CALIFORNIA 1991 Cold Case Solved — She was Hidden in Plain Sight for 18 Years 

We’re learning more about what happened to Jaycee Dugard in the days and months  after her kidnapping 18 years ago, and it is as troubling as you’d expect.  her in the backyard in a tent or one of the outbuildings  back there. They left her in that backyard for 3 and 1/2 years.  If it weren’t for our next  guest, Jaycee Lee Dugard could still be living in captivity.

 But their quick response after coming face-to-face with suspect Phillip Garrido cracked the 18-year-old abduction case wide open.  Um well, there were there were numerous  indicators. He was um he was very passionate about what he was what he was um trying to uh deliver the event that he wanted to host, but nothing that he said was really making a lot of sense.

 They just weren’t acting like normal young girls would act. They were very pale. They were very The youngest one was very intensely staring at me. Um their answers um to our questions seemed very clipped and rehearsed. They they just seemed really lifeless.  That is over. You know, he Nancy and Phillip are behind bars.

 I am angry, you know? But then the other on the other hand I have two beautiful daughters that I can never be sorry about.  We were in that situation together, and they know what happened. And it’s time to move on and start start fresh.  On the 17th of June, 2002, a fire crew was dispatched to a house on Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California.

The call was routine. A child had hurt a shoulder in a swimming pool. They treated the injury and filed the report, and it went into a county record system where it sat untouched for 7 years. Here is the problem with it. The state of California had been sending officers to that exact address since 1999. Trained officers whose job was to walk that property and write down what they saw.

 According to every one of those reports, there was no swimming pool at that house. There were also no children. Nobody ever put those two facts side by side. The fire department had its record, the parole division had its. Both accurate, both filed correctly, and no one in either building had reason to go looking for the other.

 That is the shape of this case. Not a mystery. Not a lack of evidence. A girl who vanished from a bus stop at 11 and came back at 29. And in between, a paper trail so complete that a state investigator would later reconstruct where she had been the whole time. From documents that already existed. A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story.

 The video contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. I’m going to walk you through that paper trail, one document at a time. Subscribe now because you’re going to want to be here for the last 3 minutes. June the 10th, 1991. Myers, California. A mountain community southwest of Lake Tahoe. 5,000 people.

The kind of place families move to because it felt safe. 8:00 in the morning. Jaycee Lee Dugard, 11 years old, walked from her front door toward the school bus stop. It was close enough that her stepfather could watch her go, and he did. He saw a two-tone gray sedan come down the street past the house. He watched it make a U-turn.

 He watched it stop near Jaycee. The passenger door opened. A woman reached out and pulled her in, and the car accelerated away. He got on a bicycle and went after it. He could not catch it. What followed was one of the largest searches in El Dorado County history. Sheriff’s deputies, state investigators, the FBI out of Sacramento, volunteers, dogs, aircraft.

 Every tip was worked, and every tip was worked in the wrong direction. The description was a gray sedan with two adults in it. No plate, no marks. In a state with millions of gray sedans, that is not a lead. It is a category. So, the search stayed close to home, then pushed into Nevada because state lines are where you look.

 It never went west. It never reached a house on Walnut Avenue in Antioch, 168 miles the other way where the car had already arrived. That was not negligence. In 1991, there was no reason to look at Antioch. The reason would come later and it would arrive in a file. Everything in this next section comes from a state report you can download today. That’s how we work here.

Hit subscribe. It’s the only reason these episodes get made because a file did exist. It had existed for 15 years before that morning in Myers and it was thick. In November of 1976, a man named Phillip Craig Garrido approached a woman outside a store in South Lake Tahoe and asked for a ride saying his car had broken down.

 She agreed. He directed her to an empty lot, restrained her, and drove her an hour to a storage unit in Reno, Nevada that he had modified in advance for exactly this. She was found because a patrol officer noticed a broken lock at 3:00 in the morning and checked it. A federal court sentenced Garrido to 50 years for kidnapping.

 A Nevada court gave him 5 years to life on the sexual offense. Two courts, both building to make certain he did not walk back out. He served 11 years. In January of 1988, the federal government released him on parole and handed him to Nevada. 7 months later, Nevada released him, too, onto lifetime parole supervision and he went to live at his mother’s house in Antioch.

 That is the file that existed in June of 1991. And there is one more document in it. The strangest piece of paper in this case. In March of 1999, 8 years into her being held at that address, federal authorities discharged Garrido from federal parole early. The certificate that ended it contains a commendation.

 It notes that he responded positively to supervision and credits him for his personal accomplishments. It is reproduced in full as an appendix to the state’s report. You can read it. It is a letter congratulating a man on his progress, written while the person he had taken was living in his backyard. Nevada still had him on lifetime parole, and he was living in California under an interstate compact all 50 states belong to.

 When a parolee lives in your state, you supervise him. So, in June of 1999, the California Department of Corrections took over the file. The first thing that happened was an argument. Garrido told his new agent he should not be on parole at all. That when the federal government let him go, Nevada’s hold ended, too. For 5 months, the only activity on the case was the argument about whether there was a case.

Then came the classification. Department policy said any parolee required to register as a sex offender should be placed at high control, the most intensive level, for at least a year. Garrido had convictions for kidnapping and a violent sexual offense. He was exactly who that rule was written for.

 He was assigned to minimum service, the least intensive level the department has. For the next 6 months, the total contact the state of California had with Phillip Garrido was three office visits, some phone calls, and five short reports he filled out himself. It took until May of 2000 for someone to notice he was a registered offender and move him up a level.

 In January of 2001, an agent sat down to assess his risk. The form gives three options: low, moderate, high. The agent selected low, and I want to read you what that box says, because this is the hinge the decade turns on. The low-risk category describes an offender whose controlling offense, the crime that sent him to prison, is non-sexual, and whose sexual offending is opportunistic rather than a driving pattern.

 The high-risk box, 3 in down the same page, describes an offender whose controlling offense is sexual, who shows an established pattern, and who needs a specialist caseload. Garrido’s controlling offense was taking a woman off a street, restraining her, driving her an hour, and abusing her in a unit he had prepared beforehand.

 There is no reading of that crime under which it is non-sexual, and none under which it is situational. Everything needed to reach the right box was in the file the agent was holding. Eight years later, 3 weeks after the arrest, the department ran him through an updated assessment tool. It came back high-risk.

 The Inspector General put it plainly, that first decision set the tone for everything after it. Everything in this case turned on someone not checking. That’s what my book, Not on My Watch, is about. Links in the description. Once a file says minimum risk, the file starts protecting itself. Every decision after that gets made by someone reading a document that says, “This man is not the priority.

” Over the 10 years California supervised him, parole agents made face-to-face contact with Garrido at his home on at least 60 occasions. Now, you may have heard a version of this case in which nobody ever went into that backyard. That is not what the record says, and the truth is worse. Agents did go into the backyard. One drew a diagram of the house.

 The most recent agent said explicitly that he went out back and that the yard appeared to end at the inner fence. It did not. The property continued well past it into an area of tents, sheds, and outbuildings built up over years, screened by tarps and an 8-ft fence, and running from the corner of the house along the side fence through a hole cut in that fence and on toward the back of the lot were utility lines, cable, telephone, electrical wire, visible from several points in the yard, photographed later by state investigators from the

exact positions an agent would have been standing in. Nobody wrote them down. Not one agent in 60 visits over 10 years ever recorded noticing a wire running to a part of the property they believed did not exist. And those wires had an ordinary explanation available. Lines running somewhere they shouldn’t are a classic indicator of stolen electricity or a computer someone doesn’t want found.

 Following that wire required no imagination. It required looking. Agents are also required to make what the department calls collateral contacts, talking to neighbors, to local police, to anyone who sees what happens when the officer isn’t there. Reviewers found no record of any agent speaking to a single neighbor on that street. When investigators knocked on those doors in 2009, they got answers immediately.

Two had seen children at the house, and one man told them something difficult to hear. He had lived in the house whose backyard shared a fence with Garrido’s. In the summer of 1991, he was about eight, and he had a conversation through the chicken wire between the two yards with a young blonde girl on the other side. She told him her name was Jaycee.

She told him she lived there. Garrido came out and took her inside. Shortly afterwards, the 8-ft fence went up. That was weeks into the 18 years, and the boy who heard it was exactly the kind of person the rules exist to send an officer to talk to. Local agencies had material, too. At least 30 logged interactions involving that address.

 Nothing required parole agents to ask, so nobody asked. On the 30th of November, 2006, a resident next door called it in. The report is short and specific. Several tents in the neighbor’s yard with people living in them, and children there. The caller was concerned because of what the neighbor had been convicted of. No action was taken by the responding officers.

That is the call, 15 years in, that came closest. It went nowhere because the person who took it had no way of knowing it was the second time that address had produced a record involving a child, and no way of knowing about the swimming pool. Then, on the 17th of June, 2008, an agent went to the house for a routine visit, and found a 12-year-old girl there. He asked.

 Garrido said she was his brother’s daughter. The agent accepted it and left. There is no record of follow-up. State investigators later checked that story. They contacted the brother. It took almost no effort. He did not have a daughter. By then, Garrido was wearing a GPS tracker. In April of 2008, as part of a statewide push to monitor every sex offender on parole, the department fitted him with an ankle unit.

 Department leadership called that program aggressive monitoring. Because his file still said low risk, he went on the passive tier, data uploads on a schedule, and an agent looks at it if the system flags something. The system flagged a great deal. Agents could draw a boundary on a map, so the system would tell them if he traveled beyond the 25-mile limit his parole imposed.

 That boundary was never drawn. Reviewers later pulled a single 32-day stretch and found he had gone outside it seven times. A curfew zone did exist and it generated 14 alerts that he had left the property overnight. All 14 were ignored. Then there is the number that stops you. Across that same period, the tracker lost signal almost every night, typically for 9 hours or more. The system reported it 335 times.

276 of those alerts were never acknowledged at all. The remaining 59 were acknowledged and then nobody recorded doing anything about them.  [clears throat]  The department later suggested the construction of the house might have blocked the signal while also confirming that parolees have been known to mask a signal deliberately.

 And there was one more thing in that data. If an agent had opened the map, the dots cluster in a part of the property the department did not believe existed. The tracker was telling them where he spent his time. It had been telling them for over a year. Nobody opened the map. Everything so far is a system failing with every advantage it had.

 What ends this case is two people with no advantages at all. Subscribe now. This is the part that changes how you think about the whole thing. The 24th of August, 2009, the University of California, Berkeley. Garrido walked into the campus events office to ask about a permit for a religious event of his own making. Two young girls were with him.

 The person he spoke to was Lisa Campbell, manager of the special events unit. She had never heard of this case. No file, no background, nothing but a man talking in a way that did not sit right. Grandiose, insistent, describing an event he claimed would be enormous and government connected. And the two girls with him were, in her words, sullen and submissive.

 Campbell did not confront him. She said afterwards she was deliberate about how she treated him because she did not want him deciding not to come back. She booked him in for the next afternoon and went to a campus police officer named Ali Jacobs. Jacobs ran the name Philip Craig Garrido, registered sex offender on parole, convicted of kidnapping and a violent sexual offense in the 70s and nothing anywhere in that record about children.

Next day both women sat in that meeting and kept it normal. He was relaxed. He talked about his beliefs and handed them a book he had written. Jacobs later said she kept looking at the younger girl for anything, a glance, an expression, and got nothing back. When it was over, Jacobs called his parole agent and got a voicemail.

 She left a detailed message about what she had seen. The agent acted that day. He drove to the house with a second agent, detained Garrido outside, and searched the residence. He found the wife and the mother, no girls. On the way to the parole office, Garrido explained that the girls were relatives’ children, that he had permission to take them, and that a parent had already collected them.

 At the office, the agent and a supervisor went through the file together and reached a conclusion that is hard to read. A month earlier, in July of 2009, a new condition had been added to Garrido’s parole prohibiting him from being in the presence of minors. Sitting in that office, the agent and supervisor decided it did not apply to him on the grounds that his convictions did not involve minors.

 He also had a separate long-standing condition barring contact with females aged 14 to 18. And sitting in that same file was a 1972 arrest in California on charges involving a 15-year-old girl, dismissed when she declined to testify and never removed from the record. They drove him home and told him to come back in the morning. He came back.

 On the 26th of August, he brought his wife and three young girls with him. As they arrived, the agent finally reached Ali Jacobs by phone and heard her account directly, including that the girls had called this man Daddy, and that he had called them his daughters. The agent’s own understanding from 10 years of files was that Garrido had no young children.

He separated them. The oldest gave a first name and said she was the mother of the other two. The agent thought she looked far too young and asked her age. She said 29 and laughed about how often people assume she is their sister. She had no identification. She would not give a phone number for anyone who could confirm who she was.

 She said she had learned long ago not to give personal information to anyone. In another room, Garrido was saying the three girls were his brother’s children, and that he did not know his brother’s address or phone number. Officers from Concord arrived. The young woman apologized for lying and offered a new account that she had been hiding from an abusive husband.

 Then a Concord sergeant took Garrido into a room alone. He came out and told the parole agent that Garrido had just admitted he was the father of the two younger girls. The questioning resumed, and in that room, in a parole office in Concord, California, Phillip Garrido admitted what he had done in 1991. When the officers went back and told the young woman, she stopped maintaining the story. She gave them her name.

 She said she was Jaycee Dugard. She was 29 years old. She had been 11 when she walked toward that bus stop. In April of 2011, both Garridos pleaded guilty. Phillip Garrido to kidnapping and 13 further felony counts involving sexual offenses. Nancy Garrido to kidnapping and a felony assault count. Both waived appeal.

 The agreement was structured so that Jaycee Dugard and her daughters would never have to take a witness stand. On the 2nd of June, 2011, at the El Dorado County Superior Court in Placerville, Judge Douglas Fimister sentenced Phillip Garrido to 431 years to life and Nancy Garrido to 36 years to life. The judge called him the poster child for what a sex offender supervision system exists to prevent.

 Jaycee Dugard did not attend. Her mother, who had spent 18 years looking, read her daughter’s statement aloud in that courtroom. She had chosen not to be there, she wrote, because she refused to give them another second of her life. In November of 2009, the state’s office of the Inspector General published its findings. Across the 123 months California supervised Phillip Garrido.

 Reviewers concluded he had been properly supervised for 12 of them, a failure rate of 90%. The day after the arrest, before any of that was known, the department had held a press conference praising its agents and stating that Garrido complied with his parole conditions throughout. That was technically true.

 He was never formally violated. The report’s finding was that he should have been repeatedly. In July of 2010, California settled with Jaycee Dugard and her daughters for 20 million dollars. A federal review published the following year found the earlier federal supervision, the decade during which she was actually taken, had been clearly substandard.

 And the Inspector General issued a warning that had nothing to do with this family at all. At the time, roughly 7,000 people were being monitored by GPS in California. About 4,800 of them on the passive tier, the one that missed 335 alerts. The report’s language was blunt. A program like that gives the public a false sense of security.

I keep coming back to that fire department call. June 2002, a child, a swimming pool, an address. It was not a tip, it was a form filled out correctly by people doing their jobs well, describing two things that could not exist at a house the state had been visiting for 3 years. It went into a drawer because no system would put it next to a parole file.

 That is what this case is, not a clever concealment, not a man who outsmarted anyone, a man who lied badly and repeatedly, a brother’s daughter, three sisters, and who was believed every time because believing him was faster than making a phone call. Two people ended it, neither of whom had any of the information.

 They noticed something wrong in a room and did not talk themselves out of it. Everyone who had the file looked at the file. The two who didn’t looked at the girls. If this one stayed with you, the comments are open and I read them. If you know anything about a case we cover here, that’s where it goes. We’ll we be back with another case file which took place 1973 in California with a 13-year-old girl named Linda Ann O’Keefe who walked home from summer school in Newport Beach and never made it.

 That case stayed open for 45 years until investigators used a technique that did not exist for most of the time they were looking. Subscribe now so it comes to you the day it drops. I’ll leave you with the number because it’s the part I can’t put down. 60 visits, 10 years, one wire running along a fence pointing straight at her.

 This has been the Crime Bureau.