Kidnap victim's 'Fritzl-type hell'

Aug 28 2009

A man alleged to have kidnapped the woman - missing for 18 years, who has just walked into a California police station - has also been accused of fathering two children with her during that time.

In echoes of the Josef Fritzl case - the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while he imprisoned her in a cellar - Jaycee Lee Dugard has told police that she was kept in a shed at the end of her kidnapper's garden and was forced to have two children with him.

Jaycee and her two daughters were kept in complete isolation at the rear of a house in Antioch, California, where Phillip and Nancy Garrido live, police alleged.

The Garridos have been arrested and are in police custody at El Dorado county jail.

The woman and the children appeared to be in good health, but police added that "living in a backyard for 18 years had taken its toll" on Jaycee. The children have never been to school and have never been to a doctor.

El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said she had spent most of her time in sheds, tents and outbuildings to isolate her from the world.

Jaycee was snatched by two people in a car from a bus stop outside her home in 1991. Police said they are "99% certain" the woman who walked into Concord police station almost two decades later is Jaycee.

Phillip Garrido is being held on suspicion of kidnapping, rape by force and lewd and lascivious acts with a minor.

In a press conference, a spokesman for the El Dorado Sheriff's Department said Jaycee's two children - aged 11 and 15 - were born and brought up in the shed, which had electricity and a "rudimentary shower".

It also emerged that Mr Garrido was convicted of rape and kidnap in Nevada in 1971.