Sheriff: We 'Missed an Opportunity' to Find Jaycee Dugard

ANTIOCH, California (CNN) -- Law-enforcement officers "missed an opportunity" in November 2006 to find a woman who had been kidnapped as an 11-year-old girl and held since 1991, a California sheriff said.

Someone called 911 on November 30, 2006, to say that a woman and young children were living in tents in the backyard of Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender, Sheriff Warren E. Rupf of Contra Costa County, California said Friday.

The responding officer left without going into the back yard, the sheriff said.

"This is not an acceptable outcome," he said.

On Friday Dugard also began the long process of reuniting with her family.

A psychiatrist envisioned a slow and overwhelming adjustment for Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was kidnapped in 1991 as her stepfather watched, helpless, in front of her house in South Lake Tahoe, California,

Dugard lived for the next 18 years in a shed and other outbuildings behind her abductor's house, where she gave birth to two girls that he fathered; the girls are now aged 11 and 15, police said.

Investigators arrested Garrido on charges of kidnapping and abusing her after police discovered Dugard on Wednesday.

"The last 18 years have been rough, but the last two days have been pretty good," her stepfather, Carl Probyn, told CNN's "American Morning" on Friday.

Authorities have jailed Garrido, 58, and his wife, 54-year-old Nancy Garrido, on numerous charges. An arraignment for the couple is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. PT (4 p.m. ET) Friday in Placerville Superior Court in Placerville, California.

El Dorado County sheriff's office online records showed that Phillip and Nancy Garrido are being held on suspicion of offenses including conspiracy to commit a crime and kidnapping with the intent to commit robbery and rape.

During their time living in Garrido's backyard, Dugard and her two children apparently rarely ventured out of their compound, investigators said.

Dugard "was in good health, but living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll," El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar told reporters. He described her as "relatively cooperative, relatively forthcoming" in discussions with detectives. She was "in relatively good condition," neither obviously abused nor malnourished, he added. "There are no known attempts by her to outreach to anybody."

The children didn't go to school or to the doctor's office. Now they and their mother are being thrust into a strange new world.

Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist, told CNN Dugard's world will now take on an air of science fiction.

"It would be a little like being a time traveler, of being introduced to a world you have no concept of," Morrison said. "You're going to be absolutely overwhelmed."

Dugard faces a change of identity -- she apparently was known as "Allissa" while living behind her captor's house -- and "has no idea what's out there," Morrison said. She may actually miss her captors because they apparently have been the center of her world for so long, she said.

"The only reality she has is the life that she's lived," Morrison said. "In her parent's mind," however, "she's still the 11-year-old girl."

Probyn said he felt helpless after witnessing his stepdaughter's abduction in 1991.

"When it first happened, I was thinking, 'If I had my car keys, I would have chased him and done this and this,'" Probyn told CNN on Friday. "But lately, toward the last few years, I just wanted an ending to this."

He expressed anger at Garrido and his wife, who police say was with him when the 11-year-old girl was abducted.

"It's just sick," he said. "It benefitted him but destroyed everybody else. That's pretty sick."

Part of the shock, he said, is that Dugard's "youngest child is the same age as Jaycee when she was taken."

Terry Probyn -- who is now separated from Carl -- spoke with her daughter on Thursday and learned that she had two daughters of her own, he said. Carl Probyn said he expects Dugard and her two children to come back to Southern California since "that's where we all live." He added that it was not immediately clear whether and when that would happen.

Probyn said he had lost hope over the years that his stepdaughter would ever be found. Now, he and Dugard's mother are faced with a potentially difficult reunion with their daughter -- and grandchildren they didn't know existed until this week.

"None of the children had ever gone to school. They had never been to a doctor. They were kept in complete isolation in this compound, if you will, at the rear of the house," Kollar said. "They were born there."

Garrido apparently maintained a blog in which he claimed to control sound with his mind. The blog now has numerous profanity-laced responses from people outraged over his alleged actions.
In a rambling telephone interview from jail, Garrido told CNN affiliate KCRA of Sacramento that he was relieved at being caught.

"I feel much better now," he said. "This is a process that needed to take place."

The investigation went years without apparent progress until Tuesday, when Garrido showed up on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley with his two daughters and tried to get permission to hand out literature and speak, Kollar said. He did not know the subject of either the literature or the planned talk.

Police officers "thought the interaction between the older male and the two young females was rather suspicious," so they confronted them and performed a background check on him, Kollar said.

That check revealed that Garrido was on federal parole for a 1971 conviction for rape and kidnapping, for which he had served time in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

The two female police officers contacted Garrido's parole officer, who requested that he appear Wednesday at the parole office.

"My dad said he never saw a young woman," said Russo, who added that her 94-year-old father considered Garrido to be a "kind of strange, reclusive, kind of an angry kind of guy."

She said the one-story house's backyard was obscured by trees and ringed by a wooden fence.

In his jailhouse interview, Garrido told KCRA he could not go into detail about why he chose to abduct Dugard. "I haven't talked to a lawyer yet, so I can't do that," he said.

But Garrido said he had "completely turned my life around" in the past several years. "You're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim," he promised. "If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backward and in the end you're going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story."

He added, "Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house. You're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing that took place with me in the beginning, but I turned my life completely around."

Describing his two daughters, he said, "Those two girls slept in my arms every single night from birth; I never kissed them."

In a later comment, he said that, from the time the youngest was born, "everything turned around."