Suspicious behaviour on a university campus led to Jaycee Lee Dugard's, discovery, writes DENIS STAUNTON, Washington Correspondent
JAYCEE LEE Dugard would check the clock on the microwave every morning and at precisely 8.05am, the blond 11-year-old would start the short walk to her school bus stop in California’s South Lake Tahoe. Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, watched Jaycee leave on the morning of June 10th, 1991, dressed in pink shorts and a pink top.
Suddenly, a car made a U-turn, stopped next to Jaycee and as the door was flung open, she was dragged inside. That was the last time her family saw Jaycee until she arrived home this week as a 29-year-old woman with two children aged 11 and 15.
Police say that, in the intervening 18 years, Jaycee had been held in a makeshift complex of sheds and tents, where she was raped by a convicted sex offender who fathered her two children.
“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.
Her alleged abductors, Phillip Garrido (58) and his wife Nancy (54), were arrested this week on suspicion of kidnapping and various sex charges. Garrido had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1976 and had been on parole since his release from prison in 1988.
Jaycee might never have been found if a campus police officer had not become suspicious last Tuesday when she saw Garrido distributing religious literature at the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by Jaycee’s two children.
“A UC police officer observed them and thought the interaction between the older male and the two young females was rather suspicious,” Kollar said.
The officer ordered a background check on Garrido and when she found out that he was a convicted sex offender, she notified his parole officer. Garrido walked into the parole office a day later, along with his wife, Jaycee and her daughters.
“During interviews with the three of them – the two suspects and Jaycee – sufficient information was determined from all three of them that Jaycee was who she was purported to be and that these two people had information that only the kidnappers could have known,” Mr Kollar said.
When police went to Garrido’s house in a San Francisco suburb, they found a “backyard within a backyard” with two tents, two sheds, a shower and an outhouse hidden by a fence lined with trees, rubbish bins and an old dishwasher.
The biggest shed was 3.05m by 3.05m(10ft by 10ft), and none of the structures, which were powered by electrical cords run out from Garrido’s house, was taller than 1.83m (6ft). One shed was soundproofed and could only be opened from the outside and the only access to the hidden warren of structures was through a gap in the fence that was draped with an old tarpaulin.
“The way the house is set up, the way the backyard is set up, you could walk through the backyard, walk through the house, and never know,” Mr Kollar said. He added that Jaycee was taken to the house immediately after she was abducted, that her two children were born there and that there was no evidence that she ever left the home before this week.
Probyn, whose marriage to Jaycee’s mother ended after the kidnapping, said yesterday that his wife told him she looked almost like she did when she was kidnapped. “She looks very young, she looks very healthy,” he said.
“She told me that Jaycee feels really guilty for bonding with this guy. She has a real guilt trip.”
Police said there was no indication that Jaycee had ever tried to escape from her captors or attempted to make contact with Garrido’s neighbours, none of whom knew she was in his house. “She was in good health, but living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll,” Mr Kollar said. Garrido, who ran a printing business from his home, claimed in a blog registered in his name that God had given him the ability “to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world”.
He was convicted of kidnapping a 25-year-old woman whom he snatched from a South Lake Tahoe parking lot, handcuffed, tied down and held in a mini-warehouse in Reno, Nevada. He also has a conviction for rape by force or fear stemming from the same incident.
In a radio interview from jail yesterday, Garrido said he had not admitted to kidnapping Jaycee and claimed he had changed since she bore his first daughter 15 years ago. “I tell you here’s the story of what took place at this house and you’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning. But I turned my life completely around,” he said.
“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.”