It's both an extraordinary and sickening story out of northern California: The return of a kidnap victim 18 years later. Jaycee Lee Dugard (DUH-gird) was kidnapped at age 11 near her South Lake Tahoe home on Jun 10, 1991 and wasn't seen again despite a massive search, nationwide publicity and one of the largest police investigations in the region. Then, by sheer luck, she's identified by law enforcement and her kidnappers are arrested.
That would be Phillip and Nancy Garrido (guh-REE-doh) 58 and 55, respectively) arrested after he was brought to a parole office in Concord, accompanied by a woman and two small children.
But there are many disturbing details of this story.
Jaycee was held captive the entire 18 years in Antioch, CA, (a Bay Area suburb). Garrido, a registered sex offender, had been brought in for questioning because someone reported suspicious activity involving him and the two children the day before at the U-C Berkeley campus. It turns out the two children were Jaycee's. She was raped by Garrido. She and the children spent most of their lives in tents and sheds in a hidden backyard behind the Garrido house, accessible only through a very narrow opening covered by a tarp. One of the sheds was completely soundproof. They couldn't be seen from any angle, either from the street or from homes in the neighborhood.
One investigating officer said, "You could walk through the house and through the back yard and never know there was another set of living circumstances in that backyard."
And yet, a Google Earth map of 1554 Walnut Ave. reveals eveals both backyards, with the backyard tents and sheds plainly visible from above.
Both suspects are in custody on assorted kidnapping, rape and conspiracy charges.
Some background details:
--There's no connection between kidnapper and the Jaycee's family. Police say it was simply a random kidnapping.
--Jaycee is in good health though "living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll."
--Jaycee was taken to the kidnapper's residence immediately after being abducted and had remained there ever since. The children were born there. They are 11 and 15, which would've made Jaycee 13 when she was raped and impregnated the first time.
--The children were home schooled and had never been to a doctor, but weren't malnourished and seemed to be in good physical condition. They were kept completely isolated in this backyard "compound."
--All the backyard tents and sheds had electricity furnished by extension cords from the house. There was a rudimentary outhouse and a rudimentary shower, similar to latrine facilities at a campground.
--The parole agent became suspicious when Garrido arrived at his office with Jaycee and her two children. He had never seen either Jaycee or the kids in his visits to Garrido's house. Once he began questioning the circumstances, Jaycee came forward with what happened. Garrido was arrested at the parole office.
--Garrido had deep religious beliefs that combined faith with fascination in the paranormal. He reportedly "conducted religious revivals in a tent and said he had developed a device through which he could control sound with his mind," who said "the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world."
--Garrido ran a printing business. Neighbors described him as "very religious," "a little different" and "weird."
--Garrido ran a printing business. Neighbors described him as "very religious," "a little different" and "weird."
Now what?
This story is likely to unfold over many weeks and months, from the details about how an 11-year-old could be kept imprisoned without neighbors becoming suspicious to the reunification with her original family. Personally, I can't think of any punishment that would deliver any measure of justice. It's rare for an 18-year-old kidnap case to end with a reunion which is what makes this story so amazing, but the event prior to that are what makes this story so sickening. And most difficult of all, trying to find some level of closure that delivers an appropriate justice.
We often are confronted with heinous crimes like these and in an effort to make sense out of what happened, we try to determine an appropriate action. In other words, what is justice?
Doing justice is something which we wrestle with frequently in our society and it is such a difficult task for us. Some people who believe doing justice is an uncomplicated phenomenon. Just take the harshest possible sentence and administer it to someone who has made you angry by their actions and you will have balanced the scales of justice. It doesn't happen. That's revenge, but it's not justice.
We may rest easier if we try, convict and execute the kidnappers with all possible haste. Personally, I'd be happy to "pull the switch." That might make a lot of us sleep better at night, but it does nothing to undo what has happened to the victims --Jaycee and now, two children. Her life was taken from her; the two children have never had a real childhood.
Real justice would be some sort of resolution and peace for the victims. I don't know if that's even possible, and that makes this a difficult matter for us. There is no explanation, no excuse for what the Garridos did. We want one, but there is none. It's a level of closure that doesn't exist.
For the family -- Jaycee, for her parents, for these two children-- this will be a very long road. Jaycee and these two children had virtually no life they could call their own. The two children called Jaycee, Alyssa. Their world was the secluded quarters of a cloistered backyard. In cases like this, victims are taught by their abductors to lie all the time --lie about where they are, who they are, where they're from. They have no identity. And you find in abduction cases of this magnitude, where someone is reunited after many years, that the parents who lost their child have much to overcome. They've come to accept they'll never see their child again. Experts in these matters will tell you from experience that it's very hard for the parents when they've gone through so much emotionally in accepting their child's death only to discover that death never occurred. And now you have a child on your hands that after maybe five, 10 or 15 years, both physically and emotionally, you no longer recognize, you no longer know. You come to terms with your child being alive, which is wonderful, but dealing with the terrible trauma that the child has been through that makes her unrecognizable. You are revisited by all the guilt and second guessing you went through at the time of the abduction --all of it undeserved.
In some cases it can represent a gap between mother and child that cannot be bridge. They remain, in effect, strangers --in other words, no closure for the people who deserve it the most. They surely deserve that closure far more than we do in seeking something like the simple execution of two perpetrators. The execution of the kidnappers does nothing to bring back what the victims have lost.
Find a way to resolve that problem with easy measure, and then, I think you've achieved some level of justice.
This isn't exactly a story you can say has a happy ending; it's far from over. Add to this the pressure of a meddling media uninterested in respecting the family's privacy and it's clear the many chapters still to be written in this story are fraught with land mines, making the search for "justice" that much harder, and perhaps impossible.
Police press conference on the Duggard kidnapping and arrest
Comments
another religious freak - go figure.
Parole officer should be given high praise for being on his/her toes and for following through on his suspicions.
Go figure -- To be fair: This guy hardly represents anything Christian in the general sense, let alone evangelical. If you didn't think he was already disturbed by his criminal behavior, the idea that he has his own kind of Hale-Bop type religion thing going would tell you he's far from a religious freak some people associate with over-the-top evangelicals.
As for the police work: Real credit should go to the UC Berkley cop who smelled something wrong with this guy when he was on campus. She notified his parole officer and the parole officer called the guy in, as I understand these still developing details, WITH the two young kids. So kdos to the campus cop and the parole officer.
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