A Stolen Life

Phillip Garrido

 

On June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was just another normal girl in Meyers, California, growing up and living her life. The Dugards had relocated to Meyers because they knew it to be a safer neighborhood than where they had lived previously. She was walking to school on her usual route and nothing seemed amiss.

 

By 1991, Phillip Garrido had already committed several crimes and had a history of kidnapping. He had kidnapped Katherine Callaway in 1976, holding her hostage in an abandoned warehouse. When he was found and arrested, police diagnosed him as a “sexual deviant and chronic drug abuser.” He admitted to masturbating to elementary school girls in his car frequently. All of this led to a 50-year prison sentence in 1977.

 

There, he met his future wife Nancy, who would later be his accomplice in crime. They married in prison in 1981. By 1988, the two were both released from prison on parole. Phillip was heavily monitored, wearing a GPS bracelet on his ankle and being frequently inspected by parole officers.

 

On that fateful day in June, Jaycee was walking on the sidewalk when a car pulled up beside her. She believed the man inside was asking for directions and walked up to the open window. Suddenly, Phillip pulled out a stun gun and shocked her unconscious. Nancy helped him haul her limp body into the back seat of the car.

 

After a three-hour drive, she was brought out of the car into an unfamiliar backyard. Phillip began asking her to take off her clothes, but she couldn’t understand why this strange man would ask her to do that. Before she could do more than utter a few words, however, Phillip was forcefully stripping off her clothes: all of them. He then brought her inside to shower with him, grabbing a razor and forcefully shaving her genitals.

 

“See this?” Phillip says as he pulls off his pants.

 

“Make it grow.”

 

After this, Phillip put a pair of handcuffs on Jaycee’s wrists and brought her into a tiny little shed in the backyard. This was where she was to live from now on. Phillip came in a few times a day to bring food and water or empty the chamber pot which she had as a toilet, but other than that, there was only Jaycee and the handcuffs in that hot, sweltering shed.

 

Periodically, Phillip came into the shed in a more agitated mood. Jaycee would come to realize that this was when he came for sex. She quickly learned, through Phillip’s advice, that resistance was futile and that it would only make things worse.

 

“He forces my legs open and inserts the hard thing between his legs in me. It feels like I am being stretched apart. I am so small and he is so big. Why is he doing this? Is this normal?”

 

For a few months, Jaycee would cry herself to sleep. Phillip became everything she had, for she depended on him for food, water, and human company. But she always dreaded the nights where Phillip came home drunk and wanting sex.

 

Over the years, a lot happened. Jaycee was impregnated twice by Phillip, once at 13 and once at 16, and she gave birth to two healthy baby girls. Both of them would grow up barely knowing or having a conception of a world beyond the tents and rooms in the Garridos’ backyard.

 

 

The complex where Jaycee and her children were held for eighteen years

 

As Phillip’s psychological influence on Jaycee took its toll. she became very submissive, reliant, and even sympathetic towards her captor. When he told his sad stories about how he had a “problem” he couldn’t control and that he needed her to help with it, she felt bad for him and maybe even a feeling that she had to remain there to protect others from Phillip’s “bad side.”

 

Phillip opened a printing business that was moderately successful, and Jaycee was made the graphic designer of the business. She often had access to a computer, emailing, and a business phone to communicate with clients. Many customers recall talking to her over the years, but as further proof of the effectiveness of Phillip’s indoctrination, she never once mentioned or even hinted at her true identity or her kidnapping.

 

As Jaycee grew up and became an adult woman, she no longer served to satisfy Phillip’s pedophilic lust. For once, showing that he was not entirely inhuman, he never once touched or violated his and Jaycee’s children. But he still, with Nancy’s help, frequented the playgrounds and elementary schools from which he could observe the children playing. He often asked Nancy to get the girls to lift their skirts or spread their legs and then took pictures from his car.

 

During her 18 years of captivity, police had multiple opportunities to uncover the kidnapping or link Phillip to the disappearance. Most notably, the kidnapping had happened near South Lake Tahoe, just a few miles from where Garrido had kidnapped his first victim in 1976. Several leads were also discovered early in the search, but none led to any results.

 

Examination of the Garridos’ backyard after the discovery revealed that all that was hiding the tent maze and Jaycee from the world was an 8-foot fence. Not once did the parole officers discover anything suspicious about the Garrido property, even as Phillip was brought up on several minor drug charges.

 

Nothing, of course, besides the brilliant psychological manipulation of Phillip Garrido.

 

In 2009, Phillip’s tendencies toward the supernatural finally got the best of him. He was always into ideas of the occult and alternative science, but he seems to have gone off the rails with this last plan. He brought Jaycee and their children to a police department at UC Berkeley to discuss his “God’s Desire” program. The officers there naturally found the pale and submissive girls suspicious and ran a background check, quickly discovering that Phillip was a registered sex offender on parole for kidnapping charges.

 

The police detained Jaycee and the children, separating them from Phillip. Jaycee, even when questioned, still protected the truth about her identity and Phillip’s crimes. She made up a whole alibi and maintained her story right up until when Phillip cracked and admitted his kidnapping and rape of Jaycee. Even then, Jaycee, who had not so much as said her own name in over a decade, had to write out her name on a piece of paper.

 

“I said I couldn’t say it. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I told her I haven’t said it in eighteen years. I told her I would write it down. And that’s what I did. Writting shakily on that small paper, the letters of my name:”

 

J A Y C E E L E E D U G A R D

 

The Garrido property was raided and endless evidence of the crimes was discovered. Nancy and Phillip were quickly arrested and Jaycee was brought back to the real world for the first time in eighteen years. She reunited with her family and continued to be a wonderful mother to her kids, who were already fast approaching high school age.

 

In 2011, she published a memoir of her experiences in captivity and returning to normalcy, titled A Stolen Life. If you would like to know more about her personal experiences in captivity, I highly recommend you get a copy. It is a very compelling read.

 

 

Nancy Garrido was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to 36 years to life in prison, without the possibility of parole.

 

Phillip Garrido was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to 431 years to life in prison, without the possibility of parole.

 

Anyone who masturbates to elementary school children, kidnaps an eleven-year-old, and rapes/abuses her for eighteen years, is definitely the worst criminal in history to me.

 

Source of Blogg : The Eric Wang's Answer