Ethiopian Review

CONCORD — Lt. Jim Lardieri sat at his desk last week waiting to hear from two of his officers who were helping parole agents interrogate two girls and a woman who had accompanied a sex offender to a nearby parole office.

Several detectives came by his desk, saying they also were on their way to the parole office. They had been told that the woman might have been kidnapped nearly two decades ago. Details were sketchy, they said.

Lardieri decided to log on to the Web site for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to see what he could find about missing children that fit into that time line.

He had just found the page for a girl named Jaycee Dugard, who was 11 on June 10, 1991, when she was kidnapped by a couple near her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood.

Suddenly his phone beeped. It was a message from his sergeant at the parole office.

“Hey, we got Jaycee Dugard here,” Lardieri recalled him saying.

Dugard had resurfaced after 18 years.

Lardieri described the series of interviews that culminated with what police say is the discovery that Dugard, now 29, was alive and had been in captivity for the past 18 years in a backyard lair in Antioch. While there, police say, she gave birth to two daughters fathered by kidnapping suspect Phillip Garrido. He and his wife, Nancy Garrido, have been charged in Dugard’s abduction.

The story began Wednesday, when a Concord-based parole agent sought police

assistance in questioning two girls and a woman. The three were with Phillip and Nancy Garrido when the sex offender showed up at the parole office. He had been ordered to appear after he and the girls had aroused suspicion at UC Berkeley.At first, the girls and woman seemed reluctant to answer basic questions asked by the parole agent and Concord officers while the Garridos were in the room. So the officers separated them.

“They weren’t suspected of anything. It just didn’t sit right,” Lardieri said. “The suspicion was so high that we couldn’t just leave this as it is.”

In a room by herself, Lardieri said, the woman now known to be Dugard quickly admitted to her real identity. Lardieri said he suspects that it was the first time she had come under serious interrogation and she succumbed to the pressure, implicating Phillip Garrido as her kidnapper.

“Through some additional probing “… she finally confided and said, ‘This is what happened and this is who I am,’ Lardieri said.

Garrido was immediately jailed at the Concord Police Department on a probation violation. Dugard and her two daughters, meanwhile, were questioned further by El Dorado County cold-case investigators, who happened to be in Stockton and headed over once they got word of Dugard’s reappearance. A short time later, Nancy Garrido was arrested.

“Whenever a kid goes missing, most cops are very cynical,” Lardieri said. “It was a great day to be in law enforcement. We got one back.”

(By Robert Salonga | Contra Costa Times)