Jaycee Dugard Found After 18 Years, Kidnap Suspect Allegedly Fathered

Jaycee Dugard Found After 18 Years, Kidnap Suspect Allegedly Fathered

On June 10, 1991, as Jaycee Dugard waited for the bus to take her to school, two strangers grabbed her and pulled her into a car — and then kept her locked up in their backyard shed for 18 years. The couple who had kidnapped her, Phillip and Nancy Garrido, began referring to her as "Allissa," and Phillip Garrido subjected the young girl to an ongoing series of sexual assaults. During her time in captivity, Dugard kept a journal in which she wrote about being afraid, lonely, depressed, and feeling "unloved." "It feels like I'm sinking. I'm afraid I want control of my life," she wrote. "This is supposed to be my life to do with what I like… but once again he has taken it away. How many times is he allowed to take it away from me?" Learn more about the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard and how she was finally rescued in August 2009: On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard, an eleven-year-old girl, was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop in Meyers, California, United States. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated, even though several people witnessed the kidnapping. Dugard remained missing for over 18 years until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two adolescent girls, now known to be the biological daughters of Garrido and Dugard, on August 24 and 25 of that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer, Edward Santos Jr. to order Garrido to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. Garrido was accompanied by a woman who was eventually identified as Dugard Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were arrested by police after Dugard's reappearance. On April 28, 2011, they pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping Dugard. Investigators revealed that Dugard had been kept in concealed tents, sheds, and lean-tos in an area behind the Garridos' house at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California, where Phillip repeatedly raped Dugard during the first six years of her captivity. During her confinement, Dugard gave birth to two daughters, who were aged eleven and fifteen at the time of Dugard's reappearance. On June 2, 2011, Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life imprisonment; his wife, Nancy, was sentenced to 36 years to life. Phillip is a person of interest in at least one other missing persons case in the San Francisco Bay Area. As Garrido had been on parole for a 1976 rape at the time of her kidnapping, Dugard sued the state of California, which had taken over his parole supervision from the federal government in 1999, on account of the numerous lapses by law enforcement that contributed to her continued captivity and sexual assault. In 2010, the state of California awarded the Dugard family US$20 million. Dugard also sued the federal government on similar grounds pertaining to Garrido's time as a federal parolee, but in a 2–1 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that suit because Garrido had not victimized her at the time he was placed under the supervision of the federal parole system and that as a result of this, "there was no way to anticipate she would become his victim." In 2011, Dugard wrote an autobiography titled A Stolen Life: A Memoir. Her second book, Freedom: My Book of Firsts, was published in 2016. Jaycee Dugard's biological father, Ken Slayton, was not involved in her life, nor in the investigation that followed her kidnapping. When Dugard was seven, her mother Terry married a carpet contractor named Carl Probyn and gave birth to Dugard's half-sister, Shayna, in 1989. Although Dugard was close to her mother and sister, she was never close to Probyn. In September 1990, Dugard's family moved from Arcadia, California, in Los Angeles County, to Meyers, a rural town south of South Lake Tahoe, because they thought it was a safer community. At the time of the abduction, Dugard was in the fifth grade, and anticipated an upcoming field trip.