by John Glatt
That afternoon, Manuel Garrido told the New York Post he believed his son was a serial killer.
“He was a sex addict,” declared his father. “I believe my son killed the prostitutes.”
He also speculated that Phillip had wanted children so badly, he had persuaded Nancy to help him kidnap Jaycee Dugard to bear them.
“I believe with all my heart,” he told the Post, “that he decided that if [Nancy] couldn’t conceive, he’d find someone who could. So the pair of them hatched the deal and went out to someone who could give them babies. Jaycee was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and Nancy grabbed her.”
Garrido thought his son had deliberately selected a young girl who was easier to control.
“I know the sort of guy he is,” he explained. “He would be able to intimidate and bully [her] into accepting everything they said.”
He also criticized his ex-wife, Pat, for not stopping Phillip Garrido’s madness.
“[She] must have known about Jaycee,” he told the Post. “She lived there all the time. She could have done something, but didn’t.”
This would be the last interview Manuel Garrido would give for free. From then on he demanded money up front.
But his father was not the only one convinced that Phillip was a serial killer. After learning of his friend’s arrest, Marc Lister went up to his attic and retrieved the three compact discs that Garrido had given him of his music, a few years earlier. When he listened to the lyrics for the first time, he was horrified.
“I was absolutely sick to my stomach,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh shit, I don’t believe this.’ ”
According to Lister, besides the creepy love songs Garrido had written about Jaycee Dugard, there were also others about murders, including details of where victims were buried.
“I could take the CDs and play them through,” Lister explained, “and say, ‘Okay, dig here. You’re going to find a body.’ ”
Lister painstakingly transcribed all twenty songs, before taking them to his attorney for safekeeping.
“[In one] he’s burying some bodies,” he said. “He talks about ‘going through the mountain in the early morning.’ That would be up at Lake Tahoe, where you go through a rock which is in the mountains. And when you come out the sun always shines on the other side. Then he talks about seeing a man standing on the hill, holding a skull.”
Lister also believes that Phillip Garrido abducted other girls besides Jaycee and did unspeakable things to them.
“I believe in Phil’s schizophrenic state of mind,” he said, “that if he was angry at Jaycee, and he didn’t want to hurt her, that he’d go and take it out on other young females.”
And Garrido’s onetime Rock Creek bandmate Eddie Loebs was also listening to his old song lyrics, since reading about his arrest.
“You see where the guy really was at with women,” said Loebs. “Now I hear his song ‘Insanity,’ and it takes on a new meaning.”
That Sunday, Carl Probyn was in New York for a whirlwind media tour. He appeared on several morning and cable shows, giving updates on how Jaycee and the girls were adapting to their new freedom. And with the insatiable media interest worldwide in the Jaycee Lee Dugard story, he had hardly slept since Wednesday, when it first broke.
“We’re basically on the same level as [Ted] Kennedy’s funeral today,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal by telephone from a suite in the Trump World Tower in Manhattan. “I mean it’s that big of a news [story]. I’ve probably done fifty interviews today. My wife’s really appreciative that I’m doing these interviews and being the spokesman.”
And again he told the Gazette-Journal that Jaycee had “strong feelings” for Phillip Garrido.
“She really feels it’s almost like a marriage,” he said.
Probyn also hinted that the reunion had not gone entirely smoothly, and there was still much work to do.
“They are doing fine,” he said, “not fine, but fine for the situation. My wife says that Jaycee is an excellent mother, and they are bonding, playing little games like checkers. They are doing okay for the situation.”
While in New York, Probyn had breakfast with Diane Sawyer, as well as being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera, who had first covered the Jaycee Lee Dugard story in 1993.
“Carl, shake my hand,” said an emotional Rivera on his program for the Fox News Channel. “I’ve got to give you a hug. Congratulations.”
Carl told him it was the first time he had felt happy since his stepdaughter’s kidnapping in 1991.
“My heart is feeling good,” he said. “I mean I couldn’t ask for a better scenario. I never expected this.”
Then Rivera asked how Jaycee was doing.
“She’s fragile,” said Probyn. “She’s a real mellow girl. Did you see how beautiful she was? And it paid off. I mean she survived eighteen years. I think if she would have been feisty and tried to climb the fence every day or whatever, she probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
After filming the studio segment Geraldo Rivera took Carl Probyn out on his sailboat around New York Harbor.
43
ANTIOCH 94509
On Monday, August 31, the Los Angeles Times revealed Antioch was a haven for sex offenders, with one of the highest levels in America. The devastating front-page story reported that more than one hundred registered sex offenders lived within Phillip Garrido’s 94509 ZIP code.
“It’s a small, scruffy unincorporated island,” read the story, “largely surrounded by the hard-knock city of Antioch.”
Antioch had been particularly hard-hit by the recession, reported the Times, with the median price of homes falling 40 percent in the last year. Foreclosures were rampant, with 699 new ones being filed in July 2009.
But perhaps the main reason for attracting so many sex offenders was Jessica’s Law, which had been passed in November 2006. From then on, sex offenders released from prison could not live within two thousand feet of schools, churches or parks, where children regularly gather. And this had turned the unincorporated part of Antioch into a magnet for them, as it had none of these amenities.
Captain Daniel Terry, who heads the investigative division at the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department, told the Los Angeles Times that the county had a staggering 1,700 registered sex offenders. And there was just one detective assigned to the 350 his station was responsible for monitoring.
“These people are walking among us everywhere,” he said ominously. “This is reality.”
Resident Dawn Cordy lived a few blocks away from Phillip Garrido and at least three other registered sex offenders. She told the Times that these people moved to Antioch because they can with few questions asked.
“We’re mostly an older bunch,” explained Cordy, fifty-two, “and we don’t pay them much attention. This is Boonieville.”
Antioch mayor Jim Davis attempted to distance his city from Phillip Garrido, maintaining the unincorporated area was not really part of his town, although he said he would like to annex it, so it could be policed properly.
“There’s a lot of building out there violating code,” he said. “If the city were out there, all the sheds and tents out there would not have been tolerated.”
On Monday morning, investigators resumed searching the backyard next to the Garridos’ where the bone fragment had been found. Five cadaver dogs were brought in to walk the large area as reporters waited outside on Walnut Avenue, closely watching every move.
Around 6:00 P.M., investigators finished their four-day search and began packing up their gear. As they removed the crime scene tape from around both houses, they refused to comment on whether there had been any further discoveries.
Betty Upingco, who lived opposite the Garrido home, said all the police activity was upsetting everyone on Walnut Avenue.
“It freaked me out,” she said. “Then the more and more you hear of it, you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God! This guy lived three doors down from us.’ ”
That nigh
t Katie Callaway Hall, as she was now calling herself, and her husband, Jim, appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. Over the weekend, the Reno Gazette-Journal had put Phillip Garrido’s entire 1976 trial transcript on its website, as well as the police report. The 304-page trial transcript graphically detailed exactly what Garrido had done to Katie during the eight hours he was with her. It also revealed Garrido’s bizarre sexual obsessions, including how he used to masturbate in front of seven-year-old girls.
Katie and Jim Hall had flown to New York for a series of television interviews, telling their family and friends to tune to CNN at nine o’clock without explaining why. And when Katie told her harrowing story to viewers, it was the first time many of their family and closest friends had heard about it.
“My heart goes out to Jaycee,” she told Larry King. “I can’t imagine what Jaycee is going through. He had me for eight hours, he had her for eighteen years.”
Katie said she was sickened that Phillip Garrido had been freed from prison so early, and no one had bothered to listen to her.
“I want to scream from the depths of my soul,” she told King. “Scream because my fears turned out to be justified. He struck again.”
The next morning, Lieutenant Brian Addington of the Pittsburg Police issued a press statement, saying no evidence had been found during the four-day search to link Phillip Garrido to the ten unsolved prostitute killings.
“The search lasted four days,” it said, “and covered the entire house and backyard, including all of the structures and tents. We also checked an adjacent neighbor’s backyard.
“Aside from a few items that will require further forensic examination before they can be completely excluded, we did not locate any evidence to connect Phillip and Nancy Garrido to Pittsburg’s unsolved cases.”
Late one night, a convoy of unmarked police cars drew up outside 1554 Walnut Avenue. By this time most of the reporters had left, and no one noticed the plainclothed detectives lead Jaycee Lee Dugard into the backyard. It was the first time she had been back since the morning of Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s arrest.
Investigators needed Jaycee to show them around the ramshackle backyard she had been imprisoned in for so long. There was a psychologist at her side the entire time to help her cope with all the emotions of returning to the place where she had been imprisoned for so long.
Then for the next several hours, police with flashlights led her around every shed and tent, asking her to describe in detail exactly where she had been imprisoned and what had happened where.
Several times Jaycee broke down in tears, revisiting the scenes of her nightmare. But with the experts’ gentle guidance, she showed investigators where Garrido had locked her up after the abduction, and where he had first raped her a month later. She also showed them where she had given birth to Angel and Starlit.
“Jaycee literally had to fight for breath,” a source inside the investigation told the National Enquirer, “as she looked at the makeshift toilet, stained sofa beds, battered chests of drawers and plastic storage units that she used as she struggled to make a normal life for her kids.”
Then she bravely mapped out for investigators how she and her daughters had lived in squalor, providing valuable ammunition for the prosecution in the case against Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
Soon afterward, Jaycee and her daughters moved into an FBI safe house in San Francisco with Terry Probyn and Shayna. And the long task of deprogramming Jaycee and the girls began in earnest, as prosecutors continued their questioning.
Their investigation included Jaycee’s secret journal, which she kept the entire time she was with the Garridos. The heart-wrenching diary provides a compelling look into her twisted relationship with her captors, and the mental cruelty they wielded over her.
A source inside the investigation revealed to the National Enquirer that Jaycee still had feelings for the Garridos and loved them. After the couple’s arrest, Jaycee begged prosecutors to drop all charges against them, saying she was now safely back with her family.
For years, Phillip Garrido had instructed Jaycee on what to do if police ever arrested him. He told her to immediately find an attorney, so she would be able to communicate with him via their respective lawyers and under the radar of law enforcement.
Inside the safe house, the highly specialized team of psychologists were actually trying to re-create their day-to-day lives in the backyard to ease them back into the world. A senior police source told the London Sun that although Angel and Starlit were both highly intelligent, they had little understanding of the world.
“They have never watched TV,” said the police source, “and have no concept of math, geography or history. They have never heard of the president of the USA or anything about the wider world.”
Psychologists had determined that Jaycee and the girls should initially maintain the same routine they had had with the Garridos. So the television sets had been removed, as the girls had never seen one. It was also to protect them from exposure to the media coverage of the case.
“They are being given TV microwave dinners and their favorite meatloaf meals,” reported The Sun. “They have never had soda drinks, so they get cooled water, which is what they are used to.”
Jaycee and her daughters all slept in the same room, as they had done in their backyard tent. And on a positive note, psychologists noted that Angel was now coming out of herself, although Starlit remained painfully shy.
44
“SHE LOVED JAYCEE VERY MUCH”
On Wednesday, September 2, Nancy Garrido’s defense attorney, Gilbert Maines, appeared on all three network morning TV shows. The veteran lawyer, who has practiced in California for more than forty years, boasts on his website that he has earned the respect of both judge and jury, as well as his peers.
“Compromise and obtaining a settlement,” says his home page, “is a skill just as important as winning in the courtroom. Mr. Maines is a counselor who wants to take his client where the client wants to go and do it in the most expedient manner possible.”
So far Maines had spent just two hours with Nancy Garrido, who remained in deep shock one week after her arrest.
“She’s distraught, she’s scared,” Maines told Meredith Vieira on NBC’s Today show. “She seems to be a little lost at the moment.”
He said that although Nancy understood why she was in jail, she loved Jaycee and the girls and considered them family.
“There came a time when she felt they were like a family,” said Maines. “She loves the girls very much and she loved Jaycee very much. And that seems a little strange given the circumstances, but that’s what she had said to me.”
When Vieira asked if Nancy had explained how Jaycee had first come to Walnut Avenue, Maines refused to answer, saying it violated attorney-client privilege. However, he would be exploring Nancy’s mental condition at the time of the abduction.
“I would be derelict in my duty,” he said, “if I didn’t pursue every avenue that was available, and one of them certainly is to look into her state of mind at the time and prior. And I can’t say right now that she is incompetent to stand trial. I think my plan is sometime in the near future to have her evaluated. To have an expert talk to her and spend some time with her.”
The attorney also revealed that he had received threats since taking the case and planned to hire a bodyguard.
“I just try and ignore those,” he said.
A few hours later, Tina Dugard gave an exclusive interview to the Orange County Register about the first five days she had spent with her niece Jaycee and her two daughters. With all the sensational stories out there, Jaycee’s family had decided it was time to take the media initiative.
“There’s a sense of comfort and optimism, a sense of happiness,” the forty-two-year-old teacher told reporter Greg Hardesty in her living room. “Jaycee and her girls are happy.”
Tina said after the emotional family reunion, everyone had bonded and reconnected, as police investigators
and counselors hovered in the background.
“People probably want to think that it’s been this horrible, scary thing for all of us,” she said. “[But] the horrible, scary thing happened eighteen years ago and continued to happen for the last eighteen years. The darkness and despair [have lifted].”
Tina, who is thirteen years older than her niece Jaycee, then described how all six of them soon started acting like a normal, ordinary family.
“[There was] laughing and crying and sitting and holding hands,” she said. “All three are very tight.”
She said during their downtime, when they were not being interviewed by investigators or seeing counselors, Jaycee reads mystery novels while her daughters play computer games.
One night Tina and Jaycee watched a DVD of the Disney movie Enchanted, starring Julie Andrews. Then they discussed their favorite films and what they had seen recently. Jaycee told her aunt she wanted to see Sandra Bullock’s new movie, The Proposal.
She said Angel and Starlit loved playing their favorite game, Super Mario Smash Brothers, on Nintendo DS and drawing pictures.
One day, Tina said, she took Angel and Starlit outside the safe house for a nature walk. And as they all lay on the grass watching the clouds float by, the girls told their great-aunt how they loved animals and climbing trees.
“It was a beautiful day,” recalled Tina.
In the media battle for the Jaycee Lee Dugard story, the TV tabloid show Inside Edition appeared to be winning. Over the next several weeks the show broke a number of exclusives, including the first and only TV interview with Phillip Garrido’s first wife, Christine Murphy.
“He’s a monster,” said Murphy. “I was always looking for a way to get away.”
She said she was in love with him when they eloped in 1973, after being high school sweethearts. But when they moved to South Lake Tahoe, Phillip started becoming more and more controlling and violent. He spent all day taking LSD or smoking dope, and was always trying to get her to participate in orgies with “multiple partners,” but she refused.