CA- Jaycee Lee Dugard abductor Phillip Garrido 'wanted cute blonde girl'

9-16-2009 California:

Phillip Garrido selected the pretty blonde girl with the gap-toothed grin as his prey during a "child shopping" trip because she looked "cute" , his wife Nancy has told investigators in California.

But the couple decided not to try and snatch 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard that day in June 1991 because she was walking through South Lake Tahoe with a bunch of school friends.

Instead, they apparently trailed her to her home before returning the next morning to complete their horrific mission. Mrs Garrido allegedly jumped out of their car and grabbed her as she walked to nearby a bus-stop, while her husband remained behind the wheel.

She has described the chilling precision that went into the abduction as prosecutors put together the case for multiple charge of kidnapping and rape against the husband and wife. "That's the one I want," Garrido told her when he saw Jaycee in the resort town. "She's cute, but she's with the other kids. Let's come back later and get her."

Michael Cardoza, a Californian attorney and former prosecutor, relayed his coldly calculating words to The Sunday Telegraph after being briefed on Mrs Garrido's testimony by law enforcement contacts. Another source close to the investigation has confirmed that was her account.

"This was nothing less than a child shopping trip," said Mr Cardoza. "It just makes their actions all the more horrendous and reprehensible."

The disturbing revelation will further fuel the anguished debate in California about the state's child protection laws, which effectively encourages scores of former sex offenders to congregate in neighbourhoods - like the outskirts of Antioch - where there is little local government and not much sense of community.

It will also add to the frustration across America that so many people who interacted with the Garridos - including police, public officials and close neighbours - failed to grasp what was going on.

Mrs Garrido's version of how Jaycee was snatched throws an even more sickening light on the advice her husband dispensed a decade later to a child safety campaigner for whom he was printing a kidnap prevention fact sheet. "Phillip offered a couple of suggestions if we were updating the leaflet," Janice Gomes told The Sunday Telegraph.

"He said: 'Children should never walk to a bus-stop by themselves. They are no match for an adult so there should always be an adult with them,'" she recalled.

Garrido also dismissed the theory of "safety in numbers" for a group of unaccompanied children, telling her that a determined attacker could always pick off one of the bunch as the others fled.

"It just seemed like sensible advice that children should always be in the company of an adult, even if you think they are safe," said Mrs Gomes, who set up the National Community Empowerment Programme after one of her young daughters was molested three decades ago.

Yet despite his weird personality, a tendency to burst into song and outlandish religious beliefs, it never struck her that the man known as "creepy Phil" by youngsters in the area might have been speaking with such horrifying personal knowledge about the dangers faced by lone children at bus-stops.

And Garrido, now 58, was printing the flyers from the business he ran in the same backyard lair that was home to Jaycee - and by then the two daughters he allegedly fathered after repeated rapes - in Antioch, 45 miles east of San Francisco.

Nor was Mrs Gomes the only one of Garrido's customers to whom he made what are now haunting observations about caring for children's welfare Maria Christenson, who runs a recycling business in nearby Pittsburg, recalled her printer visiting her office at a time when she was bringing her young child with her to work. "You're doing the right thing, Maria," she recalled him telling her. "You should always watch your kids. You can't trust others to look after them."

And another former client has now uncovered unnerving evidence of Garrido's attraction to young girls - in his own music.

In 2006, Marc Lister, who runs a glass shops, was given a CD by Garrido of his songs but put the music away unplayed until last week. Now that he has listened to the collection of suggestive rock songs and trippy synthetic ballads, there are clues aplenty to Garrido's warped sexual tastes.

"The way she walks, yeah, subtly sexy/What can I do? I fall victim too/A little child, yeah, look what you do," goes one lyric that apparently blames a little girl for making him fall victim to her sexual allure.

Another lyric with a troubling message runs: "Mother in your eyes, deepness in your pride/played well when I first met 'ya/Saved from the days, I kept saving you, but in the darkness you remain/Everybody pays in the human race/Being abused and used as devices."

Mr Lister told yesterday's Contra Costa Times: "I think there's some sort of a message here. I think it's disturbing. I'm surprised he wrote lyrics about some of the things in here, whether for the girls or his own mental outlet. It's a little bit twisted. It's not right."

In another song on the CD, entitled Voices are Real - probably recorded in the sound-proofed room that has been discovered in his sprawling backyard - he declares: "For every little girl in the world/They want to be in love, yeah/You're just the same, go play a game/Just tell me that you want me."

And: "I will tell you about the only one/She's a dream, dream come true/With a note saying you're my baby blue."

Garrido, they all now realise with the benefit of chilling hindsight, knew exactly what he was talking and singing about. He and his wife allegedly kidnapped Jaycee in 1991, just three years after he was released from parole for a violent drug-fuelled 1976 kidnap and rape of a casino croupier.

And it has since emerged that Jaycee was not his only alleged child rape victim. In 1972, aged 21, he was charged with drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl at an Antioch motel, but the case was dropped when she chose not to testify in court. There is "a good chance" there are other victims, said Lt Leonard Orman of Antioch police.

Garrido's first wife has also come forward to describe how he attacked her, threatened to gouge her eyes out and had a violent and voracious sexual appetite. And Californian police are investigating whether he was involved in the abduction of two other girls, one of whom looked strikingly similar to Jaycee, who went missing after his release.

While Garrido's own words and acts are now helping paint a fuller picture of his life, his wife's past - and motives - remain much more of a mystery.

What is known about her points to an existence of extreme contradictions. For Mrs Garrido worked as a respected nursing aide caring for the disabled and the old at the same time as she helped her husband keep Jaycee and her two daughters captive in their backyard.

Indeed, investigators believe that her nursing expertise allowed her to play the role of midwife when those children, now aged 11 and 15, were born during the 1990s.

Her impressive collection of nursing references dated back to 1981 - the same year that she married Garrido in a prison ceremony, well aware that her new husband was serving a then 50-year sentence for rape and kidnapping.

She was born Nancy Bocanegra in Bexar County, Texas, in 1955, the oldest of several children in a Mexican-American family that moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1972. Some time after Garrido's 1977 incarceration at Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas, she met him while she was visiting an uncle who was a fellow inmate.

She was reportedly an impressionable Jehovah's Witness who fell for the handsome young prisoner - who was already claiming that he had found God and put the drug-fuelled sex and violence of his youth behind him.

They married when she was 26 and he was 30.

Mrs Garrido moved from Denver to Leavenworth in the mid-1980s to be nearer her husband, renting cheap one-bedroom apartments in converted townhouses. And she was already supporting herself by working as a nurse, judging from the CV she later presented. After Garrido's release, the couple moved in with his mother and step-father on Walnut Avenue, in a scruffy working-class neighbourhood of Antioch.

For the next 10 years, Mrs Garrido worked with disabled patients as a nursing and physical therapy aide in the area - even as Jaycee and later her girls were forced to live in a squalid network of tents and shacks in a compound hidden from neighbours by trees and high fences.

For 38 days in 1993, she was Jaycee's sole jailer after Garrido was locked up for breaking his parole by smoking marijuana. Yet even then, she made no effort to alert the authorities - seen as crucial evidence by the prosecution that while she may have had a domineering husband, she was actively complicit in the whole operation.

This double life has amazed her former colleagues at the ARC nursing agency which took her on in 1994 after she passed a state background check. "The people who received services through her, they liked her very much. She was a good employee and she was well-liked by the people she worked with," Barbara Maizie, the agency's executive director, told a local newspaper. "They cannot believe that this is possible. They're totally shocked."

Her family in Denver - her divorced parents and at least four brothers still live there - were just as stunned when her role emerged 10 days ago. In the first comments by a relative, her brother David blamed Garrido for his sister's plight as he recalled a young woman who would go fishing and canoeing.

"I've got nothing bad to say about my sister," he said. "He [Garrido] turned her into that. She was normal until she hooked up with that guy."

The 46-year-old looked bleary-eyed and exhausted when he opened his front door in a Denver suburb. "My mother looks even worse," he said.

His sister left the ARC agency in 1998 to look after her elderly bed-ridden mother-in-law - a role she carried out with diligence and care, according to next-door neighbour Helen Boyer. "Nancy was great with Pat [Garrido's mother]," she said. "She devoted herself to that woman."

She was always unassuming but also became increasingly reclusive. "The wife was like a hermit," said Damon Robinson, another neighbour. "She looked like she had no spirit."

Prosecutors believe she was a full partner in the kidnapping and rapes and will demand multiple life sentences against both Garridos, who pleaded not guilty in their first court hearing.

Gilbert Maines, her court-appointed attorney, appears to be preparing to argue that she was brainwashed, in thrall to her husband's personality and religious beliefs, as some acquaintances and family members have claimed.

But legal experts emphasise that even if he did hold a domineering sway over her - and he of course claimed to be able control minds and hear angels through a special black box- that would be little defence in court.

Mr Maines added that his client came to view Jaycee and the girls as "family". He said: "She loved the girls very much and she loved Jaycee very much."

Miss Dugard, 29, who has spent more than a week at a secret location with her daughters, the mother she last saw 18 years ago and other relatives, has also reportedly told them she formed a "bond" with the couple who stole her away.

She worked in Garrido's printing business, oversaw graphic designs and met clients. Indeed, The Sunday Telegraph was shown a card advertising the business that featured her in a glamorous pose, head resting on her hands, blonde hair falling across her made-up face.

She looks just like a happy young woman, even an aspiring model. That she could have appeared so contented is another mystifying twist to a near-inexplicable story. ..Source.. by Philip Sherwell in Antioch