Shattered Innocence

by Robert Scott

  “Then the younger girl said, ‘We have an older sister that lives with us, too. She’s twenty-eight.’

  “Immediately the older girl said, without missing a beat, ‘She’s twenty-nine.’ And she looked right up at her dad. She seemed bothered that this was mentioned.”

  At the time, Ally didn’t think much about the comment concerning the older sister. She just noted that there was another young woman in the Garrido household that was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old and sister to these two others. Ally was mainly focusing on whether there was a crime involved with this situation, and tried to figure out if there was something upon which she could detain Phillip Garrido. She wondered if she needed to call Child Protective Services (CPS) or the Berkeley Mental Health Services to come in.

  Ally noted, “Phillip was clearly disturbed. I didn’t know if he took medication or not. All of this was going through my head as I sat there. My training was kicking in, and I was thinking, ‘What do I have here? What can I do?’

  “All of this happened within a matter of minutes. I think the whole meeting from beginning to end was less than fifteen minutes long. So while Lisa was talking to him, I was in cop mode, thinking, ‘What can I do?’ Basically, I couldn’t come up with anything at the moment. I was searching the younger daughter’s face for any kind of sign from her. I was just looking at her to see if she would give me a sign—‘Help me!’ Any kind of sign if she couldn’t talk. But I wasn’t reading anything from those kids.

  “Knowing that I probably couldn’t pull them away from their dad to talk to them, I decided what I was doing was all I could do at present. Just listen, send them on their way, and maybe contact the parole officer.”

  At the end of the meeting, Ally spoke up and said to Phillip, “Sir, what would you like for us to do for you? Would you like to forward me that book, and I hand it on to my supervisor? Would that make you happy?”

  Phillip answered enthusiastically, “Yes, would you, please!”

  Garrido gave Lisa and Ally a copy of the book as well. Ally noticed that he had been shaking a lot during his conversation with Lisa, and without warning, he now grabbed his oldest daughter and unexpectedly said, “I’m so proud of my girls! They don’t know any curse words. They don’t know anything bad about the world.”

  Ally recalled at that moment, “I felt so horrible for those girls. I knew there was something wrong. But I just said to him, ‘Well, you should be proud. You have two lovely daughters.’”

  At that point, Phillip and the girls went on their way; and for a moment, Ally and Lisa just looked at each other. The whole meeting had been bizarre and surreal in the extreme. Ally recalled, “Lisa and I turned toward each other, and I heaved a big sigh. I said to her, ‘What do we do now?’ I told Lisa my thoughts and said, ‘We can’t call CPS. We can’t call Berkeley Health. I don’t know what to do. There’s no real crime here. I can’t prove anything.’ We were just talking and saying there was something up with those girls, but we didn’t know what. We didn’t know what kind of activities were happening at their home. We didn’t have any proof. As a cop, you want to have proof before you act. I was very frustrated.

  “I told Lisa the only thing I can do right now is call Phillip Garrido’s parole officer and talk to him. Maybe this is Phillip’s normal behavior and they’re already aware of it, and maybe I was just taking all of this out of context.”

  Deciding that calling the parole officer was the only viable course of action, Ally phoned Phillip Garrido’s officer, who was not in his office at the time. She left a message on the answering machine and described her concerns. She described how disturbed Phillip Garrido seemed and all the strange material he brought to the UC office. Ally also said that he had brought his two young daughters with him and they seemed out of touch with reality and very robotic. Ally stated that she’d like the parole officer to call her back and perhaps they could set up a meeting where she could go into further details about her concerns.

  As Ally noted, “I thought that was going to be the end of it. But the parole officer called me back the next day. He said, ‘Can you please tell me the situation again?’ So I described the situation to him. And he stopped me when I said that Phillip Garrido brought his two daughters to campus. He said, ‘He doesn’t have any daughters!’

  “My stomach just sank. I said, ‘Well, he had two daughters with him that day. They had his blue eyes. They looked like him. They were calling him ‘Daddy.’ I had no reason to believe they weren’t his daughters. And they even referenced an elder sister at home.’

  “The parole officer replied, ‘Well, I think he had some granddaughters. I’m not sure. Let me double-check on that. What I’ll do, I’ll call him into the office and I’ll meet with him. I’ll just tell him that because of parole he’s not allowed to come back to your campus.’”

  Ally said later, “I thought, ‘Great. That’s fine with me. My job is done.’”

  Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell’s job on the matter might have been over for the moment, but within hours, their lives and many other lives around them would never be the same. By late afternoon on Wednesday, August 26, 2009, the San Francisco Bay Area and the whole world would know what had occurred in their office on the UC Berkeley campus. And like everyone else, both Ally and Lisa would be absolutely stunned by what was revealed.

  CHAPTER 2

  A YOUNG WOMAN NAMED “ALYSSA”

  Edward Santos was a parole agent working out of the Fairfield, California, office in 2009. If there was any one constant with parole agents in that office, it was that they all had very heavy case loads. In Contra Costa County alone, where Phillip Garrido lived near the city of Antioch, there were hundreds of registered sex offenders whose cases had to be attended to.

  Santos already knew that Phillip Garrido, age fifty-eight, lived with his wife Nancy, fifty-four, east of Antioch, on semirural Walnut Avenue. Walnut Avenue was a collection of modest homes, with large backyards and lots of trees. In the background, across the railroad tracks, were the remains of the paper mills that had once dominated the area. The paper mills had been closed for years by 2009, but a handful of other industries were still scattered along the south shore of the San Joaquin River. A few small grape vineyards were also located near Walnut Avenue, and an extensive Catholic cemetery was three blocks from the Garrido home.

  Most of the people who lived in the Garrido neighborhood were either working-class or retired. Some of them knew that he was a registered sex offender and was on parole. Many others had no clue that he was a sex offender. Most didn’t know a great deal about him, other than he sometimes acted strangely and would come up to them talking about his religious beliefs. And they knew that he sometimes wandered down the street, singing as he walked along. Most of the songs were religious in nature, although he would mix in old rock tunes on occasion.

  Phillip, who generally went by the name Phil, was six feet four inches tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and had thinning hair. Only recently, within the last year, he had been required by state law to wear a GPS monitoring device around one of his ankles. All of this stemmed from the kidnapping and rape of a woman in the Lake Tahoe region in 1976. Phil had taken the woman across state lines from California to Nevada, and because of that reason, he had served his time in federal prison. But since 1989, Phil had been out of prison and on parole. Eventually the federal government relinquished parole on Phil, but the state of Nevada did not, concerning its case against him. And in essence, California parole agents were “watching over Phil” on Nevada’s case. As it turned out, “watching” was very loosely enforced when it came to Phil Garrido.

  On the afternoon of August 25, 2009, Parole Agent Santos received a phone call on his answering machine from UCPD officer Ally Jacobs. Officer Jacobs, of course, had left a message about her meeting with Phil Garrido and his two daughters at the UC Berkeley campus. When Santos phoned Jacobs back, she was already gone from work for the day. But because of the disturbing information t
hat she had left on his answering machine, Santos decided to take a trip out to Garrido’s residence on Walnut Avenue.

  At around 6:00 P.M., Santos and Agent LaGrassa contacted Phil at his home, and Phil answered the door. Not quite knowing what was going on, the agents placed handcuffs on Phil’s wrists to be on the safe side, and they escorted him outside the house. Agent LaGrassa stayed outside with Phil, while Santos went back into the house, where he contacted Phil’s wife, Nancy, and Phil’s elderly mother, Patricia, often known as Pat. It was quite obvious that Phil’s mother suffered from memory loss. Santos searched the entire house, but found no one else there. Nonetheless, because of Officer Ally Jacobs’s message, the parole agents took Phil to the Concord Parole Office, about twenty-five miles west of Walnut Avenue, for questioning about the two girls whom he had called his daughters.

  All the way there, Phil was adamant that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He kept saying that the kids Jacobs had seen were actually those of his brother, and Officer Jacobs misunderstood him when he said they were his daughters. Phil added that one of the girls’ parents had come and picked them up from Walnut Avenue when he returned home from Berkeley. He also said that the parents had given him permission to take the girls to UC Berkeley.

  When Phil and the agents reached the Concord Parole Office, Santos checked Phil Garrido’s file. Then Santos contacted his supervisior, G. Sims, at the Fairfield Parole Office, and discussed the file on Garrido with Sims. Even though Garrido had a “no contact with minors” clause in the file, it was discovered there was no “nexus” as to why that was there. In parole agent terms, this was an SCOP (special condition of parole). There was one new amendment in the file dating back to July 2009, prohibiting Phil from being in the presence of minors. But on August 25, 2009, the parole agent and supervisor decided that the condition didn’t apply to Phil at the moment because Phil had no current or prior convictions involving minors. His kidnapping and rape conviction from 1976 had concerned an adult female. Not knowing what to do about all of this, Agents Santos and LaGrassa took Phil Garrido back home and told him to report to the Concord Parole Office again, at eight the following morning.

  Phil Garrido, wife Nancy, the two girls who had been with Phil at UC Berkeley, and a young blond woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties, all trooped into the Concord Parole Office about 8:10 A.M. on August 26. They came in while Santos was on the phone with Officer Ally Jacobs. Phil signed in at the front desk, and Nancy, the young blond woman, and the two girls took seats in the lobby. As soon as Santos came back to the lobby, Phil Garrido waved for Nancy, the young woman, and the two girls to follow him, and they all started to make their way toward Santos’s office.

  Santos told Phil to wait alone outside the office, and he asked Nancy, the young woman, and the two girls to follow him to a conference room. When they all sat down, Santos introduced himself as Phil’s parole agent. Then he asked the young blond woman and the two girls their names. The young woman said that her name was Alyssa Franzen. (At later times, her name would be spelled as Allissa, Alicia, and Alissa.) After Phil’s mother, Patricia, divorced, she remarried and became Patricia Franzen. The oldest girl said her name was Angel, and the youngest one was named Starlit, or Starlet, or Starlite, depending on who was talking about her. Alyssa looked over at Nancy Garrido, while Santos said that he needed information on the parents of the two girls. Immediately Alyssa spoke up and said that she was their mother.

  Santos said with astonishment, “You look too young to be their mother!”

  Alyssa laughed and replied, “I get that all the time from people. They think I’m their sister.”

  Santos wanted to know how old Alyssa was, and she told him that she was twenty-nine. When Santos asked her for identification, Alyssa said that she had left it at home. Santos wanted to know the date of her birth, and she said that it was May 3, 1980. Asked to spell her full name, she hesitated for a moment, then spelled it out loud and slowly: Allissa Franzen. This, of course, was different from Alyssa, which would become the most common spelling of her name.

  Asked where Alyssa and the girls lived, she said sometimes they stayed with relatives of Phil and Nancy Garrido; other times, they stayed with Phil and Nancy at Walnut Avenue. Santos noted, “While I tried to get further information about Alyssa and the girls, she became defensive and agitated. She wanted to know why she was being interrogated by me. Nancy quickly jumped into the conversation and said, ‘Yes, Agent Santos, why are you interrogating us? We have done nothing wrong.’”

  Santos explained to them that he was not interrogating them, but rather was looking into an incident that had occurred on the UC Berkeley campus with Phil and two young girls on the previous day. Alyssa spoke up and said that she was aware that Phil had taken the two young girls in question to UC on August 25, and also acknowledged that she knew he was a registered sex offender and on parole. Alyssa declared that she had no problem with Phil taking the girls to the UC campus.

  Santos asked Alyssa if she knew what crime Phil had committed. Alyssa responded that it was for kidnapping and rape of a woman many years previously. Then Alyssa added that he was a changed man and was a great person around her kids. “He has a gift!” she declared. After Alyssa said this, the two girls chimed in and spoke up in Phil Garrido’s defense. They claimed he was a great person and had never done anything objectionable around them. In fact, the girls praised him to the realm of adoration.

  Santos tried to get more personal information about Alyssa, but she dug in her heels and wouldn’t answer his questions. She even asked if she needed a lawyer at that point. Santos tried to reassure her that any information she gave out about herself or the girls was going to stay in the file and not be made public. Once again, however, Alyssa became agitated and stated, “I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  Seeing that he was getting nowhere with them, Santos asked Nancy, Alyssa, and the two girls to go downstairs and wait, while he spoke with Phil Garrido alone. Once the women and girls had gone downstairs, they left the building and went out to the parking lot and sat in their vehicle. Santos then went back to the lobby and escorted Phil to his office.

  Santos began by asking Phil what his relationship was to Alyssa and the two girls. Phil answered the question by posing a question of his own: “What do you mean?”

  Not to be put off, Santos asked the same question again, and after thinking about it for a while, Phil answered, “They are all sisters.” Phil then said that he thought Alyssa was twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old.

  Santos asked who the girls’ father was, and once again Phil thought for a while before saying, “A relative of mine.” So Santos asked one more time, and Phil gave a very odd answer, “He’s the son of my mother.”

  Santos replied in amazement, “So that makes him your brother?”

  Santos noted, “He looked at me with astonishment and said, ‘Yes.’”

  Then Phil added that the girls’ parents were divorced and that they sometimes lived with his brother, Ron, and sometimes with their mother. At other times, the girls lived with himself and Nancy. Asked where Ron lived, Phil said that he didn’t know the address or phone number, but that he lived somewhere in Oakley, California, about five miles from the Garrido home. Asked about the girls’ mother, Phil said her name was Janice and that she lived in Brentwood, California. He also said that he didn’t know her address or phone number.

  At the end of this conversation, Santos escorted Phil to a different office and had a parole agent stay there with him. Because of all the inconsistent information he was getting, Santos contacted Agent Lovan, and they went to talk to Nancy, Alyssa, and the two girls in the parking lot. Santos took Alyssa back into a room separately from the others, and asked her why she had lied to him previously. Alyssa asked, “What do you mean?” Santos replied, “Phil just told me that you are those girls’ older sister and not their mother.”

  To this, Alyssa looked confused and finally said that she was the guardian of the t
wo girls, so she considered herself to be their mother. Santos wasn’t having any of this double-talk and told Alyssa if she continued to refuse to cooperate, he would contact Child Protective Services and the local police department. Faced with that prospect, Alyssa admitted, “I’m their biological mother.”

  Trying to get any more information out of Alyssa by this point was like trying to pull nails. Santos insisted that she give him some identification or an address and phone number of relatives of the girls. To this, Alyssa replied that she had learned a long time ago not to carry any personal information around or to give that information to strangers. Santos asked her to explain herself, and Alyssa kept repeating that she didn’t know why she was being interrogated and that she might need a lawyer.

  It’s not apparent when Nancy Garrido joined Santos and Alyssa, but she was there at some point and started telling Alyssa that she needed a lawyer. Then suddenly Alyssa’s demeanor seemed to change and she became more concerned about the girls’ welfare than her own. Santos asked Alyssa why Phil had said the girls were her sisters. Alyssa replied, “He was just trying to protect me.”

  So Santos asked what Phil was trying to protect her from, but she wouldn’t answer. And to all other questions about herself, Alyssa clammed up. Getting absolutely nowhere, at 9:17 A.M., Santos called 911 and had them contact the Concord Police Department (CPD). Santos requested an officer come over to his location and assist him in this matter.

  While waiting for an officer to arrive, Alyssa continued saying, “I don’t know what is going on! I’ve done nothing wrong!” Starlit spoke up and said that she needed to use the restroom immediately. Because Santos didn’t want any of the females out of his sight by that point, and they were not supposed to use the restroom in the parole office, he escorted them to the adjacent Concord Public Library, which had restroom facilities. Once they got there, however, he discovered that the restroom was closed.