Jaycee Dugard

Case background and investigation

Jaycee Lee Dugard was 11 years old when she was abducted on the morning of June 10, 1991, while walking from her home to a school bus stop in the South Lake Tahoe area of California. Wikipedia's account, drawing on court records and news coverage, places the abduction in Meyers, just south of the city, and says her stepfather saw her being pulled into a car and tried to follow. At the 2011 sentencing, the judge said Phillip Garrido had used a stun device on her during the abduction, NBC News reported.

She was taken to the Garridos' home in an unincorporated area near Antioch, in Contra Costa County. According to NBC News, she was kept first in a backyard shed and later in tents behind the house. During her captivity she gave birth to two daughters fathered by Phillip Garrido. Wikipedia gives their birth dates as August 1994 and November 1997, when Dugard was 14 and 17.

Phillip Garrido was on parole throughout. He had been convicted in the 1970s of kidnapping and raping a woman, served about 11 years in prison and was paroled in 1988, according to a People report carried by Yahoo. California took over his supervision from federal authorities in 1999. A November 2009 report by the California Office of the Inspector General, described by ABC News, found that the corrections department had failed to supervise him properly and had missed repeated chances to discover the people living behind his house.

The case broke open in late August 2009. According to ABC News, Garrido appeared on the University of California, Berkeley campus with the two girls, and campus police employees who checked his background learned he was a registered sex offender and alerted his parole office. When he came to a parole office meeting on August 26, 2009, accompanied by his wife, Dugard and the children, Dugard's identity was established and the Garridos were arrested.

On April 28, 2011, both defendants pleaded guilty in El Dorado County Superior Court. KABC reported that Phillip Garrido admitted 14 counts, including kidnapping and rape, and that Nancy Garrido admitted kidnapping and a rape-related charge. On June 2, 2011, Judge Douglas Phimister sentenced Phillip Garrido to 431 years to life and Nancy Garrido to 36 years to life; both waived their right to appeal, according to NBC News. Dugard did not attend, and her mother read a statement on her behalf.

California paid Dugard a $20 million settlement over the failures in parole supervision. According to Wikipedia, a separate suit against the federal government was rejected by the Ninth Circuit in 2016. Dugard published memoirs in 2011 and 2016 and founded the JAYC Foundation.