San Francisco, September 17: A day after police launched a new, more intensive search of the home of the California couple charged with the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, officers said Wednesday they had found more bone fragments on the property.
The search also uncovered bone fragments in the neighbouring yard, where the main suspect Phillip Garrido, 58, had access for several years. Though the fragments have yet to be identified as human, a piece of bone found in an earlier search of Garrido’s home is likely human, police said.
Garrido and his wife, Nancy, have pleaded innocent to the 29 charges stemming from their alleged kidnap of Dugard in 1991, when she was just 11. They are alleged to have kept her hidden for 18 years, and forced her to bear Garrido two daughters. Dugard and the girls, aged 11 and 15, have been reunited with their family at a secret location.
Police launched the new search Wednesday, saying they were looking for evidence linking Garrido, a convicted sex offender, to two other kidnappings of young girls that happened in the years before Dugard was snatched.
Garrido has been mentioned as a possible suspect in a string of unsolved murders, in which the bodies of dead women were dumped in an area close to where he once worked.
–Agencies