The discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard living in makeshift tents behind a home in Antioch, California 18 years after her abduction shocked the country. Snatched from a school bus stop near her South Lake Tahoe, CA home in 1991 when she was 11, Dugard had been held in isolation by a convicted sex offender who fathered two children with her, one when she was only 14. Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were arrested. Garrido, charged with kidnapping, raping and imprisoning Dugard, is now suspected in the kidnapping and disappearance of two California 13-year-olds in the late 1980s.
With a twisted history of sexual abuse and drug use, Garrido became fanatical about religion in the 1970s. Imprisoned in 1977 for kidnapping and repeatedly raping a Reno, Nevada woman, he told a police psychiatrist, "I have been brought to God." It was his religious fervor that eventually led to Dugard's discovery and rescue and Garrido's arrest. His odd behavior while seeking a permit to hold a religious rally at UC-Berkley made officials suspicious, triggering events that led to his arrest.
Child molesters often turn to religion to rationalize their actions, Ken Lanning, a former FBI profiler specializing in kidnapping and child abuse cases, told the Associated Press. "A lot of them, when they're molesting children, put a lot of time and energy into trying to convince themselves that they're not bad people," Lanning said. "In some cases, the element of religion will come into it, and they will use varying aspect of their religious belief to justify all of this."
In conversations with neighbors and business clients and in police interviews before his arrest, Garrido repeatedly talked about finding God. The Reno woman he raped in 1977 said he preached about God and Jesus while he was raping her.
On Friday: Why Megan's Law didn't help Jaycee Dugard sooner.
