Such are the scenes that emerge from testimony released this week in the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held against her will for 18 years.
On Thursday, Phillip and Nancy Garrido were sentenced to lengthy terms for Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping, rape and imprisonment. After the sentencing, Judge Douglas C. Phimister of El Dorado County Superior Court released a redacted version of grand jury testimony Ms. Dugard gave in September, revealing new details about her captivity.
It also offers a glimpse into the twisted thinking of Mr. Garrido — a convicted sex offender on parole for a 1976 attack on a Nevada casino worker — and his justification for his crime.
Ms. Dugard says, for instance, that she was raped shortly after she was kidnapped, and repeatedly thereafter during sessions that Mr. Garrido — who used methamphetamine — described as “runs.” But Mr. Garrido told Ms. Dugard that she was simply “helping him” with a “sex problem.”
He said “he got me so that he wouldn’t have to do this to anybody else,” Ms. Dugard recalls.
The accounts also include a chilling description of the morning of Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping — June 10, 1991 — near her home in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Ms. Dugard said she had been walking to a bus stop when she was spotted by the Garridos, who had been hunting for a young girl.
“This car comes up behind me,” Ms. Dugard said in her testimony. “I didn’t feel it was weird at the time, but it kind of pulled in close,” adding she thought that the person was going to ask for directions.
Suddenly, however, Ms. Dugard said she felt a shock through her body — the Garridos used a stun gun — and she fell into a bush. It was then she saw Phillip Garrido for the first time.
“He gets out and I stumble back into the bushes,” Ms. Dugard recalled.
She was thrown into the back seat and covered by a blanket. “And then I heard voices in the front, and the man said, ‘I can’t believe we got away with it,’ and he started laughing,” Ms. Dugard said.
Later, Ms. Dugard describes being taken to the Garridos’ home outside Antioch, Calif., a Bay Area suburb, where she pleaded for her release.
“I just wanted to go home,” she said. “I kept telling him that, you know, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. If you’re holding me for ransom, my family doesn’t have a lot of money.’ ”
“I didn’t know his purpose,” she said.
When the Garridos were arrested in August 2009, the authorities discovered a hidden backyard compound made up of ramshackle tents and sheds, including a small, sparsely furnished two-room building where Ms. Dugard said she was held.
Ms. Dugard spent most of the first year alone — except during Mr. Garrido’s sexual assaults — though Mr. Garrido gave her a cat to keep her company. (He eventually took the animal away after the smell of urine got too strong in her room.)
Ms. Dugard was eventually introduced to Ms. Garrido, who took over feeding their captive, and the Garridos moved into the shed themselves. “Basically, we were all sleeping in the same room,” she said. “We watched TV together. I didn’t feel as lonely anymore.” They also gave her Barbie dolls to play with.
But there was also intimidation from Mr. Garrido, including attack dogs and threats to use the stun gun.
“He would turn it on and say something like, you know, ‘You don’t want it to happen again. You should be good.’ ”
In 1993, Mr. Garrido returned to prison for a short time for an unspecified parole violation, a period during which Ms. Dugard remembers asking Ms. Garrido where he was. She said “he was on this island for a little vacation,” Ms. Dugard said. “And he came back with an ankle bracelet.”
Ms. Dugard was glad not to suffer any more sexual attacks during that period, and the rapes were less frequent after Ms. Dugard got pregnant at age 13. She gave birth to a daughter in 1994 in the building where she was held, with Ms. Garrido helping with the delivery.
“He knew I was really scared about getting pregnant again,” Ms. Dugard said. “He said he just couldn’t help himself, but he was really trying to stop.”
Ms. Dugard did eventually get pregnant again, giving birth to a second daughter in 1997, a result of a final attack by Mr. Garrido. “That’s the last time he had sex with me, was when she was conceived,” Ms. Dugard said.
Soon after, they just started “acting like a family,” celebrating birthdays, and “just trying to be normal, I guess.” There was a backyard pool and a family printing business.
At one point during her testimony, Ms. Dugard was shown a journal she kept, including entries in which she called herself a coward for not trying to escape, though longing for freedom. But, she said, “I couldn’t leave. I had the girls.”
Near the end of the testimony, Ms. Dugard describes the final days of her ordeal, in August 2009, after Mr. Garrido had been brought in by parole officers for questioning after a campus officer at the University of California, Berkeley, had raised their suspicions.
Ms. Dugard, who went with Mr. Garrido to the meeting, had been told to lie for him and to give her name as “Alissa,” but parole officers soon began peppering her with questions about her identity, flustering her.
Moments later, an officer came in and said Mr. Garrido had confessed to the kidnapping.
“I started crying,” Ms. Dugard said. “And she said, ‘You need to tell me your name.’ ”
“And I said that I can’t because I hadn’t said my name in 18 years,” Ms. Dugard said. But then, she said, “I wrote it down.”