Dugard speaks about 18 years as sex slave, life after release
By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times
As 14-year-old Jaycee Dugard struggled in a crude backyard shed to deliver her baby daughter, the serial predator who had abducted and raped her stepped in to unwrap the umbilical cord that trapped the infant.
“She was beautiful,” Dugard said of the child she birthed three years into her captivity in Northern California. “I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore. I knew I could never let anything happen to her.”
ABC News' Diane Sawyer, left, speaks with Jaycee Lee Dugard in her first interview. Photo/Jill Belsley-ABC News
In an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer broadcast Sunday on ABC, Dugard, displaying remarkable poise and smiling often, provided chilling details about the 18-year ordeal she endured at the hands of her captors, an increasingly deranged parolee named Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, who aided the abduction and condoned his rapes.
Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life,” to be released Tuesday, tells how the Garridos informed her she was pregnant when she was 13. At the time, she knew she was putting on weight and waddling, but she didn’t know why.
A naive, toothy-grinned blond when she was taken captive at age 11 in 1991, Dugard is now 31 with brown, shoulder-length hair and impossibly young skin — the result, she said, of years spent with little exposure to the sun. Around her neck she wears a pine cone on a chain.
A pine cone, she told Sawyer, was the last thing she grabbed after Phillip Garrido shocked her with a stun gun and Nancy Garrido dragged her into the car as she walked toward the school bus on the street in front of her South Lake Tahoe home.
Hope Phillip Garrido is thrown in a cell where guards look the other way as his cell mate makes him regret every min. that he was allowed to live!!
And while Garrido clearly is pure evil to the core and the one responsible for this tragedy, I hope the federal & state agents that were supposed to check up on him and failed to even to do a basic search of his backyard at least lose their pensions! Plain & simple they failed to do their job! And it’s a very small price to pay relative to what Jaycee has suffered!!
But ironically this interview occurred the same week it came out El Dorado Co. Sheriffs scammed their way to fake degrees in order to increase their pay, yet apparently are keeping their jobs? The Dugard kidnapping occurred in their jurisdiction! Maybe if the Sheriffs Dept. was spending its time chasing down the very basic leads of those who had previously committed sex crimes in So. Lake Tahoe, such as Garrido, instead of finding ways to scam the taxpayer, Jaycee would’ve been found sooner.
That this crime occurred right under society’s nose is what’s so incredibly shocking!!
But finally, hopefully Jaycee and her children can find some peace and enjoyment as they get on with their lives!!!!!!!
don’t become what you hate?