Finding religion proves to be Garrido's undoing

CALIFORNIA - As police yesterday combed the 58-year-old Garrido's squat bungalow in Antioch, California, for clues that may link him to the murder of nine prostitutes, further disturbing details of his mental state emerged, helping paint a picture of a bombed-out refugee of California's hippie past.

Garrido spent most of the 1970s tripping on LSD, bingeing on cocaine and smoking pot, before an 11-year prison stretch for kidnapping and raping a woman in a storage unit he had converted into a "sex palace", with sex aids, hardcore pornographic magazines and stage lights.

In the years since his release, Garrido and his second wife, Nancy ran a small printing business that earned them enough to get by.

Nevertheless, they made some neighbours uneasy. Garrido was known locally as "creepy Phil", while Nancy, who had married him in 1981 while he was still in prison, was described as "standoffish".

Her brother-in-law has been quick to suggest that Nancy was a "robot" who "would do anything" Garrido asked and there is some evidence she was in thrall to her 6ft 4in husband.

On her blog, she asks for people to come forward to invest in her husband's music. "The profits from your investment will double, that's how confident I am about his music," she promised.

About five years ago Garrido developed a fascination with hearing voices, believing that he had some sort of telepathic hotline to angels. His conversations became peppered with a wired mix of psychological mumbo-jumbo and religion, allusions to mind control and choice biblical references.

"This all began by God removing a problem from my shoulders that behavioural scientist [sic] believe is not possible to remove," he said on a blog. "Since then my life has seen major improvements allowing me to stand here today a free man."

In July, Garrido appeared at the offices of a local telecoms firm and claims to have showed how "the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world".

Garrido formed a not-for-profit company, Gods Desire, with its own website, to spread his vision. He claimed to have created a device that would "pronounce words through my own mental powers", which were "unearthly in nature".

The Garridos have pleaded not guilty to 28 charges involving the kidnap, rape, sexual assault and false imprisonment of Jaycee Lee Dugard, an 11-year-old girl who was snatched from a bus stop near her South Lake Tahoe home in 1991. The abduction attracted national attention. For a long time, Jaycee's stepfather, Carl Probyn, was the prime suspect.

Repeated "forcible rapes" of Jaycee produced two girls, now aged 11 and 15. Police claim the couple kept Jaycee and the two children in their backyard, which housed tents and sheds that could not be seen from the outside, hidden by trees and vegetation.

"None of the children have ever been to school, they've never been to a doctor," said Fred Kollar, El Dorado County undersheriff. "They were kept in complete isolation in this compound."

But as Garrido became obsessed with religion, he started to run extraordinary risks, taking Jaycee and the children to public places where he would lecture bemused passersby on the threat of government mind control and the need to "honour the Creator".

It was while he was preaching on the University of California's Berkeley campus that a police officer spotted the two little girls. They had pale complexions and their attitude caused the officer, Ally Jacobs, to study them closely. "The younger daughter was staring directly at me, as if she was looking into my soul, with this eerie smile on her face. I just got a weird, uneasy feeling."

Questions revealed that Garrido was a registered sex offender, and had a parole officer. Jacobs phoned the officer, saying she had spoken to the 58-year-old and his daughters. "Garrido doesn't have any daughters," Jacobs was told. "At that point, my stomach just sank," she recalled.

Summoned for a parole interview, Garrido appeared with his wife and Jaycee and the children, and was arrested by police shortly afterwards. In a bizarre phone interview with a local television station after his arrest, Garrido claimed to have left documents with the FBI explaining his motives. He said people would hear "a powerful, heart-warming story".

The police lost no time claiming credit for solving a long-running abduction mystery. "The diligent questioning and follow-up by the parolee's agent of record led to Garrido revealing his kidnapping of the adult female," the California Department of Corrections said.

But in 2006 the police had received an emergency call that said Garrido was housing children "in tents in his backyard" and also accused him of being a "psychotic sex addict". Despite this, the police never searched behind his house.

"Organisationally, we should have been more inquisitive or curious and turned over a rock or two," Contra Costa County sheriff Warren Rupf said.

Since last December officials - including parole agents and sheriff's deputies - had visited the Garridos some 16 times for a variety of reasons yet had failed to detect anything was wrong.

"Here was a prisoner who was a very great danger to the community," said state senator Tom Harman. "The parole people knew it, he was supposedly being checked three times a month, and he was still able to perpetrate this crime that lasted over 18 years."

More questions are mounting. The charge sheet against the Garridos alleges that they would take Jaycee, whom they called Allyssa, into Contra Costa County "with the intent to commit rape".

The Contra Costa sheriff's office said nine prostitutes were killed in the area between 1998 and 2002 and their bodies found dumped in industrial parks in Pittsburgh and Bay Point, near where Garrido once worked. Investigators have named him as a "person of interest".

WIFE ACCUSED OF EQUAL PART IN ABDUCTION, RAPE

Nancy Garrido played an equal role in her husband's alleged crimes, according to a 16-page charge sheet filed in California by US prosecutors.

Nancy Garrido is accused along with her husband Phillip of kidnapping Dugard "for sexual purposes".

Prosecutors accuse Nancy Garrido of "forcible rape", committing a "forcible lewd act upon a child" and of "false imprisonment by violence".

They allege she "did unlawfully have and accomplish an act of sexual intercourse with a person, to wit, Jane Doe (the alleged victim), not his/her spouse, against said person's will, by means of force, violence, duress, menace and fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on said person and another".

In total, Nancy Garrido faces 16 charges dating from June 10, 1991 - the day Dugard was abducted - to August 26, 2009, the day she reappeared in public.

The allegations raise questions about the relationship between the Garridos, who were married while Phillip was serving a prison term for kidnapping and raping a 25-year-old woman in California.

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