Lost and Found (30 page)

When the girl looked up and saw her, Polly said, “Hi, how are you?”

“Fine,” replied the girl.

“Are you getting ready to go swimming?” asked the pensioner.

“No,” said the girl.

Then Polly asked how old she was, and the girl replied ten.

“I have a little grandson that’s your age,” Polly told her. “Maybe you’d like to come over and play with him sometime?”

“No,” said the girl, shaking her head.

When Polly asked her name, she turned around and ran off.

The next day the fence had been boarded up. The Garrido backyard was no longer visible.

That October, parole agent Eddie Santos was assigned the difficult Phillip Garrido case. He first visited 1554 Walnut Avenue at 3:30
P.M
. on November 26, meeting Garrido and his mother, finding “no new info” to report.

Later that day, he prepared a case review of Parolee Garrido. He found that Garrido, who was initially paroled on June 8, 1999, for rape, had a “stable residence,” lives with his wife and is unemployed. He advised he be kept at the “current level” of supervision.

From now on Agent Santos would visit Garrido’s home twice a month, as well as seeing him occasionally in his office for group meetings and drug testing.

That Halloween, Phillip Garrido dressed up in a gorilla costume and took his daughters trick-or-treating. At Christmas, he visited Deepal and Mala Karunaratne’s home with Nancy and Alyssa to exchange holiday gifts. Mala said Alyssa had visited their home on numerous occasions, but always with Nancy or Phillip. Phillip usually sat in the middle of the carpet, and started preaching from his Bible or singing his songs, much to the Karunaratnes’ annoyance.

A few months earlier, when their daughter had gotten married, Alyssa had done all the invitations for the shower and the wedding. So that Christmas they wanted to thank her.

“Alyssa had done so much printing for me,” recalled Mala, “so I thought I should give her a gift. She’s the most sweetest girl that you ever could meet, so I told her to come.”

When Mala gave Alyssa her present, she opened it and became very emotional.

“She hugged me,” recalled Mala. “She said, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ I said, ‘I have to do more than this because your prices are so low.’ ”

35

THE SECOND COMING

As 2009 dawned, Phillip Garrido became obsessed with the Second Coming of Christ and the pivotal role he would play in it. He started preaching with a new intensity.

“He’d talk about the Second Coming,” recalled Lorenzo Love. “He said God’s coming back and will save people who do drugs and forgive them for their sins.”

Every couple of weeks he would arrive at Love’s towing company, and deliver an impromptu sermon.

“He believed that God did not judge you as you are,” said Christine Meacham. “He told us he had drugs, gambling and sex problems but through his church he was found and reborn. That the heavenly father was going to save him.”

But when no one appeared to be taking his message seriously, he became more and more upset.

“Phil was not getting the reception that he had anticipated,” said Marc Lister. “He was getting frustrated because people were just blowing him off. A lot of times he’d talk to me and he’d come to tears, as he kept saying, ‘You’ve got to believe me! You’ve got to believe me!’ ”

Lister now believes that all the years of smoking methamphetamine and taking other hard drugs were taking their toll. Although Lister says he has no firsthand knowledge that Garrido was manufacturing meth in his backyard, as later reported, it was easy enough to get in town.

“Every other house has dope in Antioch,” he said. “The place is a shithole. I mean you can buy it next door.”

One morning that spring, Phillip Garrido arrived at Maria Christenson’s recycling plant with his younger daughter, Starlit. He was acting so strangely she was certain he was high on something.

When Maria asked who the little girl was, Garrido snapped, “Oh, this is my daughter. We’ve got to go.”

“She was clinging to him,” Christenson remembered, “and she was dressed kind of old-fashioned, like something you’d wear twenty years ago on a farm. That’s what caught my eye. She was so pale and her skin wasn’t the right color.”

During the brief period they were in her office, Starlit seemed interested in Christenson’s collection of brass animals in a display case.

“She wanted to look at it,” Maria said, “but he wouldn’t let her talk to me. I think maybe he was doing drugs, because he was so wired and in a hurry all the time.”

On May 3, 2009, Jaycee Dugard turned twenty-nine. It was now almost eighteen years since she was kidnapped by Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Although she had assumed a completely new identity as Alyssa Franzen, she still clung to a vestige of her old life by writing every day in her secret journal. It was her
only
true expression of her real identity, a way of voicing her true feelings of being trapped by a madman in a bizarre netherworld.

Over the years she had grown to love Phillip and Nancy Garrido, but she also knew she could never escape their clutches without risking her daughters’ safety.

Living like campers in tents in the hidden backyard for so many years had made Alyssa resourceful. And despite the terrible conditions, she had done her best to create a home for Angel and Starlit. A large welcome sign hung over the concealed entrance, along with several plastic butterflies and other rather pathetic homey touches. There were drawings and artwork all over the various sheds and tents, and the children’s five cats were probably more comfortable than their owners.

The ten-foot-by-ten-foot shed, where Alyssa had been held in restraints for her first eighteen months in captivity, now housed the Printing For Less operation, with several computers and printers. There were bookshelves full of magazines and books about cats, as well as several romance novels by Alyssa’s favorite author, Danielle Steel. There was also a filthy fish tank and a microwave.

Nearby was a small blue tent where Alyssa, Starlit and Angel’s outdated thrift-shop clothes hung on plastic racks. It was stuffed with dressers overflowing with clothing.

Another old faded tent alongside served as their sleeping quarters, with dirty stripped-down couches for beds. In one corner on a small dressing table was a large cosmetic box, full of old makeup, hairbrushes and combs.

And every night, while Alyssa and her daughters made do with the deplorable conditions they had grown used to, Phillip and Nancy Garrido slept soundly inside the house in comfortable beds.

That June, Pat Franzen’s already frail health worsened, with her worried son summoning emergency services three times over a three-week period.

On June 5, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had introduced a new GPS system. And Phillip Garrido had started tampering with his GPS ankle bracelet. Over the next three months, Garrido’s signal was lost almost every night for hours at a time. But almost all the electronic alerts to the Concord parole office were ignored.

A month later, on July 6, Phillip Garrido posted a new entry on his “Voices Revealed” blog. Entitled “A Power That Has Been Kept Hidden,” it rambled on incomprehensibly about his new religion and saving the world. And it talked about “an intelligently prepared plan that is hidden in the scriptures” that will “inspire all humanity.”

He and Alyssa were now working on an ambitious eight-day series of seminars and demonstrations, to be sponsored by their client J & M Enterprises and held in a tent on their premises. Alyssa designed a series of flyers and posters, showing a new sunrise, to publicize the event.

“Don’t Miss Out,” read the God’s Desire Church flier. “Something brand new is taking place.”

Alyssa had also designed a stunning new logo for “God’s Desire,” to accompany its newly stated mission: “To instruct and encourage intellectual, moral, and spiritual improvement.”

The event would run Monday through Friday from noon to 4:00
P.M
. and on weekends from 10:00
A.M
. to 5:00
P.M
., with a one-hour break for lunch.

During the eight-day event, Phillip, Nancy, Alyssa and the two girls all manned the God’s Desire Church tent that had been set up in Jim and Cheyvonne Molino’s front yard. At various times they would all sing together, as Phillip Garrido strummed along on his guitar. And Garrido gave demonstrations of his black box at periodic intervals.

But although all advertising material says the event’s sponsor was J & M Enterprises, mentioning its “Large stock of used parts for all model cars and trucks” and twenty-four-hour towing service, Jim and Cheyvonne Molino later distanced themselves from it.

“He said he had a flier stating he was going to have a tent here,” explained Cheyvonne. “He was just hanging out at the back of our lawn, okay.”

Her husband, Jim, says the God’s Desire event was very informal.

“He had a tent out front,” he later told a local television station, “that he would sit and talk to people. He’d play music for them and get them interested in the Bible.”

A few weeks later, on August 14, Phillip Garrido blogged about the event’s great success.

“During the month of July 2009,” he wrote, “J & M’s Enterprises . . . was the host to a powerful demonstration, the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongues of angels in order to provide a wake-up that will in time include the salvation of the whole world.”

Two days after the J & M Enterprises event, Phillip Garrido delivered an order of postcards to East County Glass and Window Inc. It was the third attempt at getting them right, as owner Tim Allen had repeatedly returned them with mistakes.

“We had ordered some postcards,” explained Allen, “and they were wrong. So we asked him to make them again and the same had happened. This time they were correct and he brought them in and dropped them off.”

Allen thought the printer was even more distracted than ever, and was now contemplating finding a new print company, after almost fifteen years with Printing For Less.

Love’s Transport and Tow, Inc., was also having problems with the deteriorating quality of Garrido’s work. When Garrido arrived in mid-August with his Bible and several thousand numbered invoices, owner Christine Meacham was appalled at the glaring mistakes.

“They were smeared,” she said. “They were crooked. And I’m wondering if he had the young girls do it, because nothing’s ever been wrong before.”

After she pointed out the mistakes, Garrido agreed to redo them. But suddenly he started talking about an amazing new spiritual development, eerily different from the usual message he preached.

“He said this is a new revelation,” recalled Meacham. “It’s going to be different once the world knows. The time is going to come.”

Phillip Garrido also told Janice Gomes it was almost time to start his God-given mission to save the world.

“Janice, trust me when my story hits, it’s going to be worldwide,” he told her breathlessly. “You’re not going to believe what God healed me of. You’re not going to believe the kind of person I was.”

Now, Phillip Garrido’s sole topic of conversation was an upcoming trip with his daughters to the People’s Park on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

“He kept telling me, ‘I’m going to Berkeley! I’m going to Berkeley,” recalled Maria Christenson. “That was all he kept thinking about. He wanted to go to Berkeley so bad.”

Janice Gomes believes his Berkeley trip was the culmination of four years of planning.

“He was stepping out,” she said. “This is time. He was prepared for this. He believes in what he’s doing—as crazy as it is.”

A few days later, Marc Lister ran into Garrido at a mutual friend’s house. Garrido gave him one of his black boxes, asking if he could take care of it, along with a stack of other church material.

“I think he had come to a crossroads,” said Lister. “He was fed up with no one listening to him, and had decided to turn himself in and bring his message to the world.”

In hindsight, Lister believes that Garrido had now decided to take his message to a global stage, and deliver Jaycee Lee Dugard back to the world.

“Within days the world’s going to know my story,” he told Lister, who advised him to get back on his meds.

At 8:10
A.M
. on July 29 Agent Santos arrived at Walnut Avenue, for his twice-monthly visit. Garrido said he was unable to supply a urine sample for drug testing at that time. Three hours later, the parole officer returned to collect it.

A few days later, Phillip Garrido attended a funeral of a relative. It would be the last time Ron Garrido would ever see his younger brother, who was acting strangely, pacing to and from his car.

“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” Ron would later say.

On Saturday, August 15, Phillip Garrido brought Starlit and Angel to Cheyvonne Molino’s daughter’s “Sweet Sixteen” birthday party, held at a nearby water park. Previously Garrido had asked if his daughters could attend, as they had become closer to the Molinos during the recent God’s Desire religious event on their property.