Another example of how dangerous sex offenders can be. Perhaps if the offender, Phillip Garrido had a job and not his own business he would have been caught. Unfortunately, background screening is not done to give someone a business license and operate a company from their home.
Woman kidnapped as an 11-year-old in ’91 found
The alleged abductor and his wife are held. Officials believe that he fathered two girls with the victim.
A woman kidnapped nearly two decades ago when she was an 11-year-old on her way to school was discovered in the Bay Area this week after her alleged abductor aroused the suspicions of a UC Berkeley police officer, authorities revealed Thursday as they began investigating the bizarre case.
Authorities said Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender, and his wife, Nancy, kept Jaycee Lee Dugard in a ramshackle warren of sheds, tents and tarps behind a fence in the backyard of a home in Antioch, northeast of Oakland.
They believe that Garrido, whom acquaintances described as a “religious fanatic,” fathered two daughters with Dugard, who is now 29. The girls are 11 and 15.
Dugard was reunited with her mother Thursday in an East Bay motel. The Garridos were being held in the El Dorado County Jail in Placerville. They are to be arraigned today.
Dressed in pink, Dugard was walking the few blocks to her bus stop in June 1991 when two people in a car snatched her from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood. Her stepfather, who witnessed the abduction, leapt on a mountain bike in pursuit.
In the 18 years since, Dugard, whom the Garridos called Allissa, has never been back to school or to the doctor. Nor have her daughters, authorities said.
“It’s a miracle that we got her back,” Carl Probyn, her stepfather, said in an interview at his home in Orange as he displayed pictures of his stepdaughter. “How do you get 18 years back? . . . I just hope that she can have a decent life from here on out. Her life kind of stopped at 11.”
Neighbors and acquaintances said Garrido — who was convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1971 and has been on federal parole since — ran a print shop out of his house, introduced the three as his children and was religious but not aligned with any organized ministry.
A blog called “Voices Revealed,” registered to the 58-year-old Garrido, says God has given him the ability “to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world.”
Garrido’s chance encounter with an officer at UC Berkeley on Tuesday unlocked the mystery of Dugard’s disappearance.
At a packed news conference Thursday in Placerville, El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said Garrido and Dugard’s two daughters had gone to the campus to hand out fliers and hold an event of a religious nature.
“A UC police officer observed them and thought the interaction between the older male and the two young females was rather suspicious,” Kollar said.
Standard university procedure requires that anyone handing out literature on campus undergo a background check, Kollar said. During that check, the officer discovered that Garrido had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in Nevada, was incarcerated in federal prison in Kansas, and was later paroled to California.
“Federal parole in his particular case,” Kollar said, “lasts a lifetime.”
On Wednesday, Garrido went to the Concord parole office to meet with his parole officer. It is unclear, Kollar said, if he was ordered to show up or if he volunteered. But he arrived with his wife, Dugard and the two girls.
“During interviews with the three of them — the two suspects and Jaycee — sufficient information was determined from all three of them that Jaycee was who she was purported to be and that these two people only had information that the kidnappers could have known,” Kollar said.
The Garridos were arrested Wednesday.
In a rambling, sometimes incoherent, phone interview with Sacramento station KCRA-TV Thursday, Garrido said that he had not admitted to a kidnapping and that he had turned his life around since the birth of his first daughter 15 years ago.
“I tell you here’s the story of what took place at this house and you’re 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,” he said.
It was unclear Thursday exactly when Garrido was in and out of prison. Kollar said he was convicted in 1971 on the Nevada federal kidnapping and rape charges.
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