CA- Jaycee Dugard case: Phillip Garrido apparently avoided sex offender registration for years

This case gives new meaning to bizarre...

9-22-2009 California:

For eight years after Jaycee Dugard's abduction, through the sexual bondage of her teen years and the birth of her two girls fathered by Phillip Garrido, state and local authorities likely had no clue that a convicted sex offender was living at the house on Walnut Avenue near Antioch.

It appears Garrido didn't register as a sex offender in California until 1999, despite his 1976 convictions in Nevada for kidnapping and raping a female casino worker, and the fact he was under federal parole supervision over those years.

It may be nobody ever told him to register, a top federal parole official said.

There may be many others like him — people who were convicted of sex crimes in other states, moved to California and have since flown below the sex offender radar, a state Department of Justice official acknowledged.

"He came to us in 1999, when he was in that (unincorporated) Antioch address, and since then for 10 years he has registered as required," said Contra Costa County sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee of Phillip Garrido. "I can't account for what happened before that, or even where he was."

State authorities refused to detail Garrido's registration history. But El Dorado County sheriff's officials say Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were living at the house since at least 1991, when police say the couple snatched Dugard, then 11, from her South Lake Tahoe street and spirited her back to the house.

The couple have pleaded not guilty to 29 felony counts in Dugard's kidnapping and a series of alleged rapes between the day of her abduction and December 1997.

Cranston Mitchell, vice chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission, declined to disclose the address that Garrido gave when he transferred to the supervision of a federal parole agent in California in late 1988. He moved to California shortly after serving 11 years of a 50-year federal sentence for the 1976 kidnapping, and another seven months in state prison to complete his sentence on the rape charge.

Mitchell said the commission does not keep records detailing a parolee's supervision.

But he and Deputy Attorney General Janet Neeley, who oversees the state's sex offender registry, both suggested he could easily have slipped through the sex registry cracks.

For one, state laws varied at the time. Nevada didn't launch its sex offender registry until the late 1990s, long after Garrido moved back to California. Also, he was on federal parole for kidnapping, not rape. The rape conviction came in Nevada state court. Only in 1999, when his federal sentence expired, did Garrido fall under state parole supervision, through an agreement between Nevada and California.

His federal parole officer in California probably knew about the Nevada rape conviction, Mitchell said, but may not have thought Garrido needed to register in California. Only later did sex offender registries gain the spotlight, he said.

"I can't say if they knew about the law or not. It's very possible nobody even knew that the (registry) law existed," Mitchell said.

California's registry, one of the nation's oldest, started in 1947. Public notifications began in 1996, and the state in 2004 launched the Megan's Law Web site. It now reveals mug shots, addresses, convictions or other information on more than 65,000 sex offenders, including Garrido.

A scenario similar to Garrido's "could have happened a bunch of times," Neeley said.

With new laws and computer databases to track sex offenders across state lines, a federal or state parolee like Garrido would probably not escape notice, said Neeley, who is also a member of the California Sex Offender Management Board.

But some states still do not notify sex offenders that they must register if they move out of state, though it's required under federal law.

So if the sex offender is off parole or probation, it can happen.

"What if an offender comes in from New Jersey and (New Jersey) didn't notify them they had to register when they move to a new state? Nobody's given them notice of their duty," Neeley said. "There could be quite a few."

Had Garrido been on the registry back in the early 1990s, when it was much smaller, he might have drawn scrutiny from local law enforcement at some point.

Or not. Even in 2006, when a neighbor reported "several tents pitched in the yard with people living in them," "young children in the tents" and that Garrido said "he was psychotic and had a sexual addiction," the deputy who responded to the 911 call never checked the sex offender registry.

He visited the home, met with Garrido at the front of the house, and left without entering. ..Source.. by John Simerman, Contra Costa Times