Thursday, September 10, 2009

Garrido's Love Songs to Girls

SF Gate- Kidnap-rape suspect Phillip Craig Garrido recorded love songs featuring lyrics that appear to refer to young girls, a business acquaintance said Friday.

"For every little girl in the world, they want to be in love, yeah," Garrido sings in one song. "Please tell me that you want me."

In another song, Garrido croons, "The way she walks, yeah, subtle, sexy. What can I do? I fall victim too. A little child, yeah, look what you do."

Garrido told Marc Lister, a 15-year acquaintance, that he wrote the songs while serving time in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., for a 1976 kidnapping and rape, Lister said.

Garrido gave two CDs containing 20 songs several years ago to Lister, a former glass-shop owner who hired him to print his business cards and invoices and who knew people in the music business.

Lister said he believes some of the lyrics could reflect a predilection for young girls. Garrido, 58, who led a rock band and played bass as a teenager in Brentwood, is accused of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard, then 11, from South Lake Tahoe in 1991, raping her and keeping her imprisoned in a backyard compound at his home outside Antioch.

His wife, Nancy Garrido, 54, has also been charged with kidnapping and rape. Both have pleaded not guilty.

"The language, the lyrics, they're suggestive and they're provocative in a lot of the songs," Lister, 57, of Concord said Friday during an interview at the Walnut Creek office of his business attorney, Mark Mittelman.

Lister said he wanted to share the lyrics with law enforcement and raise money from the songs to benefit abused women, but not before he gets a chance to "sit down with Jaycee and make sure it is not going to impair or slow down, in any way, her going back into society, just starting out a normal life."

Garrido sought Lister's help to get his music released to raise money for a religious program to "let people hear the word of God in the way that he interpreted it," Lister said.

"When he gave me these, he said, 'Someday, these are going to be worth millions,' and I just thought, 'Well, Phil's just being weird again,' " Lister said.

He said he had listened to the music - which features Garrido playing bass - without fully comprehending the lyrics and had tossed the CDs into storage.

Lister said he had visited the Garridos' home on Walnut Avenue a number of times and had seen Dugard and her daughters, who authorities say were fathered by Garrido.

Garrido introduced the girls as "our daughters," Lister said, but it was unclear to him whether Dugard or Nancy Garrido was his wife.

Dugard "always looked healthy to me," Lister said. "There was absolutely nothing that I saw that would have raised suspicion."

Mittelman and Lister shared transcribed lyrics and played short snippets of some of the songs with reporters. They also displayed one of Garrido's business cards that they said showed a picture of Dugard several years ago.

The card, which they did not allow to be photographed, shows an attractive, smiling woman with flowing blond hair. Lister said the picture was clearly a "glamour shot" and that Dugard, who helped Garrido with his printing business, often wore her hair up in a bun.

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