Jaycee Dugard Unveils Twisted Mind of Her Captor in Memoir
Abduction survivor Jaycee Lee Dugard's memoir, A Stolen Life, reveals the dark, twisted mind of her captor, Phillip Garrido – a self-professed street minister who abused drugs and preyed on young girls.
Dugard, 31, recounts Garrido as a calculating individual who used manipulation and the threat of force to kidnap and hold her as a sex slave for 18 years.
He used food, toys, pets and affection to endear himself to the shy, emotionally-deprived 11-year-old Dugard. Garrido then used Dugard to fulfill his perverse fantasies, which involved drugs, dress up and various lewd sexual acts.
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Dugard was kidnapped by Garrido and his wife Nancy in 1991 as she made her way to the bus stop near her Lake Tahoe home. Garrido subdued the blond, blue-eyed girl with a stun gun. Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, said he watched helplessly from the driveway as the Garridos’ sedan sped off with her inside.
Back at his compound, Garrido repeatedly sexual assaulted and raped the young girl. In A Stolen Life, Dugard recalls that Garrido also immediately took off her clothes and forced her to touch and shower with him. She spent her first nights sleeping in a shack in the backyard, handcuffed, wearing nothing more than a towel.
He repeatedly raped her, every day, Dugard wrote, sometimes in day-long sessions where he forced her to dress up in various costumes, review pornographic material with him and perform oral and vaginal sex. The rape continued even after she gave birth to his two daughters at ages 14 and 18.
"Each time it happened I learned to 'go away' in my mind until he was finished," she says of the experience.
Throughout the ordeal, Garrido constantly told Dugard that she was helping him with his "sex problem," that she was keeping him from victimizing other girls and his wife was grateful for her help. However, Garrido, a registered sex offender, continued to prey on girls. He used his wife to secretly videotape girls at playgrounds and parks sitting with their legs open or doing splits.
If Dugard showed any sign of non-compliance, he threatened her with his stun gun and threats to sell her or to subject her to sex with his dog or his wife.
It appears that Garrido also used the Bible and mentions of God to manipulate Dugard. He repeatedly told Dugard before raping her that it would be the final time because he had been reading the Bible and God was helping him with his problem.
Dugard, who describes herself as having been painfully shy with her family and peers, expresses being, at the time, confused and emotionally torn between a desire for attention and repulsion for their crimes against her.
"I was naïve and desperately alone," she shares. "I was locked in a room all by myself for days on end and he was my only contact with the outside world. All I could do was survive and endure."
That she did.
Dugard survived nearly two decades of captivity in the Garrido compound despite several sightings by neighbors, customers of Garrido's printing business and even parole officers.
She was discovered at age 29 after University of California Berkeley police officers called Garrido in for questioning.
Dugard says she wrote the memoir, in part, to hold Garrido accountable for his actions.
"Phillip Garrido believes no one should find out what he did to an eleven year old girl ... He also believes he is not responsible for his actions," she wrote.
Rather, he chooses to believe that his 18-year escape is "the work of angels" and that the story of Dugard's kidnapping is, according to a 2009 interview, a "heart-warming story."
Last year, the El Dorado County Superior Court postponed criminal proceedings against Garrido to determine if he was mentally competent enough to stand trial.
News accounts reported that Garrido claimed to hear the voices of angels and God, and said he had developed a device through which he could control sound with his mind.
Garrido's delusions could be a result of his drug abuse. Dugard recalls in her book that he constantly abused speed, crank (crystal meth) and marijuana and bragged about out-smoking his friends. Garrido also took some medical drugs – what Dugard calls an "enabling therapy."
Dugard, however, notes that Garrido was a master manipulator who had convinced her that she needed him and had to protect him.
"It is incredible, the depth of his manipulation," she describes. "It did not feel like manipulation at the time. Only distance and time have revealed what life was there and what life looks like outside."
Garrido was determined competent for trial. He was later found guilty and was sentenced to 431 years in prison.
In her new life on the outside, Dugard has enrolled her two children in school. She is also a part of the JAYC Foundation, whose mission is to ensure the timely treatment of families that are recovering from abduction and the aftermath of other traumatic experiences.
Dugard says she is no long protecting Garrido's secrets.
"I believe that everyone should know exactly what he and his wife Nancy were doing all these years in their backyard," she wrote.
A portion of her book, now an Amazon bestseller, is being donated to the JAYC foundation. The foundation offers food, equine and animal therapies. The animal therapy is apt since Dugard's pets were a source of comfort throughout her ordeal.
