PHILIP AND Nancy Garrido, the couple who kidnapped, raped and imprisoned a Californian schoolgirl, then held her captive for 18 years, are likely to die in prison.
Philip Garrido, now 60, “lacks a soul,” Judge Douglas Phimister said when sentencing him to 431 years in prison yesterday.
“What you have done is beyond horrible.” Nancy Garrido snatched 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard from a street in South Lake Tahoe on June 10th, 1991, as she walked to her school bus stop. And it was she who delivered the two daughters whom Dugard bore in captivity, the first when she was 14 years-old, the second at age 17.
Nancy Garrido, now 55, was sentenced to between 36 years and life in prison.
Ms Dugard and her daughters were kept in a ramshackle warren in the back garden of the Garridos’ home in a suburb of San Francisco. They were freed in August 2009, after Philip Garrido’s behaviour on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley raised suspicions.
The couple pleaded guilty in April, so that Ms Dugard, now 31, would not have to testify against them. Both waived their right of appeal. Garrido’s wife’s lawyer said their crimes were the result of their addiction to methamphetamine.
Ms Dugard did not attend yesterday’s court session, but her mother, Terry Probyn, read a statement from her.
“I chose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence,” Ms Dugard wrote to Philip Garrido.
“I hated every second of every day of 18 years because of you. There is no God in the universe who would condone your actions. You stole my life and that of my family.”
Ms Dugard's memoir, A Stolen Life, will be released by Simon Schuster on July 12th. The state of California awarded her damages last year because parole agents failed to monitor Philip Garrido, a convicted sex offender.
Before the Garridos were sentenced in Placerville, California, Ms Probyn told the court of her own suffering, while the Garridos sat impassively, their hands in the pockets of their orange prison jumpsuits.
“How could someone take away the one person in the world I loved so deeply?” Ms Probyn asked, weeping.
“Where is she? Is she hungry? Is she cold? Is she hurt? My baby was gone and all my dreams turned to nightmares. She was a vulnerable child and I was unable to help her. During 18 years away, I could hear her crying, not with my ears, but with my heart. I could feel her pain, not with my body, but with my heart . . . I lived in hell on earth. It was you, Nancy Garrido and Philip Garrido, that broke my heart.”