Phillip Garrido, the religious zealot who allegedly kidnapped an 11-year-old girl and imprisoned her in his back garden for almost two decades, had previously attempted to gouge out his first wife’s eyeballs with a safety pin, it was claimed last night.
The attack on his wife is one of many new details to emerge about Mr Garrido, known as “Creepy Phil” to his neighbours, raising more questions about why the serial rapist, church founder, business card printer and former LSD dealer had not been brought to justice earlier — or kept in prison for the full 50 years of his 1970s rape sentence.
“He’s a monster,” Christine Murphy, who eloped with Mr Garrido in 1973, said in an interview with CBS’s Inside Edition. She said that she had fallen in love with Mr Garrido at high school — in spite of her sweetheart having been accused of raping a teenage girl.
Not long after they had exchanged wedding vows, Mr Garrido is alleged to have turned violent. “He started to get controlling, he started hitting me,” she said. “He smacked me, he told me to grow up.”
At the time Ms Murphy worked at a casino in Reno, Nevada, to pay their bills because Mr Garrido was an out-of-work musician. He would take LSD or smoke marijuana every day, she said, and he flew into a rage when she told him she did not want to have sex with multiple partners. Her most terrifying encounter with her husband came after he saw another man flirting with her.
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“He took a safety pin and went after my eyes,” she said. “He tried to gouge my eyes out with it.”
The first time Ms Murphy tried to run away, Mr Garrido pulled up his car in front of her and dragged her inside — perhaps his first kidnapping. Ms Murphy finally escaped Mr Garrido only when he was convicted of kidnapping and rape and sentenced to 50 years.
She has since remarried and had four children. She thought that her former husband was still in jail until she heard the news last week about the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard. After allegedly kidnapping Jaycee at the age of 11, Mr Garrido had fathered two children with her, the first being born in her back garden prison when she was only 14. “It made me sick to my stomach,” Ms Murphy said.
Mr Garrido, 58, now faces life in prison, as does his wife and alleged accomplice, Nancy, 55. He is also under investigation for the murder of as many as ten women, and yesterday detectives took a bone fragment from land next to his house.
Meanwhile, Mr Garrido’s father, Manuel Garrido, 87, has described his son as being “absolutely out of his mind” and believes him to be capable or murder.
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Mr Garrido’s brother has compared him to the serial killer Charles Manson.
While the police in Antioch, California, where Mr Garrido allegedly held Jaycee in squalid conditions for almost two decades, have already apologised for failing to respond to neighbours’ complaints — an officer who knocked on Mr Garrido’s door didn’t bother to search the property because he didn’t know he was a registered sex offender — attention has now turned to why he was let out of prison in the first place.
It also emerged that more than 100 registered sex offenders live in Mr Garrido’s postal code, perhaps because it is an “unincorporated” area and therefore gets little police attention.
The retired police officer who in 1976 apprehended a strung-out Mr Garrido in the process of raping a 25-year-old woman in a Reno warehouse — which he had equipped with rugs and pornographic magazines, alcohol and theatrical spotlights — told a local newspaper that he was astonished when the man he had put away for life was set free decades before his sentence was due to run out.
And although Mr Garrido allegedly kidnapped Jaycee from South Lake Tahoe — the town where he had snatched his previous victim — detectives seemingly never considered him a suspect.
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“I thought he got sentenced to 50 years to life, so how he got out after 10 years, I’ll never know,” Clifford Conrad, 66, said. “I guess a lot of people dropped the ball his whole life.”
Mr Garrido’s 1976 rape victim, Katherine Hall, told CNN on Monday that Mr Garrido had stalked her when he got out of jail. “I’ve lived in fear ever since,” she said. “I knew he was hunting me.”
Ms Hall had not expected her former attacker to be paroled until 2006 at the earliest. When she made an appointment with Mr Garrido’s parole officer to complain, he told her that there was nothing he could do.
Ms Hall said that she was kidnapped after picking up Mr Garrido as a hitchhiker. He then smashed her head into the steering wheel, handcuffed her and said: “if you do good, you won’t get hurt.” Then he took her to the warehouse in Reno.
She was saved when Mr Conrad drove past at 2am and saw a car parked outside and a light under the door.