by John Glatt
While they were waiting for the detectives to arrive, Lardieri sent some officers to Antioch to secure Phillip Garrido’s house until a search warrant could be signed by a judge.
“Mr. Garrido’s elderly mother was still there,” said Lardieri, “so we had to make some arrangements to have her taken care of by the Contra Costa Regional Medical Center.”
At around 2:00 P.M., El Dorado County detectives R. Straffer and R. Fitzgerald arrived, briefly meeting with Lieutenant Lardieri to draw up a game plan. It was agreed that the Concord Police Department would assist El Dorado in the preliminary investigations.
“It flowed very well,” recalled Lardieri. “We assisted with some interviews of Mrs. Garrido and the two daughters. The El Dorado County detectives interviewed Jaycee and Phillip Garrido.”
As the afternoon progressed, Jaycee managed to compose herself enough to give a full statement to the El Dorado detectives.
“She was able to tell her story to them,” said Lardieri. “The two younger girls were very talkative. They were talking about what they do at the house and stuff. They probably felt safe being around our people.”
A few hours later, Nancy Garrido was arrested, after confessing to helping her husband kidnap Jaycee Lee Dugard. Hearing of their arrests, Jaycee Lee Dugard tearfully begged the investigators to free them, saying that now she had been found everything was all right, and she didn’t want the Garridos arrested. But her pleas fell on deaf ears.
At 9:00 P.M., Phillip and Nancy Garrido were transported to the county jail at Martinez, where they were booked. Nancy was held on $4.195 million bail, but as a parolee Phillip was ineligible for bail.
38
“THEY FOUND JAYCEE”
Around 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday afternoon, Tina Dugard was preparing a salad when she received a call from an El Dorado County investigator, asking for her sister Terry’s phone number. Tina, forty-two, gave it to him, although he refused to say why he needed it.
A few minutes later, FBI agent Chris Campion called Terry Probyn on her cell phone at Riverside School District, where she worked as a secretary.
“We’ve got Jaycee,” he told her excitedly.
At first Terry thought it a cruel hoax. But then Campion put Jaycee on the phone, so she could hear her long-lost daughter’s voice for the first time in eighteen years. After a short, highly emotional conversation, in which Terry asked some family questions that only Jaycee could answer, she was convinced that it really was her daughter.
Then Agent Campion, who had been involved in the investigation from the beginning, came back on the line.
“She’s got something else to tell you,” he said, handing the phone back to Jaycee.
“I have babies,” Jaycee announced.
“How many babies?” asked Terry.
“Two,” she replied.
Agent Campion came back and without going into details told her Jaycee had been with some people who were now in police custody.
After putting down the phone, Terry called her youngest daughter Shayna, now nineteen, with the incredible news. She then drove home, falling into Shayna’s arms.
At around 4:00 P.M., Shayna telephoned her father, Carl Probyn, now sixty-one, and put Terry on the line.
His estranged wife first asked if he was sitting down.
“They found Jaycee,” she told him, taking a short pause. “She’s alive.”
“And we both lost it,” recalled Carl. “We cried for ten minutes.”
Terry told him that she had initially thought it a bad joke, but then asked Jaycee a few questions only she would know the answer to.
“She remembers everything,” said Carl. “They talked back and forth and she had the right answers to all my wife’s questions about her childhood. [My wife’s] in shock. I told her and my daughter to sit down there and think of questions to ask her.”
Then Carl asked Terry if they had known the abductors personally, and she replied no. She said the police were taking DNA samples from Jaycee to make certain it was her, but she was convinced it was.
A few minutes later, Tina Dugard received an excited call from her niece Shayna, saying Jaycee had been found.
“I don’t know what I felt,” Tina later told The Orange County Register. “I just said, ‘What?’ I’m sure I repeated that word several times. . . . We both started crying hysterically.”
Then it was agreed that she would meet Terry and Shayna at Ontario Airport the next morning, taking the 6:00 A.M. flight to San Francisco to be reunited with Jaycee and her two daughters.
Late afternoon, a judge signed a search warrant for 1554 Walnut Avenue, Antioch, which had been sealed off with yellow police crime tape. Then FBI agents and officers from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department moved in to begin the search.
At the end of the backyard, the officers saw an eight-foot fence, lined by tall trees. There was an old dishwasher, garbage cans and other rubbish backed up against it.
Then an investigator pulled a blue tarpaulin that hung over the fence, and it came apart revealing a narrow entrance. He squeezed through to enter the secret world where Jaycee and her daughters had lived.
A crude hand-painted welcome sign was strung between two branches, and there was the sound of wind chimes. In front of them was a maze of variously sized outbuildings, shacks and tents. There was also an eight-foot-by-four-foot steel cage.
The backyard within a backyard was strewn with rubbish. Broken toys, discarded furniture, appliances, cardboard boxes and yard cuttings were dumped everywhere. There was an open septic hole, and the makeshift outside toilet had not been connected to any septic tank or sewer.
And investigators also found, hidden among rusting vehicle parts, tarps and plastic buckets, Phillip Garrido’s old beat-up two-tone sedan that he and Nancy had used to abduct Jaycee so many years ago.
“It was as if you were camping,” said El Dorado County sheriff Warren Rupf, who was one of the first officers to enter the backyard. “The structures are no more than six foot high. All the sheds and tents had electricity furnished by electrical cords. Nothing more sophisticated than that. There was a rudimentary outhouse and a rudimentary shower.”
A rusting children’s playground set with two swings and a slide lay next to a ramshackle old barn. At one corner of the large yard was an empty raised swimming pool, full of dirty leaves. Nearby were two adult canvas chairs, standing next to a child’s deck chair. A large hollowed-out Halloween pumpkin rested on a laundry basket.
Then investigators entered one of the larger tents, staring in disbelief at Jaycee and her daughters’ appalling living conditions. There was a sofa covered in old pillows, papers and electrical equipment. A pile of dirty women’s clothes and underwear had been thrown in one corner, and old mattresses, cushions and toys covered moth-eaten old carpets. A teddy bear lay on the floor next to four naked Barbie dolls and an open container for lice treatment.
There was a large collection of cat books, puzzles and figurines and a box of Special Kitty pet food.
They then ventured into the ten-foot-by-ten-foot shed, which had been soundproofed and could only be opened from the outside. Inside they found Phillip Garrido’s guitars and recording equipment as well as restraints.
By the side of it was a derelict tent, held together by broken wood and pieces of tarpaulin. All the windows were boarded up and the doors nailed shut.
But Jaycee and the girls were not the only residents of this virtual prison, which would later be compared to a concentration camp. A Labrador mix and a Rottweiler roamed around the backyard, happily coexisting with five pet cats. There was also a pigeon, three cockatiels and a mouse, which was kept in a cage. Investigators immediately called in the Contra Costa County Animal Control, which collected the animals to take care of them.
By nightfall, investigators had started removing bags of evidence from the backyard. But it would take several weeks to complete the search.
By this time, reporters had started arriving at
Concord Police Station after a tip-off that there had been a major development in the famous Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping case. But police officers had been ordered not to comment to the media, who were already camped outside the Galindo Street police headquarters.
“Our big concern was that we wanted to protect their privacy,” said Lieutenant Jim Lardieri. “Because we knew once this case got to the press it was going to be huge.”
Later that night, Carl Probyn broke the dramatic news that his stepdaughter had been found alive after eighteen years. In telephone interview with the Channel 10 Sacramento News from his home, he was overcome by emotion.
“It’s an absolute miracle,” he declared. “Can you imagine this after eighteen years?”
Probyn told how the FBI had called his wife, Terry, and given her the news, before putting Jaycee on the line. He said he knew few details about where Jaycee had been living all this time, except “she was with some people and . . . they are in custody.”
“I told my wife I want those responsible to be taken down,” said Probyn. “No deals at all.”
Berkeley campus police officer Allyson Jacobs was driving home from work when her cell phone rang. And she answered to find a highly excited parole agent Eddie Santos.
He informed her that Phillip Garrido was a kidnapper and the other daughter at home was Jaycee Lee Dugard, whom he had abducted eighteen years ago. Then he congratulated her for solving the case, calling her a hero.
“And I said, ‘Cool, that’s great,’ ” she recalled. “I’m glad that I helped this family.”
It was getting dark as Jaycee, Angel and Starlit were taken to a nearby motel by witness victim advocates, until they could be reunited with their real family the following day. It would be Jaycee Lee Dugard’s first night of freedom since June 10, 1991—6,574 days after she was snatched off the street in South Lake Tahoe by Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
That night Jaycee finally told her daughters the terrible truth, of how Phillip Garrido had kidnapped her when she was the same age as Starlit. And that she was their biological mother and not their older sister, as they always believed.
On hearing this, and that Phillip and Nancy Garrido, whom they had thought of as their parents, were now in jail, the girls began crying uncontrollably. They deeply loved and worshipped their father and hated to think of him and Nancy imprisoned.
Over the last eighteen years, Jaycee had bonded with Phillip Garrido, seeing herself as his wife. It would take many months of professional counseling and help to free them all from the mental prison Phillip Garrido had so carefully constructed.
39
“A GENETIC CONNECTION”
At 6:00 A.M. on Thursday, August 27, Terry, Shayna and Tina caught a flight to San Francisco to be reunited with Jaycee. Although Terry was overjoyed to be seeing Jaycee again after so many years, she had some trepidation about meeting her two grandchildren for the first time.
Tina Dugard had been up all night, with all the excitement of learning her beloved niece had returned. She had finally managed to grab an hour’s sleep and then overslept, almost missing the flight from Ontario Airport.
At San Francisco International Airport, they were met by FBI agent Chris Campion, who drove them to the motel where Jaycee and her daughters were waiting. When they arrived, a witness advocate informed them that Jaycee, Angel and Starlit were all in a room, and that they should go in separately.
Terry went in first, then Shayna. When Tina’s turn came she walked into the room and Jaycee threw her arms around her.
“Auntie Tina,” she sobbed.
Both women looked at each other for the first time in eighteen years, and just burst into tears, hugging as tightly as they could.
“I looked at her and I knew right away,” Tina would later tell The Orange County Register. “After eighteen years you have a sense of, ‘Could this possibly be true?’ She absolutely knew who I was. She remembered me right away . . . it was one of the happiest moments of my life.
“There was an instant connection. It was almost a genetic connection. An instant sense of family, for all of us.”
Tina described the reunion as “surreal” and “fabulous,” saying she, Angel and Starlit discovered an instant rapport and soon bonded.
“I’m a teacher,” she said. “I know kids. And I can tell you that they are a normal eleven and fifteen-year-old.”
The amazing family reunion was also attended by FBI agent Campion, who had become personally involved in the case since first being assigned to it in 1991.
“It was a very emotional scene,” he recalled in an FBI podcast. “So Terry, right now, is understandably just ecstatic. Both of them were just overjoyed to be with each other again. The two daughters are probably as happy as Jaycee to be part of this family.”
For the next five days, all six members of the family would remain at the secret location on the outskirts of San Francisco, getting to know each other, assisted by a team of therapists and counselors.
A few hours earlier, detectives from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office had collected Phillip and Nancy Garrido from the Contra Costa County Jail, transporting them to the Placerville Jail to await their arraignment.
Then Lieutenant Bryan Golmitz of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department issued a press release over the Internet, announcing Jaycee Dugard had been found and there would be a 3:00 P.M. press conference at Placerville Fairgrounds with more details.
Headlined “Kidnapping Victim Located After 18 Years,” it read, “1991 kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard has been located in good health in the greater Bay Area of California. Jaycee Dugard was abducted on June 10, 1991 from South Lake Tahoe, CA. At the time of the incident, it was reported that a vehicle occupied by two individuals drove up to Jaycee Dugard and abducted her in view of her stepfather.
“Since the date of the occurrence the investigation has been ongoing and today’s events could bring it to resolution.”
At 3:00 P.M., El Dorado County undersheriff Fred Kollar addressed the media at a press conference at the Placerville Fairgrounds. It was being carried live by all local television stations and streamed over the Internet.
Standing by an American flag, the bald-headed, bespectacled undersheriff looked genuinely moved by the occasion. Standing alongside him on the podium were El Dorado County district attorney Vern Pierson, who would prosecute the case, and supervisory special agent of the FBI Deidre Fike.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” began Undersheriff Kollar, clearing his throat. “I’m very happy to be in front of you under these circumstances. Jaycee Dugard was found alive in Antioch.
“Just to remind you just a little bit. She was kidnapped in June of 1991. She was taken off the street in front of her house. As you all know there was nothing then, nor is there anything now, to indicate that this was anything other than a stranger abduction of an eleven-year-old.
“On August twenty-fifth—Tuesday—the UC Berkeley Police encountered a suspect, Phillip Garrido, seeking access to the UC Berkeley campus. This alert Berkeley police officer took notice of Phillip Garrido and two young women who were in his custody. Police officers looked into Garrido’s background and found that he was on federal parole overseen by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”
Undersheriff Kollar then told the reporters how Garrido had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1976. After discovering his record, the campus officer had then contacted his parole officer, who had summoned Garrido to his office.
“Garrido brought along with him two minors,” said Kollar, “as well as Nancy Garrido and a female named Alyssa.”
Kollar explained that as the parole officer had never seen Alyssa and the two young children during his visits to Garrido’s home, he was suspicious and contacted the Concord Police Department.
“Ultimately,” said Kollar, “the female named Alyssa was identified as Jaycee Dugard. Subsequent interviews with Jaycee and the Garridos provided information that only the victim
and kidnappers could know. DNA confirmation is being sought to confirm Jaycee’s identity.
“The Garridos—Nancy and the male—were taken into custody, and an investigation led to their residence in Antioch. The two minor children turned out to be children of Jaycee and the male suspect Garrido. They along with Nancy Garrido were living together at the residence in Antioch since the original kidnapping.
“A search of the residence revealed a hidden backyard within the backyard. The hidden backyard had sheds, tents and outbuildings, where Jaycee and the girls spent most of their lives. There was a vehicle hidden in the backyard that matched the vehicle originally described at the time of the abductions. The tents and outbuildings in the backyard were placed in a strategic arrangement to inhibit outside viewing and to isolate the victims from outside contact.”
The undersheriff said that “family reunification” was already underway, but it will be “a long and ongoing process,” involving witness victim advocates, the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“Both suspects are now currently in custody in the El Dorado County jail,” he said. “Photos of both suspects are on our website and we would welcome any additional information linking them to this or any other criminal activity.”
FBI special agent Deidre Fike then spoke about the role the bureau had played in the eighteen-year investigation into Jaycee Dugard’s abduction.
“In 1991 the FBI opened a kidnapping investigation [into] the disappearance of Jaycee Dugard,” she said, “and has been working it jointly with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office. On the day that she arrived at the parole officer’s office with the subjects, the Concord Police Department contacted the FBI in San Francisco to advise them that Jaycee Lee Dugard was alive.”
She said she contacted Agent Chris Campion, who is based in Sacramento and had been assigned to the Jaycee Dugard case since the beginning.