In 1972, at the age of 21, Phillip Garrido had his first arrest. The charge: sexual assault of a minor. Four years later, he kidnapped and raped Katherine Callaway, a crime for which he received a 50-year sentence in the federal Leavenworth Penitentiary. During his trial, Garrido testified to masturbating while sitting outside middle schools and going on drug binges. After serving 11 years in federal prison and an additional seven months in Nevada State Prison, he was released in 1988 to parole authorities in Contra Costa County, Calif. For much of the next 20 years, as befitting a convicted sexual predator placed on sex offender registries, police and social workers often dropped by Garrido’s house.
Yet it wasn’t until a sharp-eyed official at the University of California-Berkeley became suspicious that police raided his house and discovered the awful truth: that Garrido was guilty of the 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard. Snatched off the street at age 11, Dugard was held in Garrido’s backyard for 19 years, where he repeatedly abused her and until she and two children he had fathered were rescued in 2011.
