When Jaycee heard that Garrido had been arrested, she was worried. After all, she had been with him for eighteen years. He was a staple of her life. But after a few hours, Garrido was returned. A month earlier, Garrido had been barred from being around minors; the parole agents were prepared to overlook the violation of his new parole conditions on the condition that he return to the parole office the following day.
When she thought about it, Jaycee could not believe that he had been returned. Garrido now believed he was above the law. He was protected by angels, he said. He even thought that the angels had been with him when he had kidnapped her. That’s how he got away with it. They had allowed him to kidnap Jaycee to keep him occupied and out of their realm. She was confused about this, as angels were supposed to be good. Did she count for nothing?
The next day Garrido, in his hubris, took Nancy, Jaycee, and the girls with him to the parole office. The parole officer could not understand what Jaycee and the girls were doing there and led them away to a separate office. When Jaycee looked back at Garrido, he winked at her.
When she was questioned, Jaycee gave her name as Allissa. Garrido had told her to say that she was the girls’ mother and she had given him permission to take them with him the previous day, even though she knew he was a sex offender. If they asked anything else, she should demand a lawyer.
Jaycee did as she was told and, after about twenty minutes, she was released. She and the girls walked back to the car where Nancy was waiting. Jaycee said that, together, they willed Phillip to return. Instead two parole agents came out of the building. One of them took Jaycee aside and accused her of lying to him. Garrido had said that she and the two girls were the daughters of his brother. She was their older sister. Jaycee could not understand this. He had told her to tell a different story and she felt betrayed. Then she grew scared that, if there was trouble, her daughters might be taken away from her. She told the agent that Garrido had lied for her sake. She had run away from an abusive husband with the children and Garrido did not want their father to know where they were.
A woman officer asked Jaycee her name. Jaycee did not know what to do. For the last eighteen years Garrido had made all the decisions. She asked to see Garrido. He was brought in, in handcuffs, and he told her to get a lawyer. But why did she need a lawyer if she had done nothing wrong, the woman officer asked.
Jaycee was left on her own to think things over. Then the woman officer returned and told her that Garrido had confessed to kidnapping her. She asked Jaycee for her name again. Jaycee replied she could not say it after not saying it for eighteen years. But she could write it down. With a shaky hand, she wrote: “JAYCEELEEDUGARD.”
Suddenly she felt free, she said. The spell was broken.
Immediately she was reunited with her girls and they were taken to the police station where they would be more comfortable. Was there anything they wanted? Their first concern was for the animals left at the house. Then the tears she had been holding back for eighteen years began to fall.
The police got on the phone to contact Jaycee’s mother. They located her at her work and the first thing that Jaycee said to her mother after eighteen years was: “Hi, Mom, I have babies.” Only they weren’t babies any longer. There was a tearful reunion the following day. Then she began down the long road to recovery.
As part of that, Jaycee visited Nancy, who said she had done what she did for love of Phillip. And she still loved him. Jaycee explained that what they had done was unforgivable.
Garrido became a person of interest in the cases of other missing girls, but a thorough search of the house and back garden yielded nothing. What the searchers did find was a scene of squalor. Before, those who had been to 1554 Walnut Avenue had only seen a small area of the backyard. Beyond a tarpaulin, there was a second compound surrounded by tall trees and a six-foot-high fence. In it, there was a barn and sheds, one of which was soundproofed. It had been used as a recording studio. Garrido recorded religious-themed and romantic country songs there. It had also been used as a makeshift prison.
Electricity was supplied to the compound by extension cords, which none of the officials who had visited the house seemed to have noticed. There were also two tents and a camping-style shower and toilet, which Garrido had provided later, as well as an old car similar to the one used in the abduction. Searchers also found childhood possessions, including books and toys.
Although Garrido had made a confession to the police, in jail, he was unrepentant.
“In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story,” he told Walt Gray of KCRA-TV in the telephone interview and he directed him to the documents he had given to the FBI, “because what you are going to have in your hands will take world news immediately…
“Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house,” he went on. “And you’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me in the beginning. But I turned my life completely around.”
On August 28, 2009, Garrido and Nancy pleaded not guilty to charges that included kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment. They persisted in this, though they had both made full confessions. But when the case finally came to trial on April 28, 2011, they both pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexual assault. This relieved Jaycee and her daughters of the ordeal of testifying. Not that Jaycee would have shrunk from that.
“Jaycee’s courage and willingness to confront her abductors in court directly led to the defendants’ plea and life sentences,” said the district attorney.
Jaycee did not attend court for the sentencing, but she did send a written statement to be read aloud in court. In it she said:I chose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence. I’ve chosen to have my mom read this for me. Phillip Garrido, you are wrong. I could never say that to you before, but I have the freedom now and I am saying you are a liar and all of your so-called theories are wrong. Everything you have ever done to me has been wrong, and someday I hope you can see that. What you and Nancy did was reprehensible. You always justified everything to suit yourself, but the reality is and always has been that to make someone else suffer for your inability to control yourself, and for you, Nancy, to facilitate his behavior and trick young girls for his pleasure, is evil. There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions. To you, Phillip, I say that I have always been a thing for your own amusement. I hated every second of every day of eighteen years because of you and the sexual perversion you forced on me. To you, Nancy, I have nothing to say. Both of you can save your apologies and empty words. For all the crimes you have both committed I hope you have as many sleepless nights as I did. Yes, as I think of all of those years I am angry because you stole my life and that of my family. Thankfully I am doing well now and no longer live in a nightmare. I have wonderful friends and family around me. Something you can never take from me again. You do not matter any more.
Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years, Nancy 36 years to life. By the time the Garridos were convicted, Jaycee and her family had already been awarded a $20 million settlement in 2009 through the state’s victim’s compensation fund.
Meanwhile an investigation was under way to discover how Garrido, a registered sex offender on parole, was able to keep Jaycee Dugard captive for eighteen years without being found out.
At least twice a month, Garrido’s home was visited by parole agents, but they never ventured beyond the house, even though a neighbor complained that children were living in a complex of tents in the backyard. Even when they had seen Jaycee and one of her daughters there, the parole agents made no further inquiries.
Neighbors knew Garrido was a registered sex offender, and kids on the block called him “Creepy Phil” and kept their distance. Though the compound was arranged so that people could not see in easily, the next-door neighbor reported that children were living there. Another neighbor recalled that when he was a child, he met Jaycee through the fence. He said
that she had called herself Jaycee. He asked whether she lived there or was just visiting. She said that she lived there. Then Garrido came and took her back inside. Later, Garrido built a tall fence around the property. However, Jaycee does not mention meeting a neighbor boy through the fence in her book A Stolen Life.
Ten months after Jaycee had been abducted, a girl with her description was seen staring at a picture of herself on a “missing” poster in a gas station in Oakley, not two miles from the house outside Antioch where Garrido lived. A witness called the Contra Costa County sheriff’s office from the pay phone there and reported seeing the girl return to a yellow van, possibly a Dodge. A deputy was sent to the gas station, but the yellow van was gone—as was the caller, who did not leave his name and never came forward. In A Stolen Life Jaycee does not mention leaving the backyard compound until shortly before her first child was born in August 1994. However, when the police searched the backyard of 1554 Walnut Avenue they unearthed a dilapidated yellow Dodge Ram van with flat tires that was half-buried in dirt behind the house.
In June 2002, the fire department was called to Garrido’s house after it was reported that a juvenile had injured her shoulder in the swimming pool in the backyard. However, this incident did not get passed to the parole officer, who had no record of juveniles living at 1554 Walnut Avenue.
Law enforcement officers visited the residence at least twice, but did not give the backyard more than a quick inspection. In November 2006, a neighbor called 911, saying that Garrido, a sex addict, had people living in his backyard and there were children there. An officer investigating the complaint spent half an hour interviewing Garrido on his front porch, but did not enter the house or search the backyard. The officer did not even know that Garrido was a registered sex offender, though the police department had that information. Before leaving, he warned Garrido that the tents in the backyard could be a building code violation.
The California Office of the Inspector General issued a special report on the failure of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s supervision of parolee Phillip Garrido. It said that many warning signs were overlooked or ignored. Agents failed to spot the utility cables that led to the hidden backyard compound, and data from the satellite tracking device the state made him wear could have alerted his parole agent to his presence in that area, had it been reviewed.
Federal parole records, not obtained by the state, noted that Garrido had a soundproof room in his yard. Agents had failed to speak to neighbors or other local agencies. Jaycee was seen in the house and even answered the front door, though no further investigation was made concerning her background. And agents failed to act when Garrido had violated the terms of his parole
In 2008, the report says, Garrido’s parole agent met a twelve-year-old girl at Garrido’s house and accepted his explanation that she was his brother’s daughter without doing anything to verify it.
“No one can know, had the parole agents done everything right, whether we would have discovered Jaycee and her children any sooner,” said the Inspector General David R. Shaw. “However, our investigation revealed that there were missed clues and opportunities to discover their existence sooner than they did.”
Though Jaycee’s childhood had been stolen, her daughters’ had not. As a proud mother, Jaycee went on to enjoy watching them go to high school.
Chapter 2
Elisabeth Fritzl and the Father from Hell
ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 28, 1984, eighteen-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl was awoken by her father. He asked her to come down to the cellar with him. Over the years, he had been building a nuclear air-raid shelter down there. The Fritzls lived at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten, a small town in northern Austria, some thirty miles from the Czech border. It was on the front line if the Cold War heated up. Elisabeth’s father wanted her to help him install a heavy steel door. It was a strange request, but she was afraid of her father and knew it was best to do what he said.
After the two of them wrestled the heavy door into place, Elisabeth’s father grabbed her from behind and rendered her unconscious with ether. When she came to, she found herself in the dark, handcuffed to a metal pole. The bunker in the basement was not intended to be an air-raid shelter after all. It was a prison.
The room was insulated and soundproofed. Elisabeth screamed herself hoarse, but no one could hear her. People in the town who knew her were told that she had run off to join a religious sect. This was all too believable. She had run away from her abusive father before. Some neighbors were, no doubt, relieved that she had sought safety.
After a couple of days, Elisabeth was put on a long leash so that she could reach a makeshift lavatory. Then the real ordeal began. Her father started raping her. This was no surprise. He had been sexually abusing her since she was a child. And fighting back was not an option.
“I faced the choice of being left to starve or being raped,” she said. It was no choice at all.
This ordeal would not just go on for one day, or one week, or one month, or one year, but 8,516 days—just a few months short of twenty-four years.
Josef Fritzl has made no attempt to explain the incarceration and rape of his daughter. However, he has claimed to be a victim of Austria’s Nazi past. Born on April 9, 1935, he was nearly three when the people of Amstetten lined the road with their arms raised to greet Hitler (himself an Austrian by birth) as he drove into Austria on March 12, 1938, to annex the country as part of the Greater German Reich. Born in Braunau am Inn on the Bavarian border just eighty-five miles from Amstetten, Hitler spent most of his childhood in Linz, less than thirty miles from Fritzl’s home town. After the 1938 Anschluss, Hitler was made an honorary citizen of Amstetten.
Fritzl did not know his father. It seems he was killed in the war, but his mother had already caused a scandal in the small Austrian town by divorcing him, apparently for infidelity.
“My father was somebody who was a waster; he never took responsibility and was just a loser who always cheated on my mother,” Fritzl said. “When I was four she quite rightly threw him out the house. After that my mother and I had no contact with this man; he did not interest us. Suddenly there were only us two.”
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the rail line through Amstetten was used to move men and material to the front. It was repeatedly bombed by the RAF and the U.S. Eighth Air Force, so Fritzl would have spent much of his childhood in the cellar. He would also have known about captivity from an early age. In town, there was a camp for the slave laborers who were used to rebuild the railroad after the bombing raids. There was also a concentration camp for five hundred women. Many Austrians were enthusiastic supporters of the Holocaust, and inmates of the nearby Amstetten-Mauer Landesklinikum Clinic, where Elisabeth and her children would later recuperate, were killed in the Nazi euthanasia program. Fritzl would almost certainly have been a member of the Hitler Youth. Membership was compulsory after the age of ten. Indeed, Fritzl called the cellar of his home in Ybbsstrasse his “Reich.” Down there, he called himself the “Führer.”
“I have always placed a great deal of value on discipline and good behavior,” he said. “I admit that. My behavior comes from my generation. I am from the old school. I was brought up during the time of the Nazis, that meant discipline and self-control. I admit that took over me to a certain extent.”
In April 1945, Soviet tanks rolled into Amstetten and Russian troops embarked on an orgy of pillage and rape. Reports in the Austrian media say that, as a child, Fritzl “suffered badly” during this post-war occupation, a period marked by the high incidence of sexual assaults perpetrated by Russian soldiers on German and Austrian women. The Red Army stayed in Austria until 1955.
Times were hard, and Fritzl’s mother was strict. He was in awe of her and she beat him regularly. He did well at school, though he was seen as something of a loner. At the age of sixteen, he went to college to study electrical engineering and took an apprenticeship at a steel works company. He
had a number of affairs with women.
At twenty-one, he met seventeen-year-old Rosemarie, who became his wife. They had seven children. Having been an only child, he had wanted a big family. While he held down a good job, Fritzl began to exhibit a tendency toward sexual deviancy. At the age of twenty-four, he came to the attention of the police for exposing himself. He seems to have raped at least two women in Linz, though only one pressed charges. She was a nurse, and Fritzl broke into her apartment to attack her. He was convicted of rape and spent eighteen months in jail. As a result, he lost his job. But he was a talented and inventive engineer, so he quickly found employment when he was released.
He bought property, including a guesthouse and camping ground, on the shores of Lake Mondsee near Salzburg. He also extended the house in Ybbsstrasse to take in tenants. They lived directly over the cellar that Fritzl also extended into the back garden. Though some of his business ventures failed and he ran up debts of $2.7 million, he was considered a pillar of the community.
Fritzl also ruled the roost over his wife. She was frightened of him, and he mocked and humiliated her in public. Her sister thought that he beat his wife as well as the children. A friend said that Fritzl would hit and slap Rosemarie. She wanted to leave him, but could not take all seven children with her and dared not leave them in his care. However, in 1973 she made an excuse to stay at the guesthouse at Mondsee to take care of business there. Fritzl insisted that the children stay with him on Ybbsstrasse, only allowing her to see them occasionally. She moved home after the guesthouse burned down. Fritzl was arrested for arson, but was acquitted due to lack of evidence.
Of his five girls and two boys, Elisabeth was Fritzl’s favorite. He was a strict father who would not stand for dissent. His sister-in-law compared him to a drill sergeant. She said the children married young to leave home. They called him a tyrant. One son apparently had learning difficulties; he remained at home, and Fritzl used him as a drudge. The other son told a friend that he was afraid his father would kill him. Even though Elisabeth was his favorite, Fritzl brutalized her too. She was a shy, sad child and was never known to laugh. She sometimes had bruises on her body, though she took care to hide them from her school friends.
Against Their Will Page 3