Thursday, August 27, 2009

Jaycee Lee Dugard alive after 18 years in captivity.

Kidnapped Girl Found 18-years later

dugard map

A woman who has been missing from her South Lake Tahoe home has reportedly surfaced in Concord, 18 years after she was kidnapped.

Jaycee Dugard, who would be 29 today, apparently walked into the Concord Police Department on Wednesday. Concord police have declined comment, referring inquiries to the El Dorado County sheriff’s office. A news conference is scheduled for today.

Dugard was last seen on June 10, 1991 as she was walking to a bus stop in South Lake Tahoe. Dugard, a blue-eyed, blond 11-year-old dressed in a pink top and pink pants, set out to catch the bus to her school near South Lake Tahoe. She never made it.

As her stepfather watched helplessly from the family’s driveway on a hill about two blocks away, a two- tone gray sedan pulled up and someone yanked the girl into the car and sped off. Even though officers responded within minutes, no trace of the car or girl was ever found.

Dugard was last seen on June 10, 1991 as she was walking to a bus stop in South Lake Tahoe.

via Jaycee Lee Dugard Pictures.

The nightmare 18-year ordeal of a woman who was kidnapped on her way to school when she was 11 was revealed last night after she was found alive. Jaycee Lee Dugard mothered two daughters, now aged eleven and fifteen, with monster Phillip Garrido - one of them when she was just fourteen. And she was forced to spend the last eighteen years living in sheds and tents in a hidden garden behind her captor’s family house in a suburban California street. Last night’s revelations showed shocking parallels with the case of Austrian Josef Fritzl, who fathered seven children with his daughter and kept them prisoner in an underground warren under his home.

Both of Jaycee’s children were born at the house and had never been to school or even seen a doctor. Now 29, Jaycee had an emotional reunion last night with her mother, Terry, who was shocked and ‘overjoyed’ to learn that her daughter was still alive. Terry told ABC News that her daughter had been held against her will all these years and ‘confined in a box’ in the back of the Garrido's house. Jaycee was dragged screaming and kicking off the street in South Lake Tahoe in northern California as she walked to the school bus stop in 1991. And her family heard nothing from her until her identity was discovered by police on Wednesday. ...

The police spokesman said a campus officer at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, California, became suspicious of Garrido when he tried to give out religious leaflets to students on Tuesday. With him were the two daughters and when the guard checked Garrido’s background, she discovered he was a listed sex offender and was on parole for a vicious rape and kidnapping in Nevada. He was ordered to visit his parole officer the next day.

Police are confident that a woman who walked into a police station is Jaycee Lee Dugard (left), who went missing in 1991. Phillip Garrido (right) is one of two people who have been taken into custodyNancy GarridoWhen he arrived at the parole office in Concord, California, he brought with his wife, the two girls – and a woman he referred to as Allyssa. The parole officer immediately became suspicious because he had never seen Allyssa or the two girls during his visits to Garrido’s home. He called in police and officers quickly learned that Allyssa was, in fact, Jaycee Lee Dugard, the girl they had been searching for since 1991. The Garridos were arrested and a police raid on their home uncovered the secret compound where Jaycee and her daughters had lived. Police said Jaycee was ‘relatively co-operative and forthcoming’ and her remarks convinced them who she was.

Phillip Garrido - a registered sex offender - and his wife Nancy, pictured (right) yesterday, have been taken into custody. They had apparently gone into a police station in California with Miss Dugard to ask a question and were arrested when an officer became suspicious - dailymail

Image Left: Phillip Garrido's secret backyard at 1554 Walnut Ave., Antioch, Calif., where he kept Jaycee Lee Dugard and the two childern he fathered with her isolated from the world. (Google Maps)

A press conference on Thursday, shed light on the circumstances under which Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped at age of 11 in 1991, was being held for 18 years. Authorities revealed that the residence of her kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, 58, and his wife Nancy, 55, contained a hidden backyard within a backyard, and could only be accessed by tarps.

Jaycee bore Garrido two children, now ages 11 and 15, in this makeshift campground, where her alleged captor kept her and her children isolated from the world. Law enforcement reported that the area had a rudimentary outhouse and shower, and one of the sheds in which Jaycee lived with her children was sound proofed.

The Google Maps image show's Garrido's address of 1554 Walnut Ave., Antioch, Calif., according to the Megan's Law registry, illustrating the multiple blue tarps he used to conceal his captives for so many years.

Reports indicate Garrido was out on parole for kidnapping at the time he abducted Jaycee.

via examiner

Look around you. Get to know your neighbors. Are any of them keeping secret human slaves? It is rare, but not impossible.

Update 9/3/09:
Antioch police say kidnapping suspect Phillip Garrido was arrested in 1972 on suspicion of raping a 14-year-old girl. Antioch police Lt. Leonard Orman said Thursday the girl and a friend met then-21-year-old Garrido and another man near the public library. Orman says Garrido gave the girl barbiturates and took her to a motel, where she was given more drugs. He says the girl awoke there and was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted. Authorities say Garrido was set to be prosecuted in the case but the charges were later dropped when the victim refused to testify.



LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jaycee Dugard remembers her family and is enjoying getting to know her younger sister, who was a baby when Dugard was kidnapped 18 years ago, her aunt said Thursday. Tina Dugard spoke to reporters at the FBI's Los Angeles office, describing her niece's reunion with her mother and sister.

"The smile on my sister's face was as wide as the sea. Her oldest daughter is finally home," Tina Dugard said. Phillip and Nancy Garrido have pleaded not guilty to kidnap, rape and imprisonment charges related to Dugard's 1991 abduction from South Lake Tahoe. Police say Garrido fathered Dugard's two daughters and lived with them in a backyard encampment of tents and sheds in Antioch. Tina Dugard said her niece's daughters, ages 11 and 15, appeared to be bright and educated, even though they did not attend school.

"Jaycee did a truly amazing job with the limited resources and education that she herself had, and we are so proud of her," Dugard said. The family's location has been a closely guarded secret since the 29-year-old woman reappeared last week. She was 11 when she was allegedly kidnapped. Tina Dugard said the family has been spending time "in a secluded place," reconnecting and getting to know each other again.

"Not only have we laughed and cried together, but we've spent time sitting quietly, taking pleasure in each other's company," Dugard said. Tina Dugard took no questions from reporters and did not comment on the investigation into her niece's abduction. A spokeswoman for the Dugard family, Erika Price Schulte, said they would have no further public comment for now.

2 comments:

alexia said...

omg my mom just figred out that jaycee was my moms best friend when they were kids!!!!! and she is crying

Xeno said...

Oh wow Alexia. Wow. My thought is this: We replace other parts of our bodies that get damaged, so I wish there was some way to erase Jacyee's bad memories and replace them with artificial memories of having had a good life. In those prosthetic memories, your mom would be there and they would have had great times together.