Katie Callaway was just going to stop at the Tahoe City, Calif., market for a minute to pick up coffee for her boyfriend. When the 25-year-old blackjack...
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Katie Callaway was just going to stop at the Tahoe City, Calif., market for a minute to pick up coffee for her boyfriend.
When the 25-year-old blackjack dealer slipped back into her car and began to back out, Phillip Garrido tapped on the passenger window and asked for a ride.
It was Nov. 22, 1976, and Katherine Gayle Callaway was about to begin a terrifying, nightlong ordeal at the hands of a man who has become infamous worldwide since his arrest last week in the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard.
In the 18 years that Garrido allegedly hid Dugard in the backyard of his Antioch, Calif., area home, he was largely a mystery. Many knew he was a registered sex offender, but little more.
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Tuesday, as federal officials downloaded hundreds of pages from his 1977 federal court trial into the U.S. District Court computer system, a fuller, more disturbing picture of the 58-year-old Garrido and the ordeal Callaway suffered emerged from the documents.
“Sexual deviant”
He was described by witnesses in a federal courtroom in Reno, Nev., as a “sexual deviant,” a heavy drug abuser and a man who had recently found God.
Evidence showed Garrido was a troubled young man with a sexual addiction so great that he would masturbate in drive-in theaters, restaurants, bars, public restrooms and outside the windows of homes.
Garrido was born in Pittsburg, Calif., on April 5, 1951. He had “considerable emotional conflict with his parents during his formative years,” Reno psychiatrist Lynn Gerow Jr. wrote in a 1976 mental evaluation.
His 87-year-old father, Manuel, said Tuesday he would not discuss his son unless he was paid. “You give me the moola, or you get nothing,” he said. “I’m gonna start making money off this.”
Court records show Garrido graduated from high school in 1969, and he testified during his trial that within a month of graduation he had been introduced to marijuana. A month later he tried LSD.
He was arrested for possession of both in 1969, he testified, and was sent to Contra Costa County’s Clayton Farm facility.
In 1972, Garrido married his high-school sweetheart, who was a casino dealer in Reno the night Garrido, then 25, abducted Callaway.
Callaway’s boyfriend at the time, David Wade, recalled Tuesday how she would later tell him the young man was “dressed nice” and “looked all right.” The polite stranger with the ponytail pointed to a Mercedes-Benz parked nearby and said it was his but had broken down. Callaway agreed to give him a ride toward his home.
“That was her first mistake,” Wade said.
Inside the Pinto, Callaway barely spoke to Garrido, she later testified.
She turned onto the road toward the Heavenly Valley ski resort and toward Wade’s home. Garrido told her he lived just a little farther up.
Callaway pulled over a couple of minutes later where he said he lived.
No house
“I went to say, ‘Here you go,’ and I looked, and there was an empty lot there,” she testified. That was when Garrido reached over and turned off the engine. He grabbed her by the neck, then held her hands.
“If you do everything I say, you won’t get hurt,” he told her. “I’m serious.”
Garrido handcuffed her, put a leather belt around her neck and under her knees to keep her from looking up. Then he threw a coat over her and began driving.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ve got it all planned.”
They stopped for gas, and Garrido moved her into the back seat. Callaway said she tried to remain calm, to engage him in conversation.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Well, it wasn’t you intentionally, could have been anybody,” he said. “It just happened that you happened to be attractive, and that is a fault in this case, in your case, you know, at this time.”
Then he began telling her about his sexual fantasies.
“OK, we’re here,” Garrido said. They were parked in front of shed at a warehouse in Reno.
Inside, behind some heavy plastic sheeting, there was a mattress with a “red, old satin, holey, old sheet,” she said. There were red, blue and yellow stage lights set up on the mattress, a movie projector and a stack of pornographic magazines.
Garrido had a kerosene-type can he allowed her to use as a toilet. There was also marijuana, hashish and some cheap wine.
Testimony later would indicate Garrido had dropped four hits of LSD that day, something he tried to use in his legal defense.
For 5-½ hours, as a radio played, Garrido raped Callaway. He insisted she drink some wine, smoke some of the hash.
As the radio announcer said it was 2:38 a.m., someone banged on the door of the shed. Garrido went outside. He came back giggling, and told her it was “just the guy next door.”
Not long after that, however, there was another bang on the door. “I think it is the heat,” Garrido said. “Are you going to maintain, are you going to be good?”
Garrido went outside into the night air shirtless, wearing only his jeans.
Reno police officer Clifford Conrad was standing outside. He had noticed the Pinto, then the broken lock on the shed door.
Conrad began to question Garrido when Callaway poked her head out from behind the plastic sheeting.
“Help me,” she said, according to Conrad’s testimony. “She just said, ‘Help me’ again and she ran out.”
Garrido was arrested, and in 1977 was convicted in both state and federal courts.
Speaking out
Callaway is now married and lives with her husband in Las Vegas, where she is known as Katherine Hall. She is speaking publicly now and Tuesday was in New York for network television appearances.
Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison plus five years to life in state prison.
Leland Lutfy, who prosecuted Garrido’s federal case, said Tuesday he was shocked to learn Garrido was released after serving 11 years, assuming he would serve at least two-thirds of the sentence.”How could they let that kind of a monster out after 11 years?”
It would be one of many decisions about Garrido that would raise questions over the years.