Lost and Found (35 page)

“This is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story,” Garrido drawled in an eerie whisper. “You are going to be really impressed. It’s going to take world news.”

Garrido told the anchorman he had tried to contact him earlier that day, but had not been able to.

“Go to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said, “fifteenth floor in San Francisco and ask for a copy of the documents I left with them three days ago. This is for you—the mass media.”

Garrido said the documents he’d left with the FBI were “something powerful,” urging him to read them before they had an exclusive face-to-face interview.

“Because what you’re going to have in your hand,” said Garrido, “will take world news immediately.”

Walt Gray then asked why he had selected Jaycee Lee Dugard to abduct back in 1991.

“I’m so sorry,” he replied, explaining he would have to wait until he could sit down and do it correctly. “I have no desire to hold back these things. There’s a powerful, heartwarming story if you would just cooperate with me. I’m so sorry because I don’t want to disappoint you right now; I know I just have to do this in an orderly fashion.”

Then, after informing Garrido he was taping their conversation, Gray asked what he thought his situation was right now.

“Well, I am in a very serious condition,” Garrido replied, “but I can’t speak with you about this. I have to wait. I guarantee you as time goes on you will get the pieces of the story. You are going to fall over.”

Once again he told Gray to get the documents from the FBI, as they would play a big part in his “major trial.”

“Phillip,” asked Gray, “what do you hope happens once the documents are out, once the trial begins or is over?”

“Well, let me tell you this,” Garrido replied, “when I went to the San Francisco Bureau . . . I was accompanied by two children that are Jaycee Lee Dugard’s two children that we had. And then they accompanied me to Berkeley. To really start this off please get those documents. They will not disappoint you . . . you are going to be in control of something that is going to take the world’s attention.”

“Right, so, Phillip,” said Gray, “I know that you served some time in the nineties. . . . What have you been doing all this time in terms of employment? What keeps you busy?”

“The last several years,” answered Garrido, “I completely turned my life around, and you’re going to find it the most powerful story coming from the witness—from the victim. . . . If you take this a step at a time you’re going to fall over backwards, and in the end you’re going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story revealing of something that needs to be understood. And that is as far as I can go. I really want to help you but I have to make sure the media is protected correctly.”

Gray then asked if Jaycee would be contributing most to this story.

“Jaycee will also handle that with her lawyer,” he replied. “We’re going to coordinate this. . . . Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house and you are going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Gray. I want to help you further, but I also need to protect the sheriff’s office . . . the government, and I need to protect the rights of Jaycee Lee Dugard.”

Then Gray asked what he meant by “heartwarming story,” if it was a love story or about children.

At this point Phillip Garrido began to cry.

“It is a constructive story about turning a person’s life around and having those children, those two girls. They slept in my arms every single night. I never touched them . . . I can’t go any further because if I do you know I’ll go too far.”

Gray then asked if Jaycee and the two children were okay.

“Absolutely,” said Garrido, composing himself, “the youngest one was born and from that moment on everything turned around. These people are going to testify to these things.”

And he forecast that as soon as his trial began, “many hundreds of thousands of people” would come forward to testify about his powers.

Finally, the newsman said there was concern that Jaycee and her daughters had never received any medical attention.

“We just didn’t have the finances,” he explained, “and we were very concerned.”

Walt Gray then ended the fifteen-minute interview, thanking Garrido for his call.

“I am not going to play with the media,” Garrido replied. “I am going to leave this with you, because you are the first person here I was able to talk to. And I’m going to stop right there. Thank you, sir.”

“Have a good day,” said Gray, putting down the phone.

That night Jaycee Lee Dugard slept under the same roof as her mother and younger sister for the first time in eighteen years. They had now been moved to a suite in a Concord hotel, and a witness protection officer had gone shopping to buy Jaycee, Angel and Starlit new clothes. They only had the clothes they were wearing when they had left the previous morning with Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

Tina Dugard, who is a third-grade teacher, played a key role in the early reunification. But it was not easy, and there was a great deal of tension, as Jaycee felt guilty she had bonded with her kidnapper. And Angel and Starlit were also devastated that their father had been arrested, and they would probably never see him again.

When Terry called her estranged husband Carl to give a further update, her mother-in-law Wilma Probyn answered the phone, as he was busy with a television crew.

“She said Jaycee was doing good,” recalled Wilma, “that she’s got a lot of guilt, that she bonded with this guy. I think that’s the only reason she’s alive, because she did bond with him. Terry says . . . she looks like she did when she was taken at eleven, and she’s twenty-nine. She looks healthy.”

Over the next couple of days, Jaycee, Angel and Starlit started receiving intense counseling, from a psychologist provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It would be the beginning of many months of work to deprogram them, after all the years of brainwashing by the Garridos.

“Jaycee had to explain to them,” said Carl Probyn, “that she had been kidnapped. They didn’t even know that. They are upset about this because that’s their father and he’s in jail.”

The first steps included rigorous interviews by a special psychological recovery team of experts, to help Jaycee reclaim the identity that was stolen from her as a child. Terry, Shayna and Tina would have to accept that she was no longer the little girl she had been before the abduction. The fact that Phillip Garrido had fathered her two children made things far more difficult.

As Nancy and Phillip Garrido were the only parents Angel and Starlit had ever known, it would take months of intense therapy and love before they fully accepted Jaycee as their mother and their new family.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, who is not treating Jaycee Dugard or her two daughters, said that helping them recover would be like “walking a psychological tightrope.” But their prognosis was good.

“Jaycee Dugard’s road back depends upon the mind’s agility,” said Dr. Ablow, a Fox News contributor, “because now she must see that she was in danger from predators who posed as her saviors. She must somehow find her original sense of self, revisit the horror it must have been to cede all control to her assailant and take the journey from viewing herself as a helpless victim to seeing herself as a survivor.”

As for treating the children, Dr. Ablow suggested that Jaycee might tell them that “their father is a sick man, but now they are safe and very well cared for. They know nothing but the life they have lived and will need teams of healing professionals to encourage them to share their thoughts and feelings in order to have any hope of escaping severe mental disorders.”

Like everyone else, Katie Callaway had been following the dramatic discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard on the news. And on Thursday evening, she was walking by her television to feed her Maltese dog when she heard the newscaster say, “Phillip Garrido, Contra Costa.”

Katie froze, wondering if it could possibly be the man who had kidnapped and raped her thirty-three years earlier.

Then she looked at the screen, seeing his picture and the spelling of his name. The youthful face she remembered had aged over the years, and they were pronouncing his name wrong, but she instantly recognized the man who had ruined her life.

“I started screaming,” recalled Katie, now fifty-seven. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the man who kidnapped me.’ I was shocked. I was stunned. I started shaking and I couldn’t stop for about four hours.”

Since she disappeared in 1988, after her last encounter with Garrido at Caesar’s Casino, she had moved to an anonymous town in central California, becoming a realtor. But she was no longer the trusting young woman who had unwittingly allowed Phillip Garrido into her car.

She took strict precautions and never let clients into her car. If she felt uncomfortable with them, she would insist they leave their ID at her office.

Even after going underground, she was also convinced that Phillip Garrido was still pursuing her, as every few weeks a strange woman would call her office, pretending to be an old friend. Now Katie is convinced it was Nancy Garrido.

In 1995, Katie moved to Las Vegas, working as a dealer at Bally’s Casino, still living in fear of Phillip Garrido turning up one day.

On July 19, 2002, she met her husband, Jim Hall, at the Laughlin River Run, where he was playing saxophone with a local band. They married in March 2003, and she took her husband’s surname of Hall, dropping her own maiden name to make it harder for Garrido to ever find her.

Soon after they met, Katie told Jim about how Phillip Garrido had kidnapped and raped her. And that Thursday night he was upstairs in their Las Vegas home when he heard her loud, piercing screams.

He first thought, from Katie’s screams, that his father must have had another heart attack. But he ran downstairs to find her trembling in front of the television.

“That’s the guy,” she said, pointing at the television.

41

MEA CULPA

On Friday, August 28, the Jaycee Lee Dugard story made frontpage headlines across the world. “Captive For 18 Years—Nightmare of Woman Snatched as a Child,” screamed the
New York Post
; “U.S. Sex Monster Boasts of ‘Heartwarming’ Kidnap Story,” trumpeted the London
Daily Star
; and “Horrific Tale of American Kidnap Girl Laid Bare,” splashed the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

Phillip Garrido’s father Manuel and older brother Ron, who live next door to each other in separate houses in Brentwood, California, were now both talking to the press. And both agreed this had come as no surprise.

“He’s a fruitcake,” Ron, now sixty-five, told the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “It just seems so bizarre, but I can believe it. I know my brother.”

Ron compared his younger brother to infamous 1960s cult leader Charles Manson, in the way he controlled Nancy, whom he described as “a robot.”

Manuel Garrido explained to reporters that his son had received serious head injuries as a teen in a motorcycle accident.

“They had to do surgery,” said the eighty-eight-year-old. “After that he was a different boy. Tell those . . . cops to treat him like a crazy person, because he’s out of his mind.”

Phillip Garrido’s first wife, Christine Murphy, also re-emerged to tell
The Sacramento Bee
that he was “a monster.” She described him as a drug abuser and said that she had divorced him after he went to jail for kidnapping and rape. The last thing she had heard was that he had found God and married a Jehovah’s Witness in Leavenworth.

On Friday, Carl Probyn was interviewed on all three network morning shows. He told CBS’s
Early Show
he was getting regular updates on Jaycee and the girls’ progress from his estranged wife Terry.

“She told me that Jaycee feels really guilty for bonding with this guy,” he said. “She has a real guilt trip.”

A few minutes later, he told NBC’s
Today
show how Jaycee’s “mellow” personality had probably saved her life.

“She just bonded with this guy,” he said, “and she didn’t try to get away. If she had been really spunky and fought and tried to escape, maybe [she] would have been killed.”

He then appeared on ABC’s
Good Morning America
, explaining the abduction had broken up his marriage and “ruined” so many lives.

“My wife says that Jaycee looks good,” he said. “She looks almost like when she was kidnapped. She looks very young. She doesn’t look twenty-nine at all.”

Then Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explained the enormous significance that the story had for hundreds of American families whose children have disappeared without a trace.

“The Jaycee Dugard case is huge,” he said. “There are some people who assume that when a child disappears there is no hope. This provides hope for so many searching families.”

By Friday morning, many questions were being asked about how Phillip and Nancy Garrido could possibly have gotten away with it for so long. How was it possible in this day and age to have kidnapped an eleven-year-old girl and fathered two children with her, while they spent their entire lives in his backyard?

That morning, under the Freedom of Information Act,
The Sacramento Bee
officially requested California parole records for Garrido, who had been under its supervision since 1999. The paper also demanded his parole officer Eddie Santos’s field notes, listing his visits to the Garrido home and Phillip Garrido’s office appointments.

And the California inspector general David Shaw had also quietly launched his own official investigation into the matter. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appointee wanted to find out if there had been “any misconduct” by any of Garrido’s parole officers over the years, and whether any changes were required in the state parole system.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Department spokesman Gordon Hinkle said Phillip Garrido’s parole agent Eddie Santos, whose name he refused to divulge, should be congratulated.