Lost and Found (26 page)

In 2005, Angel turned eleven, the same age her mother had been at the time of her abduction. And the resemblance between the beautiful blonde child and the “missing” photographs of Jaycee Lee Dugard was uncanny.

Angel and her eight-year-old sister Starlit worshipped their father. He now regularly took them out of the backyard for trips into town, to see movies after eating lunch at their favorite restaurant.

And it was a sight to behold the gray-haired, balding six-foot, four-inch Phillip Garrido, with his two little girls trailing behind him in long, unfashionable thrift-store dresses.

“They’re beautiful little girls,” said Cheyvonne Molino, a local business owner and one of Garrido’s clients. “Well-mannered, soft-spoken, knowledgeable. I watched them grow up.”

Her husband Jim agreed.

“They call him Dad,” he said. “They’re just like two peas in a pod.”

That year, the Garridos’ aged next-door neighbor Delbert “Jack” Medeiros went into a nursing home. Phillip Garrido moved into his house as caretaker, so it wouldn’t be empty. He also adopted Medeiros’s dog, bringing it next door as a new pet for Alyssa and her children.

Phillip and Nancy had recently befriended the sick seventy-nine-year-old pensioner, who had grown fond of them and was only too happy for them look after his property.

While the old man was in the nursing home, the Garridos visited him regularly, updating him on his house and taking him out for short trips in their car.

There were also a number of sheds and outbuildings in his backyard next door. Phillip moved into one of the sheds for a time, bringing in a couch, a mattress, a music system and a VCR player. He also, reportedly, turned all the locks backward, so people could be locked in.

One day he invited Marc Lister over to see the house he was caretaking, showing him some firearms he was keeping there.

“I saw long rifles,” said Lister. “He had them stored at the house next door he was caretaking.”

Jack Medeiros’s ex-wife Magdalena Miller, who was negotiating to buy the house, talked to the new caretaker several times by phone.

“He said his kids were helping him clean the house,” she later recalled.

Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s only friend in Walnut Avenue was Janice Dietrick, who lived across the street. The sixty-two-year-old widow was dying of cancer, and the Garridos visited her regularly at night, bringing her waffles and cream.

“I know the couple real well,” said Dietrick. “We were friends and they came over all the time. Phil would do anything for me. I knew him better than anyone.”

Dietrick, who was prescribed medical marijuana, shared joints with the Garridos, chatting for hours into the night in her front room.

“He would sit with me,” she said. “He told me he had two girls. I loved the way he took care of the old people.”

Bridgehead Café owner Murray Sexton said everyone knew Dietrick was close to the Garridos, socializing with them all the time.

“Unfortunately she’s on borrowed time,” he said. “[Phillip] was giving her food. Something to eat. They’d burn one together once in a while. He was good to her.”

One hot summer night in 2005, Phillip Garrido arrived at an Antioch hotel with a twelve-year-old girl, checking into a single room under his own name. The hotel manager, Beth Torres, would later remember she was suspicious he was with such a young girl.

“I knew there was some sick sex thing going on,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t prove it at the time.”

Torres said that during the night she walked past Room 140, where Garrido was with the girl, listening for any sounds of distress.

At 8:00
A.M
. the following morning, Garrido checked out of the room, paying in cash, as the girl waited outside in his car.

“After he paid and started to walk out,” said Torres, “he turned to look at me and it gave me the chills.”

After two years at the Diamond Ridge Healthcare Center, Nancy Garrido was fired for missing four days of work without any explanation. Her co-worker Janie Bates says Nancy’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic, and it was rumored that she took pills, smoked weed and did heroin.

On the rare occasions Nancy was invited to a work function, she had refused, explaining Phillip never allowed her out socially. She also said she could never invite anybody over to the house, as her husband hated company.

“Phillip expected her home directly after work,” said Bates. “We knew she had a certain amount of time to get home or Phillip would get angry.”

Soon after losing her job, Nancy found a job with another local health facility, but, according to Bates, was let go after failing a random drug test.

31

“
GOD’S DESIRE
”

In late 2005, Phillip Garrido was reborn. Much of his life had been a struggle between sex and God. But just before his fifty-fifth birthday he announced he was giving up masturbation in order to devote himself fully to religion. He also claimed to have cured himself of schizophrenia, having invented a miraculous black box, allowing him to hear the voices of angels.

After his epiphany he spent hours drafting a rambling, often incomprehensible manifesto he called “Origins of Schizophrenia Revealed,” triumphantly proclaiming he had healed himself and was no longer a sexual deviant. And he claimed his “powerful new insight” would help law enforcement, educators and therapists worldwide understand why sex offenders, like himself, were unable to control their “abnormal desires and thoughts” and committed “such dysfunctional acts.”

“Twenty-nine years ago I was imprisoned for a violent crime,” he wrote, “that behavioral scientists believe is not possible to end. Not only have I accomplished an end to that problem but I have established a powerful means of developing a pathway for others to accomplish the same quality control.”

In his manifesto, which he later posted on the Internet, inviting the media to disseminate, Garrido attributed now being able to “process complex issues concerning love” as a key ingredient in his success.

“It is the age-old struggle between right and wrong,” he wrote, “that is holding the human race back from discovering a freedom so capable that the renewing of one’s mind becomes a simpler reality.”

Discovering this freedom, he wrote, had “reorganized and replaced an internal thought process with such unequivocal success that it literally redefines the possibilities.” There is now “solid hope” for “sexual predators,” suffering from “the many forms of aggressive sexual behavior.”

He then went on to address the subject of celibacy at length.

“Not all people who suffer from these types of problems,” he wrote, “are happy with their behavior and do experience major depression after ejaculation.”

Garrido spoke of his own remorse and self-loathing after sex, saying he was helpless to control himself the next time he was aroused. Then he described how his spiritual rebirth had led to a loving new relationship with his wife, leaving it unclear if he meant Nancy or Alyssa.

THIS IS MY STORY

It started when I began to examine issues differently due to the many moral issues and experiences I have had, the type that leads to believing in a creator who deals with reality and help a person reason correctly. Having insight of how we form thoughts and the desire to live a healthy productive life I began to discover that the human mind has an undeveloped potential, one that is subject to our own thoughts.

Because of my background I began to examine the issues of how certain behaviors cause a great deal of pain in myself and those who are victimized by those behaviors especially our family and my wife. Building from those personal experiences I prepared a way to deal with these issues in my own mind.

How? For example every time I would see a woman who was attractive I began to examine my thoughts directly, not allowing my eyes to turn aside in order to avoid those issues I needed to confront the problem. Looking allowed my self-talk to provide pictures and words that dealt with reality, saying to myself that people are beautiful and attractive. Slowly I began re-addressing the matter with reality statements such as “see how beautiful she is to look at.” These messages began confirming my desire to be rid of the physical feelings the mind provided the body. I used the feedback of other realities like the harm it caused my wife and me to help supply a healthier out look [sic].

In time it began to form a new picture, slowly beginning to drop and reinforce the issues that kept opening the doors to inappropriate thoughts and desires. At first the mind (or self talk) would send out the same stimulating messages leaving me subject to the physical attractions. As time went on I gained control over my body by taking the next step, (controlling masturbation) as it is a key in opening the mind up to more problematic developing. This allowed me (after a few months) to find a new experience awaiting me the type that escapes our notice without having the experience to know what it would provide. This helped supply a completely new freedom that at first became an observation and not much more, that is until the weeks passed by and the reality started to set in.

When this was well formed within my belief system I started to notice a new freedom was being established through the subconscious mind. As this went on one day I discovered one of the most powerful freedoms imaginable, it was like the feelings one has when he is with someone new for the first time, except this time it was with my wife. When I had intercourse with her the feelings were so powerful and exciting that every time we have intercourse now it is as though I had just met her, you know the kind of excitement we all find when we first meet someone we keep thinking of them often during the day and can hardly wait to be with them.

Get ready because here is the reward: Finally one day when we were having intercourse and I ejaculated I got up and in great anger I realized I never needed to act or do the things I used to believe was so great and stimulating. At that same moment I began explaining to her how my relationship with her was all I ever needed and at that moment I knew and felt what must be the greatest freedom of all because I was able to see myself as wanting those things only! I began to weep telling her, “I am sorry for the things I did in the past” at that time a feeling of remorse came over me, one that I never new [sic] or felt before or even dreamed was possible.

Since then it has happened again and again and has become a powerful reward providing a loving interaction the kind that was meant to be between a man and a wife. The fact is I now find myself no longer wanting to separate from her after sexual intercourse, instead I keep telling her how much I truly love her, because now I find it desirable to hold her calling into play the same feelings I had just before the sexual interaction, the feelings that attracted me to desire that interaction was still there without the need to have sex, imagine that!

Research shows the desire for a man to have intimacy with his partner after sex is not usually there instead I feel the opposite and very content afterwards. You have no idea how rewarding that is especially for me as I always wanted to get away from a woman after it was concluded, no longer needing or desiring to touch.

This is just part of the progress I have made through knowledge I have gained concerning the creator and his purpose intended for mankind. I would never have changed nor would I have ever known the quality found in such freedom. Thanks to God and his Son Christ Jesus I am alive and free of these burdens.

This is the process God and his son provided me with as I cleaned the inside of the mind not just to make it look that way on the outside. God will testify for me concerning these facts. God willing I will be teaching this and other skills Christ is providing for me in the prisons throughout the U.S. as well as over seas [sic].

Soon afterward, Phillip and Nancy Garrido arrived at Maria Christenson’s recycling center, asking to talk to her privately in her office. He told her he was starting a church in his backyard, asking for a $2,000 loan to build a bathroom for it.

When she agreed to lend Phillip the money, he suddenly became very emotional.

“He started talking about how he was a changed man,” Maria recalled. “And he didn’t masturbate any more.”

Then Phillip and Nancy both burst into tears, as he told her he had once been to prison, without elaborating further.

“They were both crying and she was hanging onto him,” Maria recalled. “I couldn’t understand why is he in front of his wife telling me he doesn’t masturbate. I tried to get rid of him really fast.”

From then on Christenson tried to avoid Phillip Garrido as much as possible, telling her employees never to leave her alone with him again.

On January 31, 2006, Phillip Garrido filed the first of two applications, officially registering to create what he would call the Phillip C. Knight Institute. He submitted the forms and a $15 filing fee to the Contra Costa County Clerk’s Office. It was then duly stamped by recorder Stephen L. Weir, giving him until January 31, 2011, to use the “fictitious business name statement.”