Lost and Found (2 page)

If only law enforcement had heeded Katie’s desperate pleas, little Jaycee might have been spared her terrible eighteen-year ordeal.

Over the years, while Jaycee and her daughters Starlit and Angel lived in squalor hidden away in his backyard, the authorities missed many opportunities to catch the sexual predators and free their captives. And they would almost certainly still be there if the increasingly delusional Garrido had not virtually given himself up, seeking a world stage to preach his bizarre religious beliefs.

Perhaps the only precedent for this strange case is Austria’s Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his own daughter Elizabeth for almost a quarter of a century, fathering her seven children. In 2008 I wrote a book about the case,
Secrets in the Cellar
, but in many ways the Jaycee Lee Dugard tragedy is even more disturbing and heartbreaking, as it should never have happened in the first place.

Lost and Found
is the result of ten months of exhaustive research and countless interviews. In it I have attempted to explore what went wrong with the system, allowing such a dangerous sexual predator back on the streets to commit the outrageous crimes with which he has been charged.

In September 2009, I visited Antioch and spoke to many people with first-hand knowledge of Phillip and Nancy Garrido, some of whom wished to remain anonymous.

I would like to thank: Tim Allen, Deepal Karunaratne, Lorenzo Love, Christine Mecham, Maria Christenson, Murray Sexton and Tony Garcia of the Bridgehead Café, Lt. Jim Lardieri, Michael Cardoza, Phillip Sherlwell, retired detective Dan DeMaranville, Janice Dietrick, Janice Gomes, Marc Lister, Victor Acosta, Eddie Loebs, Tommy Wilson-O’Brien, Jim and Cheyvonne Molino, Wayne Thompson, Betty Upingco, Polly White and Carol Lloyd of the Washoe County Library System.

As always, I would also like to thank my editors at St. Martin’s Paperbacks, Charles Spicer and Yaniv Soha, for their unstinting support and the superb job they always do.

Gratitude also to Gail, Jerome and Emily Freund, Debbie, Douglas and Taylor Baldwin, Trudy Gerstner, Henry Kaufman, Charlie Chen, Danny and Allie Tractenberg, Cari Pokrassa, Milda Koueder, Providence Juca, Alex Hitchens, Virginia Randall, Ena Bissell and Annette Witheridge.

Prologue

June 1991

Phillip and Nancy Garrido had spent months preparing. Behind the white picket fence that surrounded the middle-aged couple’s three-bedroom cinder block home, less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco, there was anticipation and excitement.

Always obsessive, Phillip had worked hard on his most ambitious project to date. He had divided the acre of land behind his house into two parts, creating a backyard within a backyard. At the front he had planted shrubbery, trees, and built an eight-foot fence to conceal the rear half from his neighbors. This he had transformed into a kind of concentration camp, installing an escape-proof shed.

The onetime rock musician had carefully soundproofed it with foam insulation, to muffle any sounds. Alongside it he’d constructed a primitive outhouse and shower, laying green high-voltage electricity cables all the way from his house for power.

It was in this shed that the Garridos would hold their captive. For they intended to kidnap a young girl to act as both their sex slave and the bearer of their children.

This wouldn’t be the first time the six-foot, four-inch Phillip Garrido had snatched an innocent young girl off the streets to satisfy his uncontrollable appetite for sex. But fifteen years earlier, in Reno, Nevada, it had ended badly. High on LSD, he’d been raping and sodomizing his unfortunate victim for five hours when a policeman arrived at his mini-warehouse and caught him red-handed. Even hardened detectives were shocked by the extraordinary lengths he had taken to prepare that early version of his prison, equipping it with flashing stage lights, a bed, sex toys, explicit magazines and copious quantities of wine and drugs.

“It looked like a scene from a porno flick,” recalled retired detective Dan DeMaranville. “He actually used a pair of scissors to shave off her pubic hair.”

After federal and state trials, Garrido had been sentenced to fifty years to life in prison. But the master manipulator had managed to beat the system, getting out after only eleven years.

It was while caged inside the tough Leavenworth Federal Prison that he’d first met Nancy Bocanegra, a devout Jehovah’s Witness there visiting her uncle. From his cell he had courted her with letters, and they eventually fell in love. In 1981 they were married in a jailhouse ceremony by a nondenominational pastor.

Several years later, the wily Garrido persuaded a parole board he had found God behind bars, and he was freed on parole. Heading west with his new wife to Antioch, California, they had moved into his mother’s house. But when Nancy discovered she could not have children, Phillip persuaded her to help him kidnap a young girl to bear their children.

It was God’s will, he explained, that they start a family.

One afternoon in early June 1991, the Garridos set off in their old gray two-door sedan, driving three hours east to South Lake Tahoe, California, where Phillip once lived. They were searching for a prepubescent female, who would be easier to handle than an older one. But just in case she put up a fight, they had brought a stun gun.

By the time they arrived at the picturesque ski resort 6,200 feet high in the Sierras, the schools were letting out for the day. Phillip drove through town until he spotted a pretty elementary school pupil getting off the school bus, and drew up behind her.

Amelia Edwards still remembers the sound of the tires pulling onto the dirt road behind her.

“[It] turned my stomach and sent chills down my spine,” said Amelia, who was then eleven years old. “I remember walking faster, hearing the tires go faster. So I ran home.”

But she did manage to get a good look at the battered old car and its occupants—an “Arab-looking woman” with dark hair and a man—before they drove off at high speed.

After returning to Antioch to regroup, the Garridos returned the following Sunday to hunt for new prey. It was late afternoon when they arrived in Meyers, California—five miles outside South Lake Tahoe.

Before long Phillip Garrido saw her for the first time, skipping along a street with a couple of school friends. He immediately knew he had to have her.

“She’s perfect,” he told his wife, Nancy.

Jaycee Lee Dugard was the sort of little girl Garrido had always lusted over. The blue-eyed, blonde-pigtailed child had the innocent smile of an angel and was just a month past her eleventh birthday.

The predators then followed as Jaycee went into an arts fair, getting out of the car and going inside to watch her from a distance. Then they followed her out of the fair, watching her wave goodbye to her friends and walk up Washoan Boulevard to her home and go inside.

They then drove off up the hill to wait until the next morning, when she would be alone and vulnerable.

Monday, June 10, was the beginning of the last week of the school year. It was a typical morning in Jaycee’s household. Jaycee’s mother Terry was running late, so she left for work in a hurry, without kissing her eldest daughter goodbye. It would haunt her for years.

Jaycee got ready for school. She showered and put on her favorite pink sweater and stretch pants, white blouse and white sneakers. Then after looking in on her baby sister Shayna, who was sleeping soundly, the fifth-grader checked the clock on the microwave oven, which read 8:05
A.M
.

Jaycee’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, was working in the garage when he saw her come out of the house. After saying goodbye he watched from his window as she walked out of the driveway, skipping up the steep pine-studded hill toward the school bus stop, three blocks away on Pioneer Trail.

It was a beautiful sunny morning without a cloud in the sky. There was just a dusting of snow on the dreamy Sierra mountains, rising above the town.

While he watched Jaycee go up the hill, Probyn was suddenly aware of a two-tone silver Ford, slowly driving by and making a U-turn below his driveway. Then it headed back up the winding hill toward Jaycee. As it passed by his house, Probyn got a good look at the female passenger—an olive-skinned woman with straight black hair. His initial thoughts were that they were probably lost and needed directions.

Then he watched as the car reached the top of the hill, drawing alongside Jaycee. Suddenly, it turned sharply and screeched to a halt to cut her off. He heard Jaycee scream, as the passenger door was flung open. Then to his horror, he saw the woman grab Jaycee and drag her into the car, which sped off up the hill, disappearing in a cloud of dust.

Part One

1

“
THE BABY OF THE FAMILY
”

Phillip Craig Garrido was born in Pittsburg, California, on April 5, 1951, to Manuel and Pat Garrido. His brother Ron was seven years older and the two brothers would never be close. The Garridos were a lower-middle-class family. Manuel worked as a forklift operator and Patricia as a secretary.

In the early 1950s, Pittsburg was a largely middle-class rural town, forty miles northeast of San Francisco. Originally known as Black Diamond for its rich coal deposits, the town lay on the busy State Route 4 highway, carrying commuters to Oakland and San Francisco.

“I had been raised in the country and lived in a very clean house,” Phillip wrote in 1978. “I was the baby of the family and spoiled in the long run.”

When Phillip was small, Manuel moved his family fifteen miles east on Route 4 to Brentwood. There they lived in a tiny house at the end of a dirt road, with Phillip sharing a room with Ron.

“Phillip and his brother Ron were good boys when growing up,” said their mother Pat. “But I always wished I could have had a daughter.”

Manuel Garrido was a strict father who often disciplined his youngest son, while his doting mother let him do whatever he wanted. Phillip was her favorite child and in her eyes he could do nothing wrong.

“I was more strict than his mother,” explained Manuel in 2009. “She gave him everything. Anything he wanted growing up, he got.”

Years later, Phillip told a psychiatrist that his parents had caused him “considerable emotional conflict” during his formative years.

Manuel Garrido remembered his younger son as a sweet, gentle, well-behaved child, who loved making people laugh.

“He was never any trouble,” he said. “He was bright, intelligent and polite.”

With his dark good looks and inscrutable smile, little Phillip Garrido could have been a choirboy. And from the very beginning he was a charmer, easily manipulating his parents and teachers to get exactly what he wanted.

He also had a natural sense of humor that the other kids liked.

“[He was] very popular with a lot of friends,” said his father. “They loved his jokes.”

By the time he entered Liberty High School at fourteen, his father had high hopes for his future.

“He was clever and good with his hands,” Manuel remembered. “He could do complex electronics.”

But he was a mediocre student, with little interest in his studies or school activities. Although he was now over six feet tall and athletic, Phillip disliked sports and did not belong to any school societies. But he loved rock music, spending hours in his bedroom, listening to his favorite British invasion bands, instead of doing his homework.

In 1967, San Francisco was ground zero of the Summer of Love, but according to his father, sixteen-year-old Phillip hated the flower children and what they represented.

“He’d see hippies with long hair,” said Manuel, “and laugh at them.”

But according to Manuel Garrido, everything changed when his son had a motorcycle accident, sustaining serious head injuries.

“They had to do surgery,” Manuel recalled. “He would talk funny and do funny things. After that, he was a different boy. Entirely different. That’s when he started to change.”

Janice Gomes grew up near Brentwood and knew many of Phillip’s Liberty High School friends.

“He got a very severe head injury,” said Gomes. “And after that they say he wasn’t really the same.”

When he finally came out of hospital, Phillip grew his hair long, started smoking marijuana and taking LSD. He rarely attended classes and his grades plummeted.

Girls liked his new outlaw image, tall and devastatingly handsome with long flowing hair, and flocked to him.

He was now missing school, smoking grass every day and taking LSD at weekends, and to finance this he started dealing drugs.

“Then he got onto that LSD crap and he was gone,” said his father. “It ruined his life. He stopped going to school. He fell in with a bad crowd of Mexicans. He went nuts.”

After someone gave him an electric bass guitar, Phillip learned a few lines and formed a band, playing covers of Jefferson Airplane and Credence Clearwater Revival at local dances.

His 1968 junior year class photo had shown a clean-cut seventeen-year-old, his jet black hair smartly slicked back surfer-style. But the following year when Phillip Garrido graduated, there was no photograph for him in the Liberty High Yearbook.

In his last year at Liberty High, Phillip Garrido devoted himself to getting high and writing songs. He spoke about grandiose schemes to make millions of dollars, telling his father he could now talk to God.

“I thought he was weird, but not that weird,” recalled his classmate Steve Lucchesi. “I’m not sure if he was high all the time or saw things differently. But something went haywire.”

Phillip had converted an old shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden into his private den and rehearsal space. He painted it black and soundproofed it with mattresses, covering the walls with psychedelic posters. No one else was allowed inside, and he would spend hours in there getting high, playing guitar and masturbating to his growing collection of pornographic magazines.

“He was a sex addict,” explained his father. “He started going crazy. We tried to get him help, but what could a doctor do? The LSD had killed his brain.”