Jaycee Lee Dugard, now 29, was Phillip Garrido’s “sex slave” for 18 years, said David Garner in the London Evening Standard, starting when the registered sex offender kidnapped her, at age 11, from her home in South Lake Tahoe. In a case with “strong comparisons” to incestuous Austrian dungeon monster Josef Fritzl, Garrdio, 58, repeatedly raped Dugard in his backyard compound—a 10-foot-square shed at first—and she had two of his children.
Looking at the smiling photos of a young pre-abduction Jaycee Duggard, said Ceri Radford in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, it’s “impossible to imagine what happened next,” or to understand how Phillip Garrido can now describe her sick ordeal as ultimately a “heart-warming story.” This isn’t a “sappy, Oprah-style ‘I’ve turned my life around’ transformation story,” it’s a tale of “one man’s evil and one girl’s destroyed decades.”
According to his brother, Phillip Garrido has been a troubled “fruitcake” for decades, said Damien Bulwa in the San Francisco Chronicle, and wife Nancy Garrido, whom Phillip met while serving a 1971 prison sentence for abduction and rape, is “a robot” who will do anything Phillip says.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The “apparent complicity of his wife” is one of the questions under the larger, “How could his happen?” said Bruce Maiman in Examiner.com. But there are plenty more, like: How did police, parole officers, and neighbor miss all the “alarm bells”? How does a registered sex offender on Megan’s list keep a girl, then three girls, incommunicado in his suburban backyard for 18 years?
His neighbors in Antioch, Calif., knew he was “more than a little strange,” said Robert Salonga in the San Jose Mercury News, but he seemed more “annoying” than dangerous. He pushed “handmade religious literature” on them and invited them to sermons, and his blog, tied to his “Gods Desire” business, shows a “preoccupation with mind control,” especially controlling sound with his mind.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.