Police teams say they have found a small bone fragment while digging next to the home of the man accused of kidnapping and sexually abusing Jaycee Lee Dugard.
Detectives with dogs trained to find human remains have been searching 58-year-old Phillip Garrido’s property and the garden next door, where he used to be caretaker, for possible links to other unsolved sex crimes, including the murder of prostitutes.
Jimmy Lee, a spokesman for Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department, said that it would be several weeks before tests showed whether the fragment was human or animal.
The bone was found on Sunday in the next door neighbour’s garden in Walnut Avenue in Antioch, he said, adding that several other pieces of evidence were also removed.
Jaycee was 11 when she was abducted on her way to school in the South Lake Tahoe area, 18 years ago. Long assumed to be dead, she was in fact living in squalid tents and sheds in the Garridos’ back garden, and had had two children by her abuser.
Advertisement
Mr Garrido and his wife, Nancy, 54, were arrested last week and charged with 29 counts connected to Jaycee’s kidnapping, rape and imprisonment, after police employees at the University of California, Berkeley, became suspicious of him and contacted his probation officer.
Last night fresh details emerged of Mr Garrido’s troubled inner life, in court papers relating to his conviction 32 years ago for the earlier kidnap and sexual assault of a young woman in the South Lake Tahoe area.
During his 1977 trial he admitted to being sexually fascinated with young girls, prowling through quiet neighbourhoods as a ‘peeping Tom’, leering at children as young as seven and exposing himself to them as he fantasised about rape.
He testified that he took LSD and cocaine as sexual stimulants and that he frequently masturbated in public places including the “side of schools, grammar schools and high schools, in my own car while I was watching young females”.
At his trial in February 1977, in Reno, Nevada, his attorney tried to have him declared insane because of his heavy drug use, but the judge over-ruled this and Mr Garrido went on to testify.
Advertisement
He admitted to abducting a woman and taking her to a rented storage unit described by investigators as a “sex palace” with items for playing out his fantasies. He said that he did not think what he did was wrong.
“I have had this fantasy and this sexual thing that has overcome me,” he said.
“I had this fantasy that was driving me to do this, inside of me; something that was making me want to do it without - no way to stop it.”
The 25-year-old said that he had started using marijuana and LSD within a month of high school graduation and that he was arrested in 1969 for drug use. He said he also used cocaine and other “uppers and downers”.
He said he did not believe he was harming his victim, even though he handcuffed her, bound her and taped her mouth shut before raping her.
Advertisement
“I don’t go breaking into people’s houses,” he said. “I don’t go to hurt anybody.”
He said he was working with a minister in jail “getting close to God”. He told his own attorney that before finding God, “I couldn’t feel shame,” for the rape.
Mr Garrido talked briefly about his upbringing, testifying that his parents never beat him and stopped disciplining him after he turned 10.
“My father never did take any restrictions of beating me or disciplining me, and my mother spoiled me,” he said.
Mr Garrido described himself as “very happily” married at the time of his offence. “She is beautiful,” he said of his then wife.
Advertisement
The victim testified that Mr Garrido tapped on her window as she was pulling out of a food market on the way to see her boyfriend and told her his car had broken down. He asked for a lift and then attacked her, handcuffing her and tying her up.
She said that Mr Garrido discussed his sexual fantasies while driving her to a storage unit he rented in Reno, where he assaulted her for more than five hours until a police officer saw the victim’s car and knocked on the door of the building.
She told the jury that she asked Mr Garrido why she was chosen and he responded: “It just happened that you happened to be attractive and that is a fault in this case in your case, you know, at this time.”
Dr Lynn Gerow, a court-appointed psychiatrist who examined him in December 1976 and found him fit to stand trial, described Mr Garrido as a tall, thin and “unkempt” man who appeared to suffer from “a mixed sexual deviation” and chronic drug abuse.
“The latter may be responsible in part for the former,” Dr Gerow wrote, in a three page report.
Advertisement
Dr Gerow said Mr Garrido was the second of two siblings, reported emotional conflict with his parents in his formative years, later worked on and off as a musician and increasingly abused drugs, including LSD. He was married at the time to a casino dealer.
“He was preoccupied with the idea of sex and admitted to a history of several sexual disorders,” the doctor said.
A month before Mr Garrido’s trial, neurologist Dr Albert F Peterman wrote that he had found no hard evidence of brain damage when he examined the suspect.
“LSD made him quite aggressive, which he realises,” the doctor noted. “He had used LSD prior to his alleged offence, but remembers the details of the abduction and sexual activity quite well.”
The doctor said Mr Garrido had appropriate concern about his criminal case. “He states that he is looking forward to going to court and has found religion and feels his life will change for the better.”
There were concerns at the time of his first trial that Mr Garrido may have made other kidnap attempts. The judge was told that he was also suspected of trying unsuccessfully to kidnap another woman an hour before he succeeded, but this detail was not revealed to the trial jury.
Shortly before Mr Garrido took the witness stand in his trial, the prosecutor told the judge, “We think by pointing to and questioning the defendant about prior specific acts prior to this incident, we can show he is following a pattern of attempting to kidnap and attempting to and raping, other women.” He did not elaborate.
Mr Garrido was sentenced to 50 years to life, but served only 10 years in a federal prison in Kansas before he was granted parole. He belatedly admitted to raping the woman and served seven months for the rape conviction in a Nevada prison before being granted an early release in August 1988. Miss Dugard’s kidnap happened less than three years later.