Lost and Found (27 page)

Several years later, he refiled the forms, as he had forgotten to write the word “Institute” on the earlier one.

Later there would be speculation that Garrido had intended to start his own school to educate his daughters, Angel, now aged eleven, and Starlit, eight, as well as giving him access to other young girls.

To help him prepare the application, Garrido arrived at notary public David Robinson’s office with some legal questions.

“We helped him fill out the paperwork,” said Robinson. “We notarized it.”

Then Garrido triumphantly announced that he had cured himself of his sexual addiction.

“It’s kind of a conversation stopper,” said Robinson’s wife, Rainy, who was also there. “I thought it was something very odd to say.”

One morning, an excited Phillip Garrido arrived at Jim and Cheyvonne Molino’s car-wrecking yard with important news.

“He said he had a project he was working on,” recalled Cheyvonne, “and it was the development of a cure for schizophrenia.”

Garrido then showed them a large black box with an amplifier inside, and input jacks on either side for earphones. There was a third input for a microphone. He then explained how schizophrenics always hear voices in their head.

“So if a normal person puts this on,” said Cheyvonne, “they can hear what a schizophrenic walks around hearing in everyday life. That’s how he explained it to me.”

Then, Garrido demonstrated his device for the Molinos. He put on one set of earphones leading from the black box, giving the other to Cheyvonne. Then he turned around to face the wall, and started whispering into the microphone.

“He’d ask you to tell him if you could hear him whispering,” she said. “And he’d change his sounds.”

Over the next few months, as he perfected his black box, he started making increasingly bizarre claims about it. Eventually he maintained that it allowed him to hear the heavenly voices of angels.

Nancy, Alyssa, Angel and Starlit were to serve as his devoted disciples, venturing out with him into the world to save mankind.

For his first public demonstrations of the black box, Phillip Garrido would take Alyssa and their two young daughters to parks around Antioch, giving exhibitions to the homeless. His client and friend Marc Lister witnessed about a dozen of these.

“There were a couple of parks in Antioch where the homeless hang out,” said Lister. “He’d go down there and test the waters.”

According to Lister, Alyssa, Angel and Starlit all participated in the public demonstrations, which soon became more ambitious. Then Garrido started driving to People’s Park near the University of California, Berkeley Campus, where hundreds of homeless people gather everyday for free meals. Alyssa took charge of logistics and planning, while Angel and Starlit handed out free water and snacks.

“He’d get a group of up to fifty people together,” said Lister, “by handing out sandwiches and cold drinks. Then he’d start plugging in his black box and do all his stuff.”

According to Lister, Alyssa often complained about the problems she faced, organizing these public displays. And she would blame demons for trying to stop them, disseminating their message to save the world.

“She was telling me they were out at People’s Park,” he recalled, “and all the things they had to do to get on campus. Dealing with the police and dealing with this person and that person. It was her belief that it was demons that were putting these people—these roadblocks—in their way.”

Lister attended many demonstrations, genuinely curious about how the black box worked.

“I just stood around and watched,” he said. “One time Phil was in a panic because he was late. There were a lot of people there and he was busy talking, handing out sandwiches, handing out drinks. He had [Alyssa] and the girls handing out some pamphlets and literature.”

Then Garrido hooked up the power cord to a generator, and switched on his black box, turned away from the crowd and started talking.

“I stood back and watched,” said Lister, “and I saw people raising their hands. ‘I hear you, Phil! I hear you, Phil.’ ”

In late June 2006, Betty Upingco threw a high school graduation party for her son, inviting the entire neighborhood. In the middle of the party, Phillip Garrido showed up by himself, and as the loudspeakers were broken and there was no music, he ran home for his.

After setting them up in the yard, he was invited to join the party. He began drinking and his behavior started getting “weird,” as one attendee put it. He gave strange looks to all the young girls, and made suggestive remarks.

“He made us feel very uncomfortable,” recalled Betty. “And he kept trying to talk to the teenage girls. Finally my husband told the boys to take the speakers and give them back to him.”

Garrido walked back to his house and stood by his front gate, inviting the girls inside as they walked home.

“They came back and told us,” Betty said, “ ‘He keeps trying to lure us over to talk.’ So at that point, we started escorting the girls out.”

A few days later, Betty Upingco’s daughter went on the Megan’s Law website for sexual offenders, discovering to her horror that their neighbor was on there. He was listed as a convicted rapist, along with his photograph and a description of the surgical scar on his abdomen.

“So from that point on,” said Upingco, “anytime we had female guests over, we would escort them out of the area and made sure we kept an eye on them. It was very uncomfortable.”

32

“
DO YOU HEAR ANYTHING
?”

That June, Phillip Garrido started demonstrating his black box to his print clients, as he did his rounds. He drafted a “Declaration of Affirmation,” which he asked each to sign after witnessing his invention.

“This document is to affirm,” it began, “that I Phillip Garrido have clearly demonstrated the ability to control sound with my mind and have developed a device for others to witness this phenomena. By using a sound generator to provide the sound, and a headphone amplification system,
(a device to focus your hearing so as to increase the sensitivity of what one is listening to)
I have produced a set of voices by effectively controlling the sound to pronounce words through my own mental powers.”

Then he left a space to be signed and dated, confirming that they had witnessed him at their place of business, “controlling a voice or set of voices that are unearthly in nature.”

It also addressed Phillip Garrido’s state of mind.

“Concerning the state of Phillips’ [
sic
] mindfulness and his freedom to conduct himself appropriately: I will confirm that out of the many years I have interacted with him, business or otherwise, he has always acted mature and intelligent. He has a steady personality throughout the many years I have known him. He has never displayed an unsuitable, incoherent or improper cognitive behavior all the years I have known him.”

One morning he arrived at the East County Glass & Window company, asking to see the owner, Tim Allen.

“He said, ‘I’m doing demonstrations with the box,” Allen recalled. “It was twice the size of a shoe box maybe, and it had some sort of electronics inside.”

Garrido then proceeded to plug in the earphones, handing a set to his amused client to put on.

“The way he described it,” said Allen, “is that he could hear people think. He could hear voices. God would talk to him and he could hear the voices through this box, and that I could understand what he was thinking telepathically.”

Then, as Allen’s employees looked on in astonishment, Garrido began the demonstration.

“I shut my eyes,” said Allen. “I really wanted to hear something, but all I could hear were kind of hollow sounds like a shell.”

But the one voice he did hear came from outside the earphones, asking, “Do you hear anything?”

“And so I opened my eyes,” he recalled, “and I looked at him and he was mouthing words, but he wasn’t saying anything.”

Garrido asked him again if he had heard anything, and Allen said he could not.

“Then he started whispering louder,” he said. “And when he got to a certain volume out of his mouth, I could hear him. So I told him, “Phil, I can hear you.’ And he said, ‘Great! My box works! It’s fantastic.’ ”

Not wanting to hurt Garrido’s feelings, by telling him that it was his voice and not the black box he had heard, Allen thanked him for the demonstration, wishing him good luck with his new invention.

“I just said, ‘That’s great, Phil.’ I didn’t want to erode his self-esteem.”

Later Allen would say that his purported signature on Phillip Garrido’s Declaration of Affirmation that day was a forgery.

When Garrido arrived at Deepal Karunaratne’s house with the black box, the realtor told him he didn’t have time for a demonstration.

“He told me he could control voices with that,” recalled Karunaratne. “He kept bugging me to test it.”

Finally the realtor gave in, just to humor him.

“It was just like an amplifier,” he recalled. “I could see that he’s moving his lips. I could hear the voices like birds singing. The voices of the air. Stuff like that. I don’t know what he was trying to do.”

When Garrido asked him to sign his declaration, Karunaratne agreed, just to get rid of him.

A few days later, Phillip Garrido arrived at Janice Gomes’s new office, which she shared with a friend named Kevin, another of his print clients.

“Phillip brought up a big black box,” Gomes recalled, “and he set it down on the table. And he says, ‘This is just fantastic. I want you to hear the angels speak to me through here.’

“And Kevin looked at him and said, ‘Phillip, you and the angels get out of here. I’m busy.’ ”

When he tried to demonstrate it to Maria Christenson, who was still wary after his previous outburst about masturbation, she told him to keep their relationship just business.

“He said that I was going to be blown away,” Maria recalled. “I was going to fall over backwards when he’d shown me the black box he had in the car. But I never let him, when he wanted to bring it in. So he just kind of backed off then. He was getting too weird.”

He then produced his black box affidavit for her to sign anyway, becoming angry when she refused.

“I didn’t want to sign one,” said Christenson. “He was mad at me because he wanted to bring that box, so I could hear the voice. And I just said no.”

Several months later, Christenson took her children Erika, twenty-six, and Cary, fourteen, with her to collect a print order at Phillip Garrido’s house. When there was no answer at the front door, they walked over to the side, peeking over the fence into the backyard.

“We were on the fence when he came out,” Maria recalled. “And he got very upset and told us to get back in the car, because he had a vicious dog.”

While they waited in the car for Garrido to bring them the order, Erika begged her mother to leave immediately, saying it was just too creepy and weird.

“I just told them,” recalled Christenson, “ ‘That guy’s a Jesus freak. He’s harmless.’ ”

Around that time, David Bocanegra called to see how his sister Nancy was doing. She now hardly ever spoke to her family, and on the rare occasions she did, Phillip was always there hovering in the background.

During their conversation, Nancy seemed very excited as she told her brother that Phillip had invented a black box that allowed him to talk to God.

“It was just really off the wall,” said David. “I couldn’t believe my sister was with this guy that was just nuts.”

On August 22, Phillip Garrido brought eight signed Declarations of Affirmation to a notary public to be officially witnessed. Later most of his clients would deny ever signing them.

In an attached affidavit, Garrido swore under oath that each client had signed and dated it under their own free will.

“I state that each individual,” read his affidavit, “clearly witnessed myself demonstrate the freedom to control and produce a set of voices unearthly in nature.

“I willingly assume full legal responsibility under the laws of perjury in the state of California that protect all humans from deliberately providing false or misleading testimony.”

In late November, Damon Robinson and his girlfriend, Erika Pratt, rented Jack Medeiros’s house, which Garrido had been taking care of. When Robinson moved in he was surprised to find all the locks had been turned around, preventing the doors being opened from the inside. Although the property was supposed to have been vacant for the last three years, it was obvious somebody had been living there, as there was a mattress and other old furniture in the living room.

On November 30, Erika Pratt was showing a girlfriend around their new home, when they looked over the fence into the Garridos’ backyard. And to their surprise they saw two little blonde-haired girls, who were obviously living in a tatty collection of sheds and tents. They also saw several pit bulls roaming around.

“He had little girls and women living in that backyard,” Pratt, twenty-five, later told the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “and they all looked kind of the same. They never talked and they kept to themselves.”

“Freaked out” by what she had seen, Pratt called her boyfriend, who told her to call the police.

She then called 911, reporting her neighbor Phillip Garrido was a “religious psychotic with a sex addiction,” with young children living in tents in his backyard.

A deputy from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department was duly dispatched to 1554 Walnut Avenue to investigate. He questioned Garrido in his front yard, never asking to enter the backyard, as he did not consider there was any reason to do so.

But before leaving, he did warn Garrido about possible code violations if he had people living outside in a residential neighborhood.

Then the deputy, who had no idea that Phillip Garrido was a registered sex offender on parole for rape and kidnapping, got in his squad car and drove off.

Later, Pratt contacted the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department to find out what had happened.

“[They] told me they couldn’t go inside because they didn’t have a warrant,” she said. “So they just told him they’d keep an eye on him.”