On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard, an eleven-year-old girl, was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop in Meyers, California, United States. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated, even though several people witnessed the kidnapping. Dugard remained missing for over 18 years until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two adolescent girls, who were later discovered to be the biological daughters of Garrido and Dugard, on August 24 and 25 of that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer, Edward Santos Jr, to order Garrido to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. Garrido was accompanied by a woman who was eventually identified as Dugard.
Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were arrested after Dugard's reappearance. On April 28, 2011, they pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping Dugard. Investigators revealed that Dugard had been kept in concealed tents, sheds, and lean-tos in an area behind the Garridos' house at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California, where Phillip repeatedly raped Dugard during the first six years of her captivity. During her confinement, Dugard gave birth to two daughters, who were aged eleven and fifteen at the time of Dugard's reappearance. On June 2, 2011, Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life imprisonment; Nancy Garrido was sentenced to 36 years to life. Garrido is a person of interest in at least one other missing persons case in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As Phillip Garrido had been on parole for a 1976 rape at the time of her kidnapping, Dugard sued the state of California, which had taken over his parole supervision from the federal government in 1999, on account of the numerous lapses by law enforcement that contributed to her continued captivity and sexual assault. In 2010, the state of California awarded the Dugard family US$20 million (equivalent to $28.8 million in 2025). Dugard also sued the federal government on similar grounds pertaining to Garrido's time as a federal parolee, but in a 2–1 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that suit because Garrido had not victimized her at the time he was placed under the supervision of the federal parole system and that as a result of this, "there was no way to anticipate she would become his victim." In 2011, Dugard wrote an autobiography titled A Stolen Life: A Memoir. Her second book, Freedom: My Book of Firsts, was published in 2016.
Background
Dugard family
Jaycee Dugard was born May 3, 1980, in South Lake Tahoe, California. Her mother, Terry Dugard, and her biological father, Ken Slayton, had met while both were on camping vacations in Arizona and had a brief relationship while there. Slayton was not involved in her life, nor in the investigation that followed her kidnapping. When Dugard was seven, her mother married a carpet contractor named Carl Probyn and gave birth to Dugard's half-sister, Shayna, in 1990. Although Dugard was close to her mother and sister, she was never close to Probyn. In September 1990, Dugard's family moved from Arcadia, California, in Los Angeles County, to Meyers, a rural town south of South Lake Tahoe, because they thought it was a safer community. At the time of the abduction, Dugard was in the fifth grade, and anticipated an upcoming field trip.
Kidnappers
The primary offender, Phillip Craig Garrido, was born in Pittsburg, California, on April 5, 1951. He grew up in Brentwood, where he graduated from Liberty High School in 1969. Garrido's father Manuel later stated that his son had been a "good boy" as a child, but changed radically after a serious motorcycle accident as a teenager. He turned to drug use – primarily methamphetamine and LSD.
In later court testimony, Garrido admitted that he habitually masturbated in his car by the side of elementary and high schools while watching girls. In 1972 he was arrested and charged with repeatedly raping a 14-year-old girl after giving her barbiturates, but the case did not go to trial after the girl declined to testify. The following year, he married his high school classmate, Christine Murphy, who accused him of domestic violence and alleged that he kidnapped her when she tried to leave him.
In 1976, Garrido kidnapped 25-year-old Katherine Callaway in South Lake Tahoe, California. He took her to a Reno, Nevada, warehouse, where he raped her for five and a half hours. When a police officer noticed a car parked outside the warehouse and then a broken lock on its door, he knocked on the door and was greeted by Garrido. Callaway then emerged and asked for help. Garrido was promptly arrested.
In a 1976 court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, Garrido was diagnosed as a "sexual deviant and chronic drug abuser". The psychiatrist recommended that a neurological examination be conducted as Garrido's chronic drug use could be "responsible in part" for his "mixed" or "multiple" sexual deviations. He was evaluated by neurologist Albert F. Peterman, whose diagnostic impression was that Garrido showed "considerable evidence of anxiety and depression and personality disorder." He was convicted on March 9, 1977, and began serving a fifty-year federal sentence on June 30 of that year at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
At Leavenworth, Garrido met Nancy Bocanegra, his future accomplice/secondary offender in Dugard's kidnapping, who was visiting her uncle, another prisoner. On October 5, 1981, he and Bocanegra were married at the prison. On January 22, 1988, Garrido was released from Leavenworth to Nevada State Prison, where he served seven months of a five-years-to-life Nevada sentence. Having been granted parole, he was then transferred to federal parole authorities in Contra Costa County, California, on August 26, 1988. Garrido and his wife moved to the city of Antioch and lived in the home of his elderly mother, who suffered from dementia. As a parolee, Garrido wore a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet and was regularly visited by parole officers, local sheriff's deputies, and federal agents.
Abduction
On June 10, 1991, Dugard's mother, who worked as a typesetter at a print house, left for work early in the day. Dugard, who was 11 years old at the time, wore her favorite all-pink outfit as she walked up the hill from her house, against traffic, to catch the school bus. When she was halfway up the hill, a gray car approached her. She thought that the man driving the car was stopping to ask for directions.
The driver, Phillip Garrido, rolled down the window and tased Dugard unconscious with a stun gun before abducting her. His wife, Nancy, dragged Dugard into the car and removed her clothing, leaving only a butterfly-shaped ring that Dugard would hide from them for the next 18 years. Nancy covered Dugard with a blanket and held her down as Dugard drifted in and out of consciousness during the three-hour drive to the Garridos' property, 120 miles (190 km) away in Antioch. The only time Dugard spoke was when she pleaded that her parents could not afford a ransom. The district attorney in the Dugard case believed that Nancy had scouted Dugard as a prize for Garrido.
Probyn witnessed the abduction of his stepdaughter from within sight of their home. He saw two people in a mid-sized gray car – possibly a Mercury Monarch – make a U-turn at the school bus stop where Dugard was waiting, and a woman forcing Dugard into the car. He chased after them on a bicycle but was unable to overtake the vehicle. Some of Dugard's classmates were also witnesses to the abduction. Initial suspects included Probyn and Ken Slayton, Dugard's biological father, though they did not know each other and Slayton had only had a brief relationship with Dugard's mother in 1979, not knowing he had a child. Probyn took and passed several polygraph tests, and Slayton was also quickly cleared of suspicion. The kidnapping led to the breakup of Terry and Carl Probyn's marriage.
Search effort
Within hours of Dugard's disappearance, local and national media in South Lake Tahoe covered the story. In the following days, dozens of local volunteers assisted in the search effort, which involved nearly every resource within the community. Over the next weeks, tens of thousands of fliers and posters were mailed to businesses throughout the United States. Since Dugard's favorite color was pink, the town was blanketed in pink ribbons as a reminder of her disappearance, and as a demonstration of support for her family by the community.
Terry Probyn founded a group called Jaycee's Hope, which directed the volunteer and fundraising efforts. Cassette tapes of the song "Jaycee Lee", along with T-shirts, sweatshirts, and buttons, were sold to raise money for poster materials, postage, printing, and related expenses. Child Quest International and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children were involved in the effort. A reward was offered, which was noted on the posters and fliers. The kidnapping case attracted nationwide attention and was featured on the June 14, 1991, episode of the Fox television show America's Most Wanted. The ensuing years were a continuous effort of child safety awareness, fundraising events, and candlelight vigils marking Dugard's disappearance, keeping her story in the public awareness.
Captivity
Upon arriving at the Garridos' home in an unincorporated area of Antioch, the Garridos took Dugard, her head still covered with a blanket, behind their house, where they had constructed a series of dilapidated tents and sheds. Garrido placed Dugard inside a tiny shed that had been soundproofed. Dugard later stated in her memoir and an interview with ABC News that upon arrival, Garrido handcuffed her and left her naked in the shed, which he bolted shut, warning her that trained Doberman Pinschers outside the shed would attack her if she tried to escape. Right after the abduction, Garrido forced Dugard into a shower with him, which was the first time she had been exposed to an unclothed man. During her first week in captivity, Dugard remained in handcuffs, her only human contact being Garrido, who sometimes brought her fast food and talked to her. He provided a bucket for her to use to relieve herself. A week after the kidnapping, Garrido raped the still-handcuffed Dugard for the first time. He continued to rape her frequently, doing so at least once a week for the first three years of her captivity.
At one point, Garrido provided Dugard with a television, but she could not watch the news, and remained unaware of the search for her. Almost a month and a half after her kidnapping, by Dugard's recollection, Garrido moved her to a larger room next door, where she was handcuffed to a bed. He explained that the "demon angels" let him take her and that she would help him with his sexual problems because society had ignored him. Garrido would occasionally go on days-long methamphetamine binges he called "runs", during which he would force Dugard to keep him company by performing sexual favors and engaging in various other activities with him. Garrido made her listen out for the voices he said he could hear from the walls, and often professed a belief that he was a chosen servant of God. These binges would end with Garrido sobbing and apologizing to Dugard, alternating with threats to sell her to people who would put her in a cage.
Seven months into her captivity, Garrido introduced Dugard to his wife, Nancy, who brought the child a stuffed animal and chocolate milk and engaged in the same tearful apologies to her. Though Dugard craved the woman's approval at the time, in a 2011 ABC News interview she stated that Nancy was just as manipulative as Garrido. Dugard related that Nancy alternated between motherly concern and coldness and cruelty, expressing her jealousy of Dugard, whom she regarded as the one to blame for her predicament. She characterized Nancy, who worked as a nursing home aide, as "evil" and "twisted". When Garrido was returned to prison for failing a drug test, Nancy replaced her husband as Dugard's jailer.
The Garridos' neighbor, Patrick McQuaid, told the San Jose Mercury News that as a child he recalled meeting Dugard through a fence in the Garridos' yard soon after the kidnapping. He said that she had identified herself by the name "Jaycee" and that when asked if she lived there or was just visiting, she answered that she lived there. At that point, Garrido came out and took her back indoors. He eventually built an 8-foot-tall (2.4-meter) fence around the backyard and set up a tent for Dugard, the first time that she was allowed to walk outside since her kidnapping.
The Garridos manipulated Dugard further by presenting her, on two occasions, with kittens that would later "mysteriously vanish". When Garrido discovered that she was signing her real name in a journal that she kept about the kittens, she was forced to tear out the page with her name on it, the last time she would be permitted to say or write her name until her captivity ended eighteen years later. She was never allowed to see a doctor or dentist.
Pregnancy and children
Almost three years into her captivity, the Garridos began to allow Dugard freedom from her handcuffs for periods, though they kept her locked in the bolted room. On Easter Sunday of 1994, they gave her cooked food for the first time. The couple informed Dugard that they believed that she was pregnant. Dugard, aged 13 at the time, had learned of the link between sex and pregnancy from television. Dugard watched television programs on childbirth in preparation for the birth of her first daughter, which occurred when Dugard was aged 14, on August 18, 1994. After the birth of her first daughter, Garrido raped Dugard less frequently, though he would do so when he had taken drugs.
The last time Garrido raped Dugard was the day her second daughter was conceived. Her second daughter was born when Dugard was 17, on November 13, 1997. Dugard took care of her daughters using information learned from television and worked to protect them from Garrido, who continued his enraged rants and lectures.