by John Glatt
“He immediately responded,” she said, “and we continue to work jointly with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office in furtherance of this investigation.”
Undersheriff Kollar then took reporters’ questions, saying his officers were still interviewing Jaycee and her daughters and Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
One reporter asked about Jaycee’s condition when she had been found.
“She was in good health,” replied Kollar, “but living in a backyard for the past eighteen years does take its toll.”
Another reporter asked if Jaycee had asked for help.
“I don’t know that,” said Kollar, “but in discussion with detectives, she was relatively cooperative, relatively forthcoming. She wasn’t particularly evasive at all.”
Then he was asked if Jaycee and her daughters had been living in sheds.
“It’s hard to describe,” he replied, “but there was a secondary backyard that’s screened from view from literally all around. The only access to it is a very small and narrow tarp. Her and the two children were living in a series of sheds. There was one shed entirely soundproofed. It could only be opened from the outside. Another shed had more access to the public and then two tents.”
A television reporter asked about Jaycee’s two children.
“None of the children had ever gone to school,” he said. “They’ve never been to a doctor. They were kept in complete isolation in this compound at the rear of the house. From what they have both said he fathered both of those children with Jaycee. They are with Jaycee and whatever group is assisting in the reunification.”
The undersheriff then revealed that Nancy had been with Phillip Garrido during Jaycee’s kidnapping, and matched Carl Probyn’s description of the female in the car.
“My understanding,” he said, “is that they went directly to that property from the kidnapping. Jaycee has been there ever since and the children were born there and lived there. They were in relatively good physical condition. They weren’t obviously abused. They weren’t malnourished. No obvious indicators.”
District Attorney Vern Pierson refused to comment on specific charges, saying his office would be filing a criminal complaint tomorrow at noon in El Dorado Superior Court.
“Beyond that,” he said, “I don’t think I should comment.”
Immediately after the press conference, the sheriff’s office released mug shots of both the Garridos. Phillip looked in a trance, staring straight at the camera. There are two large scabs on the left side of his nose, and his short receding hair is uncombed. Nancy looks drawn and haggard, her unwashed dark hair tangled around her shoulders. She looks helplessly at the camera, as if not quite sure where she is.
Carl Probyn watched the televised press conference with an Associated Press reporter and photographer at his home in Orange, California. And during the dramatic revelations about the deplorable conditions Jaycee had been living in, he grimaced—being photographed, holding his hands up to his face in horror.
Asked his reaction after the press conference, Jaycee’s now graying stepfather said he was just “overwhelmed” by what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“It broke my marriage up,” he said tearfully. “I’ve gone through hell. I’m a suspect until yesterday.”
Later that afternoon he held his own press conference at his home, for local television news stations.
“My name is William Carl Probyn,” he said. “I’m Canadian. I go by Carl.”
He said he was still in “total shock” since Terry had called him the previous afternoon with the amazing news.
“I had given up hope of having her alive,” he said, as he laid out old photographs of Jaycee on a table. “I was in the process of wanting to recover her body basically. And now to get her back alive is like winning the lottery. She sounds like she’s okay up to a point. She’s probably still mentally eleven years old. She’s gone through so much.”
He said he was also struggling to understand why Jaycee had not come forward earlier.
“I don’t know if she was brainwashed,” he said. “I don’t know if she was walking around on the street. I don’t know if she was locked up under key for eighteen years. I have a million questions.”
About an hour later, Terry called with an update on Jaycee and the girls, as Carl was being interviewed by Paloma Esquivel of the Los Angeles Times. And on learning new details about Jaycee’s early days of captivity, when she was locked in a shed in Phillip Garrido’s secret backyard, he burst into tears and begged her to stop.
“I don’t want to hear any more,” he told her.
Then, after putting down the phone, he voiced his disgust at what Jaycee had endured at the hands of Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
“No schooling, no nothing—I was hoping it wasn’t that scenario,” he told Esquivel. “This is pretty horrific stuff, to be treated like an animal. These people. I’ll never forgive them. It’s already devastated our lives.”
Later Probyn would be asked what it was like living for so long under a cloud of suspicion, that he was somehow involved in Jaycee’s disappearance.
“I’m free now,” he said. “They caught him and it’s solved.”
But he was still angry with several in-laws, who had hired an investigator to find evidence against him.
“I don’t want these people back in my life,” he said. “They actually raised money . . . to put me in jail.”
Straight after the press conference, the world’s media descended on Antioch, California. The sleepy backwater San Francisco suburb was suddenly overflowing with television news crews and scores of reporters, hungry for any information on Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Over the next few weeks, newspapers as far away as England, Australia and China would cover this almost unprecedented story, making Jaycee Lee Dugard something of an international superstar.
By late afternoon, as a helicopter circled overhead, taking aerial photographs of 1554 Walnut Avenue and its secret back garden, reporters were knocking on the Garrido neighbors’ doors for interviews.
“If you didn’t look into this guy’s eyes and see straight evil,” neighbor Sam Kovistl told a reporter, “you’d be blind. You’re not even looking in the eyes of a human. I could tell he had something to hide.”
Before long, reporters found Phillip Garrido’s Voices Revealed blog, and began tracking down his printing clients, listed in his black box affidavits. And it soon became clear that Jaycee, Angel and Starlit were well known to many of them.
Realtor Deepal Karunaratne told reporters that he had known Jaycee as Phillip Garrido’s oldest daughter, Alyssa, often seeing her on a day-to-day business basis.
“She does all my work and does all the designing,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “Every time she comes she’s very well-dressed and she seemed to be very healthy and happy.”
Tim Allen, president of East County Glass & Window, Inc., said he used Phillip Garrido’s printing business for more than a decade, describing him as an “out there” religious fanatic.
“He was always talking about this new religion thing, rambling,” said Allen. “He seemed like a simple guy with a mental problem.”
Allen told reporters that over the last several years, Garrido had started bringing two “cute little blonde girls” into his showroom, saying they were his daughters.
“They looked normal,” he said. “They spoke really well and one even shook my hand.”
Cheyvonne Molino of J & M Enterprises said she knew Angel and Starlit well, and they had even attended her daughter’s Sweet Sixteen birthday party, just a couple of weeks earlier.
“We didn’t realize anything was wrong,” she said, “except they didn’t go to school with other kids.”
Molino described Angel as very “clingy” to her father, saying they were both “very shy.” Sometimes he brought them over to visit her teenage daughter, so they would have someone their own age to talk to.
In Walnut Avenue, neighbors told reporters that it
was common knowledge that Phillip Garrido was a sex offender. The neighborhood children called him “Creepy Phil,” and always kept their distance.
Damon Robinson, who had lived next door to the Garridos for the last three years, explained how in 2006 his former girlfriend had seen little children living in the backyard in tents.
“I told her to call the police,” he said. “I told her to call right away.”
40
“A POWERFUL, HEARTWARMING STORY”
At 4:45 P.M. that Thursday afternoon, KCRA-TV anchor Walt Gray was about to go on air for his five o’clock newscast when his boss told him he had a phone call from Phillip Garrido. At first the veteran newsman thought it a joke, but when he realized it really was Garrido, calling from Placerville Jail, he took a deep breath and went into an audio booth, turned on a tape recorder and picked up the phone.
“This is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story,” Garrido drawled in an eerie whisper. “You are going to be really impressed. It’s going to take world news.”
Garrido told the anchorman he had tried to contact him earlier that day, but had not been able to.
“Go to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said, “fifteenth floor in San Francisco and ask for a copy of the documents I left with them three days ago. This is for you—the mass media.”
Garrido said the documents he’d left with the FBI were “something powerful,” urging him to read them before they had an exclusive face-to-face interview.
“Because what you’re going to have in your hand,” said Garrido, “will take world news immediately.”
Walt Gray then asked why he had selected Jaycee Lee Dugard to abduct back in 1991.
“I’m so sorry,” he replied, explaining he would have to wait until he could sit down and do it correctly. “I have no desire to hold back these things. There’s a powerful, heartwarming story if you would just cooperate with me. I’m so sorry because I don’t want to disappoint you right now; I know I just have to do this in an orderly fashion.”
Then, after informing Garrido he was taping their conversation, Gray asked what he thought his situation was right now.
“Well, I am in a very serious condition,” Garrido replied, “but I can’t speak with you about this. I have to wait. I guarantee you as time goes on you will get the pieces of the story. You are going to fall over.”
Once again he told Gray to get the documents from the FBI, as they would play a big part in his “major trial.”
“Phillip,” asked Gray, “what do you hope happens once the documents are out, once the trial begins or is over?”
“Well, let me tell you this,” Garrido replied, “when I went to the San Francisco Bureau . . . I was accompanied by two children that are Jaycee Lee Dugard’s two children that we had. And then they accompanied me to Berkeley. To really start this off please get those documents. They will not disappoint you . . . you are going to be in control of something that is going to take the world’s attention.”
“Right, so, Phillip,” said Gray, “I know that you served some time in the nineties. . . . What have you been doing all this time in terms of employment? What keeps you busy?”
“The last several years,” answered Garrido, “I completely turned my life around, and you’re going to find it the most powerful story coming from the witness—from the victim. . . . If you take this a step at a time you’re going to fall over backwards, and in the end you’re going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story revealing of something that needs to be understood. And that is as far as I can go. I really want to help you but I have to make sure the media is protected correctly.”
Gray then asked if Jaycee would be contributing most to this story.
“Jaycee will also handle that with her lawyer,” he replied. “We’re going to coordinate this. . . . Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house and you are going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place from the end to the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Gray. I want to help you further, but I also need to protect the sheriff’s office . . . the government, and I need to protect the rights of Jaycee Lee Dugard.”
Then Gray asked what he meant by “heartwarming story,” if it was a love story or about children.
At this point Phillip Garrido began to cry.
“It is a constructive story about turning a person’s life around and having those children, those two girls. They slept in my arms every single night. I never touched them . . . I can’t go any further because if I do you know I’ll go too far.”
Gray then asked if Jaycee and the two children were okay.
“Absolutely,” said Garrido, composing himself, “the youngest one was born and from that moment on everything turned around. These people are going to testify to these things.”
And he forecast that as soon as his trial began, “many hundreds of thousands of people” would come forward to testify about his powers.
Finally, the newsman said there was concern that Jaycee and her daughters had never received any medical attention.
“We just didn’t have the finances,” he explained, “and we were very concerned.”
Walt Gray then ended the fifteen-minute interview, thanking Garrido for his call.
“I am not going to play with the media,” Garrido replied. “I am going to leave this with you, because you are the first person here I was able to talk to. And I’m going to stop right there. Thank you, sir.”
“Have a good day,” said Gray, putting down the phone.
That night Jaycee Lee Dugard slept under the same roof as her mother and younger sister for the first time in eighteen years. They had now been moved to a suite in a Concord hotel, and a witness protection officer had gone shopping to buy Jaycee, Angel and Starlit new clothes. They only had the clothes they were wearing when they had left the previous morning with Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
Tina Dugard, who is a third-grade teacher, played a key role in the early reunification. But it was not easy, and there was a great deal of tension, as Jaycee felt guilty she had bonded with her kidnapper. And Angel and Starlit were also devastated that their father had been arrested, and they would probably never see him again.
When Terry called her estranged husband Carl to give a further update, her mother-in-law Wilma Probyn answered the phone, as he was busy with a television crew.
“She said Jaycee was doing good,” recalled Wilma, “that she’s got a lot of guilt, that she bonded with this guy. I think that’s the only reason she’s alive, because she did bond with him. Terry says . . . she looks like she did when she was taken at eleven, and she’s twenty-nine. She looks healthy.”
Over the next couple of days, Jaycee, Angel and Starlit started receiving intense counseling, from a psychologist provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It would be the beginning of many months of work to deprogram them, after all the years of brainwashing by the Garridos.
“Jaycee had to explain to them,” said Carl Probyn, “that she had been kidnapped. They didn’t even know that. They are upset about this because that’s their father and he’s in jail.”
The first steps included rigorous interviews by a special psychological recovery team of experts, to help Jaycee reclaim the identity that was stolen from her as a child. Terry, Shayna and Tina would have to accept that she was no longer the little girl she had been before the abduction. The fact that Phillip Garrido had fathered her two children made things far more difficult.
As Nancy and Phillip Garrido were the only parents Angel and Starlit had ever known, it would take months of intense therapy and love before they fully accepted Jaycee as their mother and their new family.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, who is not treating Jaycee Dugard or her two daughters, said that helping them recover would be like “walking a psychological tightrope.” But their prognosis was good.
“Jaycee Dugard’
s road back depends upon the mind’s agility,” said Dr. Ablow, a Fox News contributor, “because now she must see that she was in danger from predators who posed as her saviors. She must somehow find her original sense of self, revisit the horror it must have been to cede all control to her assailant and take the journey from viewing herself as a helpless victim to seeing herself as a survivor.”
As for treating the children, Dr. Ablow suggested that Jaycee might tell them that “their father is a sick man, but now they are safe and very well cared for. They know nothing but the life they have lived and will need teams of healing professionals to encourage them to share their thoughts and feelings in order to have any hope of escaping severe mental disorders.”
Like everyone else, Katie Callaway had been following the dramatic discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard on the news. And on Thursday evening, she was walking by her television to feed her Maltese dog when she heard the newscaster say, “Phillip Garrido, Contra Costa.”
Katie froze, wondering if it could possibly be the man who had kidnapped and raped her thirty-three years earlier.
Then she looked at the screen, seeing his picture and the spelling of his name. The youthful face she remembered had aged over the years, and they were pronouncing his name wrong, but she instantly recognized the man who had ruined her life.
“I started screaming,” recalled Katie, now fifty-seven. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the man who kidnapped me.’ I was shocked. I was stunned. I started shaking and I couldn’t stop for about four hours.”
Since she disappeared in 1988, after her last encounter with Garrido at Caesar’s Casino, she had moved to an anonymous town in central California, becoming a realtor. But she was no longer the trusting young woman who had unwittingly allowed Phillip Garrido into her car.
She took strict precautions and never let clients into her car. If she felt uncomfortable with them, she would insist they leave their ID at her office.
Even after going underground, she was also convinced that Phillip Garrido was still pursuing her, as every few weeks a strange woman would call her office, pretending to be an old friend. Now Katie is convinced it was Nancy Garrido.
