MEDIA ATTENTION in the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the California woman who was kidnapped at the age of 11 and held in a squalid, backyard encampment in Antioch, a suburb of San Francisco, for 18 years, has turned to the psychological question of why Dugard did not escape from her captor, Phillip Garrido.
Dugard adopted the name Allissa and worked in the Garridos’ home printing business, answering the telephone and waiting on clients. One customer, Bill Daughrill, told the Associated Press he saw Dugard twice in the past six months when he stopped by the Garridos’ home to fetch office supplies. Dugard walked out to his vehicle alone, and could have escaped or sought his help, he said: “There was a reason she did not say anything.”
Experts believe that Garrido controlled Dugard by making her totally dependent on him, and possibly by making her believe that he and his wife Nancy, who has also been charged with her abduction, were her family.
“In some cases, the person eventually becomes somewhat thankful for whatever they do receive and knows that the person could kill them, but didn’t,” JoAnn Behrman-Lippert, a psychologist who specialises in cases of child abduction, told USA Today. “For many people, the most important part is survival . . . If people are captive, they have to figure out what to do to please their captor so they are not further harmed.”
Ms Dugard’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, told BBC Radio 5 that Jaycee survived by bonding with her kidnapper: “Jaycee was a very mellow girl. She didn’t cry. She had kids (with Garrido) and . . . it’s the Stockholm syndrome.”
The term “Stockholm syndrome” refers to bank staff who were held captive for six days in Sweden in 1973. The hostages resisted rescue, refused to testify against their kidnappers and raised money for their legal defence.
The most famous US case of Stockholm syndrome was that of Patty Hearst, a newspaper heiress who was kidnapped in 1974 by a revolutionary group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst joined the group, was photographed in camouflage fatigues holding an assault rifle, and participated in bank robberies. After serving a prison sentence, she married her prison guard.
The Dugard case has cast doubt on the passage of legislation in the California state assembly that would have cut the state’s budget deficit by $1.2 billion by freeing 27,000 convicts on an early parole programme. Garrido was arrested in 1976 and convicted of kidnapping and raping a 25-year-old woman. Though sentenced to 50 years in prison, he was paroled in 1988, and equipped with an electronic device that enabled police to follow his movements.
Police continue to search the garden of the house next door, which Garrido looked after until 2006. Police believe he may be connected to nine murders in the San Francisco Bay area between 1998 and 2002, just seven miles from his home.