Lost and Found (24 page)

On May 3, 2000, Jaycee Lee Dugard turned twenty years old. Investigators used a newly developed computer technique of age progression to show what she might look like today.

The picture—showing a beautiful, smiling blonde woman—was added to her missing poster, alongside a photo of how she had looked when she disappeared.

Five days later, on May 8, California parole agent Al Fulbright visited 1554 Walnut Avenue, Antioch, for the first time since taking over the Garrido case, almost a year earlier.

When the agent informed Garrido that he would now have to undergo regular drug testing, the parolee replied that he would probably test positive as he was taking tranquilizers to calm him down. Then Nancy came in and talked to the agent briefly.

Later, in his official report, Agent Fulbright voiced his frustration at having to deal with Garrido, his most difficult client, writing, “Why did I take this case?”

28

CREEPY PHIL

Phillip Garrido’s increasingly eccentric behavior was beginning to attract attention. Months earlier, he had confided to his friend Marc Lister that he was taking medication for schizophrenia and had it under control. But Lister suspected he often didn’t take his prescribed drugs, self-medicating with illegal ones instead.

“I watched Phil go off on his tangents,” recalled Lister. “I would say, ‘Phil, get back on your meds.’ ”

Garrido would now burst into song at the slightest opportunity. He loved singing Madonna songs in particular. He was also writing songs for Britney Spears and mailing them off to her management.

“ ‘Like a Virgin’ was his favorite,” said Janice Gomes. “He would sing very high and very off-pitch. He sang to everybody and it made me very uneasy.”

He also ordered Alyssa to prepare a new business card with Madonna’s headshot, having her touch up the eyes and mouth to avoid possible copyright problems.

It became commonplace for Garrido to serenade his clients while delivering orders. One day he was chatting to Tim Allen across his East County Glass and Window company showroom counter, when Allen happened to mention that his son played guitar and sang in his punk band.

“He went nuts,” recalled Allen. “Phillip got all excited. He said, ‘Hey, I used to be in a band and I write songs. I play guitar and I record my own songs.”

Then Garrido started snapping his fingers and tapping his toes and burst into song to the amazement of the other customers.

“They were snappy songs,” said Allen. “And he had a pretty decent voice and he’d sing pretty loud. He came in and sang to us a couple of times.”

Betty Upingco and her family moved onto Walnut Avenue in 1999, and before long she met Phillip Garrido, who lived opposite.

“I saw him downtown singing in the grocery store,” she remembered. “Just singing very loud. I thought he was weird. I just didn’t like the aura that I felt about him.”

At the time Upingco owned a concrete business and ordered some business cards from her neighbor, as they were such good value.

“He brought them to my house and left,” she said. “It was very scary. I never even knew he was in my yard and I was at home.”

The local children were also scared of Garrido, who had started practicing tai chi moves in his front garden every morning. They started calling him “Creepy Phil,” after he told some boys to be careful what they said about him, because he could hear everything.

In summer 2000, Janice Gomes ordered business cards for her National Community Empowerment Programs action group. But when Phillip Garrido delivered them, she noticed her color portrait was far too dark and “Child Safety” had been spelled “Child Saftey.” So she sent them back. A few days later, when he returned it redone, the color was better but it was still “Child Saftey.”

“So I asked Phillip,” she said, “ ‘Why are all my business cards spelled wrong?’ And he says, ‘Well, my daughter’s doing them.’ ”

As he’d already told her his daughter helped out in the business, Gomes asked why he had someone so young doing her business cards. Garrido thought for a second, and replied that she was very smart.

“Well,” she told him, “she’s not a good speller.”

“She’s a good speller for six,” he replied.

The child advocate kept the misspelled cards, as she thought it was sweet.

In January 2001, a new parole agent in charge of the Garrido case officially reevaluated him as a low-risk offender. He completed a “Sex Offender Risk Assessment” form, determining if the current level of supervision was appropriate. And although Garrido had been convicted of violent rape and kidnapping, the agent decided the following low-risk description most applied to him:

“One or possible registerable [
sic
] sex offenses in the record along with other non-sex-related offenses. Controlling offense is non-sexual. Offending sexually is more opportunistic or situational than a primary deviant sexual orientation. These cases can be reasonably handled on a control service caseload.”

From then on Phillip Garrido’s supervision became even less intensive.

June 10, 2001, marked the tenth anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction. And more than a hundred supporters walked in a solemn pink ribbon procession along U.S. 50. The somber parade began in front of Meyers Library, where a permanent plaque to remember Jaycee had been set up by a rock.

Terry Probyn, now forty-two, returned to South Lake Tahoe for the sad occasion, walking the parade route with the former Meyers Elementary School principal, Karen Gillis-Tinlin.

“I walked with Jaycee’s mom,” she remembered, “and part of our conversation was just needing closure.”

Later, Terry addressed the marchers. In the ten long years since her daughter had been abducted, Terry had visibly aged with worry lines lining her forehead.

“Someone out there knows what happened,” she told the crowd. “We need peace. Give us that gift.”

That year, Alyssa’s oldest daughter Angel turned seven. Later investigators would question whether Phillip Garrido now transferred his sexual attentions toward her. For at his 1976 trial, Garrido had readily admitted to being obsessed with seven-year-old girls and masturbating outside schools.

“As [Alyssa] gets older,” explained Michael Cardoza, a former San Francisco major crimes prosecutor, who was later briefed on the case by the FBI, “he becomes less interested in her. Because of his sickness he wants the younger girls.”

29

1554
WALNUT AVENUE

Occasionally, Phillip Garrido would breakfast at the Bridgehead Café, a small diner a few blocks away on East 18th Street, Antioch. Over the years, café owner Murray Sexton got to know the eccentric local printing entrepreneur, who was always in a hurry.

“He’d come in and sit down and have breakfast,” Sexton recalled. “Or sometimes he’d get a couple of burgers to go.”

Sexton says that Garrido always came alone and he never saw Nancy, Alyssa or the two little girls.

As his daughters grew up, Phillip Garrido set up a small tent as a classroom with geography maps and assorted books, mostly about cats. There were now a number of pet animals being kept in the backyard compound, including two dogs, four cats, two cockatiels, a mouse and a pigeon.

As time went on, Alyssa persuaded her jailer to allow her and their daughters more and more freedom. Later she would tell police that she had never feared for her daughters’ safety, although she eventually learned of his sexually violent criminal past, and that he’d served time for kidnapping and rape.

She even initiated serious conversations about their daughters’ future, persuading him to buy the 1998 book
Self-Esteem: A Family Affair
by family relationship expert Jean Illsley Clarke. Ironically, one of the chapters in the best-selling book was “What’s a Nice Family Like Us Doing in a Place Like This?”

The book’s message was that children’s needs are best served by parents whose own needs have not been neglected. And it offered “a range of creative and workable options,” encouraging parents to build up their children’s self-esteem while fulfilling their emotional needs.

Alyssa also attempted to educate her daughters in one of the tents, with the limited resources available. She taught them the alphabet and basic reading and writing skills. But Garrido censored their reading, refusing to allow them any children’s novels or the typical books popular with young girls. The only books he allowed were about cats.

A makeshift bookshelf in the tent classroom was entirely devoted to feline books, including Peter Gethers’s
The Cat Who Went to Paris
and English anthropologist Desmond Morris’s
Catlore.
He also bought Angel and Starlit Barbie dolls, bicycles and a thousand-piece cat jigsaw puzzle.

Garrido was an avid reader himself. His bookshelf inside the house was devoted to true crime, horror and science fiction. His favorite author was the American horror-thriller author Dean Koontz. Among his almost complete collection of Koontz books was
Intensity,
featuring a demented serial killer and rapist who keeps a young girl imprisoned in his basement.

Late at night, while Garrido was out on his regular prowls around the neighborhood, Alyssa used the Internet to teach her children about the world. Her lessons included astrology, the names of the night sky constellations and basic botany.

But as Phillip Garrido refused to allow his captives to watch television, they had little concept of history, math or geography. And as Alyssa’s education had been cut short in the fifth grade, she could only teach them the basics that she had learned.

On cold winter nights, Alyssa and her girls would wrap up in sleeping bags and huddle together in their tent, as she told them stories she remembered her mother telling her as a little girl.

The two blonde girls grew up believing that Phillip was their father, Nancy their mother and Alyssa their older sister. They never knew she had been kidnapped against her will and they were all prisoners, as Alyssa wanted to protect them from the truth.

Around that time, Phillip Garrido instituted a list of rules that Alyssa and the girls must always follow. If anyone ever came to the front door, they had to immediately run out of the house into the backyard. And in the event Alyssa was ever asked about Angel and Starlit, she was to say that they were hers and she was fine with them being around Garrido. He later created a second cover story, that they were his nieces.

And in the event that he was ever arrested, Alyssa was ordered to get an attorney, so he could continue to communicate to her through lawyers, with attorney-client privilege protecting them from prying law enforcement.

That summer, Phillip and Nancy Garrido began taking Angel and Starlit out in the evenings to promenade up and down Walnut Avenue.

“My daughter remembers seeing him and his wife,” said Betty Upingco, “walking down the street in the evening with a toddler in a stroller. But his girls never came out and played on the street like the other kids.”

As the years went by, Phillip lessened his hold on Alyssa and their daughters, confident they were under his complete control. They were still living rough in his secret backyard, but in measured acts of kindness he built them an above-ground swimming pool, installed a trampoline and gave them various bicycles and other toys.

Often, on lazy hot summer afternoons, Pat Franzen would sit outside in the backyard, watching Alyssa playing with Starlit and Angel. Later she would claim that her son had told her they were his children by an old girlfriend.

“I saw all three girls as my granddaughters,” she explained. “Out back the two youngest went out to play in the garden. They didn’t have lots of toys, but they spent their time reading books or sitting with Alyssa.”

Dale and Polly White, who shared a back fence with the Garridos, often heard the little girls laughing and splashing around in the pool.

“We used to hear children back there playing in the pool,” said Polly White. “We thought they were just there visiting Pat.”

That June, the Contra Costa Fire Department was called to 1554 Walnut Avenue, after a little girl injured her shoulder in a swimming pool accident. The fire department later wrote up a report of the visit, but apparently it was never read by Phillip Garrido’s parole agent.