San Francisco, August 31: Police on Sunday continued to seek answers to how a convicted sexual predator was able to kidnap a young girl and keep her, along with the two children she bore him in captivity, for nearly two decades.
Despite warnings from neighbours, law enforcement failed to notice that something was seriously wrong at the home of convicted rapist Phillip Garrido, 58.
Scores of police continued to comb the home of suspects Garrido and his wife Nancy, 54, in connection to the abduction and captivity of Jaycee Lee Dugard, now 29.
Dugard was discovered on Wednesday, nearly two decades after the blonde schoolgirl was snatched outside her home in 1991, when she was just 11.
Neighbours described Garrido as a religious fanatic who grew more and more strange, and who lately was intent on spreading his confounding beliefs widely, sometimes accompanied by his two girls.
Dugard had been 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, around 80km east of San Francisco.
News reports Sunday said the two daughters, 11 and 15, fathered by Garrido, had been told that their mother was kidnapped by their father.
Her stepfather Carl Probyn told news media that the girl’s mother told him that Jaycee is “fragile” and doesn’t think she ever tried to escape.
On Saturday, police searched Garridos home in relation to a series of prostitute killings in the 1990s, as other bodies had been found close to where Garrido worked, the San Francisco Chronicle said.
—Agencies