JOIN USDaughdrill was met by a polite young woman with blonde hair who Garrido had said was his daughter Allissa.
“She was the design person; she did the art work; she was the genius,” Daughdrill said.
Daughdrill said he had regularly exchanged e-mail messages and even spoken on the phone with Allissa, but that she had never hinted at her real identity or at the secret of her life with Garrido.
The woman, in fact, was Jaycee Dugard, the authorities say, and on Friday, Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy, 54, were arraigned on more than two dozen counts of kidnapping, rape, false imprisonment and other charges in connection with Dugard’s abduction in 1991 as she walked to a bus stop in South Lake Tahoe. She was 11.
Dugard and her two daughters — both fathered by Garrido— had been living in a squalid compound hidden behind Garrido’s plain single-story house.
Her seemingly normal interaction with customers of Garrido’s printing business was just one of the many revelations on Friday in the bizarre and unfolding story about her life over the last 18 years.
Dugard was reunited with her real family after revealing her identity to Garrido’s parole officer on Wednesday.
“Jaycee expressed some regret, like guilt when she saw her mother, that she hadn’t escaped,” Probyn said. “She is feeling guilt for having bonded with this guy the way she did. He had her for 18 years. We had her for 11.” According to the authorities, Dugard, 29, and her children, 11 and 15, lived in a dirt-floor compound about the size of a tennis court and consisting of several ragged tents, hand-built sheds and small efforts at creature comforts: a set of wind chimes, for example, and a dingy couch.
Probyn said Dugard had told her mother that she sometimes was forced to live in a box, and the police said that at least one of the sheds was soundproof. As investigators prowled the compound this week, a wire cage could be seen next to a tent.Even as Garrido — a convicted sex offender — and his wife pleaded not guilty on Friday in the kidnapping case, the police searched their home for clues in a string of nine murders. The killings, from 1998 to 2002, involved mostly prostitutes, many of whom were sexually violated, said Capt Daniel Terry of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department.
Investigators said the victims’ bodies had been found in industrialised areas of the cities of Pittsburg and Bay Point, which are near Antioch. Captain Terry said the police believed that Garrido once worked at the location where several of the bodies were found.
How Dugard and her children lived outside in a lot surrounded by other homes without detection for nearly two decades, as the authorities suspect, remains one of the questions in the case.
The New York Times