Authorities: Wife in California kidnapping watched over victim while husband briefly jailed

Authorities: Wife watched over kidnap victim

SAN FRANCISCO — Nancy Garrido spent years caring for her elderly, bedridden mother-in-law while a girl kidnapped in 1991 was allegedly held prisoner in the backyard of the home she shared with her husband.

When Phillip Garrido went to prison for six weeks on a parole violation, the former nursing assistant watched over Jaycee Dugard, authorities said.

“You can reasonably infer from the charging document that the wife was doing that,” said former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, who is acting as a special spokesman for the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office.

The emerging details paint a conflicting portrait of the 54-year-old woman charged with her husband in the kidnapping and rape of Dugard, who authorities say had two children with Garrido during her 18 years in the backyard in Antioch. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Dugard’s stepfather Carl Probyn said Nancy Garrido fit the description “dead-on” of the woman who pulled his stepdaughter into a car in South Lake Tahoe nearly two decades ago.

Nancy Garrido’s attorney, Gilbert Maines, did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

But on CBS’s “The Early Show” Wednesday, he said his client loves and misses the two girls her husband fathered with Dugard and said she saw them all as a family.

It was unclear if the lawyer would claim Garrido was coerced into aiding her husband. But such a claim could be undermined by her silence about Dugard’s captivity while her husband was held at a jail facility for six weeks in 1993 on a parole violation, said criminal defense attorney Michael Cardoza, a former San Francisco Bay area prosecutor.

“There are too many facts in the case and too many opportunities for her to make it right that she did not take advantage of,” Cardoza said. “No jury will believe that for those 18 years she was under duress that whole time.”

Garrido looked haggard when she appeared in court last week wearing an orange jail jump suit. She cried and put her head in her hands several times.

Public records provided no clear picture of her life before she met Phillip Garrido, a divorced former musician who had worked odd jobs and had a history of drug abuse.

They were married in 1981 while he was serving time at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., for the Nevada kidnapping of a casino worker who was sexually assaulted for five hours in a storage unit. The wedding was conducted by the prison chaplain.

Leavenworth resident John Saunders said he rented an apartment to Nancy Garrido in 1985 but does not remember much about her.

“She got her deposit back so I can only assume she cleaned the place up and was a decent renter,” he said.

In January 1988, Phillip Garrido was transferred to the Nevada state prison system and released later that year.

The couple returned to Contra Costa County in California, where Phillip Garrido was raised. Nancy Garrido became a certified nurse assistant in 1989, according to California Department of Public Health records. Her certification expired in 1995 when she failed to renew it.

Department spokesman Ken August said the state does not track where nursing assistants work.

The couple then went to live in the Antioch home of Phillip Garrido’s mother, Patricia Franzen.

Next-door neighbor Helen Boyer, 78, said she knew Franzen for more than 30 years and often saw Nancy Garrido.

Boyer said Garrido had worked in nursing homes for years but stopped about five years ago to become Franzen’s primary caregiver when she became bedridden.

Nursing assistants are on a low rung of the medical profession and cannot work without the supervision of a doctor or nurse. But Nancy Garrido’s training might help explain how Dugard could deliver two babies and now have two healthy daughters, ages 11 and 15, even though authorities said none of them had seen a doctor.

Neighbors and customers of Phillip Garrido’s printing business said they saw little of his wife. They said his chief assistant was a blonde 20-something woman he introduced as his daughter Allissa, his name for Dugard.

“The wife was like a hermit,” neighbor Damon Robinson said. “She looked like she had no spirit.”

Associated Press Writers Terry Collins, Paul Elias and Lisa Leff in San Francisco, and Don Thompson in Sacramento contributed to this report.