Lost and Found (22 page)

“He just walked in with some fliers,” said company president Tim Allen. “He described his business and what type of services he offered . . . any kind of printing we would need, he could take care of us. He was very polite. Very courteous.”

Allen did not buy anything that day, but three months later he decided to give Printing For Less a try, placing a small order for some business cards.

“It was acceptable,” he recalled. “The price was good and the service was excellent.”

Tim Allen viewed Garrido as a “self-employed entrepreneur,” admiring his professionalism and efficiency. The printer would always arrive on time to pick up the materials, returning a few days later with the finished order to collect his check.

And East County Glass and Window company was soon using him for all its printing supplies, including envelopes, letterhead, coupons and business cards.

“Everybody here thought he was a little bit strange,” said Allen, “but it’s not illegal to be strange. He acted a little bit different, but he didn’t act dangerous or anything.”

A few days later, Garrido walked into a nail salon in Antioch with his brochures and a book of his sample business cards.

“He was talking to the owners of businesses in the area,” recalled local businesswoman Janice Gomes, who was having a manicure and knew Garrido from high school. “He said his wife had just had a baby and they were starting a new business.”

Gomes asked for one of his cards, and was impressed by his polite, low-key approach.

“He seemed very friendly,” she said, “very open and wasn’t pushy. ‘Oh, don’t make a decision now. If you find that you are interested, give me a call.’ ”

A few months later, Gomes called the number on his business card, leaving a message on his answering machine for him to call back.

“You always got a recording,” she said. “At least for the first few years. Later on you were able to get someone on the phone.”

Then Gomes ordered some plain business cards, which were half the price of the company she had been using. And when they came back she was highly impressed by the results.

”So I told everyone about him,” she said, “and they told their friends. He’s very competitive, so over the years quite a few people were using Phillip’s services.”

In the winter of 1995, Terry and Carl Probyn took part in a six-minute video on missing children. Produced by Doug Broomfield of the Veeple Video Company, the short film used actors to re-create the abduction, as part of a special project to track down missing children.

In a highly emotional interview, Jaycee’s tormented mother was filmed in her daughter’s bedroom, clutching her favorite stuffed bunny.

“A piece of me is missing,” Terry said tearfully. “A piece of my heart feels like it’s been ripped. And I don’t feel like a complete person.”

Lead detective Jim Wilson was also interviewed about the current state of the investigation, saying he had become personally involved in the case.

“It’s just hard to deal with,” he said. “We’re still actively investigating leads and reevaluating. I mean we’re in a phase now where we’re going back and we’re reevaluating everything we did.”

Trish Williams of Child Quest International, who had been involved from the beginning, said her organization had received more than ten thousand Jaycee Dugard sightings.

“Unfortunately, in your stranger abduction,” said Williams, “rarely do you have a good ending.”

A few months after the short film was made, Carl and Terry Probyn split up. They had been in counseling for months with their daughter Shayna, but all the stress and pain of Jaycee’s disappearance had finally proved too much.

So Carl moved out and got his own place, although they remained friends and never officially filed for divorce.

“This broke our marriage up,” Carl explained later. “We had a great marriage. My wife and I have never sat down and talked about it. It’s too painful. My wife’s personality is the same as Jaycee’s—she’s mellow, she’s easy-going. I mean we never argued.”

Phillip Garrido doted on his aging mother, who was now being looked after by Nancy. And Pat Franzen, who had always spoiled her favorite son, apparently had no idea that Alyssa had been kidnapped and been forced to bear her granddaughter Angel.

“That was her world,” said Pat’s longtime friend and neighbor Helen Boyer. “He really catered to her—he and Nancy both.”

The gray-haired seventy-four-year-old pensioner was frequently seen driving her son’s old gray two-door sedan around Antioch. Now long retired from her maintenance job for the local school authority, Pat loved puttering in her back garden. And her pride and joy were the grapes she was growing by the far wall of the back garden, near the white-roofed shed where Alyssa and her daughter Angel lived.

One day she asked Dale and Polly White, whose garden backed directly onto hers, to cut down a paradise tree growing through a shared fence, as it was interfering with her vines.

“Well, actually the tree started on her side of the fence and came through our side,” observed Polly White. “So my husband said he’d cut it down. He told me he didn’t know why she asked him to cut it down, as it was growing on her side. I said, ‘Well, perhaps she doesn’t have anybody else to cut it down.’ ”

Mike and Glenda Shelton rented the house next door to the Garridos from 1996 to 1998, sharing a driveway with them. They both thought Phillip “weird” and “defensive,” as he refused to allow anyone near the gate to his backyard.

“You could always tell there was something funny about him,” recalled Mike Shelton. “One time the lock on the gate was broken, and Garrido appeared to be in a panic until it was fixed.”

In March 1997, sixteen-year-old Alyssa became pregnant again. And with his second child on the way, Phillip Garrido started enlarging the hidden backyard compound to cope with his growing family. He built another shed and over the next few years would add several more tents, as well as installing a plastic swimming pool, a yellow slide and a set of swings.

His printing business was flourishing and Alyssa now spent most of her time on the computer, designing clients’ stationery and setting up the printing machinery. The artistic teenager loved designing logos for customers, often adding her own unique, charming touches.

A childish-looking graphic for a local recycling center had a large picture of the earth lying inside a blue recycling bin, alongside other rubbish. Another graphic for Wayne’s Barbershop in Pittsburg had a smiling face on the end of a barber pole—resembling the Democratic political pundit James Carville—brandishing a cut-throat razor and electric clippers.

Barbershop owner Wayne Thompson first met Phillip Garrido when he came into his shop for a haircut, and began pitching his print company. Then, after shaking Thompson’s hand, Garrido immediately washed his hands in the sink.

“He was a germ freak,” explained Thompson. “He looked like he bought his clothes at Goodwill.”

Garrido handed him a Printing For Less business card, boasting that the beautiful blonde on it was his daughter Alyssa.

“He told me,” said Thompson, “ ‘I put my daughter’s photo on it to show customers how I can display their photos on their business cards. I got Alyssa all fixed up to look glamorous.’ ”

Thompson pinned the card on his notice board, and was soon ordering all his stationery from Printing For Less.

Since being released from his 1993 parole violation, Phillip Garrido had steered cleared of trouble. His federal parole officer visited 1554 Walnut Avenue on occasion, but never saw anything out of the ordinary.

Once a parole agent had actually been inside Garrido’s secret prison compound behind the house, drawing an accurate diagram of it and its proper dimensions. Even the shed—used to imprison Alyssa—was included. But apparently the agent had not been suspicious, placing the diagram in Garrido’s federal parole file where it gathered dust.

In fact Phillip Garrido’s only run-in with law enforcement was a traffic citation, issued on February 10, 1997.

If the convicted kidnapper and rapist was no longer under suspicion, Carl Probyn certainly was. On March 18, 1997, a team of investigators from the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department arrived at his old Washoan Boulevard residence to dig up the front porch of the house. They refused to reveal what they were searching for.

“We’re going back and trying to put some closure to some leads,” said Lieutenant Fred Kollar obliquely. “Sometimes you want to have someone else come back and look at the case.”

When the
Tahoe Daily Tribune
asked Carl Probyn if he was still a suspect in Jaycee’s disappearance, he replied that he probably always would be.

“There is about one percent of Tahoe who think we had something to do with the kidnapping,” he told a reporter. “And this just gives them fuel for the fire.”

Terry Probyn brushed off the renewed search, which turned up nothing, saying it did not bother her.

“We never had any doubt that the family had nothing to do with it,” she said. “But some people in town expressed concern that somehow the family was.”

Although her estranged husband Carl had now returned to Southern California, Terry said she felt “bound” to South Lake Tahoe until the mystery of Jaycee’s disappearance was solved.

“It’s hard to move with life,” she explained, “when you are still stuck on the past.”

But Terry Probyn was determined that something positive should come out of her daughter’s abduction. And in 1997, she donated $3,400 from her Jaycee Dugard search fund to the Soroptimist International chapter of South Lake Tahoe, to launch the Fighting Chance program.

Terry Probyn was the keynote speaker at that year’s Soroptimist International meeting, where she officially announced the program in Jaycee’s memory.

“It is really time to tell our children,” she told the meeting, “that at the very moment they are in the grasp of an abductor, it is important to free themselves.”

Now taught to all fourth through sixth graders in Tahoe schools, the hands-on abduction prevention course instructs kids how to fight back if they are ever abducted. And since the program was launched, thirty-five hundred students have gone through it, and it is credited with preventing the abduction of at least three local children.

“The whole community was really touched by Jaycee’s abduction,” explained local teacher Charma Silver, who helped formulate the program. “We wanted to do something proactive to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.”

In the final lesson, under the supervision of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department, students are placed in a trunk of a specially designed training car, and told to fight their way out. Other lessons include kicking out the taillights or ripping out the car’s electrical wires.

“If a person tried to pull a child into a car,” Terry told the meeting, “that child should try and run in the opposite direction from where the front of the vehicle is pointed. If a person tries to pull a child off a bicycle, the child should hold onto the bicycle as long as possible.”

In 1998, Terry finally left South Lake Tahoe, moving to Southern California to live with her sister Tina. A few years later she made a self-help video for children with martial arts expert Ken Bowers.

“If I would have given [Jaycee] the knowledge to help herself,” she told viewers in the video called
A Child’s Life
, “she would be with me today. Jaycee was caught off guard. She wasn’t expecting someone to come up behind her and cut off her path. She froze. I’d have given her the knowledge to run the other way or possibly help herself find an avenue out after she had been taken.”

On Thursday, November 13, 1997, Alyssa gave birth to a baby girl, under Nancy Garrido’s helping hand. Phillip Garrido named his second daughter Starlit and it would be their last. Later there would be speculation as to whether Garrido might have disposed of any male children he had sired, thinking of them as possible threats when they grew up.

Investigators would also explore whether he had been responsible for a series of four gruesome murders around the Antioch/Pittsburg area, officially naming him a “person of interest.” The unsolved murders were all along stretches of Highway 4—the main corridor through Contra Costa County—that Garrido drove up and down every day, making calls for his printing business. One of the bodies was found in a dismantling yard where he sometimes worked.

On November 6, 1998, fifteen-year-old Pittsburg High School sophomore Lisa Norrell disappeared after attending a coming-of-age party at an Antioch social club. After she was insulted by a boy, the teenager stormed out of the party and was last seen walking along Highway 4, towards her home in Pittsburg. After she failed to arrive home that night the FBI was called in, and later her shoes were found dumped on the dark, lonely stretch of road.

A week later, Lisa’s body was discovered facedown in an industrial park, just four miles away from Garrido’s house. She had been asphyxiated, and at the time police refused to release any information about the injuries, as they were too horrific. Years later it would emerge that Lisa often visited her aunt Kathy Russo, who lived directly opposite the Garridos in Walnut Avenue, Antioch.

The murder shocked Contra Costa County, and former California governor Gray Davis put up a $50,000 reward for any information leading to her killer’s arrest. And though several man were charged with her killing, they were never brought to trial, as there was insufficient evidence.

Four weeks later came the first in a series of savage prostitute killings in the Pittsburg area, over a two-month period. On December 5, the body of twenty-four-year-old Jessica Frederick was found stabbed and beaten in an another industrial park in Pittsburg. Once again, investigators even withheld the autopsy report from her family, as it was too gruesome.

Ten days later, thirty-two-year-old Rachael Cruise was discovered strangled to death in a ditch, close by where Lisa’s body had been found. And in January 1999, twenty-seven-year-old Valerie Dawn Schultz, who used the professional name “China,” was found murdered. She had been stabbed and asphyxiated. A few days later, a fifth woman was found barely alive, after being brutally beaten and left for dead.