by John Glatt
“There seems little question that Mr. Garrido was ‘a spoiled child.’ It is characteristic of him to go to extremes in whatever commitments are made or programs are undertaken; depending on the character of the pursuit, this can be contributory to excellence or extreme derogation.
“At this point in time, only occasional feelings of depersonalization, cognitively construed hallucinations, and nightmares plague him from the earlier toxicity. He has good management of impulses in the psychosexual realm, and appropriately oriented toward their prosocial expression throughout his future years.
“In effect, it does appear the instant offense evolved from the potentiation by drug use of what were comparatively normal drives to abnormal forms of expression and intensity.”
Dr. Kiehlbauch appeared much impressed with his patient’s positive progress in his first year at Leavenworth.
“He has gained measurably with respect to these over his period of service to date,” wrote Dr. Kiehlbauch. “Highly significant is Mr. Garrido’s record of accomplishment in training, education, and treatment since his arrival here. He has achieved conspicuously in educational self-development, on-the-job training in carpentry, and in a drafting vocational training course.”
And the psychologist also noted how the convicted kidnapper and rapist was now a devout Jehovah’s Witness, participating in religious ceremonies with other inmates.
“The depth of his religious commitment and his impact on his life philosophy are clear,” noted the doctor, “and his style of dealing with these phenomena, is on balance, quite healthy. He sees himself as one whose life is and will be based on his strongly held religious beliefs.”
As to his progress in treatment, the doctor noted that Garrido had been “regular, active, and highly productive.” And taking into account his long fifty-year sentence, their work had involved developing his personality, resolving areas of conflict and reevaluating his lifestyle patterns.
Dr. Kiehlbauch reported that his patient was “acutely conscientious,” his “prime concern” being that their lengthy sessions together were “inconveniencing his supervisor,” as it kept him away from his work detail.
“Mr. Garrido follows a very active work and leisure activities schedule,” he explained, “and seems quite healthy in his interests.”
The doctor also reported positive results for a barrage of psychological testing Garrido had recently undergone. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test—used to identify deviant personality traits—showed Garrido’s personality was “healthy,” falling within normal limits.
Garrido was also given the Bender Motor Gestalt Test, developed in 1938 to screen children for developmental disorders or brain damage.
“Activity and approval-seeking behaviors were a strongly recurring phenomena,” wrote Dr. Kiehlbauch. “The protocol reflected careful attention to detail and manner of presentation without significant derogatory indicators.”
Dr. Kiehlbauch also put his patient through the Rotter Incomplete Sentence Test, where he was given forty unfinished sentences to complete. Developed in 1950, this test is commonly used to test sex offenders and evaluate their state of mind.
“The Incomplete Sentence Test,” wrote the psychologist, “reflects Mr. Garrido as a sensitive young man, who is deeply committed religiously and goal oriented in management of life’s problems and aims.”
Dr. Kiehlbauch reported that the test also revealed Garrido becomes “driven” and “compulsive” when he commits to a cause or purpose, approaching it with “extreme zeal and diligence.”
“Appropriate degrees of secondary narcissism,” wrote the doctor, “and considerable conflict with regard to his current marital situation are also clear.”
Summarizing his report, Dr. Kiehlbauch expressed great surprise when Phillip Garrido rejected his offer to help him transfer to a far easier mental health facility. Instead his patient had insisted on spending a minimum of three more years at Leavenworth, allowing him to complete his religious education and development program.
“All things considered,” Dr. Kiehlbauch wrote, “this examiner recommends 1) a modification of the current sentence to indeterminate parole eligibility, and 2) a recommendation that he be paroled when treatment and training goals are accomplished, unless there is some dramatic change in his condition in the interim.”
Dr. Kiehlbauch also recommended that on his eventual release from prison, Garrido should receive psychological treatment and parole supervision to ease his transition back into the community.
“Prognosis for successful transition to the community is considered very good,” reported the doctor. “The likelihood of further extralegal behaviors on Mr. Garrido’s part is seen as minimal.”
Three weeks later, on May 10, Assistant United States Attorney Leland Lutfy filed a motion in district court urging Judge Thompson to deny Phillip Garrido’s plea to reduce his sentence. He pointed out that the defendant had filed his motion well past the 120-day limit after sentencing, and was therefore void.
“While defendant Garrido’s motion might at first blush appear to be made by a repentant criminal,” wrote Lutfy, “the Court should keep in mind the nature of the crime for which Garrido was convicted and the circumstances surrounding it.”
The prosecutor then reminded the judge how cruelly and viciously Garrido had treated his victim during her kidnapping.
“Garrido treated this girl no better than he would a side of beef,” read his motion, “and the Court’s imposition of sentence was equal to Garrido’s actions.”
Judge Bruce Thompson agreed, ruling that Phillip Garrido’s fifty-year federal sentence would remain.
16
NANCY
On July 20, 1979, Phillip Garrido’s mother Pat, now fifty-eight and nearing retirement, and his new stepfather Herschel Franzen, purchased a three-bedroom gray cinderblock house in Antioch, California, for $68,000. Built in 1951, 1554 Walnut Avenue was a 1,457-square-foot home in an unincorporated rural part of town. It fronted almost one acre of land in its backyard.
All the houses in Walnut Street have large extended backyards, where chickens and other domestic animals wander around freely.
Dale and Polly White moved into their house on Viera Avenue around the same time. And their back garden backed directly onto the Franzens’, sharing a back fence.
“I used to work at the post office,” said Polly White. “Pat had a post office box there and I’d see her occasionally and ask how she was doing. We were not friends but I just knew who she was.”
After losing his fight to have his sentence reduced, Garrido, now twenty-eight, settled down at Leavenworth to serve his time. He regularly exchanged letters with his mother, who wrote him all about her new home in Antioch, which would one day be his.
In early 1980, a few weeks after Garrido’s divorce was finalized, a cellmate introduced him to his attractive twenty-five-year-old niece Nancy Bocanegra, who was visiting him in Leavenworth.
Garrido struck up an immediate rapport with the shy, soft-spoken petite beauty, who lived in Denver, Colorado. The willowy, dark-haired, olive-skinned girl was also a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and over the next few months Phillip Garrido assiduously courted her with romantic love letters.
He told the withdrawn and impressionable woman how he had now found God, putting his former life of sex and drugs behind him. And when he proposed marriage, saying it was God’s plan for them to be together, she had no hesitation in saying yes. Soon afterwards he wrote to his ex-wife to tell her the news.
“He found God,” said Christine. “He was marrying a Jehovah’s Witness lady, somebody he met who visited Leavenworth.”
Now that he had exhausted all his appeals, the ever-calculating Phillip Garrido had embarked on another tack. For if he had a loving wife and a stable home life awaiting him on the outside, his chances of parole would be far higher than they were at the moment.
Nancy Bocanegra was born on July 18, 1955, in Bexar County, Texas, one of
six children of Mexican-American parents. There was little that stood out about the pretty, dark-haired girl, as she grew up as what her brother David would later describe as “an all-American girl” in a “loving” home.
“[She was] a normal kid,” remembered David Bocanegra. “A teenager going out with her friends, working, having a good time.”
When she was seventeen years old, the Bocanegra family moved to Denver, Colorado. Nancy found a job as a nursing aide and according to her brothers never got in any trouble with the police.
“I don’t think she even had a speeding ticket,” said David.
“Not even a parking ticket,” added another brother, Rey.
But after Nancy met Phillip Garrido at Leavenworth, everything changed. In the fall of 1981, twenty-five-year-old Nancy Bocanegra began making frequent trips to Leavenworth, Kansas, to visit her fiancé.
“I knew Nancy,” said Garrido’s father Manuel. “She came down to visit him in prison. I took her to lunch. I got to know her.”
Manuel Garrido says he got on well with Nancy and approved of the match. But her family was horrified at the prospect of her marrying a convicted kidnapper and sex offender.
“Once she met Phillip,” said her brother David, “that was it. It was like she was no longer around.”
On Wednesday, October 14, 1981, Phillip Garrido married Nancy in a religious ceremony performed by Senior Pastor Nanfore Craig, of the Leavenworth Prison Interfaith Church. A couple inmates acted as witnesses, and after the ceremony a prison official took a wedding photograph of the newly married couple.
A few days later, Phillip Garrido proudly sent it to his father, who had refused to attend the wedding. He wrote on the back, “All our love, Phillip and Nancy Garrido.”
Four years of prison had aged Garrido, and he had lost his youth. He now sported a Western-style mustache, his shirt unbuttoned revealing a rugged hairy chest. The newly wedded couple have their arms around each other, as Phillip stares coolly at the camera and Nancy, her hair scruffily parted in the middle, looks at her new husband adoringly.
“It’s the only picture that I have,” said Manuel Garrido in 2009. “When he got married that’s what he sent me.”
Straight after the wedding, Nancy returned to Denver, remaining in daily contact with Garrido. She was now working as a state licensed nurse’s aide, regularly making the nine-hundred-mile trip east to Leavenworth to visit her husband.
And Phillip’s unwavering confidence that it was all part of God’s plan and he would soon be free, so they could start a family, helped her get through the tough times.
In May 1984—just seven years and two months into his federal sentence—Phillip Garrido had his first parole hearing at Leavenworth. His parole application was considered by the five-member Nevada State Parole Board, who denied his request on the grounds that he was still a danger to the public. The board also took into account the severity of his crimes, that he had injured his victim, his previous criminal history and that he had not shown signs that he had reformed.
“The board finds that further evaluation of your progress is necessary,” read its report. “Release at this time would depreciate the seriousness of the crime.”
A year later, Nancy Garrido moved to Leavenworth to be nearer her husband. She easily found work as a nurse, renting a cheap one-bedroom apartment in a converted townhouse. Over the several years she lived there she kept to herself, leaving little impression.
Her Leavenworth landlord, John Saunders, barely remembers Nancy Garrido, assuming she must have been a good tenant to get her deposit back.
Nancy could now visit her husband in the federal penitentiary as often as regulations would allow, and became even more under his control. And Phillip always gave her tasks to do, ordering her around like a servant.
In March 1986, Inmate Garrido was turned down at his second parole hearing, with the board again ruling him a danger to the public.
“In the opinion of the parole board,” read the State of Nevada Parole Board report, “continued confinement is necessary to protect the public from further criminal activity.”
A few days later—on March 19, 1986—he was transferred to Lompoc Medium Security Federal Prison in Santa Barbara County, Southern California. Nancy followed him to California, moving into her mother-in-law Patricia Franzen’s home at 1554 Walnut Avenue, Antioch. She found work as a nursing and physical therapy aid for disabled patients, and was well-regarded by her employer.
The Lompoc facility lay three hundred miles due south of Antioch, and Nancy would drive her mother-in-law there for visits. On the face of it, Inmate Garrido now appeared to have a loving family waiting on the outside, ready to give him the stability he would need if he was ever released on parole.
17
“I’LL SEE YOU AGAIN, KATIE”
On November 5, 1987, two examiners from the U.S. Parole Commission met Phillip Garrido at Lompoc Penitentiary to determine if he was ready for parole. During the thirty-five-minute prison interview, Garrido freely discussed his crime, as well as his experience as an inmate and his hopes for the future.
The thirty-seven-year-old inmate told the commissioners that he was now happily married, and, if granted parole, planned to go and live with his mother and stepfather.
Neither federal prosecutor Leland Lutfy or Garrido’s public defender attended the hearing, and it is doubtful if the commissioners were even shown Garrido’s psychiatric reports or reviewed a transcript of the trial. For apparently they knew nothing of the horrific details of Katie Callaway’s kidnapping and rape. And they seemed unaware of Garrido’s own admission at trial of being a Peeping Tom, exposing himself in public and masturbating to girls as young as seven.
The highly articulate inmate charmed the commissioners, telling them that all his troubles were the result of drugs, which were now in his past. And he persuasively spoke of his hard work in prison to earn a further education diploma before learning the drafting and carpentry trades.
He told them how he had been spiritually reborn after finding the Lord behind bars, saying his arrest had been a true blessing in disguise.
Two weeks later, the U.S. Parole Commission examiners unanimously voted to grant Phillip Garrido federal parole, transferring him to a Nevada state prison to finish his potential life sentence. Their report painted a highly positive portrait of Inmate Garrido as living proof of how the prison system at its best can rehabilitate and reform.
Ironically, federal parole was abolished that same month, with sentences becoming far longer and mandatory. But Garrido slid under the wire, as he was already serving his sentence when the far tougher regulations came into effect.
Under the old system, parole suitability was determined by a numerical formula, factoring the inmate’s age, high school diploma and history of heroin/opiate dependence. Phillip Garrido was rated category seven, actually making him eligible for parole as early as 1985, although he had been required to serve at least ten years.
On January 20, 1988, the commission officially granted Phillip Garrido parole, after serving just ten years, eleven months of his fifty-year sentence.
“Phillip Craig Garrido is eligible to be paroled,” read the U.S. Parole Commission’s Certificate of Parole. “[The] said prisoner has substantially observed the rules of the institution, and in the opinion of the Commission said prisoner’s release would not depreciate the seriousness of this offense or promote disrespect for the law, and would not jeopardize the public welfare.”
Two days later, he was discharged from federal custody.
“Before you lies the opportunity,” the U.S. Parole Commission wrote Garrido, “to plan and re-establish the course of your life toward goals approved by society and in accordance with the principles of good citizenship.”
He was then transported to a medium security state prison in Carson City, Nevada, for the life sentence he owed Nevada for forcible rape. But astonishingly he was already eligible for parole in Nevada, for his time served
in federal prisons.
Two days later, on January 22, Garrido was photographed for a Nevada Department of Prisons mug shot. In the photograph he has short hair and a small mustache. He is wearing regulation prison garb, staring at the camera impassively, his eyes giving nothing away.
On August 4, seven months after his transfer to the Carson City prison, Phillip Garrido attended his third Nevada State parole hearing. And the state board commissioners now reassessed Garrido, designating him “moderate” risk. Under the Nevada State assessment criteria, he scored a six out of a possible perfect ten low risk score.
Had the commissioners known that in 1969 he had served time in California’s Clayton Farm Facility for drug offenses, it would have added two points to his score, making him a “high risk” parolee with a score of four.
After considering his case, the Nevada State Parole Board voted three to two to free Phillip Garrido from prison and into federal parole.
In the official State of Nevada Board of Parole Certificate, Phillip Garrido was granted parole with surprisingly few restrictions. He had to reside in California with his mother and maintain steady employment. He was also required to submit to searches and regular drug testing, as well as attending outpatient substance abuse sessions and mental health counseling. But there were absolutely no restrictions on his contact with children.
On August 29, 1988, Phillip Garrido walked out of the Carson City Prison, after serving just seven months and four days of his Nevada life sentence. He then traveled 210 miles west to the ECI Halfway House in Oakland, California, entering a community treatment program for sex offenders.
Garrido was now virtually free to come and go as he pleased, as long as he attended his treatment sessions. During that time he reportedly had one violation of his parole agreement, being sent to San Francisco City Jail for a short time, before being allowed back to the ECI Halfway House.