Jaycee Lee Dugard

Late August, 2009, the campus of the University of California at Berkley. A university administrator found herself talking to a very intense man, accompanied by his two daughters. He said he was from a religious group called ‘God’s Desire’, and that they were hoping to hold a prayer meeting on the campus. For the administrator, this kind of thing was routine. What was a little out of the ordinary this time was the behaviour of the man’s two daughters, aged 11 and 15. They were unusually quiet, even cowed; and they were very obedient to their father. They were nothing like any other young Californian girls that the administrator knew. It didn’t feel right and, so, using her common sense, the administrator told the man that she was sure his meeting would be fine but, could he come back the next day, around the same time, to finalise the booking?

As soon as the man and his girls had left her office, the administrator phoned the UCPD (University of California Police Department) and told them about the worrying behaviour of the girls. The next day, when the man returned with the two girls, a policewoman sat in on the meeting. The man’s name was Phillip Garrido. She ran his details through the police computer only to discover that Garrido was a very serious and dangerous sex offender with paedophile tendencies. He was still on parole from a fifty-year prison sentence. Just being alone and in charge of two young girl was a breach of his parole.

The police went to his house in Antioch near San Francisco and found a bizarre arrangement of tents in the back garden where his two daughters lived with their mother. She was not his wife; his wife, childless, lived inside the house with Garrido. The mother of the two girls was a blonde woman about thirty years old. After a little more questioning, the police discovered that this was Jaycee Lee Dugard. They all knew the name, she was famous. She was the little girl of 11 who had been abducted by a couple in a car – eighteen long years before. For the best part of two decades, she had been held prisoner in the Garrido house and garden. First, Garrido had made her his ‘sex toy’. Then, he had made her a mother – twice.

It all started in 1991. In June of that year, in the early morning, Jaycee Lee Dugard, an 11-year-old girl, was on her way to school. Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, watched her as she walked the couple of hundred metres to the bus stop. As he watched her, he laughed at himself a little: he didn’t need to watch her, this was South Lake Tahoe and the family had moved here recently because it was ‘a safe community’. It was just then that he saw a large car pull over next to Jaycee. From where he stood, Carl had the impression that it was a man and a woman – a couple – so no danger, they must be asking the girl for directions.

Then, suddenly, the woman was pulling Jaycee, screaming, into the car. Carl couldn’t believe his eyes. Immediately, he started running up the road but the car had sped off with Jaycee inside long before he could reach her. He phoned the police right away and gave a very approximate description of the car and the couple in it; and, a very accurate description of Jaycee. The police put out information on TV and radio and set up road blocks in all directions. But, in the end, it did no good. Within two hours of being pulled into the car, Jaycee was lying handcuffed in a specially made, sound-proof room in the house of Phillip and Nancy Garrido. The handcuffs would stay on for the first three years.

Phillip Garrido was a predatory paedophile, a drug abuser, a convicted rapist and firm believer that he was a chosen messenger of God and that this gave him special rights – like the right to an eleven-year-old sex slave. It helped him with his problems, helped relieve his twisted sexual desires. In Phillip Garrido’s version of reality, Jaycee Dugard was helping other little girls because, if Garrido had not had her to help with his fantasies, he would have been out raping lots of other children. He told Jaycee this and that God, with whom he was on friendly terms, would thank her for what she was doing. Sometimes, he thanked her himself, through tears and apologies for what he had done to her. She, the 11-year-old victim, had to comfort and calm the monster who held her prisoner. He was grateful, but the handcuffs stayed on.

Garrido had the worst kind of problem with drugs which seemed to trigger his desire to rape and torture women and little girls. His father says that he was ‘a good boy’ until, at 17, he had a motorbike accident and his personality changed – very much for the worse. In 1972, he violently raped a 14-year-old girl. He was caught but the victim was too scared to speak against him in court. He went free for want of evidence.

His next recorded rape came in 1976 when he took a woman by force to an empty building in Reno, Nevada and raped her several times during a five-and-a-half-hour nightmare. He definitely planned to kill the victim but a police officer noticed the broken lock on the building and, when he opened the door, the victim ran to him screaming for help. Garrido was high on LSD.

He got fifty years’ prison time but only served about a quarter of his sentence. While he was in prison, he met Nancy Bocanegra, who was visiting her uncle. In 1988, they got married in the prison. When he came out, they started living together and she helped him to continue his drug abuse and paedophile activities. When she couldn’t have children for him, she agreed with him that this was the right moment to fulfil a great fantasy of his – to have a child sex slave living in the house. As the girl got older, he could have some children with her. God would be pleased. The Garridos got the car out and went off to South Lake Tahoe to see if they couldn’t hunt down a pretty little girl.

Garrido seemed to know instinctively how to break Jaycee and control her. For the first couple of years, she stayed locked up in the house and he was her only human contact apart from TV. She was not allowed to watch the news. Nancy, while helping Phillip all she could, did not show herself. He would bring Jaycee fast food or tell her funny stories. And then, he would rape her.

At 13, she got pregnant and so he moved her out to tents in the garden. It was overgrown with trees and had a two metre high fence all around it. Here, she had another little girl when she was seventeen. Eventually, Garrido even dared to let Jaycee out of the house, very occasionally alone. She had half-forgotten who she was, and she loved her daughters. He said she would never see them again if she ran off or made trouble.

All the while, the search for her went on. There were posters, TV information, and fund raisers. Jaycee’s stepfather, Carl, was a leading light in all this but was very much held back in his efforts when the police started to investigate him for the crime. He remained a suspect for years.

And, through the lost eighteen years, the authorities made many bad mistakes. A man as dangerous as Garrido should have been much more closely watched and checked while on parole. Sometimes, social workers or police came to the house but failed to notice anything or look around the house and garden. One social worker actually met the 15-year-old Jaycee at Garrido’s house. Garrido told him she was his brother’s daughter on a visit. The social worker checked Garrido’s criminal file to find that he didn’t have a niece. Worried, he passed the information to the police who did nothing at all.

Jaycee, with her daughters, was reunited with her family and has made a pleasingly rapid recovery from the horror she lived through for so many years. She has given TV interviews and she has also written a book in which she describes exactly what Garrido made her do during his drug and sex binges that often lasted days together. She says that holding no detail back has helped her to become herself again.

The State of California has paid Jaycee $20,000,000 because of the terrible mistakes made by the police and the parole system. Garrido was given a sentence of over four hundred years. He is now in his sixties and will surely die in prison. Nancy Garrido got only 36 years to life despite the fact that, during a six month period when her husband was in prison for drug offences, she was the only person keeping Jaycee prisoner, the little girl she had grabbed and put in the car personally in the first place. Nancy Bocanegra Garrido may one day walk free.