After 18 years, Jaycee Lee Dugard comes home

1991 kidnapping case solved

Quote :

A woman who was snatched from a bus stop as an 11-year-old child in 1991 turned up this week after being held for the past 18 years in isolation in a backyard compound by a convicted sex offender who fathered two children with her, police said Thursday.

On Thursday, Jaycee Lee Dugard was reunited with her mother, who was overjoyed to learn the daughter she feared dead was alive.

I actually remember when this happened. I'm just a few months older than Jaycee Lee, and for months afterwards in this area everyone was extremely vigilant in keeping an eye out for her.

Quote :

Police said Phillip Garrido, 58, held her the entire time as a virtual slave, sheltered from the outside world in tents, sheds and outbuildings in the backyard of his home in suburban Antioch.

"None of the children have ever been to school, they've never been to a doctor," El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said at a news conference. "They were kept in complete isolation in this compound, if you will."

Shades of the Elizabeth Smart case in this - as well as the Austrian case that broke just a while back.

Wow, I'm glad she's alive and well after all of these years. I wonder what's going to happen to her kids. I mean, it'll be hard for them, at first, to start school and a normal life.

It's great she's been found. How horrible for her, though. I hope she's able to have something of a decent life.

It's good she's been reunited with her mom, but I imagine it's going to take a lot of therapy to work through all the shit she and her kids have been put through over the last 18 years.

And why would a woman let her husband do something like this? She had to have known what was going on. He was already a convicted sex offender before he kidnapped the girl.

Eighteen years. Good lord I cannot imagine being held captive for eighteen months. She spent more time away from her mother than she did with her!

My prayers go out to this family, because I suspect there will be a long recovery process for this.