by Tom Philbin
Dead within Three Hours
If the normal course of events had occurred, according to FBI statistics, Jaycee would have been dead within three hours. The spectacular story attracted media from all over the world, and innumerable stories were published about Jaycee’s disappearance. Several organizations that lent their efforts to help find the 11-year-old, and thousands of pink—Jaycee’s favorite color—flyers about the missing girl were printed up and distributed across the country.
Searching for a Hidden Body
According to the Department of Justice, 52 percent of the bodies of murder victims are concealed to prevent discovery. In only 9 percent of cases is the body openly placed to ensure its discovery. Search-party members need to be aware that bodies often may be hidden under branches, rugs, or debris. Because bodies often are concealed, members of search parties typically stagger themselves to cover ground in intervals that approximate the length of the missing person.
None of the efforts produced a single lead, and months and then years went by without a clue as to where Jaycee might be. Somehow two people had snatched her in broad daylight and gotten away with it. That was a sobering thought. (Indeed, abduction investigators will tell you that kidnapping a child is mostly a crime of opportunity. While stalking a child may be involved in some cases, usually a pedophile just spots a child and makes an on-the-spot decision to snatch him or her.)
Over the years, Jaycee’s parents did not give up the fight to find her, but to no avail. The investigation did not come up with anything, either. Carl Probyn was asked to take a number of lie-detector tests, and he passed them all. Jaycee’s father was also found to be innocent of the crime. Although police didn’t know it at the time, Jaycee never left California. Later they found that she had been living behind a house in northeast Antioch, her quarters a couple of tents and shacks hidden by heavy vegetation. She did spend time in the house as well.
Books and the media often depict the police as being smart and efficient. But that is hardly the case. Cops frequently make mistakes, and in this case they made some whoppers—which resulted in several missed opportunities to rescue Jaycee.
Crucial Mistakes
The first mistake occurred less than a year after Jaycee was abducted. Police received an anonymous call from a man who said he had spotted a blonde-haired girl, eleven or twelve, at a gas station scrutinizing a pink poster of the missing girl. The man, who did not identify himself, said the little girl looked like Jaycee Dugard. Although he did not get the license plate of the vehicle she left in, he said it was a large yellow van.
Unbelievably, the police did a cursory investigation but did not pursue the lead. As one investigator said later, “The basic question here is how far up their butts cops had their heads. I mean, a little blonde girl looking at a picture of herself, and a large yellow van? How difficult is that to find? It was a disgrace.”
Another time, a neighbor called the local sheriff’s department to report that, looking through his fence, he had spotted a preteen blonde playing in Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s backyard. The neighbor called to the little girl and asked her name, and she actually said “Jaycee,” but he did not make the connection to the little girl who had been abducted from South Tahoe. But he did find something odd about a little girl being in the Garridos’ backyard.
In 2006, a neighbor called the police, informing them that Garrido had children living in tents in his backyard and seemed “psychotic.” Following up on the call, a deputy sheriff went to Garrido’s house and warned him that he would be violating code if he had people living outside on his property.
As bad as that was, the biggest mistake was an official’s characterization of Garrido as a “low-level” sex offender. When Jaycee was abducted, Garrido did not draw any attention from California law-enforcement authorities.
It was an abomination that he didn’t because in 1971, Garrido abducted and raped a young woman and was sentenced to hard time in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth. Incidentally, that’s where he met his wife, Nancy, who was visiting her uncle.
Mystery: One Day in the Suburbs
On July 4, 1956, Betty Weinberger wrapped her month-old son, Peter, in a receiving blanket and placed him in his carriage on the patio of their home in Westbury, New York. She then went inside for a few minutes while he napped. When Mrs. Weinberger came back to check on her son, she got a shock. He was gone and she found a ransom note. In the note, the kidnapper said he was sorry and he needed $2,000. He promised the baby would be returned “safe and happy” the following day if his ransom demand was met. Despite the kidnapper’s threat to kill the baby at the “first wrong move,” Mrs. Weinberger called the Nassau County Police Department.
Her husband, Morris, asked that the newspapers hold off on printing the story of his son’s kidnapping. All but one newspaper—the New York Daily News—complied: the kidnapping made the front page. By the following day, reporters were all over the drop-off area where the kidnapper had said the money was to be left. Of course the kidnapper never showed.
On July 10, six days after the kidnapping, the kidnapper called the Weinberger home twice with additional instructions on where to take the money to two separate “drops.” He didn’t show up at either location. But at the second drop site, cops found a blue cloth bag alongside a curb. Inside was a handwritten note telling the parents where to find the baby “if everything goes smooth.”
The note was examined by experts who agreed that the original ransom note and the second note were written by the same person.
On July 11, after the seven-day waiting period required at the time, the FBI entered the case. The only evidence officials had were the ransom notes. Handwriting experts from the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., traveled to New York and gave special agents a crash course in handwriting analysis. The investigators then started to examine the huge volume of handwriting specimens maintained by the New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau, federal and state probation offices, schools, aircraft plants, and various municipalities.
After examining and eliminating almost two million samples of writing in an operation reminiscent of the Mad Bomber case, on August 22, 1956 an agent at the U.S. Probation Office in Brooklyn noted a similarity between the writing in the ransom notes and writing in the probation file of one Angelo LaMarca. LaMarca had been arrested by the Treasury Department for bootlegging.
On August 23, LaMarca was arrested at his home by FBI agents and Nassau County police. Although he first denied any involvement in the kidnapping of Peter Weinberger, he confessed when confronted with the handwriting comparisons.
As investigators soon learned, LaMarca was a taxi dispatcher and truck driver who lived with his wife and two children in Plainview, New York.
Investigators grilled him and discovered that on July 4, 1956, he had found himself driving around Westbury, seven miles away, and trying to figure out how to get the money he needed.
When he happened on the Weinberger house, Mrs. Weinberger was leaving her son in the baby carriage to go into her house. On impulse, LaMarca scribbled a ransom note in his truck, snatched Peter, and drove off.
LaMarca told investigators he went to the first drop site the day after the kidnapping—with the baby in the car—but he was scared away by all of the press and police in the area. He drove away, abandoned the baby alive in some heavy brush just off a highway exit, and went home.
A search of the area by FBI agents and Nassau County police ensued. An FBI agent spotted a diaper pin and then the decomposed remains of Peter Weinberger.
Since LaMarca had crossed no state lines, he had not violated the federal kidnapping statute and was turned over to Nassau County authorities for state prosecution. In late 1956, he was tried and convicted by a jury on kidnapping and murder charges. The jury returned its verdict without a recommendation of leniency. On December 14, 1956, he was sentenced to death.
After a number of legal appeals—including one to the Supreme Court—Angelo LaMarca was exec
uted at Sing Sing Prison on August 7, 1958.
The fallout from the Weinberger kidnapping reached national proportions. This child was not from a well-to-do family, like the Lindbergh baby, but from a middle-class family in suburbia where people—until then—weren’t afraid of being targeted by extortionists. The Weinberger kidnapping struck fear in the hearts of average Americans. People started locking their doors. Almost overnight, an entire country lost its sense of security.
The Weinberger case also resulted in new legislation, signed by President Eisenhower, that reduced the FBI’s waiting period in kidnapping cases from seven days to twenty-four hours.
—from the website of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Garrido’s Criminal History
When Jaycee was snatched, Phillip Garrido certainly should have drawn the attention of authorities. He had a criminal history and was on lifetime parole. Phillip Craig Garrido grew up in Brentwood, California, graduating from high school in 1969. As a teen, he experienced a near-fatal motorcycle accident that drastically changed him and eventually led to drug use. Manuel Garrido, Phillip’s father, maintained that Phillip had been a “good boy” until the accident and that continued drug use changed him.
Of course, this is always a convenient excuse, as if one event could change a personality so completely. In fact, behavior is something that forms gradually in a person, not due to a single incident. Garrido’s criminal career apparently started in 1973 when he was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. He beat the charge because the young girl was unwilling to go to court.
In 1976, Garrido kidnapped Katherine Callaway in South Lake Tahoe, California. He fled with her to a warehouse in Reno, Nevada, where he sexually assaulted her repeatedly. Callaway escaped only after a police officer noticed Garrido’s car parked outside the warehouse and came in to investigate. Garrido was arrested, tried, and convicted of a variety of charges and was diagnosed as a drug addict and sexual deviant.
Worried that Garrido’s chronic drug use might be responsible in part for his deviant sexual behavior, a psychiatrist recommended a neurological exam, which came back normal. In court, Garrido admitted that he used to park his car by various schools and masturbate at the sight of young girls. He was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth and then was transferred in January 1988 to Nevada State Prison, where he served seven months of a five-years-to-life Nevada sentence. He was transferred to federal parole authorities in Antioch, California, on August 26, 1988, and lived in the home of his elderly mother, who suffered from dementia. As a parolee, he wore an ankle bracelet and the police visited him regularly.
Returned to Federal Prison
In the summer of 1993, Garrido returned to federal prison to serve five months due to a parole violation, but the cops still didn’t have a clue that he had kidnapped Jaycee. Nor did they know that Jaycee had bore him two daughters when she was in her early teens, one in August 1994 when she was fourteen and another in November 1997. During their time together as a family, Jaycee told everyone she was the Garridos’ daughter and that the younger girls were her sisters. Her two daughters also told others that she was their older sister. Dugard was a graphic artist for Garrido’s print shop and was quite good.
In June 2002, firefighters responded to a call reporting the shoulder injury a juvenile had received while swimming in a pool at the Garridos’ home. Though the parole office had no record of there being children or a pool at the Garridos’ house, the incident was not relayed.
As time went by, Garrido (who, in the opinion of the author and a number of psychiatrists, was insane) got more and more obsessed with religion. He talked often about his ability to use his mind to control sound and blogged regularly about his efforts on “God’s Desire Church.”
Just How Crazy He Was
On August 24, 2009, Garrido demonstrated very clearly just how crazy he was. He visited the San Francisco office of the FBI and delivered a four-page essay detailing his thoughts on religion and sexuality and describing how he had cured his own criminal sexual behaviors. And then he did something that would finally unravel the case.
On the same day he visited the FBI, he stopped at the University of California at Berkeley and met with special-events manager Lisa Campbell to discuss the possibility of holding a Christian event on campus as a part of his “God’s Desire” program. Noting that Garrido’s behavior seemed strange, Campbell asked him to make an appointment and return the next day. She also notified campus police officer Ally Jacobs about her concerns.
When Jacobs ran a background check, she discovered that Garrido was on parole for rape. Jacobs attended the meeting with Campbell, and when Garrido arrived with two girls, he introduced them as his daughters. Jacobs noticed the girls’ strange behavior throughout the meeting, and afterwards she left a message with Garrido’s parole office describing the unusual meeting.
This time, the cops did their job correctly. Parole officers arrived at Garrido’s house and searched it but found only Nancy, his wife, and his elderly mother there. The officers took Garrido back to the parole office where he told them that the girls with him at UC Berkeley were relatives who had accompanied him with permission from their parents. Still not convinced by his story, parole officers asked him to return with the girls to follow up and discuss the UC Berkeley visit.
The next day, the parole officers questioned the blonde woman with Garrido who said her name was Alissa. When the parole officer said that she looked too young to be the mother of the two young girls and asked her age, she said that she was twenty-nine and that everyone thought she was too young. When asked to explain their relationship again, Garrido said that all three were his nieces, children of his brother. Garrido claimed that his brother was divorced and so the girls were living with him and Nancy. Parole officers asked Alissa for identification, but she wasn’t carrying any. At this point, the parole officer called in the Concord police.
A Change in the Story
As they waited for the Concord cops, Alissa changed her story. She said she was from Minnesota and had been hiding in California from an abusive husband. She said she was terrified of being found and didn’t want to give any identifying information. Alissa continued to lie, while in another room Concord cops questioned Garrido separately, a standard police tactic. Garrido finally admitted that he had kidnapped Alissa and that he was the father of the two younger girls. As the questioning continued, Alissa finally admitted that she was the 11-year-old girl in pink who had been scooped up and abducted. She was Jaycee Dugard.
Phillip Garrido
Garrido and his wife were arrested, and an FBI agent put Dugard on the telephone with her mother, Terry, who got the call she had been waiting eighteen years for.
Why didn’t Jaycee call her mother or father or the police during the eighteen years she was held by Garrido? The main explanation, we think, is that she exhibited what is known as “Stockholm syndrome,” a term used to describe a situation in which a captive expresses adulation and positive feelings toward his or her captors that appear irrational in light of the danger. Essentially, people who are held captive see a periodic lack of abuse from their captives as indicating kindness. The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27 percent of kidnapping victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.
Together Again
Following Jaycee’s return home, her mother said Jaycee and her daughters were in good health and their reunion was going well, though slowly. Her stepfather said his stepdaughter had developed a significant emotional bond with Phillip Garrido, and the younger girls cried when they learned of their father’s arrest. According to Jaycee Dugard’s aunt, Tina, Dugard’s reappearance is an important event for families of other children who have been missing a long time because it shows that there is hope even in long-term cases. Elizabeth Smart, another girl who was abducted, has stressed the importance of focusing on the future with a positive attitude as an effective approach to accepting what has happened
.
Three weeks after her release, Jaycee Dugard made a request to gain control of the pets at the Garrido compound.
On July 1, 2010 the California State Assembly passed A.B. 1714, appropriating $20 million to settle claims brought against the state by Jaycee Dugard, her mother, and her daughters.
In 2009, Garrido and his wife initially pled not guilty to charges including kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment. However, in April 2011, they changed their plea to guilty. Phillip was sentenced to 431 years in prison while Nancy received thirty-six years to life.
Mini Mystery: On the Track of a Homicidal Pedophile
In 1928, a 10-year-old girl named Grace Budd was kidnapped and Will King, a detective in the New York’s Missing Persons Bureau, set out to find her. It is hard to imagine someone doing a better job.
King pursued the case every day for weeks that turned into months and then years. And eventually more than six years had passed since Grace Budd disappeared with the kindly old man who had identified himself to her parents as Mr. Howard. He had said he was taking her to a party, which cops learned was at an address that didn’t exist.
King worked like a dog on the case. In fact, his superiors started to worry about him—and their worry proved well founded.
Will King, working night and day on his other cases as well as the disappearance of Grace Budd, had a physical collapse and was confined to a hospital for three months. Before he was discharged, his doctors warned him about overexerting himself, and the department, also concerned for his health, assigned him to a desk job.
