Parole logs shed light on 18-year-old mystery

2-13-2010 California:

It took nearly a year for state parole agents to account for the fact Phillip Garrido was a sex offender. By then, in 2000, the first California parole agent to supervise him had recommended his discharge from a lifetime parole term from Nevada, and seemed to want him off his caseload.

"On parole from NV for life. (Why did I take this case?)," the agent writes in parole logs that state corrections officials released Friday night under a court order.

Two months later, the agent again recommended Garrido for discharge.

There would be three more requests over the years for the man authorities say kidnapped Jaycee Dugard with his wife, Nancy, and repeatedly raped her in a hidden backyard compound and fathered Dugard's two girls.

The pages of often sketchy, sometimes illegible, parole logs describe dozens of visits to the Garrido house on Walnut Avenue near Antioch over the years, and several "visual, cursory" searches of the house, with no reports of trouble.

Later, in 2008, his parole agent reported that Garrido "was acting very strange, weird to say the least by ranting on about God and loudly saying songs." Ten days later, the agent showed up at the house to find a 12-year-old girl there. The agent "conducted a visual cursory search by walking around the entire house with negative results," the log shows. He questioned Garrido about the young girl, "whom he states is his brother's daughter." The log entry ends there.

Those are some of the details that led a state watchdog agency in November to issue a scathing report describing numerous lapses and missed chances to unearth Dugard's identity and end what became an 18-year-old mystery. The report criticized the state agency for wrongly classifying Garrido as a low-risk offender, failing to talk with neighbors and others, and failing to see visible power cables running behind the backyard fence, among other problems.

Garrido, 58, served 11 years of a 50-year federal sentence in the 1976 kidnapping of a South Lake Tahoe woman he raped in a converted storage shed in Reno. He was under federal parole supervision when authorities say he and Nancy Garrido kidnapped Dugard in 1991 and spirited her back to the house near Antioch. He was discharged from federal parole in 1999, then he came under California's watch through an agreement with Nevada, which had sentenced him to lifetime parole for the rape.

"I want to thank you for your cooperation over this period of supervision and I hope that you continue to do well," wrote his federal probation officer in 1999.

Among other details from the newly released documents:

More recently, Garrido was an active participant in a parole outpatient clinic, according to a 2009 parole progress report. The clinic provides treatment and supervision to mentally ill parolees and their families.

Nancy Garrido videotaped some of the parole agent visits to the house. Often, Phillip Garrido's mother, Patricia Franzen, would be there.

Garrido pushed for years to be discharged from parole. In April 2008, Garrido wrote to his parole agent, seeking to avoid having a GPS monitor strapped to his ankle and touting a religious presentation that would shake the world. He wrote that it "will gain the attention of world leaders causing the State of Nevada a public and political crisis that will allow the state of California to release me . . ." The next day, the agent recommended him for discharge.

By 2009, Garrido claimed he was no longer active in the family printing business and listed his occupation as "church."

Corrections officials released the 120 pages of parole documents only after three news organizations sued under the state Public Records Act. An appeals court judge late Thursday refused to issue a stay. ..Source..