by John Glatt
“The kids needed to talk about it,” said Louis. “What an incredibly scary thing to have happen in a small town.”
Jaycee’s classmates even drew their own missing persons posters for their lost friend. And in a heartbreaking photo opportunity for the Associated Press, three of them posed holding them up.
“Pleas [sic] look for her. It is worth it,” read one little girl’s poster. “Tahoe Girl Kidnapped,” read another. And another classmate’s poster had drawings of a heart and a flower, alongside the words, “Jaycee Lee Kidnapped. Please Look.”
Another classmate, Kristina Rhoden, who had attended Jaycee’s eleventh birthday party a month earlier, said South Lake Tahoe was never the same again after she disappeared.
“It was horrible,” she explained in 2009. “There was an overflow of fear. That bus stop in Pioneer Trail was a major stop. We realized it could have been anybody who was taken. We just couldn’t believe someone we knew was kidnapped—that no one was really safe.”
On Wednesday, June 12, two days after Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken, the El Dorado Sheriff’s Office released the composite drawing of the suspected female kidnapper based on Carl Probyn’s description. The drawing showed a thin-faced Arabic-looking woman in her thirties, with piercing dark eyes and long black hair. It was circulated to all law enforcement agencies in California and Nevada, as well as television stations and newspapers.
The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department—the official lead agency of the investigation—were now receiving an average of one new lead every five minutes from all over America.
“We are checking all of them out,” Special Agent Tom Griffin of the FBI told The Sacramento Bee. “But I am afraid that we have nothing positive to report right now.”
After Terry Probyn’s heartfelt television plea to the kidnappers, two families from Lake Tahoe and Sacramento, who wished to remain anonymous, had pledged $10,000 each, bringing the total reward money to $25,000.
As the long agonizing hours turned into days, Terry Probyn chain-smoked, drinking herself senseless. Her friends and family tried to comfort her, but she was inconsolable. Her mood swings alternated between panic, hope, anger and despair.
“Basically my wife collapsed,” recalled Carl Probyn. “She was just beside herself.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Terry Probyn received a visit from Trish Williams, who ran a San Jose–based nonprofit agency called Child Quest International, dedicated to the recovery of missing children.
After spending some time with Terry, Williams decided she needed to be occupied doing something constructive, instead of drowning her sorrows in alcohol.
“We wanted to get her out of the house,” she later told author Robert Scott, “and doing something . . . positive.”
So she drove Terry to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, where dozens of volunteers had gathered to walk the streets, distributing Jaycee’s missing poster, as well as the sketch of her suspected female kidnapper.
Jaycee Lee Dugard’s missing poster, which would also be used on a t-shirt, bore two recent photographs and read:
ID INFO
Jaycee is a white female, 4'7" tall, weighs 80 pounds, has straight blonde hair and blue eyes. She has a gap in her front teeth, a chicken pox mark between her eyes and a birthmark on her right arm below her elbow. She also has a mole on her back and was last seen wearing a pink jacket, pink stretch pants, a white t-shirt and white canvas tennis shoes.
CIRCUMSTANCES
Jaycee was last seen by her step-father walking up a hill to her school bus when a gray on gray vehicle made a U-turn and the person on the passenger side grabbed her and put her in the car and sped off. The step-father gave chase but lost sight of the vehicle. Jaycee has not been seen or heard from since.
IF YOU SEE THIS CHILD, OR MISSING PERSON, OR KNOW WHERE SHE IS LOCATED, PLEASE CONTACT THE EL DORADO SHERIFF DEPARTMENT.
For the next few days, Terry Probyn helped distribute the posters, which soon started appearing on walls, trees, convenience stores and motels all over California and Nevada, and later as far away as the East Coast.
22
AMERICA’S MOST WANTED
By Thursday morning, seventy-two hours after the kidnapping, investigators had made little progress in their search for Jaycee Lee Dugard. Although there had been hundreds of reported sightings of the little girl or the kidnappers’ car, nothing had checked out.
“Everyone was so concerned,” said the FBI’s lead investigator on the case, Chris Campion, “because it was such a tragic and shocking case for the community. We got tons of calls, and we really diligently followed every lead that we possibly could to its logical conclusion.”
At his daily press briefing, El Dorado County sheriff Don McDonald said all investigators really had to go on was Carl Probyn’s description of the getaway car, now believed to be a two-tone gray 1980s Mercury Zephyr. He said that although investigators still believed the kidnappers might be holding Jaycee in the area, all the roadblocks and door-to-door searches had stopped.
Now-retired FBI special agent Mary Ellen O’Toole was part of the team of profilers working the Jaycee Dugard case. She thought it “striking” that a couple, especially a woman, was involved in such a crime. O’Toole, who would later co-write an FBI manual on child abduction, said investigators had been working on the theory that Jaycee’s kidnappers had also taken Michaela Garecht, three years earlier.
“We had this cluster of child abductions,” O’Toole told Dateline NBC in 2009, “and of course one of the primary questions . . . were they committed by the same individual.”
The FBI investigators were also astonished at the apparent “high-risk behavior” of the kidnappers.
“It occurred in broad daylight,” she observed. “Plus, it occurred in front of other people who could provide us with information about the car, about Jaycee, about the abductor.”
On Thursday afternoon, Anthony Batson, a producer on Fox Television’s highly rated America’s Most Wanted (AMW), flew into Sacramento with his crew. They then drove to South Lake Tahoe to interview Carl and Terry Probyn at their Washoan Avenue home. It would be the first of three AMW segments on Jaycee over the next few years.
“It was my first time dealing with the parents of a missing child face-to-face,” Batson remembered. “We talked to Jaycee’s parents. . . . They were devastated and desperate.”
Batson and AMW correspondent Lena Nozizwe interviewed the Probyns in their pine-tree-canopied backyard about the fateful morning their daughter had disappeared.
“Tears flowed throughout the interview,” said Batson. “Some of them were mine.”
Then they filmed Carl in the garage, where he had witnessed the abduction.
“Once the car opened,” he said, “I really panicked. I reached for my car keys. Didn’t have any. They were in the house.”
The AMW crew then moved to Jaycee’s bedroom, interviewing her tearful mother on her bed, surrounded by her daughter’s beloved teddy bears and dolls.
“We do feel she’s alive,” said thirty-two-year-old Terry holding Jaycee’s teddy bear. “You know, I feel her in my heart. And that’s what keeps me going.”
The segment, which would air the following night, included home video of Jaycee’s recent birthday party, with a slow-motion shot of her blowing out birthday cake candles.
“It was edited in such a way,” said Batson, “as to grab the viewer’s attention, make them look closely at the cute blonde girl on the screen, and motivate them to pick up the phone and call our free 800 number, if they had the slightest detail they thought investigators could use.”
In 2009, Batson, now a senior producer with CBS’s The Early Show, would admit that at the time he secretly believed Jaycee was already dead.
“The FBI says the first seventy-two hours is crucial in a missing child case,” he explained. “After that, the chances of recovery are next to zero.”
On Monday, June 3—one week before Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction—a t
wo-year-old girl had been playing alone in the garden of the Beverly Lodge Motel in South Lake Tahoe. Inside her mother was paying a bill at reception, when she saw a dark-skinned woman pick up the child and start walking toward the hotel entrance.
She dashed out to challenge the woman, who immediately handed over the child, saying she had just been looking for the mother. Then she got into a white pickup truck and was driven away by a Caucasian man.
After reading about Jaycee’s abduction and seeing the sketch of the suspected woman, the mother had called investigators to report the earlier incident.
And on Friday morning, at its daily briefing, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office appealed to the mysterious woman to come forward, so she could be eliminated from the investigation.
Lieutenant James Roloff then told reporters that the investigation had been “scaled down,” due to a lack of promising leads. And investigators were now hoping that evening’s America’s Most Wanted telecast would revitalize the search.
“If there are no developments over the weekend,” reported The Sacramento Bee, “investigators will reevaluate the effort Monday.”
That night millions of viewers all over North America watched the moving America’s Most Wanted segment on Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction.
“Have you seen Jaycee Lee Dugard?” asked AMW host John Walsh. “Jaycee’s eleven years old. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. She’s four-and-a-half feet tall and weighs eighty pounds.”
The dramatically powerful piece generated hundreds of leads, none of which came to anything. One viewer mailed in an ad from a swingers magazine, saying the photo of the dark-haired woman in the advertisement resembled the composite sketch.
There were no windows in Jaycee Dugard’s prison, and it was stiflingly hot that summer. Her only sense of time was when Phillip and Nancy Garrido would unlock the shed door to feed her. They gave her old clothes to wear and a rotting mattress to sleep on, only allowing her out of the filthy shed to use the makeshift toilet and shower. And investigators believe that Garrido may have fed his captive tranquilizers and other prescription drugs to keep her compliantly under his control.
Within a month of her abduction, Phillip and Nancy Garrido entered the shed with a tape player. They then turned it on to play one of his country-and-western-style love songs. In his deranged way, Garrido tried to create a romantic setting to have sex with his eleven-year-old prisoner.
He then forced the little girl down on the mattress, telling her it was the will of God, and mercilessly raped Jaycee.
At first Jaycee tried to scream for help, but he had soundproofed the shed so effectively, no one could hear her. Several times a day he would come to abuse his slave, subjecting her to unimaginable sexual cruelty.
What went through the little girl’s mind is anybody’s guess. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and then years, the gentle child stopped fighting back, eventually resigning herself to her fate.
23
THE SUMMER OF TERROR
Two weeks after Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken, there was still no sign of her. But although she seemed to have disappeared off the face of the Earth, her smiling toothy grin and enchanting blonde-haired, blue-eyed looks were known to everyone. Her distraught family regularly joined hundreds of volunteers, handing out “missing” fliers. Jaycee’s poster blanketed almost every tree and fence in Tahoe and neighboring towns. And children all over the area were now wearing “Have You Seen Jaycee?” buttons, emblazoned with her photo.
“I never knew I had so many friends,” Terry told Sacramento Bee reporter Mark Glover.
Each day Terry and Carl Probyn sat by the phone, waiting for news and fielding calls from reporters. But with absolutely no word of their daughter, every day was yet another torturous ordeal for them to face.
“I was walking the floors, ranting and raving,” Terry recalled, “thinking the worst.”
On Tuesday, June 25, Sheriff Don McDonald admitted the investigation was no nearer finding Jaycee than it had been on the day she was taken.
“We’ve had literally hundreds of leads,” he said. “But we have none right now that we think are really promising.”
The sheriff said that the fifty-officer investigation had now moved into another phase. Investigators were checking if any vehicles in the area fitting Carl Probyn’s description were registered to sex offenders. And they were also looking into the files of seven children who had gone missing in the Reno area over the last several years.
He said his department had also been receiving calls from psychics, claiming to know where Jaycee was being kept.
“We’ll have a psychic call,” said the sheriff, “say[ing] she’s being held in a large building in a metropolitan area. There’s really no way to check that out.”
Terry Probyn was also receiving a flood of upsetting calls from all over the country, making things even worse.
“They were driving me crazy with satanic theories,” she told People magazine in November 1991. “One woman called and said she felt that Jaycee was in a trunk of a car at a casino. So we spent the day knocking on trunks of cars at casinos.”
Years later, Reno psychic Dayle Schear—who later worked on the O.J. Simpson case—would claim that Terry Probyn had consulted her soon after Jaycee’s disappearance. The celebrated psychic says she did a psychic reading for the Probyns, in which she described the man and woman holding Jaycee near a white bridge.
“I described the general area and how she was being held,” Schear said. “I said it was sexual. I knew she was being held at force and she could not get to a phone to call.”
Another psychic Terry and Carl consulted several times told them that they both knew the abductors. And several years later, Jaycee’s stepgrandmother Wilma Probyn would also visit a psychic, who said the little girl was still alive and living with a couple in Northern California.
One Sunday, about a month after the kidnapping, Terry Probyn decided to sober up for the sake of her family. So she came down from her room, dried her eyes and took control of the situation.
“I was by myself,” she remembered, “and I suddenly got this inner strength to quit crying and get on with it.”
Over the next few months, Terry and Carl Probyn embarked on a mission to keep Jaycee’s story in the media, never turning down an interview. It was part of their strategy to find her, after the police investigation stalled through lack of leads.
“This was [our] whole goal from the very start,” explained Carl. “I mean we did interviews from day one and we’ve done them all the way through. Our job right now is to get her picture out there and get these interviews to get her back.”
On July 3, Terry was interviewed by the Associated Press. It went out on the national wire on Independence Day and was picked up by newspapers coast-to-coast. Accompanying the story was a photograph of Terry sadly tying a pink ribbon to a tree on Highway 50, the road Jaycee’s abductors had taken three weeks earlier.
Terry, who had taken a leave of absence from her job, also joined a dedicated group of volunteers who met every Wednesday at a South Lake Tahoe church hall. There they prepared mailers containing Jaycee’s photograph and information to be sent out to truck stops, convenience stores and campgrounds throughout North America. The group averaged five thousand mailings a week.
A local Tahoe rock band called The Movers gave a benefit concert to raise money for the Jaycee reward fund. And a silent auction was held, with all attending children fingerprinted as a precaution against future abductions.
That summer, South Lake Tahoe lived in terror that Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abductors would strike again. Parents never let their children out of their sight, and everyone started locking their doors.
“It was a summer of a lot of fear in Tahoe,” recalled Meyers Elementary principal Karen Gillis-Tinlin. “Parents didn’t just let their children walk down the street. Didn’t let them out on their bike to just ride freely in the neighborhood. We really did keep our
children close to us that summer.”
Jaycee’s former classmate Meghan Dorris said she and all her friends lived in fear.
“We were petrified to be alone,” she recalled. “We were petrified to walk anywhere by ourselves, to do anything by ourselves, because we thought we were next . . . [that] we’d be picked off the street one by one.”
Investigators then turned their attention to Carl Probyn. As the last person to see Jaycee, he soon became a suspect, and some of his in-laws even hired a private investigator to check him out.
Over the next few months, Carl would be subjected to four FBI-administered lie detector tests, as well as tough questioning from law enforcement under hypnosis.
“I think in any investigation you have to look at everyone as a suspect,” explained lead detective Jim Watson. “And you have to look at stepfathers. The person I was working for was Jaycee, and if it meant questioning the stepfather, Carl, it was simply to find out where Jaycee was at.”
Probyn says that although being under suspicion made him nervous, he totally understood why.
“The FBI put me through the wringer,” he later recalled. “I was the last person to see her alive. I went through hell. They asked me if I’d take a lie detector test. And I remember they asked me questions like, ‘Do you ever wish she wasn’t around?’ ‘Did you ever forge a document?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why don’t you guys ask me a straight question?’ ”
After the first examination, investigators told Carl he was holding something back, asking him to return for another test the following day.
“I said sure,” said Probyn. “So I took another one and then [another] the next day. And basically the same kinds of questions.”
One theory investigators considered at the time was that Jaycee had been snatched by a drug gang to whom Carl owed money.
“They were fishing,” he said. “I can’t knock them for what they were doing.”