KIDNAPPED: Jaycee Dugard

Despite being witnessed by many an eleven-year-old girl was still abducted and held captive for eighteen years.

On May 3rd 1980 in Anaheim, California, Terry Dugard’s life changed permanently with the birth of her daughter Jaycee Dugard. The father, Ken Slayton, wasn’t even aware that his daughter had been born and didn’t know that Jaycee existed until years later.

Jaycee would soon meet her stepdad and main father figure in her life when she was still very young. Legally, her stepdad, Carl Probyn, was officially a part of the family when he and Terry married when Jaycee was seven. Two years after the marriage, in 1989, Jaycee’s younger sister Shayna was born.

Shortly after Shayna’s birth in September 1990, the family would move 470 miles north to Meyers, California. They went looking for a safer community in the rural town, searching for a safer community for the young girls to grow up in.

In the new home, Jaycee continued to live the life she loved, playing with her younger sister and spending time with her mother. She would dress up for fun and spend hours out on her bike. Her hair was often pulled up in a side ponytail decorated with a velvet headband.

Just before the tragedy of this case would strike, Jaycee was looking forward to an upcoming school trip.

On June 10th 1991, Jaycee got herself dressed in her favourite all-pink, ready for her day at school. Her mother had left earlier in the morning for work and Jaycee had managed to convince Carl to let her walk the short distance from the house to the school bus stop alone.

She was almost at the bus stop when a car pulled over beside her, Jaycee thinking that it was someone about to ask her for directions, stopped. Instead, Jaycee was hit with unbearable pain from a stun gun. The mixture of electricity and pain knocked Jaycee unconscious for a woman to climb out of the car and drag Jaycee into the back seat. Right as Jaycee was inside the car, it took off.

Inside the car, Jaycee was stripped of her clothes except for a butterfly ring that she would keep hidden from her captors. The woman who had taken her, put a blanket over her head and kept Jaycee pinned down and quiet as she faded in and out of consciousness for the next three hours. The only time Jaycee was able to talk on the 120-mile drive was, her parents wouldn’t be able to pay a ransom.

Back inside Jaycee’s home, Carl had seen everything that had happened to his stepdaughter and rushed to try and save her. He chased after the car which is described as a Mercury Monarch for as long as he could only stopping when he was cut off by a car and unable to regain the distance.

The pair that had taken Jaycee were Philip Garrido and Nancy Bocanegra.

Not much is known about Bocanegra but Garrido has a laundry list of crimes in his past starting long before Jaycee was even born.

In his early life, Garrido was described as a “good boy” that was until he was in a motorcycle accident as a teen. Afterwards, he started to abuse drugs, mostly using methamphetamine and LSD.

He later admitted that he would habitually masturbate in his car by the entrance of elementary and high schools while he watched the young girls. It isn’t clear when this began.

In 1972 Garrido was arrested and charged with repeatedly raping and kidnapping a fourteen-year-old girl after he drugged her with barbiturates. Barbiturates cause a drowsy or “relaxed” feeling in the user and can often cause effects similar to alcohol. The case didn’t go to court as the girl refused to testify.

The year after his horrendous crime, Garrido married his high school sweetheart Christine Murphy. The relationship went as expected. Christine accused Garrido of domestic violence and kidnapping her when she tried to leave him. Luckily, Christine would escape the relationship with her life.

In 1976, a woman named Katherine Callaway (25) was kidnapped from South Lake Tahoe, California and taken to a warehouse in Reno, Nevada. Garrido would repeatedly rape Katherine for the next five and a half hours in the building.
A police officer passing by the area spotted Garrido’s car outside the building and when he went to investigate he found a broken lock on the warehouse door. The officer knocked on the door, watching as it was opened by Garrido. Before anything could be said Katherine emerged from inside begging the officer to help her.

Garrido was arrested on the spot.

Court ordered a psychiatric evaluation where Garrido was diagnosed as a “sexual deviant and chronic drug abuser”. A neurological examination suggested that drug use could be “responsible in part” for the sexual deviation. Further examinations would lead to a neurologist saying Garrido showed “considerable evidence of anxiety and depression and personality disorder”.
Garrido was convicted on March 9th 1977 and he began serving his 50-year sentence on June 30th at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.

Garrido was in Leavenworth when he met Bocanegra who was at the penitentiary to visit her uncle. The pair married on penitentiary grounds on the 5th of October 1981.

In spite of being sentenced to fifty years, Garrido was released from Leavenworth to Nevada state prison where he would only seven months before once again getting transferred to federal parole authorities in Contra Costa County, California on August 26th 1988.

After his release the couple moved to Antioch, California, living with Garrido’s elderly mother in her home. Garrido had to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and was regularly visited by parole officers, local deputies and federal agents.

This brings us back to when Jaycee was taken.

Police at first suspected Ken Slayton of taking Jaycee but he was quickly ruled out, this was how Ken found out about Jaycee’s existence. Carl was also taken in for questioning but passed several polygraph tests, he too was ruled out.

Within a few hours of Jaycee being taken local and national news, had flocked out to Meyers to spread Jaycee’s story. Within the first few days, dozens of volunteers were searching for Jaycee. Within the first few weeks, tens of thousands of flyers and posters were sent all over the US.

Meyers was covered by pink ribbons tied to show support for both Jaycee and her family. Terry founded the Jaycee’s Hope group that directed volunteers and fundraising efforts for searches. They sold cassettes of the song Jaycee Lee by Larry Williams, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and buttons to raise money.

On June 14th 1991, Fox’s show America’s Most Wanted featured Jaycee’s story to further the reach of information about her.

In the ensuing years, a continuous effort was made by Jaycee’s family to raise child safety awareness, fundraising events and candlelit vigils all to keep Jaycee in the public’s view.

While this was all happening, Jaycee was being held captive at Garrido’s home in a secondary backyard, living inside dilapidated tents and sheds.

When Jaycee was taken to the sheds from out of the car, the blanket was always kept on her head. At first, she was put inside a tiny shed that was soundproofed, she was handcuffed and left naked on a bed. Garrido bolted the door after he had warned Jaycee that there was a Doberman trained to attack her if she were to escape.

For the first week, Jaycee remained handcuffed in the shed with Garrido as her only human contact. He would sometimes bring her food and talk to her. In the shed, she was made to use a bucket as a toilet. Jaycee’s abuse began just a week after being taken by Garrido, being forced to shower with Garrido and the start of being raped weekly an event that would continue for the first three years of her captivity.

After a month and a half of being held Jaycee was moved from the tiny shed to a slightly larger room still in the backyard of Garrido’s house. She was once again handcuffed to a bed. Garrido went on a rambled rant about his belief that the “demon angels” allowed him to take to Jaycee and that she would help him with his “sexual problems” since the world was ignoring him.

At some point during her captivity, Jaycee was provided with a TV but wasn’t allowed or able to watch news stations. This left her completely unaware of the search efforts for her outside of the shed she was being held in.

Garrido’s abuse would increase when he went on “runs” — the term Garrido used for his days-long meth binges. During these binges he would force Jaycee to keep him company, making her listen out for voices he heard in the walls. During the binges, Garrido would often believe he was a servant of God. These “runs” would end with Garrido sobbing and apologising to Jaycee, which she would have to comfort him through before he switched to threatening to sell Jaycee to people who would put her in a cage.

Seven months into captivity, Jaycee would be introduced to the woman that dragged her into the car on June 10th. Bocanegra bought Jaycee a stuffed animal and gave her chocolate milk, she tearfully apologised to Jaycee. While Jaycee craved Bocanegra’s approval she later pointed out the fact that Bocanegra was just as manipulative as Garrido. Bocanegra would switch between acting motherly towards Jaycee to being cold and cruel to her. Bocanegra was jealous of the attention that Jaycee would get and she also blamed Jaycee for being abducted when she was 11. Bocanegra would replace Garrido as Jaycee’s captor when he was re-arrested for failing a drug test.

Jaycee would describe Bocanegra as “evil” and “twisted”.

The couple would give Jaycee kittens to raise before they would “mysteriously vanish”. This happened twice and each time Jaycee would keep a journal about her kittens that she would sign off on with her name. When Garrido found the journal he made Jaycee rip the pages with her name on them out. This would be the final time in the next eighteen years that Jaycee would be able to use her own name.

Jaycee wasn’t taken to a doctor or dentist, no matter what she was going through.

One of Garrido’s neighbours, Patrick McQuaid, would later remember when he was a child and met Jaycee through the fence. It happened not too long after Jayce had been abducted. She told him his name and when asked she told Patrick that she lived at the house. Garrido came out before the conversation could continue forcing Jaycee back into the shed.

After the interaction, Garrido built an 8ft (2.4m) tall fence around the garden and set up a tent for Jaycee to walk in when she was allowed outside.

Three years into being held captive, Jaycee was freed of her handcuffs but she was kept inside a bolted room. The same year on Easter Sunday, Jaycee was given her first cooked meal where she was informed that the couple believed she was pregnant at age 13. Jaycee had learnt through the TV that sex could lead to pregnancy and she also watched TV to prepare for the birth of her first child. That birth came on August 18th 1994 when Jaycee was just 14 years old.

After giving birth, Jaycee was raped less frequently. The assaults stopped completely when she became pregnant again. Her second daughter was born on November 13th 1997 when Jaycee was 17.

Jaycee used what she learnt on TV to care for and raise her daughters in captivity. She worked desperately to keep the two girls safe from Garrido’s abuse but all three girls would experience Garrido’s enraged rants and lectures.

Two of the few things that kept Jaycee going were raising her two girls, homeschooling them to the best of her ability and planting flowers in the backyard when she was allowed outside.

Garrido and Bocanegra forced Jaycee to tell her daughters that Bocanegra was their mother and she was their older sister. The occasional time that the girls were taken out into town or were spotted by the public the story continued.

The way Jaycee would come into contact with other people was through Garrido’s print shop where she worked as a graphic artist. One customer, Ben Daughdrill, claimed that he had met and spoken to Jaycee, claiming she did excellent work. Another customer said that Jaycee never hinted at what she was going through at the hands of Garrido and Bocanegra.

Through her job, Jaycee was allowed access to the business email and phone but she didn’t try and contact out. Most likely too scared of what would happen to her or her daughters if she was caught by Garrido.

While Jaycee was being held in the backyard Garrido was still being visited by law enforcement. At each of the visits, they never suspect or detected Jaycee or her daughters in the home.
Jaycee was never linked to Garrido’s previous kidnapping of Katherine despite it happening close by.

On April 22nd 1992, a call came in. A male voice called Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department claiming that they had seen Jaycee at a gas station less than two miles from Garrido’s property. They claimed she was intently staring at a missing person’s poster of herself before leaving in a large yellow — possibly a Dodge — van. The caller didn’t identify themself and when police arrived at the scene nobody was in the area.
Years later when the police searched the property, they found a van matching the description given on his property but it couldn’t be matched to what was seen since no license plate was given on the call. Jaycee later debunked this story saying that she wasn’t allowed off the property until shortly before her first daughter’s birth.

In June 2002, the Antioch fire department responded to a call that a juvenile had a shoulder injury at Garrido’s property. They had fallen whilst in the swimming pool. The information wasn’t relayed to the parole office, they didn’t know about the juvenile that was around Garrido or the pool on his property.

In 2006, one of the neighbours called 9–1–1 to inform them about the cluster of tents in the backyard and his belief that children were living in them. The caller said that Garrido was “psychotic” with sexual addictions. A deputy sheriff spoke to Garrido on his front porch for thirty minutes before he left, not once asking if he could go around back to check if the claims were true.
The deputy told Garrido that there would be a code violation if people were living on the property but not inside a building, the deputy left shortly after.
Later, the acting Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf apologised for the mistake made by the deputy in a news conference.

On November 4th 2009, the California Office of the Inspector General issued a report listing all the lapses made by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
In the report, it was pointed out that Garrido was incorrectly classed as only needing low-level supervision which was what opened the door to all the other lapses made.
The inspector detailed an instance when a parole officer encountered a twelve-year-old girl in the home during a check-in. Garrido explained it away as the girl is his brother’s daughter, his niece. The report continues to say that the agent didn’t make one phone call to Garrido’s brother to find out if he had any children. He didn’t.

Months before that report occurred a mind-blowing thing happened. Jaycee Dugard was found alive eighteen years after her abduction.

On August 24th 2009, Garrido went on a drive to the FBI San Francisco office where he left an essay that contained his ideas about religion and sexuality. He also suggested he had a solution to protect against behaviour like his past crimes. This essay described how Garrido had cured his deviant behaviour and how the information could be used to assist in curing other sexual predators. “Controlling human impulses that drive humans to commit dysfunctional acts.”.

That same day Garrido took Jaycee’s daughters to the University of California, Berkley (UC Berkley). He went to the campus police office, seeking permission to hold a special event as part of his “God’s Desire” program. Garrido was directed to speak to special-events manager Lisa Campbell.

In their meeting, Lisa perceived his behaviour as “eratic” while the two girls with him were “sullen and submissive”. Lisa asked Garrido to make another appointment the next day, he did so, leaving behind his name in the process.
That was the beginning of his end.
Lisa took the name she was given and asked officer Ally Jacobs to look into it. That was when they discovered Garrido was a registered sex offender on federal parole for kidnapping and rape.

The next day, at 2 pm, Garrido went back to have his meeting with Lisa, once again taking Jaycee’s daughters with him. In this meeting, Ally had sat in to observe.
She thought that the girls looked pale as if they hadn’t been in sunlight, their behaviour matched the unnaturally pale complexion. Thinking quickly, Ally reported the multiple parole violations after Garrido left the meeting, her report was left on a voicemail.

After the message had been heard, two parole agents went to Garrido’s home. He was handcuffed while they searched the home. They would only find Bocanegra and Garrido’s elderly mother who was suffering from dementia.

Despite what they didn’t find, the agents still took Garrido to the office, on the drive over Garrido echoed a similar story that had worked for him in the past. He claimed the girls were “daughters of a relative” and he had gotten permission to take them out with him.

Garrido wasn’t punished for his parole violations, those being associating with minors and travelling over 25 miles unannounced.

After reviewing Garrido’s file the agents drove him home and ordered that he report to the office the next day to discuss his trip to UC Berkeley and to follow up on the office’s concerns about the two girls.

As ordered Garrido went to the office on the 26th, with Bocanegra, Jaycee’s daughters and Jaycee who was introduced to officers as “Allissa”. For the sake of clarity, Jaycee will continue to be referred to as Jaycee.

Parole officers separated everyone from each other so that they could get identification from all of them.

Out of her fear, Jaycee maintained the Allisa story but told the agents that the two younger girls were her daughters. She claimed she was aware that Garrido was a sex offender but stated that he was a “changed man” and a “great person” and that he was “good with her kids”. The comments were echoed by those kids. As agents pushed for more details, Jaycee began to become “extremely defensive” and “agitated” demanding to know why she was being interrogated. Jaycee claimed to be a battered wife that was from Minnesota in hiding from an abusive husband.

While Jaycee was being questioned a parole officer called Concord police. A sergeant was sent out and once they had arrived, Garrido confessed to what he had done to Jaycee. It was only then that Jaycee confirmed her identity.

It is suggested that Jaycee was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome but Jaycee argued those claims, stating “The phrase Stockholm Syndrome implies that hostages cracked by terror and abuse become affectionate towards their captors… Well, it’s, really, it’s degrading, you know, having my family believe that I was in love with this captor and wanted to stay with him. I mean, that is so far from the truth that makes me want to throw up… I adapted to survive my circumstance.”
Jaycee has also said that many other victims will have been forced to sympathize just to survive their circumstances.

In the parole office, Bocanegra and Garrido were arrested while agents got on the phone with Terry Probyn, Jaycee’s mother. They were reunited on August 27th 2009.

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Phillip Garrido, aged 60, was sentenced to 431 years with charges of kidnapping, and 13 counts of sexual assault.
Nancy Bocanegra, aged 55, was sentenced to 36 years with charges of kidnapping and rape.

In court, on the day of sentencing, Jaycee gave Terry a note to read out to her former captors.
To Garrido, she wrote, “I chose to not be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence”.
To Bocanegra, she wrote, “There is no god in the universe that would condone your actions”.