens and early 20s when he started taking large amounts of LSD, hashish and cocaine during California’s flower-power era. His father, Manuel, who lives in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood, said his son was a “good boy” until he fell in with the wrong crowd, went “absolutely out of his mind” and Manuel lost contact with him.
Garrido’s first wife left him in 1973, citing his excessive drug use. It has emerged that he was arrested in 1972 for raping a 14-year-old girl, but never faced prosecution because the victim refused to testify in court. In 1976, he stopped Katie Callaway Hall in a supermarket parking lot, claiming his car had broken down. Hall says letting him into her car was “the most horrible mistake of my life”. He smashed her head on to the steering wheel, pulled the keys out of the ignition, forced her into the passenger seat, handcuffed her, and tied her head to her knees, then drove her to a shed which he had prepared as a “sex palace”, with pornography, sex toys and a mattress. Garrido raped Hall for eight hours before a policeman happened on the scene.
THIS WEEK, POLICEdistanced themselves from speculation that Garrido was involved in the murders of nine women and girls in the San Francisco Bay area between 1998 and 2002. At the time of his 1977 trial for the abduction and rape of Hall, he told a psychiatrist that he used LSD and cocaine as sexual stimulants and often masturbated next to "grammar schools and high schools, and in my own car, while I was watching young females".
Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in prison for his assault on Hall, but was set free on parole in 1988. In 1981, he met and married Nancy Bocanegra, a prison visitor and licensed nurse’s assistant. One morning 10 years later, the couple drove inland, to South Lake Tahoe in the Sierra mountain range, spotted a pretty blonde girl dressed all in pink, made a U-turn in their old Ford and stopped. Jaycee screamed as Nancy Garrido grabbed her and pulled her into the car. The Garridos took the 11-year-old schoolgirl back to their bungalow in Walnut Avenue, Antioch, a working-class white suburb of San Francisco.
Police consider Nancy Garrido an equal partner in Phillip Garrido’s crimes. When Phillip served five months in prison for a parole violation in 1993, Nancy is believed to have guarded Jaycee. With her nursing experience, she is assumed to have delivered Starlet and Angel. Nancy Garrido was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and Phillip became increasingly religious after his years in prison. Her brother-in-law described her as a “robot” who “would do anything” her husband asked. The Garridos’ next-door neighbour, Damon Robinson, said Nancy “was like a hermit, she looked like she had no spirit”.
The Dugard case has reminded the US that more than 58,000 children are abducted by strangers each year (according to Department of Justice estimates). Most cases are resolved within 24 hours, but some 115 of those kidnapped children are killed or never found.
There are 674,000 registered sex offenders in the US, and 65,000 in California alone. Two laws, named after girls who were raped and murdered, are meant to limit repeat offences. Under Megan’s Law, the public can check the record of any sex offender on the internet. Jessica’s Law, which has been passed by voters in California and many other states, bans sex offenders from living within 2,000ft of a school or park where children play.
The result of the laws has been to create what are virtually paedophile ghettos, of which Antioch is now the most notorious: 115 convicted sex offenders live in the small town, 102 in Garrido's postal zip code area alone. Daniel Terry, an official at the county sheriff's office, told the Los Angeles Timeshe has one detective to keep 350 sex offenders under surveillance. The sheer scale of the problem, and the inadequate resources devoted to fighting it, goes some of the way to explaining why Jaycee Lee Dugard's torment lasted so long.