Kidnapped girl found 18 years later

Aug 28 2009

A woman walked into a police station 18 years after she was kidnapped, having had two children by the man who snatched her as an 11-year-old girl, police said.

Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted by two people in a car from a bus stop outside her home in 1991.

Police said they were "99% certain" the person who recently walked into Concord police station in California was Jaycee.

Convicted rapist Phillip Garrido, 58, and his wife Nancy, 54, have been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and other offences, the El Dorado Sheriff's Department said.

Mr Garrido is also being held for investigation of rape by force, lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and sexual penetration, a spokesman for the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department said.

The kidnapped girl is believed to have borne two children, now aged 11 and 15, by her captor in a chilling echo of the Josef Fritzl case - the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while she was imprisoned in his cellar.

A spokesman at the Sheriff's Department said Jaycee was apparently kept in a shed in the backyard of the Garridos' house where her children were born and brought up. DNA tests are now being carried out to confirm the woman's identity and she has been reunited with her mother, although officers admitted that it "would be a long and ongoing process".

The Garridos were arrested on Wednesday after Mr Garrido - who was convicted of rape and kidnap in Nevada in 1971 - admitted the kidnapping under close questioning by a parole officer. He had been called in after being seen with two children at the University of California, Berkeley.

El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said Jaycee and her two girls were kept in complete isolation in a compound at the rear of the house in Antioch, California, where Mr and Mrs Garrido lived. They appeared to be in good health, but added that "living in a backyard for 18 years had taken its toll" on Jaycee. The children have never been to school and never been to the doctor, he said.

The undersheriff described the compound where the family was imprisoned as a "series of sheds" with electricity and a "rudimentary shower".