by John Glatt
“Phil was always putting together songs,” recalled Wilson-O’Brien, “but we didn’t do many of them.”
Over the brief time he lived at the Garrido house, Wilson-O’Brien got to know Phillip, finding that all the cocaine he was now taking often made him impossible to deal with.
“He was always kind of manic and really high energy,” explained the drummer. “He looked like he had ADD, because he was all over the map. It was hard to keep him focused on one thing. You’d be talking about something and within five minutes you’d have five different subjects going.
“You never knew what the hell was going to happen. One night at about eleven or twelve o’clock, I was in my room sleeping and he came busting into the room with a whole pile of drugs and a bunch of beer and whisky and stuff. ‘Get up! Get up! It’s time to party!’ So naturally I got up.”
Another night, Wilson-O’Brien came home to find thirty hard-core pornographic magazines carefully laid out on the living room floor. They were all open to different pages and Garrido insisted on critiquing each one, explaining like a connoisseur how each particular pose aroused him.
“He was heavily into porno,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “All kinds of porno magazines. He had a projector and a bunch of other shit.”
On one occasion he arrived home to find the front door locked, and no way to get in. Phillip was obviously inside as the lights were on, but the drummer left, not wanting any part of his friend’s “kinky” activities.
For Phillip Garrido had made no secret of his obsessive craving for very young girls.
“He always had a thing for young chicks,” said Wilson-O’Brien, “Some of the ones that I knew he was running after were borderline. I never [paid] attention to their exact age, but he would tell me these stories about young girls.”
He also wondered about Phillip’s somewhat unusual relationship with his wife Chris, who acted more like his servant.
“Except for the fact that she wasn’t turning tricks,” he said, “their relationship was like a hooker and a pimp. He was very controlling. He always had things for her to do and she did [them] very willingly.”
One night, according to Wilson-O’Brien, Phillip invited him to join him and Chris in a threesome. But he declined the offer, saying he did not feel well.
Although Phillip Garrido spent most of his time under the influence of one drug or another, on the rare occasions he was sober he could be perfectly rational.
“Early in the morning before he was all coked up,” said Wilson-O’Brien, “and we were just sitting around having coffee and waking up, he was a pretty level-headed, really nice guy.”
Tommy Wilson-O’Brien also walked into the front room on several occasions, finding Phillip Garrido studying the Bible.
“He started reading Bible scriptures to me,” recalled Wilson-O’Brien. “He goes, ‘I got into reading the Bible. This is a great book.’ I was just like, ‘Whatever, fella.’ ”
One time, Garrido began telling him about a black box he had invented, allowing him to hear people’s thoughts.
“I kind of blew him off like he was either joking or in a cocaine psychosis,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “He referred to it as his box where he could put his thoughts in it, and people would be able to hear them coming out the other end.”
After a month living with Phillip Garrido, Wilson-O’Brien decided he had to “get the hell out of there,” moving in with Eddie Loebs and his girlfriend.
By the summer of 1974, Rock Creek was one of the most popular bands in the Lake Tahoe area. They were practicing hard and improving rapidly, and for a short time even Phillip Garrido seemed focused on the music.
“We were getting more and more serious, and starting to push harder,” recalled guitarist Eddie Loebs. “We played a lot, and we were getting better and better and getting gigs.”
And Garrido always kept the band supplied with the best drugs and the best musical equipment.
“We had good equipment,” remembered Tommy Wilson-O’Brien. “He had a couple of really nice Rickenbacker basses . . . and they were pretty pricey. And we also used Marshall amplifiers.”
Phillip Garrido was now acting like a rock star, cruising around South Lake Tahoe in his sleek two-door green Monte Carlo.
“He fancied himself as a rock star,” recalled Wilson-O’Brien. “And he looked the part. He was very tall and had pretty long hair down past his shoulders.”
And the Rock Creek bassist usually had an entourage of very young girls, which he started bringing to rehearsals. One night, after arriving with two girls who looked like they were still in high school, his two bandmates asked him to stop.
“Eddie and I thought it was very disrupting for rehearsal,” explained the drummer, “to have him bring these young girls over the house. He’s just trying to show off. ‘Come on over and watch the band.’ He was a total egomaniac.”
Garrido was now taking a lot of LSD, disappearing for two or three days at a time into his house and refusing to answer the door.
“Sometimes him and Chris would lock themselves in their house,” recalled Wilson-O’Brien, who once dropped acid with them. “And I’d know he’d be in there and he wouldn’t answer the door.”
According to Wilson-O’Brien, Garrido often boasted how his wife brought him girls home from her casino.
“Chris was like a puppet,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “She would be doing something and if he said, ‘Go here and get this!’ she would snap to it—boom, boom, boom. In fact Eddie and I used to talk about it—she’s like a freaking puppet.”
Years later, Chris would reveal her nightmarish married life, and her attempts to get away from his clutches.
“I was always looking for a way to . . . get away,” she told Inside Edition in 2009. “He’d always told me he’d find me wherever.”
On one occasion Phillip Garrido flew into a violent rage when he thought another man was flirting with her.
“He took a safety pin and went after my eyes,” she said. “He left a scar on my face. He tried to gouge my eyes out with it.”
When she ran away soon afterward, Garrido tracked her down.
“He pulled up in front of me and we got in an argument,” she remembered, “and he grabbed me and threw me in the car. He’s a monster.”
Phillip Garrido’s sexual fantasies were now becoming increasingly violent. His latest one was to kidnap a young girl and turn her into a sex slave. He dreamed of being a Roman emperor like Caligula, with unlimited sexual powers over his beautiful slaves.
And he started driving around South Lake Tahoe, looking for beautiful girls to kidnap and rape, to fulfill his fantasy. One year later, he would admit to abducting a girl from the Bay Area and another from around Las Vegas, proudly boasting that he had never hurt either of them.
By 1975, Phillip Garrido was veering out of control, powered by huge amounts of cocaine and any other drugs he could lay his hands on. And over the next few months, his two bandmates became increasing concerned about his sanity.
“He got weirder and weirder,” explained Eddie Loebs. “More and more into pornography and womanizing, putting less energy towards the music.”
Then their troubled bassist stopped turning up for paying gigs.
“He got really unreliable,” said Tommy Wilson-O’Brien. “One time I hunted him down for two days, because I was going to kick his ass.”
Garrido would now disappear for weeks at a time, suddenly reappearing as if nothing had happened.
“He’d say, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry, guys,’ ” said Wilson-O’Brien, “ ‘I’m not doing drugs right now. Blah, blah, blah. Let’s play some music.’ And we’d go, ‘Okay.’ ”
But the final straw came in late 1975, when he missed an important Saturday night show at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort.
“We were all set ready to play,” recalled Loebs, “and there’s a house full of people ready to party and drink and dance. We set his equipment up and he doesn’t show.”
It was a
disaster and they were forced to play the set as a guitar and drums duo. Afterward they went round to Garrido’s house, demanding an explanation.
“We were really pissed off,” said Loebs. “We pounded on his door, but he wouldn’t answer it. So we threw him out of the band.”
After being kicked out of Rock Creek, Phillip Garrido went solo, buying himself a smoke machine and lighting equipment. He attached a fuzzbox to his bass and started playing his own songs at maximum volume.
Eddie Loebs saw his new solo act in a small bar in South Lake Tahoe.
“It was lame,” he remembered. “Probably not too many people would hire him with an act like that.”
A few days later, an excited Phillip Garrido turned up at Eddie Loebs’s apartment with a movie projector. He then started to screen Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace’s infamous porn movie, for Loebs and his new fiancé.
“It had just come out,” said Loebs. “He was turning into a pervert and was really turned on by it.”
After watching the first half-hour of the movie, Loebs and his fiancé asked him to leave.
Over the next few months, Phillip Garrido’s behavior became even more disturbing. One day Tommy Wilson-O’Brien arrived home to find his bedroom door ajar. And when he walked in it was obvious somebody had been inside.
“I’d been burglarized,” he recalled. “Except there was a twenty-dollar bill I had left on my dresser that was still there.”
He then noticed that a little metal can, where he kept his marijuana stash, had been moved from the dresser to his bed. Although it was open, the bag of weed remained untouched. Then he realized his treasured collection of 35 millimeter slides were missing.
“I had boxes and boxes of slides and they were all gone,” he said. “Just a bunch of personal pictures of all the other rock ’n’ roll bands I had played with earlier in the sixties.”
When he asked neighbors if they had seen anything suspicious, one mentioned a green Monte Carlo car parked outside his house.
“That’s what Phil was driving at the time,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “I went over to his house and I was livid.”
When he confronted him, Garrido readily admitted going to the house, saying he’d knocked on the door but no one was home. But he vehemently denied taking the slides.
“But I know he did it,” said Wilson-O’Brien. “I just thought he was doing it to hurt me. That’s so perverted, to look through somebody’s pictures and take them. And that’s when I wrote him out of my life.”
4
RENO
In early 1976, Phillip and Chris Garrido moved to Reno, Nevada, sixty-two miles north of South Lake Tahoe. They took out a lease on a house at 1855 Market Street, and Chris found a dealer job at Harrah’s casino.
Soon after arriving, Phillip rented out a mini-warehouse at 3245 Mill Street, a few blocks away from their new home. He told the owner he was a musician and needed Unit 39, a small ten-foot-by-ten-foot space, to rehearse his music.
But he had a far more sinister purpose in mind. Over the next few months he would transform it into his den of pornographic pleasure, in readiness for the sex slave he had now decided to kidnap and imprison.
Garrido started spending most of his time at the warehouse, buying alcohol at Shep’s Discount Liquor on South Wells Avenue. And he soon became friends with the store owner’s son Gregory Sheppard, also an aspiring musician.
“We played a lot together,” recalled Sheppard. “I would see him about once every two weeks.”
Sheppard later testified that he witnessed Garrido taking various drugs, including LSD, cocaine, pot, uppers and downers. He would often take two or three doses of strong blotter-type LSD at a time.
“It just depended on what mood he was in,” explained Sheppard.
Garrido also befriended William Emery, a twenty-five-year-old taxi driver, who lived two doors down in Unit 36.
“He seemed open and friendly at first,” Emery later told Reno police. “He was a good natural musician doing only his original music.”
Initially, Emery was much impressed by the “oily long-haired musician,” who was now “hard at work” getting a new band together to make it in the music business. They often hung out together that summer, smoking dope and sniffing cocaine.
“He was most usually stoned or in the process of being that way,” said Emery. “When he was stoned he was more involved and extreme in everything he did.”
Emery bonded with Garrido, as they discussed philosophy, religion and the “ultimate truth.”
One day, Garrido asked his new friend to keep an eye on all his valuable musical equipment, as he was living there full time. He gave the taxi driver a list of vehicles allowed to park in front of his shed, with a phone number to call if necessary.
In June 1976, Phillip Garrido drove to South Lake Tahoe and kidnapped a nineteen-year-old girl. According to El Dorado Superior Court papers, Garrido sweet-talked his victim into his car before handcuffing and brutally raping her. Somehow she managed to escape and apparently never pressed charges.
Three months later, Eddie Loebs visited Reno to buy a new guitar, and his old Rock Creek bandmate invited him to a party in a local hotel room. Loebs walked in to find Garrido had unscrewed the mirror from the back of the door and placed it on the dresser. On it were several carefully laid out three-foot lines of cocaine, leading to a huge rock.
“He goes, ‘Help yourself,’ ” recalled Loebs. “I think the pile was as big as my hand. And it was really good stuff. It was really strong.”
After snorting a huge line, Garrido produced a stack of pornographic magazines, spreading them out over the floor.
“He was flipping through them with a sick-sounding giggle,” recalled Loebs. “He was saying, ‘OK, look at this, Eddie.’ And showing me these chicks saying, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ ”
Loebs was so “sickened” by Phillip Garrido’s behavior that he never saw him again.
“He’s a sick guy,” said Loebs. “His sexual demons had taken over.”
Phillip Garrido had started organizing blue movie stag shows and hard-core orgies in his new warehouse retreat. He had equipped it with a large mattress with gaudy red bedding, several heavy rugs and other furnishings. And there was also a movie projector, colored lights and handcuffs, as well as restraints and various sexual devices.
One day, he invited William Emery over to see some “dirty films.” Emery agreed and as Garrido set up his movie projector, he explained how he bought his blue movies through a mail-order catalogue. Also there was a young man, whom Garrido introduced as a lighting director, explaining he was eager to see pornography for the first time.
Then Garrido turned down the lights, projecting a hard-core lesbian movie on his warehouse wall.
“He became very excited,” remembered Emery, “and started making verbal statements [about] their practices.”
Garrido gave a running commentary on the action, becoming particularly excited when lesbians used “large synthetic dildos and vibrators” on each other.
“It was of extreme nature,” Emery later told police, “manual, oral and anal action.”
After the film, Garrido invited Emery to “one of their parties” in his warehouse. He promised that there would be many beautiful women, supplied by his wife Chris from Harrah’s Casino where she worked.
“He said his wife fully accepted the idea,” Emery later told detectives, “and kept him in a constant supply of companions.”
When Garrido began explaining how it all worked, Emery told him he did not want to know, as it was not “his trip.” Eventually Emery did agree to go to one of his warehouse sex parties, arriving to find three “attractive women,” as well as a “young negro boy.”
An enthusiastic Garrido told his neighbor he was in a for a treat, and to be prepared for some “extreme” sex. Then the party started, with Garrido getting everyone high.
“There was the usual paraphernalia,” explained Emery. “Strong pot, chemically treated pot
, PCP crystals and wine with LSD in it.” The women began drinking the LSD-laced wine and everyone was smoking the “heavily saturated pot.”
Then a beautiful woman arrived, and Garrido made a big fuss over her.
“She’s a lady’s lady,” he announced, “for all of you who understand.”
Not knowing quite how to respond to that statement, Emery remained silent. And then a few minutes later, with the party in full swing, he quietly slipped out.
It would be some weeks before he saw his neighbor again, who appeared angry he had left early.
“He seemed more distant then ever,” said Emery, “and was standoffish. I feel that this is because I failed to acknowledge his statement about the woman and . . . didn’t go to the extremes that they did.”
During the few months he knew Phillip Garrido, Emery watched him become stranger and stranger. And after the orgy, he did his best to avoid him.
“Right in front of my eyes,” said Emery, “he seemed to be changing. More extreme in everything he was doing.”
In their last ever conversation, Garrido tried to persuade him and a group of other musicians to play a gig in a brothel. They thought it a bad idea and refused. But Garrido refused to take no for an answer, asking them to imagine all the fun they could have with the prostitutes.
“They said they couldn’t play their music in a whorehouse,” said Emery.
By mid-November, Phillip Garrido had finished preparing Unit 39 for his long-awaited sex slave. He had stacked the front of the small storage area high with boxes of china and other items. Directly behind he had hung three heavy rugs from the ceiling, about a foot apart one behind the other, effectively soundproofing the warehouse. At the end of each was an opening for access, creating an overall maze effect.
The final rug then opened out onto his inner sanctum, resembling a stage with gray, blue and gold carpets hanging on each of the three walls.
Inside was a large dirty mattress, covered by an old ripped red satin sheet and a dirty imitation fur blanket. On a table nearby lay handcuffs, dildos, Vaseline, a large pair of scissors and several bottles of wine. A stack of pornographic magazines were piled against a wall.
