Jaycee Dugard 'too scared to escape' from captor Garrido

A woman who was kidnapped, raped and held captive for 18 years was so afraid of her abductors that she never tried to escape, according to court documents.

Jaycee Dugard said in testimony to a grand jury that she was zapped with a stun gun while being taken from a South Lake Tahoe street at age 11 and kept under a blanket in a car as she was driven to the home of Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

Ms Dugard said she heard a man laughing as he said: “I can’t believe we got away with it.”

At his home, Garrido threatened to use the stun gun on her again and said he had vicious dogs that would attack her if she left the property, she testified.

Ms Dugard was later locked inside a backyard studio without being allowed to leave for an entire year. During later years, she felt helpless because she did not know where she would go if she escaped.

The document was released after the Garridos were sentenced earlier in the day.

Ms Dugard did not attend the sentencing, saying she refused to “waste another second” in the presence of the married couple she said stole her life.

Garrido, 60, a serial sex offender, was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison and his wife, Nancy, 55, was given a decades-long sentence.

The feelings the now 31-year-old victim had never been able to express while she was held prisoner did make it into court.

“I chose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence,” Ms Dugard said in a statement read aloud by her mother, the first public comments about her experience since police found her 22 months ago.

“As I think of all of those years I am angry because you stole my life and that of my family.

“Everything you have ever done to me has been wrong and someday I hope you can see that,” she wrote, directing her words to Phillip Garrido.

“I hated every second of every day of 18 years because of you and the sexual perversion you forced on me.”

Ms Dugard was abducted by the couple as her stepfather watched her walk towards a school bus in June 1991.

She was kept in the backyard compound and gave birth to two daughters, the first when she was 14, fathered by Garrido.

The couple, dressed in orange jumpsuits, made no eye contact with anyone and kept their heads down as the letter was read.

Garrido’s lawyer read a statement on his behalf in court, saying that he agreed with Ms Dugard and did not expect any leniency.

Judge Douglas Phimister said the Garridos had “gone shopping” for a young girl to abduct the day they snatched Dugard.

“Basically what you did was, you took a human being and turned them into a chattel, a piece of furniture, to be used by you at your whim,” Mr Phimister said. “You reinvented slavery, that’s what you did.”

The judge also accused Garrido of feigning mental illness in the days before he was arrested by telling people that he was able to speak to God through a black box.

He said Garrido did this because he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep Ms Dugard and her daughters in the “cocoon” he created.

“This is the potential problem you ran into when the family unit you believed existed started to fall apart,” Mr Phimister said.

The judge also marvelled that Garrido was able to get paroled from federal prison for a 1976 rape and kidnapping conviction after only 11 years, saying the defendant had been able to work the penal system to his advantage.

Mr Phimister said Garrido continued fooling psychologists, psychiatrists and parole officers in the years he held Ms Dugard and had even persuaded probation officers who prepared his pre-sentencing report that he posed only a low-to-moderate risk as a future sexual predator.

Mr Phimister imposed the maximum possible sentence of 431 years to life on Garrido. The judge said he recognised that Garrido had psychological problems but said he thought the sentence he worked out was appropriate.

Garrido had pleaded guilty to kidnapping and 13 sexual assault charges, including rape and committing lewd acts captured on video.

His plea was part of a deal with prosecutors that saw Nancy Garrido sentenced to 36 years to life after pleading guilty to kidnapping and rape.

The deal was designed, in part, to spare Ms Dugard and her children from having to testify at a trial.

The defendants were arrested in August 2009 after Garrido inexplicably brought his ragtag clan to a meeting with his parole officer, who had no idea the convicted rapist had been living with a young woman and two girls he described as his nieces.

The state last year paid Ms Dugard a 20 million US dollar settlement under which officials acknowledged repeated mistakes were made by parole agents responsible for monitoring Garrido. California has since increased monitoring of sex offenders.

Ms Dugard, who has written a memoir set to be published next month, has strived to preserve her privacy since she was found.

Her mother, Terry Probyn, told the Garridos in her court comments that Dugard’s daughters, ages 16 and 13, “know what you did to their mother. They realise your backyard was a prison and understand your filthy, despicable secret. They are aware that they have been deceived and I am here to tell you that there is no love lost.”

In her own statement, Ms Dugard said she was doing well now.

And she told the Garridos: “You do not matter anymore.”