by Robert Scott
Dale Kinsella, Jaycee’s lawyer, would not comment on the settlement, and Terry Thornton, a state corrections spokesperson, had only a very brief statement in regard to it. Thornton said, “All I can confirm is the state and Jaycee Lee Dugard have agreed to settle any legal claims resulting from her alleged abduction by Phillip Garrido. The agreement will help them reunite with their family and obtain services and treatment that they need to overcome their ordeal in an environment that is free from unwanted press scrutiny.”
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law on July 9, 2010. It was estimated that it could cost up to $7 million for a lifetime of therapy alone for Jaycee and her daughters. And it would cost about $450,000 to educate Jaycee and her daughters.
A San Jose Mercury News columnist, Patty Fisher, however, voiced an opinion that many others shared. Fisher wrote, I wonder how this thirty-year-old woman, who grew up without a cell phone or designer jeans, will spend her new wealth? And will it buy her happiness? Fisher noted that money could buy Jaycee a comfortable home and privacy. It could buy financial security for her children. But if Jaycee wanted her lost years back, money could never buy that.
One other disturbing report came out of the settlement. It was learned that Jaycee made a claim that one parole agent had actually spoken to her during the period she was confined on Walnut Avenue. And, of course, no action had been taken by that parole agent. Commenting on this, the attorney general’s spokesperson, Christine Gasparac, said that there was no independent corroboration that a parole agent had seen or talked to Jaycee in the Garrido household. Gasparac added, “Ms. Dugard said she could provide no other details, such as when the contact with the parole agent had occurred. One of our lawyers said that it was a statement made by the plaintiff, and because the case was settled before litigation, they never have to prove it in court.”
For many people, by August 2010, it was hard to believe that one year had elapsed since the incredible news that Jaycee Lee Dugard was alive and had been held captive for eighteen years in a secret backyard compound. The Lake Tahoe News reported that Terry Probyn had been scheduled to speak to the South Lake Tahoe Soroptimist Club. When Terry learned that a tabloid had just bought photos of Angel and Starlit, she canceled her luncheon date with the Soroptimist Club and would not make any statement at all on the anniversary date.
In light of this incident, FBI agent Chris Campion, El Dorado County Sheriff’s lieutenant Les Lovell, and DA Vern Pierson spoke to a “no guest” Soroptimist luncheon in Lake Tahoe. In other words, only to people who had known and helped Terry Probyn over the years.
Speaking to the Lake Tahoe News a short time later after that event, Campion said, “In this particular case, I don’t think it would have prevented them (Phil and Nancy Garrido) from getting out of the basin. It is a good idea to have the roadblock system in place. That is probably one thing we do better now. Even in 1991, the FBI was starting to do away with the old policy of waiting twenty-four to forty-eight hours for some kind of ransom note or call. And since Jaycee’s abduction, the FBI has moved faster on child abduction cases.” Campion noted that even in 1991, twenty FBI agents were on the scene within twenty-four hours.
As to the FBI’s continuing presence with Jaycee and her family, Campion said, “We have an agent in the area where they are living now. The agent in the vicinity of the Dugards speaks to them weekly, if not more. We take the needs of the victims and witnesses very seriously, especially in these kinds of cases where there is uncharted territory. We don’t know what their needs are going to be over the years. There are just a ton of things you don’t think about.”
Also on the one-year anniversary, a Dugard family spokesperson told Fox 40 News of Sacramento that Jaycee was doing well and making amazing progress in her therapy sessions. The spokesperson added, “Jaycee is writing weekly and working on her journal. She is great at writing. She has a talent for it and she wants to pursue it. She is also interested in starting a foundation for children victimized by men like Garrido.”
Two of the Dugard family members, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke with Channel 10 News of Sacramento about Jaycee’s new life. They said that Jaycee and her children had not barricaded themselves into another virtual compound. Instead, over the previous year, they had been to Old Sacramento, which was a reconstruction of how Sacramento was in the nineteenth century. And they had also been to amusement parks; and, in fact, Jaycee enjoyed taking road trips with her daughters after receiving her driver’s license.
The family members also stated that Jaycee and her daughters spent a great deal of time with teachers working on their education over the previous year. And they also spent a lot of time with counselors in therapy. One family member told the reporter, “Jaycee is enjoying her freedom, happy and looking forward to the day she can put the trials of accused abductors Phillip and Nancy Garrido behind her.”
In a sense, Walnut Avenue was also experiencing a period of calm and healing from the traumatic events of the previous year. A next-door neighbor of the Garridos, Helen Boyer, told a reporter that the Garrido property was filled with dry grass and weeds, and she was worried about fire danger. “We called them (the fire department) to come out and see if they would cut the lawn. It’s a fire hazard. The weeds are way high.”
Then Helen spoke of the years before all of the news had come out. “I never noticed anything odd in the whole eighteen years. I would have been the first to speak if I’d known anything was going on. I saw children on the property, but never guessed they were children of a kidnap victim. I thought they were friends of Phil and Nancy. They weren’t out often. I think Nancy was under his thumb. She went around like a robot.”
One year later, the city of Antioch was also trying to recover its image. Antioch resident Karen James Smith told Channel 10 News, “It was really sad for our city to have this.” And Mayor protem Mary Rocha said, “We were all in shock. We couldn’t believe it happened under our nose. I’m proud of our lush parks and wellkept waterfront business district. But the embarrassment of the Garrido case still makes me cringe, especially because it didn’t happen within the city limits. I think Antioch got a lot of blame that shouldn’t have been put there.”
As to the continued push by Antioch to bring Walnut Avenue and the small surrounding area into the city limits, Rocha said that many residents in that locale still fought annexation. Their reasoning was that they didn’t want to pay for city services such as sidewalks, plumbing, and other infrastructure. But Rocha said that if Walnut Avenue had been part of Antioch years ago, it would have been the Antioch Police Department that went on calls to Phil Garrido’s home, and not the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, which had done so in the past. And the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office had a lot fewer officers to send there than the Antioch PD had. What especially would have come under scrutiny were all the sheds, tents, and other structures in the farthest corners of the Garridos’ backyard. Antioch zoning would not have allowed such a ramshackle set of tents and sheds to have existed.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation also had something to say on the one-year anniversary of Jaycee’s freedom. Spokesperson Terri McDonald related, “This department has enormous empathy for the victim. We understand the public’s scrutiny and we stand up to it. I think that we continue to do better as we learn from the information. We want to reduce caseloads for agents.” She added that learning lessons from the Garrido case took time, and it was all part of a natural progression of change and adaptation.
Closer to home, Contra Costa County sheriff Warren Rupf admitted that the case had been hard on the whole department. “There were mitigating circumstances, but there are no excuses. It was a failure.” Rupf added that he was angry at not only the lapses in his own office, but in other law enforcement offices as well. “I’d like to find somebody in federal parole and shake ’em. And tell them how embarrassed I am for them that you’re not only willing, but the system allows you to sim
ply stand behind the curtain.” In other words, the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office and California parole agents had all stood up and taken their lumps on the case, but no one at the federal level ever had done so, except for Parole Agent Antwine, and he was retired by that point. In fact, it had been the early release from federal prison for Phil Garrido that had set the whole set of circumstances in motion.
At least for things that had been done since the story broke in August 2009, Sheriff Rupf could point to many improvements in his office. Rupf said that a mantra at the sheriff’s office was now, “Look into the backyard!” And the motto had paid off. In the previous month, a fourteen-year-old girl had been discovered in a motel room rented by a registered sex offender in Contra Costa County. Detective Greg Leonard related, “It quite possibly saved this girl’s life.”
GPS monitoring was being taken much more seriously, as well, by parole agents. Now they had to analyze all the dots from the GPS readings, and see just where the registered sex offender was going. The Fairfield office, which had monitored Phil Garrido, had scored a success with this in just the previous week. One of the parole agents nabbed a sex offender who had cut the GPS monitoring device off his ankle. The offender was caught as he was leaving on a bus for San Diego, over four hundred miles away.
In another case taking place in Concord, parole agents tracked down a parolee suspected in a recent auto theft. By using a laptop in one of their cars, they could pinpoint the location where the parolee was hiding out. With guns drawn, the agents stormed into a house and collared the suspect.
CHAPTER 36
“WHAT I HAVE WITNESSED HAS BEEN VERY TROUBLING.”
It came as no surprise to many when Susan Gellman put before Judge Douglas Phimister a motion to halt further court proceedings on Phil Garrido until he was examined by a psychiatrist. In a hearing on that very issue on September 24, 2010, Gellman told Judge Phimister, “Mr. Garrido lacks the capacity to stand trial or enter a plea.” Gellman told Phimister that she consistently had trouble in her meetings with Phil.
And even Judge Phimister was concerned about what he had observed of Phil Garrido in court. Phimister declared, “I’ve noticed Mr. Garrido looking away in court and not appearing to be listening to you when you were talking to him. And he would frantically scribble something on a yellow notepad when nothing important was happening. What I have witnessed has been very troubling.”
With that in mind, Judge Phimister stopped all further court proceedings against Phil Garrido, including the upcoming preliminary hearing. The preliminary hearing was a means by which the prosecution would present witnesses, and Judge Phimister would decide if there was enough evidence to proceed to trial.
Also brought up during the September 24 hearing was the fact that the defense was awash in discovery material. There were now more than 150,000 pages of discovery documents that they had to wade through. Stephen Tapson told the judge, “They just gave me eight thousand more pages yesterday!”
After the short hearing on competency, Susan Gellman told reporters outside the courthouse, “When someone either wants to go to trial for crazy reasons or not go to trial for crazy reasons, that person is not competent. And that’s what we’re talking about. This is a fundamental fairness issue. I mean you saw him. It (the court proceedings) kind of didn’t phase him.”
Then Gellman added that the psychiatric evaluation wouldn’t significantly delay the onset of a trial. She claimed, “We’re talking about a time-out in the case. We’re not talking about the case not going forward. I expect there to be a resolution. I’m not looking for this to last many, many years.”
Which, of course, all depended on whether Phil was declared sane or insane by the psychiatrist. If he was deemed to be insane, there wouldn’t be any trial for him for a long time to come. He would be sent to a psychiatric facility until the time he was found to be competent enough to stand trial.
DA Vern Pierson had a few comments of his own about whether Phil was competent or not. Pierson told reporters, “We think he is competent to stand trial. But we will defer to his attorney and the judge on this topic.”
Katie Callaway Hall was by far more outspoken. She told reporters outside the courtroom, “I think that Phillip Garrido has shown extraordinary competency in the past in his ability to make a lot of people believe anything he wants them to believe. Everybody seems to be at his beck and call, from parole boards to federal officers. He was able to hide three human beings, hide their very existence, for how many years? That takes competence.”
In light of all the problems that an open-court preliminary hearing would entail, the prosecution moved in a different direction on Phil and Nancy Garrido. They convened a grand jury, which behind closed doors found that there was enough evidence to bring them to trial. The grand jurors did this by listening to evidence presented by El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office investigators Richard Pesce and Michael Franzen, and Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office detective Garrett Schiro. They also heard testimony from one more very important person—Jaycee Lee Dugard.
Most of the counts in the indictment were the same as the charges put together in August 2009 against the Garridos, but there were a few new bits of information that surfaced. One occurred in Count IV wherein Phillip Craig Garrido and Nancy Garrido did unlawfully have and accomplish an act of sexual intercourse with a person, to wit, Jane Doe, against the person’s will, by means of force, violence, duress, menace and fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on said person. In other words, Nancy Garrido was being indicted on rape charges, just as Phil was.
Count VI indicted Phil and Nancy on charges of willfully, unlawfully, and lewdly did commit a lewd and lascivious act upon and with the body and certain parts and members thereof of Jane Doe, a child under the age of fourteen years, with the intent of arousing, appealing to, and gratifying the lust, passions, and sexual desires of the said defendant and the said child, by use of force, violence, duress, and menace.
What was interesting about Counts X and XI, which concerned the “Forcible Lewd Act Upon a Child,” was the inclusion of the phrase acts of substantial sexual conduct depicted on video produced/created by defendant Phillip Garrido. This suggested that Phil Garrido had videotaped himself, at some point, having sex with underage Jaycee, and the videotape or tapes had later been discovered by investigators. It also brought up the possibility that Nancy Garrido had done the videotaping.
Later counts were basically the same as the previous counts, except each count covered a specific year, including 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997. Count XVII concerned an indictment of false imprisonment and Count XVIII an indictment on possession of child pornography.
There were also special allegations of “two strikes” against Phil Garrido—one for the federal crime of kidnapping Katie Callaway, and the one for the Nevada crime of raping Katie Callaway.
Judge Phimister handed the indictments to Susan Gellman and Stephen Tapson, and then “sealed” them, which, in effect, meant that no one outside of grand jurors, the DA’s office, and these two lawyers knew what had been said by witnesses who had testified at the grand jury hearing. Vern Pierson later told the media, “It was a better way to get a case to final conclusion and move it along to trial. It also protected the privacy of Jaycee Dugard and spared her family from having to take the witness stand until the trial.”
Stephen Tapson didn’t have much to say to reporters outside the courthouse, but one thing he did say was significant. Tapson related, “I heard from a (grand) juror that Dugard spent a full day before the panel and that her testimony brought many in attendance to tears.”
One thing new that did come out was that the Bay Area News Group reported Phillip and Nancy Garrido raped Jaycee Dugard twice the day they abducted her from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood, then repeatedly throughout her childhood years and Phillip Garrido recorded the sex acts on video through the early part of Dugard’s first pregnancy at age 14, according to details in an 18-count indictment. Just
how much Nancy was involved in these rapes was not revealed. Nor did the Bay Area News Group go into more detail about how it was discovered that Phil had raped Jaycee twice on the very first day of her abduction.
The media wanted a lot more than just this scanty new revelation. They wanted the entire grand jury transcripts released to them. Six media companies—including the Bay Area News Group, The McClatchy Company, Associated Press, Hearst Corporation, Gannett Company, and Los Angeles Times—filed court papers asking Judge Douglas Phimister to unseal the grand jury transcripts through an attorney, Karl Olson, of San Francisco.
Olson argued that no overriding interest overcomes the right of the public access to records. It is not enough for the defendants to argue that this case has received a lot of publicity, for if that were enough to seal records, all records would be sealed in every case that the public cared about. Olson also argued that in a county of 180,000 people, sealing public records was not necessary because there was a large jury pool. The Garridos would receive a fair trial whether the records remained sealed or unsealed, according to Olson.
Phil and Nancy Garrido, however, were not the only ones who wanted the grand jury testimony to remain sealed. In an unusual agreement with the defense’s position, DA Vern Pierson also wanted the grand jury testimony to remain sealed. He took up the defense claim that unsealing the testimony would harm the Garridos’ right to a fair trial, and it would also violate Jaycee Dugard’s privacy rights. Pierson wrote in his statement to the judge that Jane Doe testified in detail about extremely private and violent sexual acts. If these transcripts are unsealed prior to trial, the details of the repeated rape of Jane Doe will be splashed all over the media. Jane Doe does not deserve this disrespect. And then Pierson added, The media is clearly entitled to access, just not yet.