Jaycee Dugard

On the morning of June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was walking from her home to a bus stop on Pioneer Trail Road in South Lake Tahoe, California. A gray sedan pulled up and a woman in the passenger seat used a stun gun on Jaycee, pulling her into the car. Jaycee's stepfather witnessed the abduction from a distance but could not reach her in time. The car sped away.

Despite a massive search and investigation, Jaycee could not be found. The case was featured on America's Most Wanted and generated thousands of tips, none of which led to her recovery. The gray sedan was never traced. For 18 years, Jaycee remained missing and was presumed dead by many.

In August 2009, Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender who lived in Antioch, California—less than 200 miles from South Lake Tahoe—brought two young girls with him to a meeting at the University of California, Berkeley. A campus police officer became suspicious and contacted Garrido's parole officer. Investigation revealed that the girls were Jaycee's daughters, born during her captivity. Jaycee, now 29, was found alive in a complex of tents and sheds in Garrido's backyard, where she had been held since 1991.

Phillip and Nancy Garrido had kept Jaycee in increasingly elaborate backyard structures, hidden behind a six-foot fence. She had been sexually assaulted repeatedly and bore two daughters—at ages 14 and 17. The case exposed catastrophic failures in the parole and sex offender monitoring system, as Garrido had been a registered sex offender under parole supervision the entire time. Both Garridos pleaded guilty and received sentences of 431 years and 36 years to life, respectively.