Californian kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard feels guilty for forming a bond with the man who abducted her as a schoolgirl and held her prisoner for 18 years, her stepfather said on Friday.
Carl Probyn, who watched helplessly as 11-year-old Dugard was snatched from outside her home in South Lake Tahoe in 1991, said his former stepdaughter had been reunited with her mother and half-sister after being found this week.
Dugard, now 29, was held prisoner by convicted rapist Phillip Garrido in a secret backyard compound in Antioch, east of San Francisco, where she was reportedly raped and gave birth to two children by Garrido.
Her near two-decade ordeal came to an end on Wednesday when authorities learned her identity.
However, Probyn told reporters that the woman was now struggling to come to terms with what had been inflicted upon her.
“Jaycee feels that she has real regrets for bonding with this guy,” Probyn told reporters outside his home in Orange, south of Los Angeles.
Dugard and the daughters she had with Garrido had felt nervous having dinner in public after being freed this week.
“They had to leave because the girls weren’t used to having people around them,” Probyn said.
Dugard, however, “remembered everything” from her childhood, Probyn said after speaking to his ex-wife, who had been reunited with her daughter at a motel outside San Francisco.
Probyn’s other daughter Shayna, who is Dugard’s half-sister, had also attended the reunion.
Shayna had told her father that Dugard “looks really good, almost like when she was abducted. She looks good, the girls [Dugard’s daughters] are good, everybody’s running around. They’re all together.”
Meanwhile, the Californian couple has denied kidnapping the 11-year-old girl and keeping her as a sex slave for 18 years as questions mounted over how their alleged crimes went undetected for so long.
Garrido and his wife, Nancy, 54, pleaded not guilty to 29 felony counts including kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment, following the discovery of Dugard on Wednesday, nearly two decades after the blonde schoolgirl was snatched outside her home in 1991.
Dugard, now 29, was confined in a makeshift prison of sheds and tents in what police have described as a “backyard within a backyard” at Garrido’s home in Antioch.
On Thursday, police revealed that convicted rapist and registered sex offender Garrido had abused Dugard and fathered two daughters with the captive, now aged 15 and 11, who had also been kept in the compound.
In a bizarre interview with a local TV station on Friday, Garrido acknowledged that his abduction of Dugard from outside her South Lake Tahoe home in 1991 had been a “disgusting thing.”
But Garrido, described by neighbors as a religious fundamentalist who wanted to set up his own church, insisted he had “turned his life around” since kidnapping Dugard and that the case was a “heart-warming” story.
Dugard, meanwhile, was reunited with her mother and half-sister at a motel outside San Francisco on Friday. Her former stepfather Carl Probyn said Dugard was struggling to come to terms with what had been inflicted upon her.
Experts said it could take years for Dugard to recover.
“I’m very concerned about her condition and her ability to heal,” said Alison Walls, a clinical psychologist at the University of the Rockies. “She will really need to be in a trauma program and treated by specialists and it will take a long time.”
Dugard was found after police reported Garrido acting suspiciously at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was trying to hand out religious literature propounding claims he was able to channel the voice of God.
He was summoned to a meeting on Wednesday with his parole officer who, having previously visited the Garrido home, found it strange that in addition to his wife Nancy he brought along two girls and a woman he called “Allissa.”
Dugard’s real identity emerged during the course of the meeting and Garrido and his wife Nancy were detained.
Nancy Garrido sobbed throughout a five-minute court hearing on Friday while her husband stood expressionless nearby. Both entered not guilty pleas through defense attorneys.
Meanwhile, neighbors of the Garridos expressed shock that the secret prison could go unnoticed for so long.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to be here this long and not know what’s going on. How could that go on under all of our noses?” said one neighbor, who gave his name only as Steve.
“When I first met him [Garrido] I thought he was a nice guy. Now I’d just like to see him shot or hung,” Steve said.
Police in Contra Costa County meanwhile admitted that they had received a tip in November 2006 that children were living in Garrido’s backyard, but failed to follow it up properly.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion