The Killer Book of Cold Cases (10 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
“In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story. My life has been straightened out…Wait ’til 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 at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.”
—Phillip Garrido, from his jail cell
Although children are not abducted often—the FBI estimates about 100 each year in the United States—the statistics on how many of those children survive are quite grim. Still, most people don’t give up hope, and sometimes there is the rare occasion when an abducted child is found alive.
That happened in the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard. When Jaycee was abducted, she was eleven years old and living in South Lake Tahoe, California, where she was waiting patiently at a bus stop. A pretty, blonde-haired girl dressed all in pink, she was being watched carefully by her stepfather, Carl Probyn, as she waited for the bus.
Then, suddenly, Probyn couldn’t believe his eyes. As he watched, a gray car swooped up, and a man and a woman jumped out of the car and grabbed Jaycee. Probyn pursued them immediately on his bicycle, but they soon were out of sight. And despite Probyn having given the police a clear description of the car and the people who had abducted Jaycee, they got away. The usual intensive search was conducted without any luck. The Probyns’ pretty little daughter had been abducted.
If the normal course of events had occurred, according to FBI statistics, Jaycee would have been dead within three hours. The spectacular story attracted media from all over the world, and innumerable stories were published about Jaycee’s disappearance. Several organizations that lent their efforts to help find the 11-year-old, and thousands of pink—Jaycee’s favorite color—flyers about the missing girl were printed up and distributed across the country.
According to the Department of Justice, 52 percent of the bodies of murder victims are concealed to prevent discovery. In only 9 percent of cases is the body openly placed to ensure its discovery. Search-party members need to be aware that bodies often may be hidden under branches, rugs, or debris. Because bodies often are concealed, members of search parties typically stagger themselves to cover ground in intervals that approximate the length of the missing person.
None of the efforts produced a single lead, and months and then years went by without a clue as to where Jaycee might be. Somehow two people had snatched her in broad daylight and gotten away with it. That was a sobering thought. (Indeed, abduction investigators will tell you that kidnapping a child is mostly a crime of opportunity. While stalking a child may be involved in some cases, usually a pedophile just spots a child and makes an on-the-spot decision to snatch him or her.)
Over the years, Jaycee’s parents did not give up the fight to find her, but to no avail. The investigation did not come up with anything, either. Carl Probyn was asked to take a number of lie-detector tests, and he passed them all. Jaycee’s father was also found to be innocent of the crime. Although police didn’t know it at the time, Jaycee never left California. Later they found that she had been living behind a house in northeast Antioch, her quarters a couple of tents and shacks hidden by heavy vegetation. She did spend time in the house as well.
Books and the media often depict the police as being smart and efficient. But that is hardly the case. Cops frequently make mistakes, and in this case they made some whoppers—which resulted in several missed opportunities to rescue Jaycee.
The first mistake occurred
less than a year
after Jaycee was abducted. Police received an anonymous call from a man who said he had spotted a blonde-haired girl, eleven or twelve, at a gas station scrutinizing a pink poster of the missing girl. The man, who did not identify himself, said the little girl looked like Jaycee Dugard. Although he did not get the license plate of the vehicle she left in, he said it was a large yellow van.
Unbelievably, the police did a cursory investigation but did not pursue the lead. As one investigator said later, “The basic question here is how far up their butts cops had their heads. I mean, a little blonde girl looking at a picture of herself, and a large yellow van? How difficult is that to find? It was a disgrace.”
Another time, a neighbor called the local sheriff’s department to report that, looking through his fence, he had spotted a preteen blonde playing in Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s backyard. The neighbor called to the little girl and asked her name, and she actually said “Jaycee,” but he did not make the connection to the little girl who had been abducted from South Tahoe. But he did find something odd about a little girl being in the Garridos’ backyard.
In 2006, a neighbor called the police, informing them that Garrido had children living in tents in his backyard and seemed “psychotic.” Following up on the call, a deputy sheriff went to Garrido’s house and warned him that he would be violating code if he had people living outside on his property.
As bad as that was, the biggest mistake was an official’s characterization of Garrido as a “low-level” sex offender. When Jaycee was abducted, Garrido did not draw any attention from California law-enforcement authorities.
It was an abomination that he didn’t because in 1971, Garrido abducted and raped a young woman and was sentenced to hard time in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth. Incidentally, that’s where he met his wife, Nancy, who was visiting her uncle.
On July 4, 1956, Betty Weinberger wrapped her month-old son, Peter, in a receiving blanket and placed him in his carriage on the patio of their home in Westbury, New York. She then went inside for a few minutes while he napped. When Mrs. Weinberger came back to check on her son, she got a shock. He was gone and she found a ransom note. In the note, the kidnapper said he was sorry and he needed $2,000. He promised the baby would be returned “safe and happy” the following day if his ransom demand was met. Despite the kidnapper’s threat to kill the baby at the “first wrong move,” Mrs. Weinberger called the Nassau County Police Department.
Her husband, Morris, asked that the newspapers hold off on printing the story of his son’s kidnapping. All but one newspaper—the
New York Daily News
—complied: the kidnapping made the front page. By the following day, reporters were all over the drop-off area where the kidnapper had said the money was to be left. Of course the kidnapper never showed.
On July 10, six days after the kidnapping, the kidnapper called the Weinberger home twice with additional instructions on where to take the money to two separate “drops.” He didn’t show up at either location. But at the second drop site, cops found a blue cloth bag alongside a curb. Inside was a handwritten note telling the parents where to find the baby “if everything goes smooth.”
The note was examined by experts who agreed that the original ransom note and the second note were written by the same person.
On July 11, after the seven-day waiting period required at the time, the FBI entered the case. The only evidence officials had were the ransom notes. Handwriting experts from the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., traveled to New York and gave special agents a crash course in handwriting analysis. The investigators then started to examine the huge volume of handwriting specimens maintained by the New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau, federal and state probation offices, schools, aircraft plants, and various municipalities.
After examining and eliminating almost two million samples of writing in an operation reminiscent of the Mad Bomber case, on August 22, 1956 an agent at the U.S. Probation Office in Brooklyn noted a similarity between the writing in the ransom notes and writing in the probation file of one Angelo LaMarca. LaMarca had been arrested by the Treasury Department for bootlegging.
On August 23, LaMarca was arrested at his home by FBI agents and Nassau County police. Although he first denied any involvement in the kidnapping of Peter Weinberger, he confessed when confronted with the handwriting comparisons.
As investigators soon learned, LaMarca was a taxi dispatcher and truck driver who lived with his wife and two children in Plainview, New York.
Investigators grilled him and discovered that on July 4, 1956, he had found himself driving around Westbury, seven miles away, and trying to figure out how to get the money he needed.
When he happened on the Weinberger house, Mrs. Weinberger was leaving her son in the baby carriage to go into her house. On impulse, LaMarca scribbled a ransom note in his truck, snatched Peter, and drove off.
LaMarca told investigators he went to the first drop site the day after the kidnapping—with the baby in the car—but he was scared away by all of the press and police in the area. He drove away, abandoned the baby alive in some heavy brush just off a highway exit, and went home.
A search of the area by FBI agents and Nassau County police ensued. An FBI agent spotted a diaper pin and then the decomposed remains of Peter Weinberger.
Since LaMarca had crossed no state lines, he had not violated the federal kidnapping statute and was turned over to Nassau County authorities for state prosecution. In late 1956, he was tried and convicted by a jury on kidnapping and murder charges. The jury returned its verdict without a recommendation of leniency. On December 14, 1956, he was sentenced to death.
After a number of legal appeals—including one to the Supreme Court—Angelo LaMarca was executed at Sing Sing Prison on August 7, 1958.
The fallout from the Weinberger kidnapping reached national proportions. This child was not from a well-to-do family, like the Lindbergh baby, but from a middle-class family in suburbia where people—until then—weren’t afraid of being targeted by extortionists. The Weinberger kidnapping struck fear in the hearts of average Americans. People started locking their doors. Almost overnight, an entire country lost its sense of security.
The Weinberger case also resulted in new legislation, signed by President Eisenhower, that reduced the FBI’s waiting period in kidnapping cases from seven days to twenty-four hours.
—
from the website of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
When Jaycee was snatched, Phillip Garrido certainly should have drawn the attention of authorities. He had a criminal history and was on lifetime parole. Phillip Craig Garrido grew up in Brentwood, California, graduating from high school in 1969. As a teen, he experienced a near-fatal motorcycle accident that drastically changed him and eventually led to drug use. Manuel Garrido, Phillip’s father, maintained that Phillip had been a “good boy” until the accident and that continued drug use changed him.
Of course, this is always a convenient excuse, as if one event could change a personality so completely. In fact, behavior is something that forms gradually in a person, not due to a single incident. Garrido’s criminal career apparently started in 1973 when he was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. He beat the charge because the young girl was unwilling to go to court.
In 1976, Garrido kidnapped Katherine Callaway in South Lake Tahoe, California. He fled with her to a warehouse in Reno, Nevada, where he sexually assaulted her repeatedly. Callaway escaped only after a police officer noticed Garrido’s car parked outside the warehouse and came in to investigate. Garrido was arrested, tried, and convicted of a variety of charges and was diagnosed as a drug addict and sexual deviant.
Worried that Garrido’s chronic drug use might be responsible in part for his deviant sexual behavior, a psychiatrist recommended a neurological exam, which came back normal. In court, Garrido admitted that he used to park his car by various schools and masturbate at the sight of young girls. He was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth and then was transferred in January 1988 to Nevada State Prison, where he served seven months of a five-years-to-life Nevada sentence. He was transferred to federal parole authorities in Antioch, California, on August 26, 1988, and lived in the home of his elderly mother, who suffered from dementia. As a parolee, he wore an ankle bracelet and the police visited him regularly.
In the summer of 1993, Garrido returned to federal prison to serve five months due to a parole violation, but the cops still didn’t have a clue that he had kidnapped Jaycee. Nor did they know that Jaycee had bore him two daughters when she was in her early teens, one in August 1994 when she was fourteen and another in November 1997. During their time together as a family, Jaycee told everyone she was the Garridos’ daughter and that the younger girls were her sisters. Her two daughters also told others that she was their older sister. Dugard was a graphic artist for Garrido’s print shop and was quite good.