A Californian woman who was kidnapped as a girl by a convicted sex predator and held captive for nearly two decades, Jaycee Dugard, 31, had even given birth to her captor’s two daughters in his backyard. She talked about her years in captivity in her first interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer Sunday night.
Dugard described walking to the school bus stop on the day of a fifth-grade field trip and being zapped with a stun gun by the captor, Phillip Garrido,58, on a South Lake Tahoe street in 1991 at age 11.
She said she had heard Garrido laughing and telling his wife Nancy Garrido, “I can’t believe we got away with it,” calling the moment “the most horrible moment in your life, times 10.”
Shortly after her kidnapping, Garrido raped Dugard. Dugard gave birth to a daughter at age 14. She had a television in captivity, which gave her the only clues she had to understand pregnancy and child rearing. Three years later, she had another daughter.
In 2009, Garrido took his daughters with him to U.C. Berkeley to preach, where two campus police officers, Lisa Campbell and Ally Jacobs, took notice. “They saved us, something I couldn’t do for myself,” Dugard said.
Garrido pleaded guilty in April for kidnapping and raping Dugard and is serving an imprisonment of 431 years. Nancy Garrido also got 36 years in prison term.
“Wow. Now I can walk in the next room and see my mom. Wow. I can decide to jump in the car and go to the beach with the girls. Wow. It’s unbelievable. Truly,” Dugard told Sawyer.
The interview came Sunday, two days before Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life,” is set to be released.