Prosecutors release evidence in Jaycee Lee Dugard case

Posted by Rose Giorza on July 12, 2011 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

As Jaycee Lee Dugard’s book went on sale Tuesday, prosecutors in Placerville released haunting new evidence from the Phillip and Nancy Garrido kidnapping case.

El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson said he consulted with the Dugard family and “determined that certain details of this horrific case need to be revealed.”

The evidence includes photographs of videotape cases that Phillip Garrido tried to destroy. The Garridos had made the tapes of Phillip Garrido’s sexual assaults of Dugard, who was kidnapped as an 11-year-old in 1991 and held captive for 18 years.

Pierson’s office enlisted the aid of NASA scientists to resurrect images from the tapes as part of the mountain of evidence they gathered in preparation for trial. Pierson’s office did not make those images public.

But the kidnappers never went to trial. Phillip Garrido, 60, pleaded guilty last month and is now in prison serving a 431-years-to-life sentence. Nancy Garrido, 55, is serving a 36-years-to-life sentence.

Pierson has scheduled an Aug. 3 session at the Legislature with state Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Roseville, to discuss the failures that allowed Dugard to remain captive for so long. He said he released the items Tuesday to “highlight the gravity and severity of the mistakes made, and in hopes of improving the supervision and detection of sexual predators.”

The evidence includes two videotapes the Garridos took of children at parks, including one in which Garrido instructs his wife on how to use and position the camera.

During that tape, he strums a guitar and sings loudly, interrupting once to ask, “You got me real good?”

“Yeah, I can see you really good,” Nancy Garrido answers.

But the camera remained focused on children at the park. The Garridos were using the song as a ruse to make onlookers believe Nancy was taping her troubadour husband.

Pierson’s office has previously said it has evidence of a 1993 tape that Nancy Garrido made in the back of a van of a 5-year-old child “for the express purpose of providing her rapist husband with sexually perverse entertainment.” The child was released unharmed.

Other evidence released Tuesday included a videotape Nancy Garrido took of a state parole officer searching their Antioch home sometime between 2000 and 2007, when Dugard would have been held captive there.

Pierson also released a few pages of federal parole documents; a booking photo of Garrido from 1972, when he was accused of rape in a case that was later dismissed; and some documents from a 1977 trial in which Garrido was convicted of kidnapping and raping Katie Callaway-Hall, a South Lake Tahoe blackjack dealer, a year earlier.

Prosecutors also released a letter Garrido sent to a judge describing his efforts in prison at improving himself; the parole certificate Garrido received in 1988 after serving only 11 years of his 50-year sentence in the 1976 rape; and a map of the South Lake Tahoe area indicating Dugard was Garrido’s fourth rape or attempted rape victim from the area.

Callaway-Hall was attacked Nov. 22, 1976, the same day Garrido tied to kidnap another woman. Six months before that, he was charged with rape and kidnap in South Lake Tahoe, but those charges were dropped because authorities believed the Callaway-Hall case would put him in prison for decades.

The Dugard kidnapping and the other cases all occurred within a few miles of each other.

Pierson’s office also released a copy of a scrap of paper with Dugard’s name on it, as well as her mother’s name, Terry Probyn.

That came from the August 2009 meeting at Garrido’s Concord parole office, where the Garridos, Dugard and her two daughters had come after a UC Berkeley police officer became suspicious of him during a campus visit and alerted parole officials.

Dugard initially told officers her name was “Alissa” but later conceded that was not true. She recounts in her book how she was too afraid to say her name out loud after all those years, so she wrote it down, ending the mystery of her disappearance.

Diane Sawyer’s Sunday “Primetime Special” interview with Jaycee Dugard was the No. 2 most-watched program of the week nationally.

Here in the Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto market, it was No. 1. ABC and its affiliate News10 will rebroadcast the two-hour program at 9 p.m. Saturday.

The re-airing will include “new investigative material,” according to ABC News, including material from rapist Phillip Garrido’s federal parole file, which was released to The Bee this week as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to A.C. Nielsen overnight ratings for Sacramento, the broadcast reached nearly 20 percent of the local television-viewing audience during its airing.

Nielsen ratings supplied by News10 showed that the “Primetime” broadcast drew an 11.2 rating and 19.8 share of households in the market. Each ratings point represents 1 percent of the market’s estimated 1.4 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show. During Sunday night’s broadcast, approximately 34.7 percent of area households were using television.