Phillip Garrido calls Jaycee Dugard kidnapping a "heartwarming story" | ABC7 San Francisco

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By ABC7

Saturday, August 29, 2009

ANTIOCH, CA

The Garridos were arraigned Friday afternoon in Placerville. The case is being handled in that El Dorado County town because Jaycee was kidnapped from that county.

RAW VIDEO: Garridos in court

/*Nancy Garrido*/ hung her head and sobbed through most of the brief court hearing. /*Phillip Garrido*/ looked intense.

Nancy Garrido's lawyer said tersely that he had not read the charges and could not explain her emotional demeanor.

"I'm not a psychiatrist, or I'm not a psychologist, she seemed to be in custody, OK?" said attorney Gilbert Maines.

If convicted of all counts the Garridos could face multiple life sentences.

Phillip Garrido was arrested Wednesday after he reported to a state parole office in Concord. He was accompanied by his wife Nancy and a woman called Allissa, who turned out to be Jaycee, and her two children. He had been ordered to come in because UC Berkeley police reported suspicious activity when they saw the 58-year-old man with two children, whom he now admits fathering with Jaycee. That is when the 18-year-old mystery began unraveling.

Jaycee was 11 years old when she was kidnapped on June 10, 1991. She was abducted 150 yards from her South Lake Tahoe home as she was walking to the bus stop. Her stepfather told police he saw a man and a woman in a gray sedan grab Jaycee and pull her in the car.

In a jailhouse interview Friday with Sacramento station KCRA, Garrido sounds like he's full of pride when he talks about the case.

AUDIO: Listen to Garrido's jailhouse interview

"In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story, one that you're going to be really impressed (with). It's going to make world news," said Garrido.

Local residents who came to court Friday said they were angry and sickened by what they had been hearing.

"Obviously he's extremely sick and delusional," said Maryanne Minnick. "He needs to be locked up forever. I mean that's it. He shouldn't have been let out probably the first time."

Family reaches out to Jaycee

Jaycee's stepfather, Carl Probyn, says the young woman and her two daughters are doing as well as can be expected.

Probyn spoke Friday morning on "Good Morning America" and says Garrido ruined many lives.

"The two girls are running around playing. My wife says that Jaycee looks good, looks almost like when she was kidnapped. She looks very young, she doesn't look 29 at all," he said. "My mother talked to her last night and she said that Jaycee feels really guilty for bonding with this man. There's really a guilt trip here. When you think about it, he's had her longer than we had her. We had her for 11 years; he had her for 18. He's ruined our lives. I have no compassion for this guy. He's just out in left field."

Jaycee's 19-year-old stepsister Shayna is also making her feelings known. On her MySpace page she says, "As of this moment we are just reuniting and everything is going well." She adds that Jaycee "has the rest of her life to live and I have a lot of love to share with my sister and new nieces."

Shayna was just a year old when Jaycee was taken. Her father says they raised Shayna almost as if she were a prisoner, refusing to let her go too far for fear she too would be kidnapped.

Missed opportunities

It may be a while before Walnut Avenue, in rural Antioch, ever becomes as quiet and overlooked as it might have been even two days ago.

On day two since the recovery of Jaycee and the arrest of Phillip Garrido, a new revelation -- in 2006, a sheriff's deputy came to the house, spoke with Garrido, asked about reports of tents and children in the backyard, and left without further investigation.

Friday, the sheriff of Contra Costa County took full responsibility.

"No one knows that we could have found Jaycee or the other children on that day in November of 2006, and I cannot change the course of events," said Contra Costa Sheriff Warren Rupf. "But we are beating ourselves up over this, and will continue to do so."

The deputy who made the call on Garrido may not have known that he was a registered sex offender. At the time, he had four calls waiting and looked at this as a code violation. The sheriff says it is not an excuse.

Suspicions escalated Friday when detectives from Pittsburg searched for evidence that might link Garrido to murders of prostitutes in the 1990s. Their bodies turned up in an industrial park near where Garrido had worked.

Neighborhood reaction

The neighborhood was a crowded place Friday, filled with people who say they knew the suspect had a criminal history, but never put the clues together.

Karen Walker met Jaycee's two children once when they returned a missing dog.

"They did seem not well taken care of," said Walker. "Their hair needed brushing and they needed dental work."

Another man had been in the house and met everyone. He says Garrido described Jaycee as his oldest daughter.

"She never called him father or dad or any name. That's the only thing that appeared to be strange," said business client Drepal Karunaratne.

Now the neighbors say it all looks suspicious in retrospect, but that's not good enough for the sheriff, who says they are paid to know better when dealing face to face with a registered sex offender after a complaint.

"None of us, particularly law enforcement, should believe a word that one of these animals utters," said Sheriff Rupf.

Suspect's criminal past

Garrido has a long criminal history of kidnapping and sexual assault.

Nevada corrections officials say he was convicted in 1977 of kidnapping a South Tahoe casino worker, driving her to Reno, and sexually assaulting her. He went to federal prison because he crossed state lines. He served 11 years, was paroled in 1988 and served a few more months in state prison. Nevada records show he was paroled to California at the end of 1988.

Other abduction cases where child was found

Jaycee's return to her family after such a long abduction is rare, but not unheard of.

Steven Stayner was abducted in 1972 walking home from school. He walked into a Ukiah police station seven years later with another abducted child, 5-year-old Timmy White.

In Oakland in 1976, 13-month-old Monica Rios was abducted by family. Investigators found her in Mexico City and returned to her mother in 1981.

In 1982, 3-year-old Tara Burke was saved from a squalid house trailer under a San Francisco freeway 10 months after her disappearance from Bay Point.

In 1976, Kevin Dewayne Portis was abducted in Southern California. He was just four years old he turned up 17 years later in Oakland in 1993.

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