Phillip and Nancy Garrido abducted 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991, and held her hostage for 18 years. (Getty)
On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard was walking to her school bus stop from her home in South Lake Taho, California, when she was abducted by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido, and his wife, Nancy. Dugard remained missing until 2009– she spent 18 years living in tents and sheds in the couple’s backyard. A curious trip to the University of California campus sparked an investigation into Garrido, and he was eventually arrested for the kidnapping and imprisonment of Jaycee Dugard.
Read on to learn more about the assailant.
1. He Is the Father of Dugard’s Two Daughters
(Twitter)
Jaycee was repeatedly raped by Phillip during the 18 years that he held her hostage, and gave birth to her first daughter when she was just 13 years old. She was 16 during her second pregnancy. For the first four years of her imprisonment, Jaycee was confined to the backyard. Eventually, and after giving birth to her two girls, she was allowed to enter the Garrido household.
On August 24, 2009, after dropping off an essay on sex and religion at the FBI, Garrido went with Jaycee and her daughters to the campus police at the University of California, hoping to get approval to hold a special event on campus as part of “God’s Desire” program. The special events manager who spoke with Garrido perceived his– and the girls’– behavior as strange. She told Officer Ally Jacobs about the situation, and asked the officer to sit on her meeting with Garrido the following day. Officer Jacobs noticed the girls’ pallor during that second meeting, and decided to investigate the matter further. Garrido eventually admitted that he had raped and kidnapped Jaycee. After he did this, Dugard identified herself, and Nancy and Phillip were placed under arrest.
Jaycee and her daughters, Angel and Starlite, have lived a secluded life since being freed form the hands of Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy.
2. Dugard Wasn’t the First Woman He Abducted
In 1976, 25-year-old Katie Callaway parked her car at a Taho City market to grab a coffee for her boyfriend. It was then that Phillip Garrido tapped on her window and asked for a ride home. The date was November 22, and little did Callaway know, she was about to endure eight hours with the sexual deviant before being set free.
When Garrido got in the car, Callaway began driving, and he eventually told her to drop him off just past the Heavenly Valley ski resort. When she pulled over, Garrido reached to the driver’s side and turned off the engine. The Seattle Times writes that Garrido then “grabbed her by the neck, then held her hands”, and told her “‘If you do everything I say, you won’t get hurt.'”
Garrido took Callaway to a converted storage unit that he’d turned into a sex room– with pornography, sex toys, wine, a mattress, a movie projector, and other sex paraphernalia scattered around the unit. He had spent the car ride detailing his sexual fantasies to the terrified 25-year-old, and took an LSD before he began raping her. In an interview on the Larry King show, Katie said,
My recollections begin around 3am. Someone banged on the door. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, his friends are coming.’ Most of the details about what happened to me after I entered the warehouse have been repressed. I have blocked out the rape, but I had bruises and scratches all over me.
Callaway had been raped for 5 and a half hours when someone started banging on the storage door- it was a policeman who had noticed the lock had been jemmied. Garrido went outside to speak to the policeman, and told him that Callaway was his girlfriend. She rushed outside and begged for help, screaming that he wasn’t her boyfriend. According to police officer’s testimony, Katie kept screaming “help me”.
Garrido was arrested that night, and charged in both state and federal courts. When detective Dan DeMaranville later asked him why he assaulted Callaway, he said that it was the only way he could get sexual satisfaction.
3. He Told the FBI He Could Control Minds
Garrido was a man who was obsessed with religion, and explicitly told the FBI he could control people’s minds. In a 1976 mental evaluation, Dr. Lynn Gerow Jr. wrote that “he had ‘considerable emotional conflict with his parents during his formative years'”.
In an article titled “Rape victim describes Garrido’s attack”, The Seattle Times writes, “Evidence showed Garrido was a troubled young man with a sexual addiction so great that he would masturbate in drive-in theaters, restaurants, bars, public restrooms and outside the windows of homes.”
On August 24, 2009, 18 years into Dugard’s abduction, Garrido visited the FBI office in San Francisco, where he dropped off a four-paged essay he had written on the subjects of religion and sexuality. In the paper, Garrido claimed that he had discovered a solution for dealing with sexual deviants, and how his findings could be used to cure other sexual predators.
4. He Met His Wife in Prison
Phillip and Nancy Garrido abducted 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991, and held her hostage for 18 years. (Getty)
Garrido met his wife, Nancy, while serving time at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth for the 1976 rape of Katie Callaway. Nancy was visiting her uncle in prison when she met Phillip, and the two soon began writing love letters to each other, writes ABC News. They married in October 1981, seven years before Phillip’s sentence was finished.
When the couple eventually abducted Jaycee, Nancy helped Phillip pull her into the car. And when Phillip went back to prison for violating his parole, Nancy Gorrido kept Dugard imprisoned for five months. Her lawyer suggested that Nancy was under the control of her husband, so she was powerless to set Jaycee free. In a news article from 1991, ABC News wrote, “…Garrido remains in an emotional state and said she misses the two girls, Angel and Starlet, that her husband fathered with Dugard.”
5. He Was Under Federal and State Supervision While Jaycee Was Being Held Hostage
Garrido was visited by his parole officer multiple times while he was hiding Jaycee in his backyard– but the officer never asked to look back there, and therefore, never knew about the compound that hid behind Garrido’s fence.
The backyard set-up consisted of tents, shacks, boxes, and a shed, and had utility lines that ran to the corner of the house. A report issued by the California Office of Inspector General reads, “A trained officer should have seen the wires and raised suspicions”, since utility wires can indicate crime– especially when seen in the house of a convicted felon.