Lost and Found (31 page)

“Phil wanted to know if he could bring the girls,” said Cheyvonne. “I said not a problem.”

As it would be a dance party for about 125, she told Phillip that his daughters should wear sundresses and sandals.

The party officially started at 9:00
P.M
., but Garrido arrived two hours earlier with the girls, to help decorate the dance floor.

“A girlfriend of mine pointed out how clingy the older girl was to Phillip,” said Cheyvonne. “It was almost like she was sending out a message, ‘That’s my man.’ At least that’s how it looked to us.”

Before the party got into full swing, Garrido left, saying he would pick up his daughters later.

“They were mixing and mingling,” said Cheyvonne. “And they didn’t stay together because we had a big space. They interacted just like the rest of the kids.”

At around 9:15
P.M
. a photographer arrived to take pictures of the guests. He took a photograph of Starlit and Angel, wearing matching sky-blue sundresses. Soon afterwards, Garrido returned, saying he was taking the girls home, as they were not used to loud rap music.

“When their dad picked up around 9:30,” said Molino, “I walked them to the car and I asked them if they had fun. And they both squealed, ‘Oh, yes!’ ”

Part Three

36

“
I’M SO PROUD OF MY GIRLS
”

On Monday morning, August 24, Phillip Garrido drove Angel and Starlit forty miles west to the FBI office at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco. They walked in the front entrance of the Philip Burton Building, passing through a security machine. Then they took an elevator up to the thirteenth floor, and Garrido walked over to the front desk, with his two daughters following behind.

He then handed a copy of his updated twenty-seven page “Origins of Schizophrenia Revealed” manifesto to an agent, saying it was important that he read it as soon as possible.

After leaving the building, Garrido and his daughters drove across the Bay Bridge to the University of California, Berkeley. They spent a few minutes at Sather Gate, where Angel and Starlit handed out God’s Desire leaflets, before walking over to the campus police headquarters at 1 Sproul Hall and going down to the basement.

Garrido walked up to the receptionist, announcing that he wanted to hold a major event on the main campus, showing a stack of pamphlets and manifestos. Then he was directed into the office of the campus police special events manager, Lisa Campbell. As he walked in, he signaled his daughters to wait outside.

When he bounded into her office, Lisa Campbell was working on her computer with her back to him. She turned around to see the tall, thin, balding man with striking blue eyes.

“He came into my office,” recalled Campbell. “He was extremely animated. Clearly unstable.”

After he had formally introduced himself as Phillip Garrido, president of the God’s Desire Church, Campbell asked about his event and what it had to do with the University of California.

“Ah, you’re going to love this,” replied Garrido. “The FBI are involved. The entire world is going to want to know. It’s God’s desire. It’s God’s purpose.”

Then, as he passionately rambled on, Campbell looked into her outer office to see two young blonde girls in long dresses staring at her, with the same piercing blue eyes as the man inside.

She asked Garrido whose children they were, and he said he was their father. Then Campbell summoned the girls in, asking how they were. But they just stood there silently like stage mannequins.

“It was as though he had set it up [to] create a distraction,” she said. “And they were just there in eye view.”

The former Chicago police officer immediately felt something was very wrong.

“I looked at him,” remembered Campbell, “and I looked at the girls. He’s going on and on and on and he’s extremely animated and they’re not. They were really poles apart.”

So Campbell decided to investigate further. As she had another appointment waiting outside, she asked if he could come back tomorrow, explaining she was busy right now but would love to find out more about his event.

“He didn’t expect that reaction,” said Campbell, “because he expected to be blown off. And so I said, ‘Would you be interested?’ He said, ‘Absolutely. You’re going to really love this. You’re going to be so grateful that you did this.’ ”

Then she made an appointment for Garrido to return with the girls the following afternoon at 2:00
P.M
.

“I wanted to get him in as soon as possible,” she explained.

After they left, Campbell went next door into campus police officer Allyson Jacobs’s office, saying there was something very strange about the guy who just came for an event permit and the two young girls with him.

“Well, let’s run him,” replied Officer Jacobs, who immediately went to the dispatch office, requesting one of the clerks check a “Phillip Garrido” on the police computer. A few seconds later the computer got a hit.

“She prints out this rap sheet longer than I can imagine,” recalled Jacobs. “He was on federal parole for kidnapping and rape, and he was also a sex registrant. And my red flags went up, because [Lisa] had mentioned something about two young kids.”

Officer Jacobs then went and told the events manager that the man whom she had just interviewed had a long history of sex crimes. And she offered to sit in at tomorrow’s meeting with Phillip Garrido.

“I didn’t feel comfortable,” said Officer Jacobs, “with her being alone with a convicted rapist.”

Several hours later, Phillip Garrido and his girls arrived at Janice Gomes’s daughter’s house to deliver some business cards on their way back to Antioch. After his trip to Berkeley, Garrido was in great spirits, suddenly bursting into song.

“He starts singing to her,” said Gomes, “scares her half to death.”

At exactly 2:00
P.M
. on Tuesday afternoon, Phillip Garrido arrived back at the Berkeley campus police building with Angel and Starlit. They went straight into Lisa Campbell’s office, where she was waiting with Officer Allyson Jacobs.

As soon as he sat down, Garrido opened up an attaché case he had brought with him, drawing out a copy of his “Origins of Schizophrenia Revealed” booklet.

“He hands us this book,” recalled Jacobs, “and then he goes off on this tangent about how he can hear voices, and he’s got all these people that can attest to that.”

While Garrido ranted on and on about a black box, Officer Jacobs looked at the two girls. The eldest, Angel, was standing stiffly by her father with her hands on the front of her legs, looking up at the ceiling, while the younger, Starlit, just stared at her, making her extremely uncomfortable.

As a mother of two young sons, Officer Jacobs was immediately struck by how unnaturally pale and gray the girls were, compared with their father’s normal skin tone. Later Jacobs would describe their clothes as something out of
Little House on the Prairie.

“The younger daughter was staring directly at me . . . with this eerie smile on her face,” she recalled, “as if she was looking into my soul.”

Then, apologizing for interrupting him midflow, Jacobs asked who the two young ladies were.

“Oh, these are my daughters,” he replied. He grabbed hold of Starlit, declaring, “I’m so proud of my girls. They don’t know any curse words. We raised them right. They don’t know anything bad about the world.”

The two campus officers both had a weird, uneasy feeling when he said that. For the two girls looked like brainwashed zombies, fearful of saying anything that might upset their father.

Officer Jacobs asked the girls what they were doing with their father.

“I’m socializing them,” Garrido answered for them. “Showing them how it’s done.”

When Jacobs asked him to explain, Garrido replied, “By interacting with people.”

Then, out of nowhere, Phillip Garrido began telling the two officers how he had once been arrested for kidnapping and rape thirty-three years ago.

“And I was kind of, okay,” said Jacobs. “I knew that but I just didn’t think he would throw that out there—especially in front of these little girls. Then the younger daughter said, ‘And we have an older sister that lives with us too. She’s twenty-eight.’ And the older sibling said, without missing a beat, ‘twenty-nine.’ And went right back up to her dad, who seemed kind of bothered that that was even mentioned.”

When they had first walked in, Officer Jacobs had noticed Starlit had a large discolored bump over one eye, and wondered if she had been abused.

“So I asked her,” said Jacobs, “ ‘What’s wrong with your eye? What happened?’

“And she says, really robotic, ‘It’s a birth defect. It’s inoperable and I’ll have it for the rest of my life.’ It was rehearsed and it caught me off-guard. I really think my mother’s intuition kicked in at that point.”

Both officers tried to engage the girls in conversation, to get as much information as they could.

“We’d ask questions,” said Jacobs, “and the younger daughter would focus her attention towards us. Give us eye contact. Answer our questions. The older one. Not so much. She was just all over the place. Her eyes were darting up at the ceiling. She was looking at her dad and just in awe . . . as if she was in worship of him. I kind of got the feelings these kids were like robots.”

When Lisa Campbell asked what grades they were in at school, they both replied in unison, “We’re home-schooled.”

Then, after about fifteen minutes, Phillip Garrido suddenly announced they had to leave. And as the two campus police officers had no real evidence to call in social workers, they had no alternative but to let them go.

After they left, Allyson Jacobs decided to call Phillip Garrido’s parole officer and tell him how strangely he was acting. For she was concerned that if he was supposed to be on medication, he obviously was not taking it and the two girls might be in danger.

So she telephoned parole agent Eddie Santos at the Concord parole office, and when the call went to voice mail she left a message.

“[Phillip Garrido] came in today with his two young daughters,” she told him, “and he was going on this schizophrenic rant. He was clearly unstable and I really think you should do a check on him. Maybe go to his house. Make sure his kids are okay, because they were a little off to me.”

It was late afternoon when parole agent Santos returned to his office and listened to Officer Jacobs’s voice message. He immediately called her back, but was told that she had left for the day.

So Santos asked his colleague Agent La Grassa to accompany him to 1554 Walnut Avenue, Antioch, to investigate further. When Santos rang the front doorbell at 6:00
P.M
., Phillip Garrido answered, and was immediately detained and handcuffed by the front gate.

Then, while La Grassa guarded Garrido outside the house, Santos went in.

“Inside the residence,” the agent later wrote in his official report, “were Garrido’s wife, Nancy, and his elderly mother Mrs. Franzen.”

Santos then searched the entire house, but found no signs of anyone else. He drove Phillip Garrido to the Concord parole office for further questioning.

On the drive over, Garrido kept saying he had done nothing wrong. The two girls, he said, were his brother Ron’s daughters, and he had permission to take them with him to the Berkeley campus. After they’d returned to Antioch, he said one of their parents had collected them.

Back at the Concord parole office, Agent Santos reviewed Garrido’s file with his supervisor G. Sims. They accepted Garrido’s story about the girls being his nieces, never bothering to check it out with his older brother.

The parole officers determined that Garrido had not violated any of his parole conditions. For although he had a “no contact with minors” special condition, it did not apply, as he had no conviction involving underage children.

“Therefore,” reported Agent Santos, “we dropped Garrido back to his [residence].”

Garrido was then ordered to report back to the Concord parole office the following morning at 8:00
A.M
., to discuss the Berkeley incident further.

37

“
MY NAME IS JAYCEE LEE DUGARD
”

At 8:00
A.M
., on Wednesday, August 26, Officer Allyson Jacobs arrived at work, finding a message from parole agent Eddie Santos to call him as soon as possible. When he came on the line, he asked her to tell him exactly what had happened the day before with Phillip Garrido and the two young girls.

“So I went through the whole story from start to finish,” Jacobs recalled. “And when I got to the part of his two daughters, he says, ‘He doesn’t have any daughters.’ ”

On hearing this, Jacobs felt her stomach sink, wondering if they had let a dangerous kidnapper go and should have stopped him.

“Well,” she told the parole agent, “he had two daughters with him that day. They have his blue eyes. They were calling him Daddy.”

Then she told him how one of the girls had mentioned having a twenty-nine-year-old sister at home.

At the other end of the line, Agent Santos could see Phillip Garrido entering the parole office, followed by his wife, Nancy, and three young girls. He told Officer Jacobs he would look into the matter and put down the phone.

He then watched as Garrido signed in at the front lobby, and the four females he was with sat down. When Santos came out of his office and opened the lobby door, Garrido started walking toward him, gesturing for the women to follow.

“I instructed Garrido to stop and wait in the lobby,” Agent Santos later wrote in his report. “I asked the women to continue in and I escorted them to the conference room.”

Nancy and the three girls all sat together on one side of the conference table, facing the parole agent.

Then Agent Santos introduced himself and asked for their names.

“The adult female identified herself as Alyssa Franzen,” wrote Santos. “I asked the two female juveniles their names and Alyssa responded by saying that the younger child was named Starlit and was eleven years old. Alyssa then stated that the other juvenile was named Angel [and] was fourteen years old.”