By Andy Goldberg, DPA,
San Francisco : As police continued their search Tuesday of properties owned or managed by kidnap suspect Phillip Garrido, many mysteries remained about the man whom neighbourhood kids called “Creepy Phil”.
Elsewhere, details began to emerge about the convicted sexual predator who allegedly snatched 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard in 1991, kept her in his backyard shed for 18 years and fathered two children with her.
Some of the information came from his own court testimony in his 1977 criminal trial for an earlier rape. Other allegations came from his first wife, who called him a “monster” prone to drug-fuelled rages.
Most amazingly, Garrido painted an astonishing picture of his own world view in a blog he had written for two years and in documents he took to the FBI just days before his arrest on the latest rape and kidnapping charges.
Among that stack of documents were writings in which Garrido, 58, detailed his struggle with sexual urges, but claimed that he had conquered his desire to act on his fantasies.
“Certain behaviours cause a great deal of pain in myself and those who are victimised by those behaviours, especially our family and my wife,” he wrote.
That pain made him try to change from the predator he had become, he wrote, according to CNN. Garrido said he began forcing himself to look at attractive women but would not allow himself to act against them.
“I realised I never needed to act or do the things I used to believe was so great and stimulating,” Garrido wrote, claiming that he became filled with remorse and was sharing his “salvation” to help other sexual predators turn their lives around.
That remorse came too late for some of his victims.
Katie Hall was a 25-year-old casino worker when Garrido kidnapped her in 1976, transported her to a sex den he kept in a storage unit and raped her numerous times. She escaped when a police officer spotted her missing vehicle and is convinced that Garrido had intended to kill her.
Garrido told the court that he could not resist his impulses.
“I had this fantasy that was driving me to do this, inside of me, something that was making me want to do it, without no way to stop it,” Garrido told the court.
Often under the influence of the hallucinogen LSD, he said that he would hang around schools and satisfy his urges in public while watching girls as young as 7.
“I have done it by the side of schools, grammar schools and high schools, in my own car,” Garrido said in court testimony obtained by The New York Daily News.
Garrido’s first wife, Christine Murphy, revealed further details. She left him in the wake of his first rape conviction, and described how Garrido once tried to blind her after he believed another man had flirted with her.
“He took a safety pin and went after my eyes,” Murphy told television show Inside Edition.
But perhaps the biggest mystery is not what went on in the mind of a sick individual, but in the failure of the justice system to deal with him.
Garrido was sentenced to a 50-year prison term after his 1977 conviction, and according to sentencing guidelines should have served at least two thirds of his sentence. Instead he was released after just 11 years, and three years later began his awful crime against Jaycee Dugard.