Simple intuition led police staff to crack kidnap case

THE two police employees credited with cracking the abduction case said it was simply intuition that something was amiss when accused rapist and kidnapper Phillip Garrido showed up at a college campus with Dugard’s two daughters.

“Their movements weren’t that of ordinary girls,” UC Berkeley officer Ally Jacobs said.

Lisa Campbell, a manager with the campus police who first spotted the trio handing out religious material at UC Berkeley, said there wasn’t one thing that raised her suspicions. Garrido, she said, “appeared to be really unstable, erratic in conversation” while his two daughters, Angel and Starlet, lingered in the background.

It was that meeting that blew open the disappearance of Jaycee Dugard who hadn’t been heard of since June 10, 1991, when the then-11-year-old was snatched off the street near her South Lake Tahoe school bus stop.

When Jacobs met the girls, 11 and 15, what she called mother’s intuition kicked in right away.

“I observed two young girls, one of which was just staring at me very intensely with this very eerie smile on her face,” she said. The older girl was acting “strange” and refusing to make eye contact with authorities.

The girls told police that they were home-schooled and they had an “older sister” living at home.

The Berkeley officers ran a background check on Garrido and discovered he was on parole. They contacted his parole officer and mentioned Garrido’s two daughters. The parole officer, who had visited Garrido’s home on previous occasions, immediately realised something was wrong because there had been no mention or signs of children in Garrido’s life.