by John Glatt
And Terry became obsessed with the nagging question of whether Carl could possibly have done more to save Jaycee. She would lash out at him, even though she realized that he had done his best to chase the abductors uphill on his bicycle before calling 911. Carl himself was racked by guilt, thinking if only he had had his car keys in his pocket, he could have jumped in his vehicle and gone after them.
August 10 marked the two-month anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction. Carl and Terry Probyn attended a moving silent candlelight vigil along Highway 50, to keep hope alive for the safe return of their daughter.
By fall, when there were still no clues to her whereabouts, many investigators secretly believed she was dead, and the search had almost ground to a halt. But the Probyns soldiered on undaunted, working around the clock to keep Jaycee’s name and picture in the public consciousness. A public service announcement was running on California and Nevada TV stations, appealing for any information about Jaycee. And her photograph was now on milk cartons and grocery bags all over America.
In one interview, Carl Probyn desperately attempted to communicate with Jaycee through Sacramento Bee columnist Anita Creamer. If she ever got to read the story and happened to be in a department store, he told her “to raise hell” and “start screaming.”
Several months later, Carl and Terry Probyn helped restage Jaycee’s disappearance for the popular TV series Missing Reward. Each week the thirty-minute show highlighted a missing person or fugitive, using actors to portray the real characters. But Carl and Terry Probyn insisted that they play themselves in a reenactment at their home, which took twelve hours to shoot.
“We didn’t want somebody else portraying our part,” explained Carl, “because I saw what happened. An actor couldn’t take my place and do the same things.”
Terry also felt it was important for them to play themselves in the segment.
“We felt this is what we can do to get Jaycee back,” she said. “This has got to be it . . . our one break.”
A few weeks later, Terry and Carl held a fundraiser at a local crafts fair. Wearing a “Missing” T-shirt with a large picture of her daughter, Terry held up a poster with her daughter’s favorite Boo Boo Bunny poem.
It’s difficult to calm a child
Even when the pain is mild,
When a lump, a bruise, or little knot,
Appears in almost every spot.
On November 25, 1991, People magazine published a major story on Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction. It would be the first of several the magazine would run over the years. The double-page feature, bearing the headline “Too Cruel a Theft,” was a candid account of the day of the kidnapping, and the terrible toll it had taken on the Probyns.
“At first nothing could stop the pain,” read the article by Karen S. Schneider. “The day Terry learned of her daughter’s abduction, she smoked cigarette after cigarette and drank herself into a stupor.”
It vividly described Terry’s ordeal over the first few days of her beloved daughter’s disappearance, and how she had been inconsolable.
“Day after day the despondent mother sank in a dark hole of drunkenness,” it read, “tears and heavy, troubled sleep.”
It also reported the unbearable pressures Carl and Terry Probyn had been under, not made any easier by his being a suspect in his stepdaughter’s kidnapping.
“It made me nervous,” Carl told People. “I had to say, ‘Sure, there were times I’d wished Jaycee wasn’t in our lives.’ ”
The lead detective, Sergeant Jim Watson, was quoted as saying investigators were now “99.9 percent sure” there was no family involvement in Jaycee’s abduction.
The Probyns said they were haunted by not knowing where Jaycee was or if she was still alive. Even Jaycee’s twenty-two-month-old half-sister Shayna knew something was wrong, said Terry, telling how the toddler would occasionally take a “Have You Seen Jaycee” button and kiss it.
“It breaks my heart,” she sobbed, “when she asks for her ‘siss.’ We just say she’ll be home soon.”
Terry said that her only source of comfort was the possibility there was a woman involved. She speculated that the female abductress might have lost her own child, and was caring for Jaycee.
“Maybe she took Jaycee because of her grief,” said Terry. “If that is true, all I can say is, ‘Please let my child go. You may like her, but I love her.’ ”
The week the People article ran, Carl Probyn was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix. He had two emergency operations, but within days he was out of the hospital and had rejoined the search for his stepdaughter.
Tuesday, December 10, marked the six-month anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction, and the investigation had stalled. Lead detective Sergeant Jim Watson said the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI had received around six thousand tips since the kidnapping, generating six hundred good leads. But even with the help of the latest FBI computers, nothing had come of any of them. There was, he told the Sacramento Bee, one tip from the very beginning that was still under investigation. But he refused to elaborate further.
To mark the somber occasion, Carl and Terry Probyn held another emotional candlelight vigil on Route 50, attended by scores of sympathetic friends and well-wishers.
A crew from America’s Most Wanted was also in South Lake Tahoe for the sad anniversary, filming an update to the story, which would air the following Friday. Once again there were hundreds of calls to investigators with new tips, but nothing ultimately panned out.
Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla was so moved by Jaycee’s story, he posted a further $100,000 reward for any information leading to her being found.
A few days before Christmas, Jaycee Lee Dugard joined sports legends like Joe DiMaggio, Joe Montana and Nolan Ryan as a trading card collectable. For America’s Most Wanted had started its own set of trading cards, with Jaycee’s color photo joining thirty-four other missing children in the two-hundred-card set.
“The whole idea is to get her picture out there,” explained Carl Probyn. “If just one person sees her, or sees the kidnappers . . . anything that helps do that is a good idea.”
The trading card set was being distributed through sports card stores nationwide. And the missing children’s set was endorsed by superstar sportsmen Larry Bird and Lawrence Taylor.
That Christmas, Terry Probyn retreated to Jaycee’s room and cried. Unlike last year there was no tree, festive decorations or holiday joy.
“I can’t bring myself to have Christmas not knowing where she is,” Terry told The Sacramento Bee, adding that she believed Jaycee was still alive. “It’s the people showing up to help . . . someone they don’t even know that helps me focus.”
Facing his first Christmas without Jaycee, Carl said the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened made it so much worse.
“If she got hit by a car,” he said, “it would tear your heart out, but there would be an ending. But there is no ending here.”
Between 4:30 and 5:00 P.M. on December 27, four-year-old Amanda Campbell left her brother to ride her bicycle around the corner to a friend’s house. The chubby little blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl never made it there. Her bicycle was found later that evening in a nearby field.
The little girl, who was never seen again, was abducted from Fairfield, California, just a forty-five-minute drive from Walnut Avenue, Antioch.
24
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
One hundred and seventy miles away in her filthy Antioch dungeon, Jaycee Lee Dugard never knew it was Christmas. Imprisoned in her windowless jail each day was just like the last, with little sense of time.
Soon after Phillip Garrido had started to rape her, the eleven-year-old had learned to cope by distancing herself from her nightmare. At first she prayed her parents would soon come and rescue her from this nightmare. But eventually she began to wonder if anyone was even searching for her. And perhaps nobody even cared.
Phillip and N
ancy cruelly played with her conflicted emotions, using them as an effective method of control. First Phillip would brutally rape her, and then he and Nancy showed her kindness, bringing her little presents and fussing over her.
Naturally shy and submissive, Jaycee was not a fighter and never tried to confront her jailer—probably the key to her survival. Later there was speculation that Garrido had fed her various drugs, like Valium and other addictive tranquilizers, making her even more docile.
As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, Jaycee somehow bonded with Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Her jailers literally held the power of life and death over her, easily brainwashing their young sex slave.
“The moment he snatches her right from her parents,” explained renowned forensic psychiatrist and best-selling author Dr. Keith Ablow, “her whole world crumbled. In a sense she had to dispel belief here in order to live there and not go crazy, utterly insane, you’d have to believe yourself to be safe. You have to convince yourself you’re in a good situation.”
There are limits to the human mind’s ability to cope, and few children have ever suffered like Jaycee Dugard.
“An eleven-year-old who is abducted,” explained Dr. Ablow, “and held against her will has little alternative but to bond with her captors. To maintain one’s desperation and grief and rage for many years would be too damaging to the human mind—so the human mind tells itself a story about safety and contentment to safeguard itself.”
Dr. Ablow believes that over the first few months of her captivity, Jaycee Dugard may well have suffered a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome—a psychological condition where in order to survive a hostage bonds closely to his or her captors. The condition was first identified in 1973, when a team of bank robbers took employees at the Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden, hostage for six days. Over that period they became emotionally attached to their captors, ultimately resisting rescue attempts by the police, later refusing to even testify against the robbers.
The term was first coined by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, a police adviser during the incident.
Perhaps the most famous case of Stockholm Syndrome came the following year, when American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst actually joined the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, who had kidnapped her. She took part in several bank robberies, eventually serving a two-year jail sentence, later commuted by president Jimmy Carter.
“He’s God to Jaycee,” said Dr. Ablow of Garrido. “Her first sexual experience is with this man. He was not only her kidnapper and rapist, but the man who kept her fed and clothed and kept her makeshift hovel dry when it rained. When she wept, it may have been he who comforted her and reassured her that everything would be all right—because he loved her.”
In January 1992, a Reno songwriter named Larry Williams wrote a moving tribute song to the missing girl, entitled “Jaycee Lee.” The catchy song had a rousing chorus of “Jaycee—Jaycee Lee. Soon the tears of joy will rain and we’ll fulfill our dreams.”
Williams then recruited a local band called Perfect Circle to record it, inviting Terry and Carl Probyn to attend the recording session. And in the middle of the song, Terry spoke this moving message directly to her daughter.
Listen to your heart baby and hear me say.
That every minute of every day.
Every moment and in every way—we are with you Jaycee.
You’re in our thoughts, you’re in our prayers and we won’t rest until you’re home.
Until you’re safe. And in the arms of the ones that love you.
In early 1992, Herschel Franzen died, leaving 1554 Walnut Avenue to his widow, Patricia. And soon after that Garrido brought Jaycee out of the shed, formally introducing her to his mother as his and Nancy’s daughter.
At 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, April 22—ten months after the abduction—an anonymous caller telephoned the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office with a new tip. The tipster reported seeing a little blonde girl staring intensely for a long time at Jaycee’s “missing” poster in the forecourt of a gas station, on Highway 4. The girl then walked to a yellow Dodge van and was driven off by a man.
The caller was convinced it was Jaycee, but did not have a license plate number or know which direction the van had taken.
By the time a deputy arrived, there was no sign of the yellow van and the caller had left.
Two months later, on the first anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction, more than four hundred people gathered in South Lake Tahoe for a special service and candlelight vigil. Carl and Terry Probyn attended the grim ceremony with their little daughter Shayna, later giving an interview to a Sacramento television station.
“I’m scared,” said Jaycee’s thirty-three-year-old mother, having visibly aged over the last year. “I’m scared that it is going to go on forever and ever and we’re never going to have an ending. We are living our worst nightmare. Unfortunately it’s gone on for too long.”
She also announced she and her Wednesday volunteer group had begun mailing out missing fliers to seventy thousand liquor stores from coast to coast.
Carl said their daughter’s disappearance had affected every part of their life, including their marriage, jobs and finances. And not a day went by without him thinking about her.
“It’s like being tortured every day,” he said. “You know she’s gone. I don’t know what they’re doing to her, but we’re being tortured every day not knowing what’s happening to her.”
That fall, Terry Probyn went back to work as a graphic designer. She still ran the search for Jaycee, but with each month passing without news, it became harder and harder to motivate herself. And her marriage to Carl was starting to fracture under all the pressure and uncertainty.
That second Christmas without Jaycee, Terry took a week off work and stayed at home, crying.
“She was a basket case,” Carl said later. “The first ten years . . . she didn’t celebrate Christmas. She would take a week vacation, and stay home. On Jaycee’s birthday she would stay home a week and just cry.”
It would be eighteen months before Phillip Garrido was satisfied that he had successfully brainwashed Jaycee. Soon after she arrived, he had renamed her Alyssa, further distancing her from her old identity. She was now under his total control.
He finally let her out of the shed and into the sunshine, although she remained captive in his secret backyard prison, living in a motley collection of sheds and shabby tents.
One hot summer’s afternoon, nine-year-old Patrick McQuaid was outside playing when he saw a little blonde-haired girl on the other side of a chicken wire fence, separating his yard from the Garridos.
“I thought she was pretty,” recalled McQuaid, who had never seen any other kids playing there before. Hoping to make a new friend, he asked if she lived there or was just visiting. The girl said she lived there and that her name was Jaycee.
Then suddenly Phillip Garrido appeared and took her into the house. The next day a new privacy fence suddenly appeared, preventing the little boy from seeing the Garrido backyard again.
“I was young and didn’t think anything of it,” said McQuaid. “Kids came and went all the time. But she sure was pretty.”
25
“MY BABY BLUE”
On March 18, 1993, a federal arrest warrant was issued for Phillip Garrido, for breaking his parole conditions. Not only had he failed to report to a federal probation officer, but he had tested positive for marijuana and was not going to aftercare counseling sessions as required.
Garrido was then taken into custody at the federal detention center in Dublin, California. And on April 1, he appeared at a probable cause hearing, which ordered him incarcerated in the Pleasanton Federal Correctional Institution.
For the next month, Phillip Garrido remained behind bars, leaving Nancy alone with Alyssa. She now assumed her husband’s duties as jailer, closely guarding the little girl and making no attempt to free her.
Every morning, before leaving for he
r nursing job, Nancy would feed Alyssa and bring her a change of clothes. She had become genuinely fond of her husband’s sex slave, believing it was God’s will they should all be a family.
Nancy was also grooming her “daughter”—now just a couple of months shy of her thirteenth birthday and going through puberty—to be ready to bear their children once Phillip was released.
During his four weeks behind bars, Phillip Garrido composed a dozen new songs, many about his beautiful young sex slave. As he strummed his bass guitar in his cell, he wrote country-and-western-type songs about Alyssa and his twisted sexual obsession for her.
“I will tell you about the only one,” begins “Baby Blue,” his love song to Alyssa. “She’s a dream, dream come true. With a note saying you’re my Baby Blue.”
The lyrics to another song appear to describe the abduction.
“Leavenworth is a long way from Nashville/ here I go tra la la/ But I get my jollies in a motorcar/ feeling good tra la la/ Stopped and sucker for a candy bar.”
Another of his bizarre love songs bears the lyrics, “For every girl in the world/ They want to be in love, yeah/ You’re just the same, go play a game/ Just tell me that you want me.”
But perhaps the most chilling is the one entitled “Mother,” in which he describes the little girl’s imprisonment and repeated rapes.
“Mother in your eyes, deepness in your pride/ played well when I first met ya/ Saved from the days, I kept you, but in the darkness you remain/ Everybody pays in the human race/ Being abused and used as devices.”
On April 29, Phillip Garrido was released to home confinement supervision and ordered to report to a halfway house in Oakland a day later. The U.S. Parole Commission case analyst then withdrew the arrest warrant, reinstating his parole subject to 120 days supervision and electronic monitoring.
Although Garrido was technically still under Nevada state parole, the federal parole authority had never informed them of their parolee’s drug violation. If they had done so, Nevada could have revoked his parole, returning him to a state prison to finish his life sentence.