Lost and Found (34 page)

Headlined “Kidnapping Victim Located After 18 Years,” it read, “1991 kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard has been located in good health in the greater Bay Area of California. Jaycee Dugard was abducted on June 10, 1991 from South Lake Tahoe, CA. At the time of the incident, it was reported that a vehicle occupied by two individuals drove up to Jaycee Dugard and abducted her in view of her stepfather.

“Since the date of the occurrence the investigation has been ongoing and today’s events could bring it to resolution.”

At 3:00
P.M
., El Dorado County undersheriff Fred Kollar addressed the media at a press conference at the Placerville Fairgrounds. It was being carried live by all local television stations and streamed over the Internet.

Standing by an American flag, the bald-headed, bespectacled undersheriff looked genuinely moved by the occasion. Standing alongside him on the podium were El Dorado County district attorney Vern Pierson, who would prosecute the case, and supervisory special agent of the FBI Deidre Fike.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” began Undersheriff Kollar, clearing his throat. “I’m very happy to be in front of you under these circumstances. Jaycee Dugard was found alive in Antioch.

“Just to remind you just a little bit. She was kidnapped in June of 1991. She was taken off the street in front of her house. As you all know there was nothing then, nor is there anything now, to indicate that this was anything other than a stranger abduction of an eleven-year-old.

“On August twenty-fifth—Tuesday—the UC Berkeley Police encountered a suspect, Phillip Garrido, seeking access to the UC Berkeley campus. This alert Berkeley police officer took notice of Phillip Garrido and two young women who were in his custody. Police officers looked into Garrido’s background and found that he was on federal parole overseen by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”

Undersheriff Kollar then told the reporters how Garrido had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1976. After discovering his record, the campus officer had then contacted his parole officer, who had summoned Garrido to his office.

“Garrido brought along with him two minors,” said Kollar, “as well as Nancy Garrido and a female named Alyssa.”

Kollar explained that as the parole officer had never seen Alyssa and the two young children during his visits to Garrido’s home, he was suspicious and contacted the Concord Police Department.

“Ultimately,” said Kollar, “the female named Alyssa was identified as Jaycee Dugard. Subsequent interviews with Jaycee and the Garridos provided information that only the victim and kidnappers could know. DNA confirmation is being sought to confirm Jaycee’s identity.

“The Garridos—Nancy and the male—were taken into custody, and an investigation led to their residence in Antioch. The two minor children turned out to be children of Jaycee and the male suspect Garrido. They along with Nancy Garrido were living together at the residence in Antioch since the original kidnapping.

“A search of the residence revealed a hidden backyard within the backyard. The hidden backyard had sheds, tents and outbuildings, where Jaycee and the girls spent most of their lives. There was a vehicle hidden in the backyard that matched the vehicle originally described at the time of the abductions. The tents and outbuildings in the backyard were placed in a strategic arrangement to inhibit outside viewing and to isolate the victims from outside contact.”

The undersheriff said that “family reunification” was already underway, but it will be “a long and ongoing process,” involving witness victim advocates, the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Both suspects are now currently in custody in the El Dorado County jail,” he said. “Photos of both suspects are on our website and we would welcome any additional information linking them to this or any other criminal activity.”

FBI special agent Deidre Fike then spoke about the role the bureau had played in the eighteen-year investigation into Jaycee Dugard’s abduction.

“In 1991 the FBI opened a kidnapping investigation [into] the disappearance of Jaycee Dugard,” she said, “and has been working it jointly with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office. On the day that she arrived at the parole officer’s office with the subjects, the Concord Police Department contacted the FBI in San Francisco to advise them that Jaycee Lee Dugard was alive.”

She said she contacted Agent Chris Campion, who is based in Sacramento and had been assigned to the Jaycee Dugard case since the beginning.

“He immediately responded,” she said, “and we continue to work jointly with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office in furtherance of this investigation.”

Undersheriff Kollar then took reporters’ questions, saying his officers were still interviewing Jaycee and her daughters and Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

One reporter asked about Jaycee’s condition when she had been found.

“She was in good health,” replied Kollar, “but living in a backyard for the past eighteen years does take its toll.”

Another reporter asked if Jaycee had asked for help.

“I don’t know that,” said Kollar, “but in discussion with detectives, she was relatively cooperative, relatively forthcoming. She wasn’t particularly evasive at all.”

Then he was asked if Jaycee and her daughters had been living in sheds.

“It’s hard to describe,” he replied, “but there was a secondary backyard that’s screened from view from literally all around. The only access to it is a very small and narrow tarp. Her and the two children were living in a series of sheds. There was one shed entirely soundproofed. It could only be opened from the outside. Another shed had more access to the public and then two tents.”

A television reporter asked about Jaycee’s two children.

“None of the children had ever gone to school,” he said. “They’ve never been to a doctor. They were kept in complete isolation in this compound at the rear of the house. From what they have both said he fathered both of those children with Jaycee. They are with Jaycee and whatever group is assisting in the reunification.”

The undersheriff then revealed that Nancy had been with Phillip Garrido during Jaycee’s kidnapping, and matched Carl Probyn’s description of the female in the car.

“My understanding,” he said, “is that they went directly to that property from the kidnapping. Jaycee has been there ever since and the children were born there and lived there. They were in relatively good physical condition. They weren’t obviously abused. They weren’t malnourished. No obvious indicators.”

District Attorney Vern Pierson refused to comment on specific charges, saying his office would be filing a criminal complaint tomorrow at noon in El Dorado Superior Court.

“Beyond that,” he said, “I don’t think I should comment.”

Immediately after the press conference, the sheriff’s office released mug shots of both the Garridos. Phillip looked in a trance, staring straight at the camera. There are two large scabs on the left side of his nose, and his short receding hair is uncombed. Nancy looks drawn and haggard, her unwashed dark hair tangled around her shoulders. She looks helplessly at the camera, as if not quite sure where she is.

Carl Probyn watched the televised press conference with an Associated Press reporter and photographer at his home in Orange, California. And during the dramatic revelations about the deplorable conditions Jaycee had been living in, he grimaced—being photographed, holding his hands up to his face in horror.

Asked his reaction after the press conference, Jaycee’s now graying stepfather said he was just “overwhelmed” by what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.

“It broke my marriage up,” he said tearfully. “I’ve gone through hell. I’m a suspect until yesterday.”

Later that afternoon he held his own press conference at his home, for local television news stations.

“My name is William Carl Probyn,” he said. “I’m Canadian. I go by Carl.”

He said he was still in “total shock” since Terry had called him the previous afternoon with the amazing news.

“I had given up hope of having her alive,” he said, as he laid out old photographs of Jaycee on a table. “I was in the process of wanting to recover her body basically. And now to get her back alive is like winning the lottery. She sounds like she’s okay up to a point. She’s probably still mentally eleven years old. She’s gone through so much.”

He said he was also struggling to understand why Jaycee had not come forward earlier.

“I don’t know if she was brainwashed,” he said. “I don’t know if she was walking around on the street. I don’t know if she was locked up under key for eighteen years. I have a million questions.”

About an hour later, Terry called with an update on Jaycee and the girls, as Carl was being interviewed by Paloma Esquivel of the
Los Angeles Time
s. And on learning new details about Jaycee’s early days of captivity, when she was locked in a shed in Phillip Garrido’s secret backyard, he burst into tears and begged her to stop.

“I don’t want to hear any more,” he told her.

Then, after putting down the phone, he voiced his disgust at what Jaycee had endured at the hands of Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

“No schooling, no nothing—I was hoping it wasn’t that scenario,” he told Esquivel. “This is pretty horrific stuff, to be treated like an animal. These people. I’ll never forgive them. It’s already devastated our lives.”

Later Probyn would be asked what it was like living for so long under a cloud of suspicion, that he was somehow involved in Jaycee’s disappearance.

“I’m free now,” he said. “They caught him and it’s solved.”

But he was still angry with several in-laws, who had hired an investigator to find evidence against him.

“I don’t want these people back in my life,” he said. “They actually raised money . . . to put me in jail.”

Straight after the press conference, the world’s media descended on Antioch, California. The sleepy backwater San Francisco suburb was suddenly overflowing with television news crews and scores of reporters, hungry for any information on Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Over the next few weeks, newspapers as far away as England, Australia and China would cover this almost unprecedented story, making Jaycee Lee Dugard something of an international superstar.

By late afternoon, as a helicopter circled overhead, taking aerial photographs of 1554 Walnut Avenue and its secret back garden, reporters were knocking on the Garrido neighbors’ doors for interviews.

“If you didn’t look into this guy’s eyes and see straight evil,” neighbor Sam Kovistl told a reporter, “you’d be blind. You’re not even looking in the eyes of a human. I could tell he had something to hide.”

Before long, reporters found Phillip Garrido’s Voices Revealed blog, and began tracking down his printing clients, listed in his black box affidavits. And it soon became clear that Jaycee, Angel and Starlit were well known to many of them.

Realtor Deepal Karunaratne told reporters that he had known Jaycee as Phillip Garrido’s oldest daughter, Alyssa, often seeing her on a day-to-day business basis.

“She does all my work and does all the designing,” he told the
Reno Gazette-Journal.
“Every time she comes she’s very well-dressed and she seemed to be very healthy and happy.”

Tim Allen, president of East County Glass & Window, Inc., said he used Phillip Garrido’s printing business for more than a decade, describing him as an “out there” religious fanatic.

“He was always talking about this new religion thing, rambling,” said Allen. “He seemed like a simple guy with a mental problem.”

Allen told reporters that over the last several years, Garrido had started bringing two “cute little blonde girls” into his showroom, saying they were his daughters.

“They looked normal,” he said. “They spoke really well and one even shook my hand.”

Cheyvonne Molino of J & M Enterprises said she knew Angel and Starlit well, and they had even attended her daughter’s Sweet Sixteen birthday party, just a couple of weeks earlier.

“We didn’t realize anything was wrong,” she said, “except they didn’t go to school with other kids.”

Molino described Angel as very “clingy” to her father, saying they were both “very shy.” Sometimes he brought them over to visit her teenage daughter, so they would have someone their own age to talk to.

In Walnut Avenue, neighbors told reporters that it was common knowledge that Phillip Garrido was a sex offender. The neighborhood children called him “Creepy Phil,” and always kept their distance.

Damon Robinson, who had lived next door to the Garridos for the last three years, explained how in 2006 his former girlfriend had seen little children living in the backyard in tents.

“I told her to call the police,” he said. “I told her to call right away.”

40

“
A POWERFUL, HEARTWARMING STORY
”

At 4:45
P.M
. that Thursday afternoon, KCRA-TV anchor Walt Gray was about to go on air for his five o’clock newscast when his boss told him he had a phone call from Phillip Garrido. At first the veteran newsman thought it a joke, but when he realized it really was Garrido, calling from Placerville Jail, he took a deep breath and went into an audio booth, turned on a tape recorder and picked up the phone.