by Robert Scott
Gray asked if Phil could talk about the circumstances that happened back in 1991 in Lake Tahoe. Phil replied, “I haven’t talked to my lawyers yet. So I can’t do that. But I can tell you that those circumstances will begin to come to light as soon as you’ve seen those documents.”
Gray wanted to know if this had anything to do with Phil Garrido’s place of business.
Phil answered, “No. Place of business?”
So Gray clarified his remark. “Just in terms of listing your home. It is God’s something—”
Phil interjected, “Oh, that. It’s a church. The reason it is in the government’s hands is so they will stay right in front of it. They have accepted it from me very happily.”
Not to be put off about Jaycee Lee Dugard and the events of 1991, Gray asked again about what had occurred in Lake Tahoe that year. Phil responded, “I’m so sorry. As soon as I can sit down and do this correctly, because I have no desire to hold back in these things.... In fact, when this takes place, you’re going to be really surprised of what has happened. It is a heartwarming story. If you would cooperate with me, you can make the decisions, and you get the information. I’m so sorry, because I don’t want to disappoint you right now. I just know I have to do this in a cautionary fashion.”
Gray said he fully understood Phil’s line of reasoning and appreciated that he was talking to him at all. Then Gray asked what kind of situation Phil thought he was in at the moment.
Phil replied, “Well, I’m in a very serious situation. But I can’t speak to you about that. That will have to wait. I guarantee you, as time goes on, you will get the pieces of the story. When you get those documents in your hands, you are going to fall over.”
Gray noted that two days previously, Phil had been at UC Berkeley, where he was contacted by some people in law enforcement. Gray wanted to know what happened there, and if Phil now felt somewhat relieved that they had found out about Jaycee.
Phil answered, “I feel much better now. It is a process that needed to take place. Please try and grab those documents, because they will do a lot for you. And then, like I said, they’re going to be a part of the trial, because this is going to turn into a major trial.”
Gray asked what Phil’s hope was when the material in the documents was revealed. Phil said, “Well, let me tell you this. When I went to the San Francisco Bureau—and I’m not avoiding the question. I was accompanied by two children that are Jaycee Dugard’s children that we had. So they sort of accompanied me elsewhere, to Berkeley. . . . Please get those documents. They will not disappoint you. I told you right away you are going to be in control of something that is going to take the world’s attention.”
Gray did not want to keep getting back to the documents, so he related that he knew Phil had spent some time in prison in the 1990s. After that, Phil had been out on his own, and the interviewer wanted to know how he had been employed.
Phil related, “The last several years, I completely turned my life around. And you’re going to find the most powerful story coming from the witnesses and from the victim. If you take a step at a time, you will fall over backward, and in the end, you’re going to find the most powerful heartwarming story revealing that something that used to be misunderstood.... Well, that’s as far as I can go. I really want to help you, but I also need to make sure that the media is also protected.”
Gray wondered if most of the information Phil was talking about would be coming from Jaycee Dugard. Phil responded, “I guess she would also hand back the truth. Hmm, this is what we’re going to do. We are going to try and make this . . . Well, wait till you read the document. My life has been . . . Wait till you read the story of what took place at this house, and you’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning. But I turned my life completely around, and to be able to understand it, you have to start . . . I’m sorry, I want to help you further, but also I need to protect the sheriff’s office and I need to protect the government. And I need to protect the rights of Jaycee Lee Dugard.”
Gray tried another approach. “Can you at least share with me what you’ve told law enforcement?”
Phil said, “I haven’t told them anything. But I will not speak to them until . . . Oh, well, what I shared with law enforcement . . . You’ll have those documents. I didn’t tell them anything else but what is in those documents—and they were really impressed.”
Once again, the interviewer tried to get Phil to answer questions about the abduction in 1991 by saying, “Did you tell them that you did have a hand in taking Jaycee back in 1991?” All Phil would say was “Oh, no, no, no. It (the document) is going to explain something that humans have not understood well.”
“I understand that, Phillip. I’m just saying you’re mentioning that it is going to be a heartwarming story. Can you give me an overview as to it as a love story? Is it a story about children? What—”
Phil cut him off. “It is a story about turning a person’s life around and having two children. Those two girls. Those two girls, they slept in my arms every single night.” (And then Phil Garrido started crying.) “I never touched them. You just have to do what I ask you to, because I can’t go any further. If I do, I’ll go too far. People are going to be coming forward at this trial, and that’s not all. I am going to leave them in a state of shock, when you see how many hundreds of thousands of people are going to come out and start testifying about something. Just do me a favor and follow the protocol that I asked you to follow because you make your own decisions from now and what you want to do. This is not for me. You will find out that this is not a play or a way of monopolizing anyone. It is a very well-constructed and powerful written disclosure. Please do that, and then we’ll work from there.”
Gray asked, “Let me ask you this before I go. Are the children okay, and everybody in the house okay?”
Phil replied, “Absolutely! The youngest one was born, and from that moment, everything turned around. People are going to testify to these things.”
Gray said, “We were just somewhat concerned about the lack of medical attention for them.”
Phil responded, “Absolutely. That is absolutely because we didn’t have the finances and we were very concerned. You have to get into . . . The federal government was involved because they’re being pursued by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are suing them with lawsuits over, hmm . . . Just read the documents and we’ll go from there. Thank you, sir. Thank you. God bless you for allowing me to talk to you.”
Gray replied, “Phillip, thank you for the call.”
Phil said, “I wanted to see you. You know. When it happened.”
Gray responded, “I did not know you wanted to see me.”
Phil ended by saying, “I am not going to play with the media. I am going to leave this with you because you are the first person here I was able to talk to, and I’m going to stop right there.”
All Gray could think to add was “Have a good day.”
One person not amused by Phil Garrido’s rambling interview was his kidnapping and rape victim of 1976, Katie Callaway, who was now Katie Callaway Hall. Katie told reporters, “I want to scream from the depths of my soul! Scream because my fears turned out to be justified. I trembled for about four hours after I heard the news about him. I always knew he was capable of this, but he should not have been able to do it. When I saw his face on TV, I started screaming, ‘Oh, my God! My God! He’s the one who kidnapped me!’”
Speaking of the rape and its aftermath, Katie said, “I have lived in fear ever since. I knew he was hunting. I knew he was. I needed to disappear. I tried not to let it consume me, but it was always there. For years, I walked around like a zombie. Now I don’t have to hide anymore. I don’t have to live every day of my life wondering if he is looking for me. I am finally free from the fear I have lived with since the day I learned he was paroled. I can’t imagine what Jaycee is going through. He had me for eight hours. He h
ad her for eighteen years. I was an adult with instincts that helped me deal with the situation. She was a child.”
CHAPTER 23
“WE ARE BEATING OURSELVES UP OVER THIS.”
Because of Erika Pratt’s revelation that she had called the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office in November 2006 complaining about a young woman and two girls living in squalor on Walnut Avenue, CCSO sheriff Warren Rupf held a press conference on this issue and the issue of lax supervision of Phil Garrido. Rupf admitted that a sheriff’s office deputy had gone to the Garrido’s home and spoke with Phil for a half hour on the front porch. This deputy did not enter the house or go into the backyard, where Erika Pratt said she had seen the squalid conditions. All the deputy said to Phil was that people living in tents could be a code violation. The deputy at the time did not know that Phil was a registered sex offender, even though CCSO had that information. And if the deputy had spoken with any of Phil’s neighbors, most of them had that information as well.
About Erika Pratt’s call, Sheriff Rupf said, “The caller said Garrido was psychotic and had a sexual addiction. I’m the first in line to offer organizational criticism and to offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility for having missed an earlier opportunity. This is not an acceptable outcome. No one should have failed to recognize a sexual registrant, including law enforcement. Our work product should have resulted in a better outcome. We have a responsibility to report people living in a backyard.”
Sheriff Rupf now told reporters, “I cannot change the course of events, but we are beating ourselves up over this and continue to do so. We should have been more inquisitive, more curious, and turned over a rock or two.”
One person who always thought Phil Garrido was a dangerous man was former Washoe County deputy district attorney Michael Malloy. He now added his take to all of the tales and controversy surrounding Phil. Malloy said, “I think the Dugard case was somewhat predictable, given his behavior in 1976 for which he was convicted. There are certainly parallels. He had a place set up for the very purpose of raping someone. That’s not usual at all. He had the place with carpeting on the walls, carpeting on the floor, carpeting hanging from the ceiling, and multicolored lights. And he was going to rape her (Katie Callaway), and said that it was her fault because she was attractive. Now he’s saying what he said in 1977. That he was glad he got caught and that it would turn his life around. He blamed it all on drugs. That’s precisely what he is saying now in the Dugard case. I think that’s just amazing.”
Detective DeMaranville, who had been the lead Reno Police Department detective on Phil’s 1976 case, was now retired. But he remembered the case very well. DeMaranville said, “That case stuck out in my mind. He (Phil Garrido) was a sick puppy. He tried to seem remorseful, but I think it was mostly a put-on.” One reason the case stuck out in DeMaranville’s mind was because of the elaborate way Garrido had rigged up his unit in the warehouse. DeMaranville still referred to it as a porno palace.
About the same time, Leland Lufty, who had prosecuted Phil Garrido in Katie Callaway’s federal case, weighed in on Garrido. Lufty told a reporter, “It was a horrendous crime. We had a tough judge. As far as we were concerned, he was locked up forever. How could they (the federal parole board) do that? Look at the record. Look at what guy did it! The case was premeditated as could be.”
And then much of the reasoning of the federal parole board in the 1980s came out. The San Francisco Chronicle spoke with Dennis Curtis, a judiciary expert. Curtis told the reporter, “It would have been a routine decision by the (federal) Parole Commission to let him go at the ten year point. The guidelines back then for a kidnapper who did not hold her for ransom and had no serious criminal record were probably less than ten years in prison. You’re looking at a much harsher sentence now.”
By 2009, kidnapping with sexual exploitation and the use of restraints, as Garrido had done with Katie Callaway, carried a guidelines sentence of twenty-four to thirty years in federal prison. Under those circumstances, he could not have kidnapped Jaycee Dugard as he did in 1991.
By the end of August 2009, Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lieutenant Steve Simpkins told reporters that three law enforcement agencies were now searching the Garrido property for evidence on some of their old cases. These included CCSO, the APD, and the PPD. And then Simpkins dropped a bombshell. He said the law enforcement investigators were searching for clues to see if Phil Garrido had been involved in the murders of ten prostitutes in the 1990s that happened around Antioch and especially in Pittsburg. Several of the prostitutes’ bodies had been dumped in an area off the Antioch-Pittsburg Highway, where Phil had once worked. Of the search, Simpkins said, “This could take a while.”
And Contra Costa County spokesman Jimmy Lee added, “We will take a close look at if there are any links to open cases.” About the next-door neighbors’ property, rented by Damon Robinson, Lee said, “It looks like Garrido lived on the property in a shed.”
A PPD investigator related, “Every law enforcement agency in sight is looking at this guy. It’s safe to say that the closer you get to where he is or was, the more interest there is.”
And CCSO captain Dan Terry reinforced this PPD angle by stating, “Pittsburg police, for whatever reason, decided Garrido was a person of interest.” The particular reason was, according to Captain Terry, that in 1998 and 1999 the bodies of Valerie Schultz, twenty-seven, Rachael Cruise, thirty-two, and Jessica Frederick, twenty-four, had been found dumped in ditches near where Phil had once worked during that time period. They had been stabbed and strangled to death.
Now a big story got even bigger, and journalists were trying to find out everything they could about the murders that had occurred in the 1990s in eastern Contra Costa County.
CHAPTER 24
COLD CASES
One of the first cold cases being looked at by law enforcement concerning Phil Garrido didn’t occur in Antioch, Pittsburg, or even Lake Tahoe. It concerned a case that had occurred in Reno, Nevada. In 1989, Reno children, Jennifer Chia, age six, and her brother, Charles Chia, age eight, were kidnapped at a school bus stop. It was only a short walk from their home to the bus stop, just as it had been for Jaycee Lee Dugard in Lake Tahoe. In the Chia children’s case, they were seen getting off the school bus on the afternoon of October 18, 1989. They never made it home.
Their mother, Ann Chang, made an appeal to the public: “I never hurt people. I don’t know why anybody would take my kids.” Bloodhounds were used, door-to-door searches were made, and a helicopter search as well. Despite an intensive effort by law enforcement authorities, no clues turned up about the children.
By November, there were billboards with photos of the missing children all around the Reno area, and still no clues came in. Slowly, as in Jaycee’s case, the amount of detective work dropped off. By the summer of 1990, only one Reno detective was actively working the case.
Then on July 25, 1990, a California Department of Transportation crew was doing roadwork in the Feather River Canyon, fifty miles northwest of Reno. While working along a road in Plumas County, between Quincy and Portola, the road crew stopped for lunch. One of the members of the crew gazed below an embankment and spotted a skull protruding from a mound of dirt.
The workers flagged down a passing highway patrol officer, who, in turn, stopped Plumas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) sergeant Terry Bergstrand. The officers then went down to where the skull was and discovered the bones of two children. Bits of clothing had been scattered around the graves, apparently after an animal had been digging there. Both victims had dark brown hair still attached to their skulls.
Some clothing was intact, and a pair of jeans included the word “party” on it, while a white shirt had the word “Esprit.” There was also a pair of Adidas athletic shoes. Four police agencies around the region responded to the PCSO, wondering if the bones were those of their cases. Because of the clothing matching the description of what the Chias had been wear
ing when last seen, the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office contacted Reno PD.
Sergeant Bergstrand later told a reporter that lots of people used a dirt turnout near the graves to either take meal breaks or even sleep there in their cars. Truck drivers did not use the pullout because of its small amount of space. The turnout was at the tree line and was filled with oaks and pines, as opposed to the desert sagebrush in lower elevation.
The excavation of the graves was a slow process, as technicians photographed and videotaped everything that might be of evidential value. A Washoe County forensic team even sifted through gravel and dirt near the edge of the road, looking for clues. The bones weren’t removed for two days from the graves.
Chang was at the Reno Police Department when she first learned about what had happened to her children. She went into shock and had to be transported by ambulance to a hospital. One of her neighbors told a reporter, “It’s sad. So sad. But in a way, I’m glad they finally found out what happened. At least she now knows. She doesn’t have to wonder anymore.”
Another neighbor, Bylinda Rockson, had often chatted with young Charles Chia before he disappeared. When Rockson heard the latest news about the children, she said, “I couldn’t believe that they were dead. The FBI had told me they were taken here right at the apartment complex. Right in front of my parking space. Charles was always chattering with me. He seemed so friendly. Maybe too friendly.”
RPD lieutenant Mike Whan now said about Garrido, “There might not be any link between the cases and him. But we’d be crazy not to look at the possibility. Anything is possible with this guy. This guy would be a better suspect than others based on prior crimes he has committed.”