Kidnapper gets life; he abused victim for 18 years

PLACERVILLE, Calif. - Jaycee Dugard refused to "waste another second" in the presence of the married couple she said stole her life.

She didn't want to be in a northern California courtroom yesterday as 60-year-old Phillip Garrido, the serial sex offender who kidnapped, raped and held her captive for 18 years, 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 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," 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."

Her mother had her own words for the couple: "The only satisfaction I know is that you will never lay eyes on my daughter again."

Dugard was 11 when she was abducted by the couple as her stepfather watched her walk toward a school bus near her South Lake Tahoe home in June 1991. They held her captive in a secret backyard compound. She gave birth to two daughters, the first when she was 14, fathered by Phillip Garrido.

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

Judge Douglas Phimister revealed several new details about Dugard's abduction, saying that Phillip Garrido used a Taser to subdue her and threatened to stun her again if she tried to escape.

"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," the judge said. "You reinvented slavery, that's what you did."

Phimister said the Garridos had "gone shopping" for a young girl to abduct the day they snatched Dugard.

The judge also marveled that Phillip 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.

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

"I think Mr. Garrido qualifies as a poster child for a sexual predator," the judge said, adding that he was disregarding the report.