Kidnap Victim Dugard Located After 18 Years: Update 1

A man suspected of snatching an 11-year-old girl and hiding her for nearly two decades in his backyard faced a Friday court appearance, as the woman's family reunited with their daughter and met the two children fathered by her alleged abductor. Ms. Dugard spent most of the past two decades living in sheds in the backyard of her abductors' home in Antioch, California, near Concord.

Jaycee Lee Dugard, the woman found alive almost two decades after being kidnapped, feels terrible guilt for forming an emotional attachment with her suspected captor. Investigators said Garrido, a convicted sex offender, raped Dugard and fathered two children with her – the first when she was about 14. Those girls, now 11 and 15, were detained along with their mother.

Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, said she was "doing well" following her release, and had been playing with her younger sister. He said: "My wife says that Jaycee looks good. She looks almost like when she was kidnapped. She looks very young. She doesn't look 29 at all."

But Probyn, 60, who witnessed her abduction and was a longtime suspect in the case, said the family had been troubled to learn the details of her ordeal. "She feels really guilty for bonding with this man. There's really a guilt trip here," he said. Probyn said the abduction had "ruined" the lives of everyone in the family. "It broke my marriage up. I've gone through hell, I mean I'm a suspect up until yesterday."

Phillip Garrido, 58, and his spouse Nancy, 54, denied 28 charges when they appeared briefly in court in Placerville, El Dorado County. Police are also searching the Garrido home in Antioch for clues to several prostitute murders in the 1990s. Several bodies in the unsolved murders were dumped near an industrial park where Mr Garrido worked.

Law enforcement authorities were in Phillip Garrido’s house at least twice in the last three years, but never discovered that a young woman he had allegedly abducted 18 years ago was living there along with the two children he had fathered with her, the sheriff of Contra Costa County said on Friday.

Mr. Rupf also said, “I’m the first in line to offer organizational criticism and offer my apologies to the victim and accept responsibility for having missed an earlier opportunity to rescue Jaycee. The sheriff said that he had apologized to the family of Ms. Dugard, who was abducted at the age of 11 as she was about to board a school bus near her home in South Lake Tahoe.

“This is not an acceptable outcome,” he said. “Organizationally we should have been more inquisitive or curious and turned over a rock or two. My criticism is of us organizationally, and not of the deputy,” Mr. Rupf said, acknowledging that the deputy should have asked more questions of Mr. Garrido. He said, there are “absolutely no excuses. We should have had a better result.”