Cadaver-sniffing dogs found a possible clue as investigators searched the property of Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnap suspect Phillip Garrido for a third day on Thursday, police said.
Sergeant J.D. Nelson said the two dogs were drawn to the same spot of Garrido’s property in Antioch, east of San Francisco, where police are hunting for possible links between the convicted rapist and two young girls abducted in the 1980s.
Investigators will use ground-penetrating radar on Friday to search the spot marked by the dogs after a concrete slab found in the ground is removed, Nelson said.
“Given the fact that both dogs indicated, we want to move forward,” said Nelson, who stressed it was too early to know whether the dogs were attracted to a cadaver or something carrying a human scent such as a diaper.
Garrido and his wife Nancy are currently in custody facing 29 charges, including kidnapping and rape in connection with Dugard, who was found alive last month, 18 years after she was abducted as an 11-year-old girl.
About five dozen law enforcement officials carrying out the latest search of the Garrido residence and an adjacent property said on Wednesday they had found bones at both sites, though it was too early to tell whether they were human.
Investigators are seeking evidence linking the Garridos to two schoolgirls who disappeared in the 1980s — nine-year-old Michaela Garecht, who was abducted from outside a Hayward grocery store in 1988, and 13-year-old Ilene Misheloff, who vanished in nearby Dublin in 1989. Dublin and Hayward are about 80km southwest of the Garrido home.
The Garridos have pleaded not guilty to kidnapping Jaycee in 1991 and keeping her in a makeshift compound in their backyard for 18 years until her discovery late last month along with her two children believed to have been fathered by Phillip Garrido.
Hayward Police lieutenant Christine Orrey said the search at the Garrido property would probably continue until the middle of next week.
She said authorities hoped to complete their search of inside the Garrido house yesterday, as well as pulling up the concrete site that attracted the dogs.
“We’re going to remove the concrete slab so the dogs can have another sniff at it,” she said.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of