Lost and Found (19 page)

There were no windows in Jaycee Dugard’s prison, and it was stiflingly hot that summer. Her only sense of time was when Phillip and Nancy Garrido would unlock the shed door to feed her. They gave her old clothes to wear and a rotting mattress to sleep on, only allowing her out of the filthy shed to use the makeshift toilet and shower. And investigators believe that Garrido may have fed his captive tranquilizers and other prescription drugs to keep her compliantly under his control.

Within a month of her abduction, Phillip and Nancy Garrido entered the shed with a tape player. They then turned it on to play one of his country-and-western-style love songs. In his deranged way, Garrido tried to create a romantic setting to have sex with his eleven-year-old prisoner.

He then forced the little girl down on the mattress, telling her it was the will of God, and mercilessly raped Jaycee.

At first Jaycee tried to scream for help, but he had soundproofed the shed so effectively, no one could hear her. Several times a day he would come to abuse his slave, subjecting her to unimaginable sexual cruelty.

What went through the little girl’s mind is anybody’s guess. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and then years, the gentle child stopped fighting back, eventually resigning herself to her fate.

23

THE SUMMER OF TERROR

Two weeks after Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken, there was still no sign of her. But although she seemed to have disappeared off the face of the Earth, her smiling toothy grin and enchanting blonde-haired, blue-eyed looks were known to everyone. Her distraught family regularly joined hundreds of volunteers, handing out “missing” fliers. Jaycee’s poster blanketed almost every tree and fence in Tahoe and neighboring towns. And children all over the area were now wearing “Have You Seen Jaycee?” buttons, emblazoned with her photo.

“I never knew I had so many friends,” Terry told
Sacramento Bee
reporter Mark Glover.

Each day Terry and Carl Probyn sat by the phone, waiting for news and fielding calls from reporters. But with absolutely no word of their daughter, every day was yet another torturous ordeal for them to face.

“I was walking the floors, ranting and raving,” Terry recalled, “thinking the worst.”

On Tuesday, June 25, Sheriff Don McDonald admitted the investigation was no nearer finding Jaycee than it had been on the day she was taken.

“We’ve had literally hundreds of leads,” he said. “But we have none right now that we think are really promising.”

The sheriff said that the fifty-officer investigation had now moved into another phase. Investigators were checking if any vehicles in the area fitting Carl Probyn’s description were registered to sex offenders. And they were also looking into the files of seven children who had gone missing in the Reno area over the last several years.

He said his department had also been receiving calls from psychics, claiming to know where Jaycee was being kept.

“We’ll have a psychic call,” said the sheriff, “say[ing] she’s being held in a large building in a metropolitan area. There’s really no way to check that out.”

Terry Probyn was also receiving a flood of upsetting calls from all over the country, making things even worse.

“They were driving me crazy with satanic theories,” she told
People
magazine in November 1991. “One woman called and said she felt that Jaycee was in a trunk of a car at a casino. So we spent the day knocking on trunks of cars at casinos.”

Years later, Reno psychic Dayle Schear—who later worked on the O.J. Simpson case—would claim that Terry Probyn had consulted her soon after Jaycee’s disappearance. The celebrated psychic says she did a psychic reading for the Probyns, in which she described the man and woman holding Jaycee near a white bridge.

“I described the general area and how she was being held,” Schear said. “I said it was sexual. I knew she was being held at force and she could not get to a phone to call.”

Another psychic Terry and Carl consulted several times told them that they both knew the abductors. And several years later, Jaycee’s stepgrandmother Wilma Probyn would also visit a psychic, who said the little girl was still alive and living with a couple in Northern California.

One Sunday, about a month after the kidnapping, Terry Probyn decided to sober up for the sake of her family. So she came down from her room, dried her eyes and took control of the situation.

“I was by myself,” she remembered, “and I suddenly got this inner strength to quit crying and get on with it.”

Over the next few months, Terry and Carl Probyn embarked on a mission to keep Jaycee’s story in the media, never turning down an interview. It was part of their strategy to find her, after the police investigation stalled through lack of leads.

“This was [our] whole goal from the very start,” explained Carl. “I mean we did interviews from day one and we’ve done them all the way through. Our job right now is to get her picture out there and get these interviews to get her back.”

On July 3, Terry was interviewed by the Associated Press. It went out on the national wire on Independence Day and was picked up by newspapers coast-to-coast. Accompanying the story was a photograph of Terry sadly tying a pink ribbon to a tree on Highway 50, the road Jaycee’s abductors had taken three weeks earlier.

Terry, who had taken a leave of absence from her job, also joined a dedicated group of volunteers who met every Wednesday at a South Lake Tahoe church hall. There they prepared mailers containing Jaycee’s photograph and information to be sent out to truck stops, convenience stores and campgrounds throughout North America. The group averaged five thousand mailings a week.

A local Tahoe rock band called The Movers gave a benefit concert to raise money for the Jaycee reward fund. And a silent auction was held, with all attending children fingerprinted as a precaution against future abductions.

That summer, South Lake Tahoe lived in terror that Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abductors would strike again. Parents never let their children out of their sight, and everyone started locking their doors.

“It was a summer of a lot of fear in Tahoe,” recalled Meyers Elementary principal Karen Gillis-Tinlin. “Parents didn’t just let their children walk down the street. Didn’t let them out on their bike to just ride freely in the neighborhood. We really did keep our children close to us that summer.”

Jaycee’s former classmate Meghan Dorris said she and all her friends lived in fear.

“We were petrified to be alone,” she recalled. “We were petrified to walk anywhere by ourselves, to do anything by ourselves, because we thought we were next . . . [that] we’d be picked off the street one by one.”

Investigators then turned their attention to Carl Probyn. As the last person to see Jaycee, he soon became a suspect, and some of his in-laws even hired a private investigator to check him out.

Over the next few months, Carl would be subjected to four FBI-administered lie detector tests, as well as tough questioning from law enforcement under hypnosis.

“I think in any investigation you have to look at everyone as a suspect,” explained lead detective Jim Watson. “And you have to look at stepfathers. The person I was working for was Jaycee, and if it meant questioning the stepfather, Carl, it was simply to find out where Jaycee was at.”

Probyn says that although being under suspicion made him nervous, he totally understood why.

“The FBI put me through the wringer,” he later recalled. “I was the last person to see her alive. I went through hell. They asked me if I’d take a lie detector test. And I remember they asked me questions like, ‘Do you ever wish she wasn’t around?’ ‘Did you ever forge a document?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why don’t you guys ask me a straight question?’ ”

After the first examination, investigators told Carl he was holding something back, asking him to return for another test the following day.

“I said sure,” said Probyn. “So I took another one and then [another] the next day. And basically the same kinds of questions.”

One theory investigators considered at the time was that Jaycee had been snatched by a drug gang to whom Carl owed money.

“They were fishing,” he said. “I can’t knock them for what they were doing.”

And Terry became obsessed with the nagging question of whether Carl could possibly have done more to save Jaycee. She would lash out at him, even though she realized that he had done his best to chase the abductors uphill on his bicycle before calling 911. Carl himself was racked by guilt, thinking if only he had had his car keys in his pocket, he could have jumped in his vehicle and gone after them.

August 10 marked the two-month anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction. Carl and Terry Probyn attended a moving silent candlelight vigil along Highway 50, to keep hope alive for the safe return of their daughter.

By fall, when there were still no clues to her whereabouts, many investigators secretly believed she was dead, and the search had almost ground to a halt. But the Probyns soldiered on undaunted, working around the clock to keep Jaycee’s name and picture in the public consciousness. A public service announcement was running on California and Nevada TV stations, appealing for any information about Jaycee. And her photograph was now on milk cartons and grocery bags all over America.

In one interview, Carl Probyn desperately attempted to communicate with Jaycee through
Sacramento Bee
columnist Anita Creamer. If she ever got to read the story and happened to be in a department store, he told her “to raise hell” and “start screaming.”

Several months later, Carl and Terry Probyn helped restage Jaycee’s disappearance for the popular TV series
Missing Reward.
Each week the thirty-minute show highlighted a missing person or fugitive, using actors to portray the real characters. But Carl and Terry Probyn insisted that they play themselves in a reenactment at their home, which took twelve hours to shoot.

“We didn’t want somebody else portraying our part,” explained Carl, “because I saw what happened. An actor couldn’t take my place and do the same things.”

Terry also felt it was important for them to play themselves in the segment.

“We felt this is what we can do to get Jaycee back,” she said. “This has got to be it . . . our one break.”

A few weeks later, Terry and Carl held a fundraiser at a local crafts fair. Wearing a “Missing” T-shirt with a large picture of her daughter, Terry held up a poster with her daughter’s favorite Boo Boo Bunny poem.

It’s difficult to calm a child
Even when the pain is mild,
When a lump, a bruise, or little knot,
Appears in almost every spot.

On November 25, 1991,
People
magazine published a major story on Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction. It would be the first of several the magazine would run over the years. The double-page feature, bearing the headline “Too Cruel a Theft,” was a candid account of the day of the kidnapping, and the terrible toll it had taken on the Probyns.

“At first nothing could stop the pain,” read the article by Karen S. Schneider. “The day Terry learned of her daughter’s abduction, she smoked cigarette after cigarette and drank herself into a stupor.”

It vividly described Terry’s ordeal over the first few days of her beloved daughter’s disappearance, and how she had been inconsolable.

“Day after day the despondent mother sank in a dark hole of drunkenness,” it read, “tears and heavy, troubled sleep.”

It also reported the unbearable pressures Carl and Terry Probyn had been under, not made any easier by his being a suspect in his stepdaughter’s kidnapping.

“It made me nervous,” Carl told
People
. “I had to say, ‘Sure, there were times I’d wished Jaycee wasn’t in our lives.’ ”

The lead detective, Sergeant Jim Watson, was quoted as saying investigators were now “99.9 percent sure” there was no family involvement in Jaycee’s abduction.

The Probyns said they were haunted by not knowing where Jaycee was or if she was still alive. Even Jaycee’s twenty-two-month-old half-sister Shayna knew something was wrong, said Terry, telling how the toddler would occasionally take a “Have You Seen Jaycee” button and kiss it.

“It breaks my heart,” she sobbed, “when she asks for her ‘siss.’ We just say she’ll be home soon.”

Terry said that her only source of comfort was the possibility there was a woman involved. She speculated that the female abductress might have lost her own child, and was caring for Jaycee.

“Maybe she took Jaycee because of her grief,” said Terry. “If that is true, all I can say is, ‘Please let my child go. You may like her, but I love her.’ ”

The week the
People
article ran, Carl Probyn was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix. He had two emergency operations, but within days he was out of the hospital and had rejoined the search for his stepdaughter.

Tuesday, December 10, marked the six-month anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s abduction, and the investigation had stalled. Lead detective Sergeant Jim Watson said the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI had received around six thousand tips since the kidnapping, generating six hundred good leads. But even with the help of the latest FBI computers, nothing had come of any of them. There was, he told the
Sacramento Bee,
one tip from the very beginning that was still under investigation. But he refused to elaborate further.

To mark the somber occasion, Carl and Terry Probyn held another emotional candlelight vigil on Route 50, attended by scores of sympathetic friends and well-wishers.

A crew from
America’s Most Wanted
was also in South Lake Tahoe for the sad anniversary, filming an update to the story, which would air the following Friday. Once again there were hundreds of calls to investigators with new tips, but nothing ultimately panned out.

Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla was so moved by Jaycee’s story, he posted a further $100,000 reward for any information leading to her being found.