Lost and Found (10 page)

“Can you remember any of the conversation that you had during this time?” asked the prosecutor.

“Yes,” she replied, as the jury hung on her every word. “I asked him, ‘Why me?’ And he said, ‘Well, it wasn’t you intentionally; could have been anyone. It just happened that you happened to be attractive, and that is a fault in your case.’

“And I asked him what aspect of this rape . . . that he got off on. And he said that he didn’t get off on pain; it was just a fantasy that he had to live out. And he had his fantasies. He had a very heavy sexual life with his wife. He was very happy, but it was just something that he had to do. And that his wife was the only one that knew where he was and what he was doing.”

When she began to tell the jury about how Phillip Garrido had viciously raped her in his Reno warehouse, defender Van Hazel objected, calling it irrelevant.

“The necessary elements,” he told Judge Thompson, “as outlined in the government’s opening statement, is an unlawful seizure and a kidnapping. [This] was consummated when she got to that gas station.”

The prosecutor argued the issue was the defendant’s “state of mind,” and the events in the shed were why he had abducted her in the first place.

Judge Thompson overruled the objection, and Lutfy asked Katie what had happened inside the warehouse.

“Do you want me to go into the rape?” she asked.

“Your Honor,” said Garrido’s attorney, rising to his feet, “I object to the characterization ‘rape.’ I believe rape is something that the jury will conclude in this case, whether it occurred or did not occur.”

“She can call it what she wants,” declared Judge Thompson.

Then Katie described once again what Phillip Garrido had done to her to satisfy his perverted sexual fantasies.

“The sexual intercourse activity was constant,” she told the jury. “He ejaculated maybe three times, twice inside of me, once on top.”

“How long would you estimate, if you can,” asked the prosecutor, “did these sexual activities take place?”

“Approximately five and a half hours,” she replied. “He had a radio on and I would hear the Reno station say, ‘This is Reno.’ And I would hear them say the time. I heard them say twelve-something. Then I heard them say two-twenty something, right before the officer came in.”

There had been a loud bang on the warehouse door, she told the jury, and Garrido had put on his jeans to investigate.

“He came back in and said, ‘I think it’s the heat,’ ” she said. “ ‘Are you going to maintain? Are you going to be good?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll be good.’ ”

At first she thought it was a setup, but had decided to take a chance, literally fighting her way through the series of hanging carpet walls and out of the warehouse naked, screaming for help.

She described her abject frustration, when the uniformed police officer standing outside with her abductor and rapist did not appear to take her seriously.

“They both looked at me like I was insane,” she testified. “I just stood out there in the freezing cold, while the officer [asked] what was going on.”

Then to her horror the officer ordered her back into the warehouse to dress, before allowing Garrido to follow her inside.

She told the jury she was “terrified” Garrido would now take her hostage, but instead he began “begging” her not to tell on him, because it would be so embarrassing. Finally she had dashed out again half-naked, with the officer this time telling her to sit in his car until backup arrived and Garrido was arrested.

In his cross-examination, Willard Van Hazel asked Callaway if she had been provocatively dressed at Ink’s Al Tahoe Market, when Garrido had first seen her.

“Was your jacket zipped while you were in the store?” he asked.

“I don’t remember,” she replied.

“Were you wearing a brassiere that night?”

“No.”

Then Garrido’s defender asked if his client had ever threatened her with a weapon.

“The only weapon,” she replied, “was a pair of scissors [which] he cut my pubic hairs with.”

Van Hazel said he assumed that after his client overpowered and handcuffed her, she had done everything she could not to antagonize him.

“I was completely passive,” replied Callaway. “I was trying to deal with the whole situation as logically as I could, without allowing terror to take over completely. I do have a son and that makes you think twice.”

“All right,” said the defense attorney. “Now, what were the things that put you in fear?”

“The fact of being bound,” she replied. “My hands handcuffed. My head strapped to my knees and being at the complete mercy of someone I had no idea what they were going to do with me, or what was going on in their minds at the time. I could go on and on.”

Van Hazel then asked if she had offered his client sex while they were still in California.

“Yes, I did,” she answered. “I asked him, ‘Couldn’t we just pull over to the side of the road and get it over with,’ because, you know, every girl has to think about rape sometime.”

Later in his questioning, Van Hazel asked if Garrido had ever mentioned his wife’s job.

“He said she was a [21] dealer,” she replied. “I asked him why he told me that if he didn’t want me to do anything about him. He also told me his name was Bill, and then he slipped up later on and he said, ‘My wife said Phil the other day.’ But I continued to call him Bill, so he wouldn’t . . . think that I knew his real name.”

Then Van Hazel wanted to know if she had discussed her own sexual fantasies, after his client mentioned his.

“I completely went along with everything,” she told the jury. “I said, ‘Oh yes. Oh I like that too.’ I tried to completely stay on good terms with him. ‘I’m all for what you’re doing.’ ”

“And this was part of that passive role?” asked Van Hazel.

“That was it,” she replied.

“In that conversation then,” continued Garrido’s attorney, “did you say you often wondered what it would be like to be raped?”

“Every girl thinks about that, yes.”

“But did you say that to the defendant, Mr. Garrido?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Callaway. “I said, ‘If everything you are telling me is true, that you are not going to hurt me, that all you want to do is give me pleasure and just make me feel good, even though you have abducted me under force, I guess it is not going to be so bad.’ ”

The public defender then asked if his client had discussed religion on their way to Reno.

“Yes,” she answered, “he talked about Jesus. He said he was going to turn himself over to Jesus next year.”

After a fifteen-minute recess, Katie Callaway retook the stand, and Van Hazel asked if on the drive to Reno she had told his client she wanted a marijuana joint.

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “I said, ‘Gee, I sure wish I had a joint right now,’ meaning it sarcastically to relax my nerves. He said, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got some stuff back at the shed that will just blow your head away.’ ”

Callaway said that when they got to the warehouse she had smoked some of Garrido’s hash, which had been a mistake.

“[It was] very strong,” she said. “It intensified all my paranoid feelings extremely. And I didn’t smoke it any more.”

Late that afternoon, William Emery took the stand. Under direct questioning he told prosecutor Leland Lutfy that he had lived in an adjoining Mill Street storage shed to Phillip Garrido.

The taxi driver told the jury he had met Garrido soon after moving in, and they had become friendly.

“He asked if I would watch his shed,” Emery testified, “and make sure that nobody broke in or anything, because he played music.”

Garrido had then told him which vehicles were allowed in front of his shed, giving him a phone number to call if he saw anything suspicious.

The prosecutor then asked what he had been doing on the night of November 22. Emery said he had arrived back in Mill Steet and seen a blue Pinto with California plates parked in front of Garrido’s mini-warehouse.

He had then gone inside his unit to change clothes, letting his dogs out for a walk.

“Then I went over to his shed,” he told the jury. “I figured he was there, so I went over and knocked twice. The hasp was down so I knew somebody was in there.”

When there was no reply, Emery sat outside for the next hour watching, while his dogs played outside. He then got a pen and paper from inside his shed, writing down the Pinto license plate number before going to a nearby service station to call Garrido’s home.

When there was no answer, he had jumped on his bicycle and cycled to Garrido’s home in Market Street, three blocks away. And when there was no answer there, he cycled back to Mill Street and went to bed.

In his cross-examination, Willard Van Hazel cryptically asked if his client would have been able to score marijuana from anyone within a five-minute range of his shed.

“You did not give Mr. Garrido any grass on that night?” asked the defender.

“No, I didn’t,” replied Emery.

“Have you on other occasions?”

At that point, the prosecutor objected, saying it was irrelevant, and Judge Thompson agreed.

At 4:30
P.M
. Judge Thompson recessed for the day, telling the jury to return the next morning.

12

“
HE IS FOLLOWING A PATTERN
”

At 9:30 the next morning—February 10—Reno Police officer Clifford Conrad took the stand. Under prosecutor Leland Lutfy’s questioning, he told the jury how he had been patrolling Mill Street at around 2:30
A.M
. on November 23, when he saw a suspicious out-of-town vehicle parked outside Unit 39.

“The vehicle shouldn’t have been there at that time of the morning,” he testified. “So I checked further and found the lock on the warehouse broken off.”

He then tried to open the warehouse door, but it would only rise four inches, so he started banging on it. Eventually Phillip Garrido appeared and rolled it up.

Asked if he rented the warehouse, Garrido said he rented it from a friend who lived over in Market Street.

“He said he had lost the key,” said Conrad. “I asked him for his date of birth and things like that . . . just everything to check [his] story.”

“Was he able to respond to each of your questions?” asked Lutfy.

“Yes, sir, he was,” replied the officer.

“Did he respond coherently?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then while he was questioning Garrido, Katie Callaway’s head appeared from behind a plastic curtain, pleading for help. Then she ran out of the warehouse stark naked and stationed herself behind the astonished policeman, who asked her what she wanted.

“Help me!” she told Officer Conrad. “He is trying to rape me.”

Officer Conrad then told the jury he had sent Callaway back into the warehouse to dress, permitting Garrido to follow her back inside.

“Why did you allow Mr. Garrido to go back into that warehouse,” asked Lutfy, “when Miss Callaway was in there?”

“I was led to believe by Mr. Garrido,” explained Conrad, “that he was married and lived down the street and that was his girlfriend.”

“Is that what Mr. Garrido said to you?” asked the prosecutor.

“He implied that,” said the officer. “He didn’t come out exactly and say that.”

“How did he imply that?”

“He said he did live down the street, he was married, and this was a friend of his. And he even called her ‘Kathy.’ ”

Although up to then Garrido had answered his questions, he now became “evasive” when asked about the naked girl.

“I asked him how long he knew the victim and where he met her,” the officer told the jury, “and he said, ‘I don’t have to answer that.’ ”

For the rest of the morning, the jury heard from a series of government experts, testifying that laboratory tests had proved positive for small quantities of cannabis, marijuana and LSD found in the warehouse. And samples of Katie Callaway’s pubic hair were consistent with ones found on clothing in Garrido’s warehouse and on a pair of his scissors, although none of her hairs were discovered in samples of the defendant’s public hair.

Just after 11:00
A.M
., the United States government rested its case. And after the jury was dismissed for lunch, defense attorney Willard Van Hazel raised the possibility of Phillip Garrido incriminating himself for the upcoming Washoe County trial, if he now took the stand in this one.

“Your Honor,” Van Hazel told the judge, “Mr. Garrido and I have conferred about trial strategy.”

The defender explained he had “cautioned” his client of the necessity for him to testify to the jury, in order to establish his psychiatric defense.

“If he takes the stand,” said Van Hazel, “to sustain that defense of not knowing that what he did at the time was morally wrong, that he exposes himself to incrimination on outstanding charges in the state of Nevada . . . carrying major penalties.”

Then Lutfy told Judge Thompson that if the defendant did take the stand, the jury should be told about his unsuccessful attempt to kidnap another young woman prior to Katie Callaway, in order to show a pattern of behavior.

“The defense is coming up with the insanity, or some kind of defense, based on LSD abuse, as I understand it,” argued Lutfy. “That this man was in some kind of fantasy, could not differentiate between fantasy and reality. We think by pointing to and questioning the defendant about specific acts prior to this incident, we can show he is following a pattern of attempting to kidnap and attempting to, and raping, other women. And we do have . . . information of other acts by this defendant.”

Pointing out that any evidence of prior acts would be “prejudicial,” the judge asked why the prosecution wanted to offer it.

“I think to show the fact that he has the intent prior,” said Lutfy, “and this is a consistent act.”

“How does it bear on intent,” asked the judge, “if he claims that he has been using LSD for four years, and that he is spaced out, or whatever they call it?”

The prosecutor replied there was no evidence that Garrido had taken LSD that night, and did not know what he was doing.

“We can show a similar pattern of behavior in a prior offense relative to the handcuffs, the whole thing is there,” said Lutfy. “I think, again, it goes to intent. The jury has the right to see that and determine whether or not this man was fantasizing one time or whether or not this was a thought-out plan of kidnapping and raping women.”