Philip Garrido has apologized for the suffering he inflicted on Miss Dugard by holding her captive for 18 years, but claimed to be in touch with a higher power.(Well 'Geez Louise' that explains everything Phil)
"I have the gift to speak in the tongue of angels," he wrote to a pen pal from prison. "People tend to believe a person is out of his mind to speak like that but this was all kept hidden for protecting man's future development."
In a rambling, handwritten message that is scattered with references to his faith, Garrido said that he wants to help other sex offenders "have the same freedom I have."
He wrote: "I am so sorry for the pain I have caused everyone. I hope you can forgive."
The note obtained by the Daily Mirror is the latest glimpse into the mental state of Garrido, who is awaiting trial with his wife Nancy for abducting Miss Dugard from a bus stop in 1991 when she was just 11 and holding her captive for18 years in their backyard. Both have pleaded not guilty.
In another letter made public earlier this month he claimed that his faith had helped him restrain his sexual impulses. "Through the spirit of Christ a mental process took place ending a sexual problem believed to be impossible," he wrote.
Miss Dugard was reunited with her family on Aug 27 after Garrido's parole officer raised the alarm.The elderly mother of Phillip Garrido has said she met Jaycee but thought she was her granddaughter. Patricia Garrido, 88, said that her son introduced Dugard as "Allissa", his daughter by a former lover -- and had no idea of her plight until police raided their California home.
"I didn't know she was being kept there against her will. I was in my bed and all I knew was this smiley girl who came to see me," Mrs Garrido said. "She always seemed happy to be there. I thought she was my granddaughter. I don't know what's happened to her now but I love her. I hope she's OK."
Garrido told his mother that the two daughters he fathered with Dugard, who are now aged 15 and 11, were also from a previous relationship.
"I don't remember how her two little girls came to be there but I thought they were Phillip's. He told me they were all his children," Mrs Garrido said.
Patricia Garrido said she saw nothing unusual about Dugard and then the girls living outside the house, saying she grew up on a farm and "was used to there being a lot of noise and spending a lot of time outside".
She defended her daughter-in-law, saying Nancy looked after her for two decades, bathing and feeding her.
"Nancy has a heart of gold and everyone seemed happy. Allissa was a very happy girl. I still call her Allissa because he never told me she was called Jaycee. I just didn't think there was anything wrong with it," Mrs Garrido said.
"They were all lovely girls. I just thought they were my family. I had no idea why he would do something like this. I don't know what's wrong with him but he has made the family very sad," she said.
Phillip Garrido selected the pretty blond girl with the gap-toothed grin as his prey during a “child shopping” trip because she looked “cute” , his wife Nancy has told investigators in California. But the couple decided not to try and snatch 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard that day in June 1991 because she was walking through South Lake Tahoe with a bunch of school friends.
Instead, they apparently trailed her to her home before returning the next morning to complete their horrific mission. Mrs Garrido allegedly jumped out of their car and grabbed her as she walked to nearby a bus-stop, while her husband remained behind the wheel.
She has described the chilling precision that went into the abduction as prosecutors put together the case for multiple charge of kidnapping and rape against the husband and wife. “That’s the one I want,” Garrido told her when he saw Jaycee in the resort town. “She’s cute, but she’s with the other kids. Let's come back later and get her.”
Michael Cardoza, a Californian attorney and former prosecutor, relayed his coldly calculating words to The Sunday Telegraph after being briefed on Mrs Garrido’s testimony by law enforcement contacts. Another source close to the investigation has confirmed that was her account.
“This was nothing less than a child shopping trip,” said Mr Cardoza. “It just makes their actions all the more horrendous and reprehensible.”
The disturbing revelation will further fuel the anguished debate in California about the state’s child protection laws, which effectively encourages scores of former sex offenders to congregate in neighbourhoods - like the outskirts of Antioch - where there is little local government and not much sense of community. It will also add to the frustration across America that so many people who interacted with the Garridos - including police, public officials and close neighbours - failed to grasp what was going on.
Mrs Garrido’s version of how Jaycee was snatched throws an even more sickening light on the advice her husband dispensed a decade later to a child safety campaigner for whom he was printing a kidnap prevention fact sheet. “Phillip offered a couple of suggestions if we were updating the leaflet,” Janice Gomes told The Sunday Telegraph.
“He said: 'Children should never walk to a bus-stop by themselves. They are no match for an adult so there should always be an adult with them,’” she recalled.
Garrido also dismissed the theory of “safety in numbers” for a group of unaccompanied children, telling her that a determined attacker could always pick off one of the bunch as the others fled.
“It just seemed like sensible advice that children should always be in the company of an adult, even if you think they are safe,” said Mrs Gomes, who set up the National Community Empowerment Programme after one of her young daughters was molested three decades ago.
Yet despite his weird personality, a tendency to burst into song and outlandish religious beliefs, it never struck her that the man known as “creepy Phil” by youngsters in the area might have been speaking with such horrifying personal knowledge about the dangers faced by lone children at bus-stops.
And Garrido, now 58, was printing the flyers from the business he ran in the same backyard lair that was home to Jaycee - and by then the two daughters he allegedly fathered after repeated rapes - in Antioch, 45 miles east of San Francisco.
What is known about Nancy Garrido points to an existence of extreme contradictions. For Mrs Garrido worked as a respected nursing aide caring for the disabled and the old at the same time as she helped her husband keep Jaycee and her two daughters captive in their backyard.
Indeed, investigators believe that her nursing expertise allowed her to play the role of midwife when those children, now aged 11 and 15, were born during the 1990s. Her impressive collection of nursing references dated back to 1981 - the same year that she married Garrido in a prison ceremony, well aware that her new husband was serving a then 50-year sentence for rape and kidnapping.
She was born Nancy Bocanegra in Bexar County, Texas, in 1955, the oldest of several children in a Mexican-American family that moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1972. Some time after Garrido’s 1977 incarceration at Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas, she met him while she was visiting an uncle who was a fellow inmate.
She was reportedly an impressionable Jehovah’s Witness who fell for the handsome young prisoner - who was already claiming that he had found God and put the drug-fuelled sex and violence of his youth behind him. They married when she was 26 and he was 30.
Mrs Garrido moved from Denver to Leavenworth in the mid-1980s to be nearer her husband, renting cheap one-bedroom apartments in converted townhouses. And she was already supporting herself by working as a nurse, judging from the CV she later presented. After Garrido’s release, the couple moved in with his mother and step-father on Walnut Avenue, in a scruffy working-class neighbourhood of Antioch.
For the next 10 years, Mrs Garrido worked with disabled patients as a nursing and physical therapy aide in the area - even as Jaycee and later her girls were forced to live in a squalid network of tents and shacks in a compound hidden from neighbours by trees and high fences.
For 38 days in 1993, she was Jaycee’s sole jailer after Garrido was locked up for breaking his parole by smoking marijuana. Yet even then, she made no effort to alert the authorities - seen as crucial evidence by the prosecution that while she may have had a domineering husband, she was actively complicit in the whole operation.
This double life has amazed her former colleagues at the ARC nursing agency which took her on in 1994 after she passed a state background check. “The people who received services through her, they liked her very much. She was a good employee and she was well-liked by the people she worked with,” Barbara Maizie, the agency’s executive director, told a local newspaper. “They cannot believe that this is possible. They’re totally shocked.”
Her family in Denver - her divorced parents and at least four brothers still live there - were just as stunned when her role emerged. In the first comments by a relative, her brother David blamed Garrido for his sister’s plight as he recalled a young woman who would go fishing and canoeing.
“I’ve got nothing bad to say about my sister,” he said. “He [Garrido] turned her into that. She was normal until she hooked up with that guy.”
His sister left the ARC agency in 1998 to look after her elderly bed-ridden mother-in-law - a role she carried out with diligence and care, according to next-door neighbour Helen Boyer. “Nancy was great with Pat [Garrido’s mother],” she said. “She devoted herself to that woman.”
She was always unassuming but also became increasingly reclusive. “The wife was like a hermit,” said Damon Robinson, another neighbour. “She looked like she had no spirit.”
Prosecutors believe she was a full partner in the kidnapping and rapes and will demand multiple life sentences against both Garridos, who pleaded not guilty in their first court hearing.
Gilbert Maines, her court-appointed attorney, appears to be preparing to argue that she was brainwashed, in thrall to her husband’s personality and religious beliefs, as some acquaintances and family members have claimed. But legal experts emphasise that even if he did hold a domineering sway over her - and he of course claimed to be able control minds and hear angels through a special black box- that would be little defence in court.
Mr Maines added that his client came to view Jaycee and the girls as “family”. He said: “She loved the girls very much and she loved Jaycee very much.” Miss Dugard has also reportedly told them she formed a “bond” with the couple who stole her away.
She worked in Garrido’s printing business, oversaw graphic designs and met clients. Former clients say she looked just like a happy young woman, even an aspiring model. That she could have appeared so contented is another mystifying twist to a near-inexplicable story.
The Jaycee Lee Dugard story is apparently for sale and the Hollywood rumor mill is pointing to Lindsay Lohan as the main actress interested in picking up the story. The fallen Hollywood starlet is said to be feverishly negotiating for the film rights to the life story of Dugard. .
Hollywood insiders are claiming that Lohan believes she has a strong resemblance to Dugard, we don’t see it at all. It will be interesting to see if Lohan can turn her trainwreck of a career around with what will promise to be a serious and uncomfortable role.
Quick question: What will your wardrobe be on New Year’s Eve?Nice dress?Black tie?How about your, ahem, underwear?If you lived in parts of South America, it wouldn’t even be a question. In Sao Paulo, La Paz, and other spots, people don brightly colored underpants to ring in the New Year—red if they’re looking for love, and yellow for money.
