POLICE FROM Antioch, the town near San Francisco where Jaycee Dugard was held hostage for 18 years by a sex offender until her dramatic release last week, will meet today to discuss reopening more than 10 cases concerning murdered and missing women in the area.
Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, have pleaded not guilty to 29 counts, including kidnapping, rape and unlawful imprisonment, after they were discovered last Wednesday to have been hiding Dugard and the two children she had borne her attacker, in tents and sheds in their garden.
Dugard had been missing since being snatched in 1991, when she was 11, outside her house in South Lake Tahoe, about 170 miles away.
Detectives are now homing in on killings and missing persons reports in and around Antioch, in the suspicion that Garrido – known by neighbours as “creepy Phil” – might have been involved in many more incidents. Police have indicated they have reasons for pursuing the investigation, but have declined to give details.
Throughout the weekend forensic and homicide officers searched the Garrido home in Walnut Avenue, Antioch, using metal detectors. They dug holes in the backyard, pored over scrap heaps and used a chainsaw to clear vegetation. They also extended the search to the house next door where Garrido (58), is understood to have been caretaker until its current occupant moved in three years ago.
Local authorities have indicated that the search of the Garrido property and the adjacent house relates to a string of nine murders that occurred between 1998 and 2002 in Pittsburg, a town of almost 60,000 in the San Francisco Bay area, just seven miles from Garrido’s home.
The victims’ bodies were all found in a remote industrial zone in Pittsburg and neighbouring Bay Point. It is understood that the methods of killing bore similarities, and that Garrido used to work in an industrial park on the waterfront close to where several bodies were discovered.
The bodies of a number of women who had been beaten, strangled or stabbed were found dumped in the area within a two-month period in 1998-99. They included three women alleged to have been working as prostitutes, Jessica Frederick (24), Valerie Schultz (27) and Rachel Cruise (32). The body of a 15-year-old, Lisa Norrell, was also found at around the same time.
Norrell, who had been adopted from Mexico as a baby by a Californian family, had been in Antioch to attend a rehearsal for a friend’s coming-of-age party. Walking home along the short, dark stretch of highway a few miles from Garrido’s house, Norrell was attacked and asphyxiated. Her shoes were found the next morning by the side of the road, and her body was discovered eight days later near a landscaping firm further along the highway. Police did not say whether she was sexually abused.
Lisa’s mother, Minnie Norrell, said on local television that police had told her they were now searching for clues to her daughter’s death. “I think I started shaking. I’m hopeful that’s who it is, just so there’s an end. There will never be closure but there will be an end,” she told KTVU.
John Conaty, one of two detectives who led the Norrell case, is now an inspector and is believed to be involved in the investigation into Garrido’s activities. The other detective, Raymond Giacomelli, was killed in a shoot-out with a drug dealer in 2003.
Other cases in which the police have shown renewed interest since Garrido’s arrest include that of Michaela Garecht, who, in 1988, was kidnapped, aged nine, from Hayward, about an hour’s drive from the Garrido home, and has not been seen since.
There is also the unsolved case of a 17-year-old girl murdered a few months before Garrido kidnapped and raped a woman in 1976, regarding which he was imprisoned for 11 years.
Over the weekend details began to emerge about the conditions in which Dugard and her children were kept. They lived in an area about the size of a tennis court with an earth floor, in tents and sheds.
The “backyard within a backyard” was kept obscured from neighbours by an intricate system of tarpaulins, with entry only through a narrow opening shielded by shrubs. Part of the construction was sound-proofed, and this section is where it is believed the two daughters, now aged 11 and 15 and called Scarlett or Starlite and Angel, were born.
Photographs have been released showing women’s clothes hung on a makeshift rack inside a tent, and a cluttered work area with haphazard shelves and food containers and objects strewn over chairs and on the floor.
Among the 20 or so books on the shelves were several volumes dedicated to cats, and a self-help book on raising families called Self-Esteem: a Family Affair. There were toys and crayons dotted around, a children’s swing outside one of the tents, and a vase of flowers.
The possibility that Garrido could be linked to a much greater series of tragedies has caused consternation, mixed with hope of new leads, across the Bay area.
In South Lake Tahoe, where Dugard used to live until her abduction, banners and ribbons have been tied to hundreds of trees and posts, all in pink, the colour she was wearing that fateful morning of June 10th, 1991. – (Guardian service)