Phillip Garrido is known to the world as the man who kidnapped Jaycee Dugard and held her captive for 18 years before authorities finally discovered the crime. What do we know about this strange and twisted man? Is he a mastermind or a mad man? Or maybe both?
Phillip Garrido’s criminal career didn’t begin with the abduction of Jaycee Dugard. Garrido became hooked on the psychedelic drug LSD while in high school in the late 1960’s, and started dealing the drug to support his own habit. For many years afterwords, LSD would remain his drug of choice, causing him to believe that it endowed him with mystical sexual powers that he intended to wield over his rape victims.
According to Garrido’s father, he was a well-behaved teen before coming into contact with LSD. After that, things began to unravel.
Phillip Garrido’s Previous Rape Victims
Phillip Garrido was only 21 when he began his career as a rapist and kidnapper. In 1972 police arrested him for drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl. After meeting the girl at the public library, he took her to his hotel room and then raped her after she passed out from barbiturates he had given her. Unfortunately, the girl’s family decided against pressing charges to spare her the ordeal of a trail.
In 1973 he met his first wife, who for privacy reasons I won’t identify here. The two were married for only a few years and she divorced him because she could no longer put up with his sick fantasies.
Emboldened by a lack of any punishment for his first crime, Garrido decided to try again in 1976. It was then that he abducted Katie Callaway, a Lake Tahoe casino worker. Pretending to have experienced an automotive break-down, he lured Katie Callaway Hall (as she’s now known) into giving him a ride to a secluded spot where he grabbed her keys away, handcuffed her, and drover her to a storage unit he was renting that he had turned into a kind of sick love palace for his victims.
At the storage unit, Phillip Garrido repeatedly raped Katie Callaway after taking several hits of LSD. His crime was fortunately discovered, and Callaway saved from who know what kinds of depredations, when police became suspicious of the car he had left parked outside the storage unit. When police investigated, the naked Callaway ran from the building, and Garrido quickly confessed the crime.
For his rape and kidnapping of Katie Callaway, Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison. He would serve only 11 of those 50 years. While at Leavenworth prison in Kansas, he met Nancy Bocanegra, a Jehova’s Witnesses member who was the niece of a fellow prisoner. The two would marry while Phillip Garrido was still in prison, and she would later become his co-conspirator and fellow jailer.
Jaycee Dugard Abduction
In 1991 Phillip Garrido, with the consent and co-operation of his wife Nancy, decided to abduct a young girl to become his sex slave and to bear him children. Jaycee Dugard was to be that gire. Nancy Garrido evidently had proven to be infertile and was at any rate under Phillip Garrido’s spell. Her brother-in-law, Ron Garrido, has called her a “robot under his control.”
In June, 1991, while she was on the way to a school bus stop, Jaycee Dugard was abducted by the Garridos and borne away to their Antioch, California home. After her abduction, Jaycee was held captive in the Garridos backyard compound for three years before she was ever allowed to leave the property. It was at about that time that her first daughter, Starlit, was born.
Four years later, Jaycee Dugard bore another daughter, who was to be named Angel. The three Dugard girls live in a hideously shabby backyard compound composed of tents and falling-down sheds. Piles of trash were strewn everywhere about the Garrido compound, which also had animal cages and sound-proofed rooms for who-knows-what horrible purpose.
At some point during her captivity, Jaycee Dugard became domesticated enough to be allowed more freedom to move about the property. Some experts have suggested that she suffered from so-called Stockholm Syndrome, in which captive begin to identify with and show loyalty to their captors.
As the years of her captivity wore on, Jaycee began to participate in Phillip Garrido’s home printing business. She even was allowed to have contact with his customers, to whom she was identified as his daughter. Former customers remember her as “polite” and “shy”.
Jaycee Dugard and her daughters were finally rescued when Phillip Garrido, who had taken on increasingly bizarre religious views, aroused the suspicion of a UC Berkeley campus police officer while applying for a permit to pass out religious literature on campus.
When authorities investigated, Jaycee Dugard’s long captivity was finally discovered, and the Garridos were arrested for their crimes. They are now in jail awaiting trial.

More details are emerging in the Jaycee Lee Dugard case about Phillip Garrido’s first victim. Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in prison in the late 1970’s for the rape of a casino worker. Garrido’s victim has now identified herself as Katie Callaway Hall. In an