Lost and Found (16 page)

THE SECRET BACKYARD

Phillip Garrido was also lying low. On December 16, 1988, he was finally released on federal parole, moving into his mother’s three-bedroom house at 1554 Walnut Avenue, Antioch.

“He came to live with me,” said Pat Franzen in 2009, “because he had nowhere else to go. And Nancy was looking after me, so it seemed the best thing at the time.”

Phillip and Nancy Garrido soon settled down into a comfortable anonymity, and could not have picked a better place for what he had in mind.

Antioch was founded in 1850 by twin brother itinerant ministers William and Joseph Smith. They arrived during the great California gold rush, naming the town Smith’s Landing. But a year later it was overrun by malaria, killing Joseph and most of the population.

Making a fresh start, William Smith threw a town-naming picnic on July 4, 1851, on the bluff overlooking the San Joaquin River. The town’s entire population of thirty-five men, women and children came to decide on a new name for their community. And at Smith’s suggestion they renamed it Antioch, after the fourth-century Syrian city, known as the cradle of Christianity.

In 1859, rich deposits of coal were found in the hills to the south of Antioch, and a prosperous mining industry sprang up. That led to the creation of several new towns around Antioch, including Black Diamond, now renamed Pittsburg.

In 1876, a railroad was built from Antioch to the coal mines, to improve efficiency. And toward the end of the nineteenth century copper ore was discovered, making the town even richer.

The town’s fortunes waned in the twentieth century, as copper supplies ran out and coal mines closed down. This led to an exodus of people leaving Antioch, looking for better opportunities in San Francisco.

By the time Phillip Garrido arrived, Contra Costa County was a modest bedroom community for Oakland and San Francisco, easily accessible through the State Route 4 corridor.

Although on the surface Antioch was a respectable blue-collar city with a population of around 90,000, a large slice of semi-rural unincorporated areas surrounded it and was a throwback to the Wild West. And with its scruffy wooden cabins, trailer homes and crude cinderblock houses, Walnut Avenue was
the
perfect place for Phillip Garrido to slip under the radar of law enforcement.

The unincorporated part of town is the boondocks, stretching for about four miles along the San Joaquin River. There is little if any police presence, as the nearest police station is miles away. There are also no schools, libraries or post offices.

Walnut Avenue and neighboring Viera Avenue, Santa Fe Avenue and Bown Lane are virtual dirt roads without sidewalks. Many driveways are littered with rusting trucks, with chickens roaming around overgrown lawns, reined in by wire mesh fences.

Cheap housing attracts people on the edge of the law, including many coming out of prison. With few opportunities in the rundown area, the main industry is crystal meth, and drug abuse is rampant. There is a proliferation of home-based labs, turning out large quantities of methamphetamine and crack cocaine. It was not quite what the federal parole authorities had in mind when they made it a condition of Phillip Garrido’s bail that he move there to live with his sixty-seven-year-old mother.

In unincorporated Antioch, everybody keeps to themselves, minding their own—often shady—business. And over the next several years, Phillip Garrido would have no trouble transforming his mother’s back garden into a fully functioning prison compound. This time he would do it properly, making sure that police would not stumble into his pleasure palace again, like they had in Reno.

Phillip and Nancy Garrido soon settled into their new lives at 1554 Walnut Avenue. Nancy’s nursing job with the disabled was going well, and although her fellow workers thought her withdrawn and slightly strange, she worked hard and was well-respected.

“She was quiet but she would always talk to me,” remembers Maria Christenson, who worked in the same building. “She worked for the handicapped people and was nice. But I would be the one doing all the talking, she’d be the one nodding or whatever. She never said much.”

Helen Boyer, who lived next door, had been friends with Pat Franzen when her son and daughter-in-law suddenly moved in without any explanation.

“He was always in a hurry,” she said, “and just different. But he was a good neighbor. [Nancy] was distant and I never had a conversation with her. She was just real cordial.”

The federal parole authorities had designated Phillip Garrido moderate risk, placing few restrictions on him. He was required to attend outpatient mental health counseling, but there is no evidence that he ever had a counselor to supervise him. His supervision reports, covering the first three years of his federal parole, were satisfactory, as he logged month after month of “difficulty free” life in the community.

As conditions for his parole, Garrido was now subject to drug testing and was forbidden from drinking alcohol. It would take him more than a year to officially register as a sexual offender, as required by law.

Soon after he arrived at 1554 Walnut Avenue, Phillip Garrido embarked on a series of home improvements. Working under cover of night, Garrido erected an eight-foot fence, as well as planting a line of shrubbery and other foliage, dividing his backyard into two.

“It was just there one day,” remembered Polly White, who shared a back fence with the Garridos. “He also installed a fence that was eight foot high, and the boards overlapped each other. And then in the places where he didn’t have the board he just nailed up pieces of wood. And it was all overgrown.”

Garrido had effectively created a backyard within a backyard, completely screening the large area at the back from the prying eyes of neighbors. Over the next few months, he also built a ten-foot-by-ten-foot soundproofed shed, as well as a primitive outhouse and shower, stringing yards of green electricity cables along the ground from the house for power.

He dragged an old mattress into the soundproofed shed, installed restraints and fitted security bars on all the windows of his mother’s house, to stop law enforcement breaking in.

Occasionally his older brother Ron and his wife would visit the house, and were shocked at how Nancy seemed under Phillip’s control like “a robot.” Years later, their father Manuel Garrido told the
New York Post
that Phillip had once propositioned Ron to have three-way sex with Nancy.

“[Phillip] wanted them to go back and have a threesome at the house,” Manuel would claim. “Ron said no, and Phil then started screaming and asking if Nancy wasn’t good enough for him.”

On November 19, 1988, a few weeks after Phillip Garrido was paroled, nine-year-old Michaela Garecht and her best friend Katrina Rodriguez rode their scooters to the Rainbow Market in Hayward, California. They left the scooters outside the convenience store, going in to buy sodas, beef jerky and taffy.

When they came out a few minutes later, Michaela’s scooter had been moved across the parking lot, by an old battered sedan car about thirty feet away. So the pretty, blonde-haired blue-eyed girl walked over to retrieve it. Suddenly Katrina saw a tall man in his late twenties appear out of nowhere.

“You looking for your scooter?” the man asked. “It’s over by my car.”

Then Michaela screamed as the man suddenly grabbed her and threw her into his car.

“She was just kicking and screaming,” Katrina recalled. “And he shoved her in the car, got in the car himself and pulled out. I just stood and watched, frozen in shock.”

A massive manhunt ensued, but there were no clues except a partial palm print on the missing girl’s scooter. Later Katrina helped a police artist compile a sketch of the abductor. Years later she said it bore an astonishing resemblance to Phillip Garrido, then living just sixteen miles away, in an Oakland halfway house.

Michaela Garecht’s disappearance was the first in a series of mysterious abductions over the next year.

At 3:00
P.M
. on January 30, 1989, thirteen-year-old Ilene Misheloff left Wells Middle School in Dublin, California, to walk home for ice skating practice. The freckled teenager with brown curly hair was last seen walking toward a ditch at Mape Park, commonly used as a shortcut. Later her backpack was found on a path, but Ilene was never seen again.

Although the Alameda Sheriff’s Department interviewed hundreds of suspects after her disappearance, they never questioned convicted abductor and rapist Phillip Garrido, who was living just forty miles away, in Antioch.

Ten months later, six-year-old Jennifer Chia and her eight-year-old brother Charles disappeared into thin air in Reno, Nevada. They were last seen at 3:20
P.M
. October 18, getting off their school bus, by their home at the Timber Hills apartment complex in southwest Reno. It was just three and a half miles away from where Phillip Garrido had once lived. On July 25, 1990, their skeletal remains were discovered off Highway 70 in Plumas County, California—fifty miles west of Reno.

And two months later, seven-year-old Monica DaSilva was snatched from her bed in the middle of the night, as her little brother James slept next to her. Her battered remains were later found in a canyon outside Reno.

It would be another twenty years before detectives reactivated all these cold cases, to see if Phillip Garrido was the man responsible.

Part Two

19

JAYCEE LEE DUGARD

In the summer of 1979, Kenneth Slayton, a ruggedly handsome thirty-three-year-old decorated Vietnam veteran, was going through a difficult divorce. So he went on a camping vacation to Lake Havasu, Arizona, to get away from it all. At the resort he met a twenty-year-old graphic artist named Terry Dugard, embarking on a passionate affair.

“I met Terry at a lake,” remembered Slayton. “I was in the middle of a divorce and we had a fling for about two weeks. She was a very sweet gal.”

After the camping trip the lovers returned to their respective homes, soon losing touch with each other. But about a year later, Slayton heard through friends that Terry had given birth to a baby girl, who looked exactly like him.

But by that time he had met his future wife, and never attempted to see the baby.

On May 3, 1980, Terry Dugard gave birth to a healthy baby girl whom she christened Jaycee Lee. As an unmarried mother, living outside Los Angeles, Terry scrimped and saved, working as an art designer. She brought up Jaycee alone, helped by her sister Tina, a teacher who lived nearby.

Growing up, Jaycee Lee was a striking girl who turned heads with her flaxen blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. She was naturally shy and nervous, with only a few close friends at school.

“[She was] an introverted child,” said Terry. “Very shy, but once she did make friends she made them for life. She would pull you into her own little world.”

When Jaycee was seven years old, Terry married a handsome forty-year-old carpet contractor named Carl Probyn, who was also a Vietnam vet. They moved into a house in the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove.

At first Jaycee resented her new stepfather, feeling he was coming between her and Terry.

“My wife and [Jaycee] were more like sisters,” explained Carl, “because I didn’t come in her life until she was about seven years old. I used to tease them that I couldn’t get a quarter between them on the couch. They were really close.”

Terry soon became pregnant again, giving birth in 1989 to a baby girl they named Shayna. Nine-year-old Jaycee adored her baby sister, often helping her busy mother take care of her.

In June 1990, the Probyn family vacationed in Lake Tahoe, falling in love with its serene rural beauty and deciding it would be the perfect place to bring up their family.

“The mountains and the clean air and a small town,” said Carl, “someplace where we’d be safe. Where the kids would be safe.”

The Probyns now saw their future living in the idyllic lakeside resort, on the Nevada-California border. Every summer the low-crime town drew gamblers and beach lovers, replaced by skiers and snowboarders in the winter. With a population of just 25,000, it had a friendly small-town atmosphere where everybody knew everybody. And Carl and Terry agreed it would be far safer than the concrete big city.

“We just decided to take the chance and move up there,” said Carl, who soon found work, hanging wallpaper and working nights at the American Legion Hall.

That September, the Probyn family moved into a house on tree-lined Washoan Boulevard in the peaceful South Lake Tahoe suburb of Meyers. Jaycee was now ten years old and her baby sister Shayna was eighteen months.

A few weeks after they arrived, Terry enrolled Jaycee in the fifth grade of the Meyers Elementary School. At first she found it hard being the new girl in town, and her teachers were concerned.

“Jaycee was very quiet,” recalled her fifth-grade teacher, Sue Louis. “I remember having to talk to her mom about trying to encourage her to raise her hand more, because even if she knew the answer, she didn’t want to raise her hand.”

The bashful, introverted girl also had problems making friends.

“She was a new kid,” said her fifth-grade classmate Nicole Sipes, “so she didn’t have a lot of friends. [She was] very soft-spoken . . . kind of kept to herself a little bit.”

But Jaycee was highly intelligent, inheriting her mother’s artistic gifts.

“She was a decent student,” recalled Meyers Elementary School principal Karen Gillis-Tinlin. “She was well liked but didn’t have a lot of friends.”

But Jaycee enthusiastically joined in many school activities, becoming a Girl Scout and playing on the soccer team.

That holiday season, Carl Probyn put up a Christmas tree in the front room, and Terry and Jaycee helped trim it. Since moving to South Lake Tahoe, Jaycee’s relationship with her stepfather had improved dramatically, and she had now accepted him as her father.

On Christmas morning a smiling Terry donned a Santa hat, as Carl shot home movies of an excited Jaycee and Shayna opening their presents.