by John Glatt
“He’d see hippies with long hair,” said Manuel, “and laugh at them.”
But according to Manuel Garrido, everything changed when his son had a motorcycle accident, sustaining serious head injuries.
“They had to do surgery,” Manuel recalled. “He would talk funny and do funny things. After that, he was a different boy. Entirely different. That’s when he started to change.”
Janice Gomes grew up near Brentwood and knew many of Phillip’s Liberty High School friends.
“He got a very severe head injury,” said Gomes. “And after that they say he wasn’t really the same.”
When he finally came out of hospital, Phillip grew his hair long, started smoking marijuana and taking LSD. He rarely attended classes and his grades plummeted.
Girls liked his new outlaw image, tall and devastatingly handsome with long flowing hair, and flocked to him.
He was now missing school, smoking grass every day and taking LSD at weekends, and to finance this he started dealing drugs.
“Then he got onto that LSD crap and he was gone,” said his father. “It ruined his life. He stopped going to school. He fell in with a bad crowd of Mexicans. He went nuts.”
After someone gave him an electric bass guitar, Phillip learned a few lines and formed a band, playing covers of Jefferson Airplane and Credence Clearwater Revival at local dances.
His 1968 junior year class photo had shown a clean-cut seventeen-year-old, his jet black hair smartly slicked back surfer-style. But the following year when Phillip Garrido graduated, there was no photograph for him in the Liberty High Yearbook.
In his last year at Liberty High, Phillip Garrido devoted himself to getting high and writing songs. He spoke about grandiose schemes to make millions of dollars, telling his father he could now talk to God.
“I thought he was weird, but not that weird,” recalled his classmate Steve Lucchesi. “I’m not sure if he was high all the time or saw things differently. But something went haywire.”
Phillip had converted an old shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden into his private den and rehearsal space. He painted it black and soundproofed it with mattresses, covering the walls with psychedelic posters. No one else was allowed inside, and he would spend hours in there getting high, playing guitar and masturbating to his growing collection of pornographic magazines.
“He was a sex addict,” explained his father. “He started going crazy. We tried to get him help, but what could a doctor do? The LSD had killed his brain.”
Lois Freitas, whose son Bill was in Phillip’s class, remembers him as an outsider who never participated in any school activities.
“He was a lone wolf,” she recalled. “Not a lot of friends. A misfit. My niece knew him as well [and] said some of the girls were frightened of him.”
It was rumored that Phillip Garrido enticed innocent young girls into his shed in his parents’ garden with the promise of free drugs before taking advantage of them.
“He would drug girls and rape them,” said Janice Gomes, “and then they couldn’t really go home and tell their parents, because they were under the influence of drugs. They didn’t tell their parents or the police, and to this day a lot of them don’t want to discuss it.”
Manuel Garrido now says his son was obsessed with deflowering young virgins, and made no secret of it.
“I lost count of the times my wife would tell me he brought another virgin back to the house,” said his father. “It was dozens. It was kind of like a trophy.”
Although Irene Thompson, who was in his English class, knew nothing of it, she still remembers the long-haired rebel well.
“He was sort of strange,” she said. “I just thought he was eccentric, not evil.”
But Carol Harris, who took the school bus with Phillip every day, says he made her uncomfortable.
“He gave me the creeps,” she recalled. “The way he looked at me. I just got a really bad feeling about him. You know when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up for no reason.”
So Harris always did her best to avoid him.
“I have a really good sense about people,” she said. “And with him I sensed danger.”
But not all Phillip Garrido’s female classmates felt the same way. Christine Marie Perreira, a pretty brunette two years his junior, became his high school sweetheart. The pretty teen with a fashionable beehive hairdo faithfully followed him everywhere, although he treated her badly and would later beat her.
Soon after they started dating, Garrido was accused of raping a young girl. He talked his way out of trouble, insisting she was lying. And as it was just her word against his, it never went any further.
“He could talk you pretty much into anything,” said Christine.
Phillip had little interest in graduating high school, but as his father wanted his son to go to college, he offered to buy him a new blue Oldsmobile to graduate.
“We had a hell of a time getting him to graduate,” recalled his father. “He didn’t want to go to school.”
In 1969, Phillip Garrido graduated from Liberty High School with a diploma, finishing the twelfth grade with B’s, C’s and D’s. But his mediocre grades hardly mattered, as he had set his sights on becoming a rich rock star.
A few months later, Phillip Garrido was arrested in Contra Costa County for possession of marijuana and LSD. He was sent to the minimum-security Clayton Farm Facility. After serving his time, he moved back in with his parents, got a succession of odd jobs and resumed dealing drugs.
He was now part of the Antioch music scene, playing pick-up bass guitar with local musicians, wherever he could find a gig. And he had also started channeling his sick sexual fantasies about young girls into the lyrics of his derivative songs, influenced by his progressive rock idols—Emerson Lake & Palmer, the Moody Blues and Yes.
Sex now dominated his life. Where once he had satisfied his urges by masturbating to pornographic movies and magazines in his parents’ shed, he was now pleasuring himself in public.
Several years later, he would admit to masturbating in restaurants, amusement arcades and bars. He was also a Peeping Tom, peering through windows at women as they undressed.
He loved to get high and park his blue Oldsmobile outside schools, masturbating as he watched young girls as young as seven. Then he would open the car door and expose himself to them, with his pants down to his knees.
Later he would testify about his unusual practices at the local drive-in movie theater.
“I would take my automobile,” he said, “and I would put up on the side windows two towels . . . to keep anybody from seeing me. And I would sit in the back seat [and masturbate].”
Garrido’s taste in pornography was also getting harder, and Playboy, Penthouse and Oui magazines no longer satisfied him.
“Well, I always looked at women that are naked,” he explained, “but there has been a type of bondage picture. Women in handcuffs, chained. There is [a certain] position that the women are in the magazines.”
Garrido now took large doses of LSD and masturbated for hours, believing the hallucinogenic drug increased his sexual pleasure by quantum leaps.
“I just increased it into a realm,” he explained, “that I didn’t even realize.”
On May 28, 1970, nineteen-year-old Phillip Garrido had his second run-in with the law, being arrested for marijuana and put on probation. Eight months later his parents divorced, with his mother Pat moving out of the family house.
“We separated in 1971,” said Manuel Garrido. “And I haven’t talked to her since. I had nothing to do with her. Then [Phillip] left home at nineteen.”
According to his brother Ron, Phillip fled town in a big hurry, after discovering local drug dealers had taken out a contract on his life.
2
INSANITY
One step in front of the drug dealers, Phillip Garrido headed to South Lake Tahoe. His high school sweetheart Chris Perreira soon followed and they married, moving into a small h
ouse together in the sleepy ski resort town.
To pay the rent, Chris found a job as a blackjack dealer in Harrah’s Casino in downtown Reno, while Phillip devoted himself to music and getting high. Without complaining, she bankrolled his increasingly lavish lifestyle.
“I was in love with him,” she later explained.
With one of her first wage checks, Chris bought him a gleaming new Rickenbacker bass guitar, like the one his hero Chris Squire of Yes played. She also bought him an expensive PA system and a vintage set of Marshall stack amplifiers.
And with his long dark flowing hair and mustache, sharp cowboy shirts, white fedora and cowboy boots, Phillip Garrido looked every inch a rock ’n’ roll star.
He immediately began playing at local bars, soon becoming part of the lively local music scene. And his charm, enthusiasm and easy humor won him acceptance by the other musicians.
Guitarist Eddie Loebs first met Phillip Garrido when he was sixteen years old, after they were introduced by a mutual friend.
“He was a lot of fun to be around,” remembered Loebs. “He sang, played bass, wrote songs and seemed like a pretty nice guy.”
The two musicians started playing together, and Garrido talked for hours about his musical heroes—the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He often whistled his favorite song of the time—Emerson Lake & Palmer’s big hit, “Lucky Man”—saying the lyrics could have been about him.
Soon Eddie Loebs’s brother Steve joined the as yet unnamed band on drums, and they played their first gigs with a revolving door of other musicians.
“Early on we played in a Mexican restaurant called El Pavo that had a stage,” Eddie recalled. “But mostly it was parties.”
Phillip Garrido drove a green Monte Carlo sports car through South Lake Tahoe, as well as a white Ford van, which he used to roadie the band’s equipment to gigs.
Before going on stage, the band members would get stoned, and Garrido always had large quantities of marijuana and other drugs available.
“He smoked pot a lot,” said Loebs, “but then he started getting cocaine and stuff like that.”
At the beginning, they mainly went on stage and just jammed, playing covers of the Allman Brothers Band and Chuck Berry.
Over the first few months they worked hard to become more professional and find their own sound, rehearsing every day at the back of Eddie Loebs’s father’s plumbing shop. They would run through their new set of songs, and Phillip Garrido’s pretentious singing style was a constant source of amusement.
“He sang like some kind of opera singer,” recalled Eddie Loebs. “I never liked his voice and we always made fun of it. Imitated him and stuff like that.”
One day Garrido turned up at rehearsal with several new songs he had written, which he wanted to add to the set.
“He wrote a song called ‘Insanity,’ ” said Loebs, “in which he sang, ‘Yes, I know that I’m going insane.’ And then he screams, ‘Insanity! Insanity! Insanity!’ and then a guitar solo. I think there were two or three other ones, including one called ‘Gipsy Lady.’ ”
“Insanity” eventually became the climax of the band’s set, with Garrido yelling, “I’m going insane,” over and over again into the microphone.
But the sheer intensity of his performance scared some of his fellow band members, who thought he was taking it a little too seriously.
When Eddie Loebs first met Chris Garrido, he was amazed at her total subservience to him.
“She was kind of quiet,” he remembered, “and you knew that there was controlling going on. She was under his thumb.”
Years later, Chris would describe how her marriage had soon turned into a nightmare.
“He started hitting me,” she said. “He smacked me, he told me to grow up.”
And she claimed that Phillip wanted her to participate in his sexually deviant lifestyle, and flew into a rage when she refused.
“Multiple partners is what he wanted,” she explained. “I wouldn’t go for that.”
Eddie Loebs says Garrido was so obsessed with young girls that the other band members nicknamed him “Filthy Phil.”
“Phil was a big womanizer,” he recalled. “He wasn’t a bad-looking guy and women liked him. But when a good-looking girl walked by, Phil would almost salivate, saying things like ‘Wow, look at that! Oh man, I’d love to jump on her.’ ”
The bassist also freely indulged in the South Lake Tahoe groupie scene, picking up young girls in the audience and bringing them home for sex. Then he would order Christine to move next door into the spare room, so he could have sex in their bed.
“Nothing slowed him down,” said Loebs. “His wife just had to put up with it. I didn’t like that because I liked Chris, but she’s quiet and never complained.”
In April 1972, Phillip Garrido drove to Antioch to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. A month earlier he had been put on probation, after yet another arrest for drugs. Garrido and a friend had arranged to meet a girl at the West 18th Street library to get high together. And she had then invited a fourteen-year-old girlfriend to join them.
It was late afternoon when Phillip Garrido and his friend pulled up outside the library to meet the girls. Although the men were far older than they had expected, the two girls got into the backseat of the car.
As they drove around Antioch, Garrido gave the girls barbiturates, a popular recreational sedative at that time. At one point the police began chasing their car, but Garrido sped away, managing to lose them.
Eventually they all ended up at the seedy twenty-three-room Riverview Motel on East 18th Street, on the edge of the town. Garrido and the fourteen-year-old then checked into a room, where he gave her more barbiturates until she passed out.
The next thing she remembered—she later told police—was waking up sometime the next day, in bed with Phillip Garrido.
“She remembers being repeatedly raped,” said Lieutenant Leonard Orman of the Antioch Police Department. “Sexually assaulted, by him.”
Later that day, the girl’s worried parents tracked her down to the motel and found her in bed with Garrido. They then called the police.
Phillip Garrido was arrested and charged with rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and providing dangerous drugs to a minor. The Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office believed it had a solid case against him.
But at the preliminary hearing, the traumatized girl suddenly refused to testify against him. Later it would emerge that Phillip Garrido’s defense attorney had threatened to portray her as a “slut” and a “whore” if she took the stand against his client.
So the Antioch Police Department had no alternative but to dismiss the case for “furtherance of justice,” letting him go free.
When Eddie Loebs learned his bassist had been arrested for raping a fourteen-year-old girl, he asked him about it. Garrido said he was completely innocent, and police had dropped the charges as the sex had been consensual.
“He was pretty much saying he didn’t do it,” said Loebs. “I believed his side of the story.”
In summer 1972, the band recruited an aging hippie keyboard player and a new female singer. But when they turned up for their first gig at the El Pavo restaurant, their bassist decided she was too ugly to play with him.
“She sang real good but she was a little bit plump,” remembered Loebs. “Phil didn’t like that she wasn’t good-looking.”
So after Garrido told her she was fat and should lose some weight, the singer quit the band in disgust.
A few weeks later, Eddie Loebs and his girlfriend went to Phillip Garrido’s house to collect some equipment. But when they arrived they were disgusted to see Garrido had attached a rubber pipe to his van’s exhaust. It then led straight into a box with a litter of puppies his dog had just given birth to.
“They were newborn puppies,” recalled Loebs, “and he’s killing them by exhaust fumes. We asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘I’ve got to get rid of these dogs.’
”
3
ROCK CREEK
In early 1974, the band recruited a new drummer after Steve Loebs abruptly quit. Tommy Wilson-O’Brien, who was twenty-eight and lived in Los Angeles, was in South Lake Tahoe for a weekend of skiing when he went to a local club to hear some music.
“Phil came over,” remembered Wilson-O’Brien. “He said he had this band he was putting together, and some gigs lined up. I wasn’t playing with anybody at the time, so it was kind of a no-brainer.”
Two weeks later, Wilson-O’Brien packed his stuff and relocated to South Lake Tahoe, moving in with Phillip and Chris Garrido until he could find his own place.
“I lived in his house,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “But it got so crazy very quickly.”
Wilson-O’Brien soon became curious about the huge amounts of the best quality cocaine, marijuana and LSD Garrido always seemed to have, although he never appeared to work.
“There were times he’d pull out a bag of cocaine that looked like a sack of feed,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “And back in the seventies cocaine was very expensive. It was like a hundred dollars a gram.”
When the drummer asked him how he could afford so many high quality drugs, Garrido claimed his wife had some kind of scam at the casino, without providing any evidence to support this.
“Phil implied she was embezzling it,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “But I never knew if he was just blowing smoke or what the deal was. But he always had money to buy drugs and the newest musical equipment. I never knew him not to have any money.”
Soon after he started rehearsing at Eddie Loebs’ father’s shop, Wilson-O’Brien named the band “Rock Creek.” And the three-piece band started playing the local clubs and ski areas around Lake Tahoe, becoming the house band for the popular Kirkwood Ski Resort.
Although they still reluctantly played Garrido’s “Insanity” song, the band now concentrated on developing a more progressive rock approach to their music. And Garrido became angry when the other members started vetoing his new songs.
