Garrido's Earlier Victims Outlined

The El Dorado County District Attorney's office has released information showing that kidnapping survivor Jaycee Dugard was Phillip Garrido's fifth identified victim.
    According to a map of Garrido's crimes, four of his previous  victims had also been attacked in South Lake Tahoe.
    The first known assault was a rape and kidnapping in Antioch on  April 14, 1972.
    That attack was followed by another rape and kidnapping on June 7,  1976, in South Lake Tahoe.
    The next assault was on November 22, 1976, when Garrido attempted  to rape and kidnap one woman and then raped and kidnapped a second woman,  also in South Lake Tahoe.
    That attack led to his conviction in federal court for kidnapping  and in state court for rape. He was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison  and five years to life in state prison.
    He only served 11 years of that sentence, however, and was paroled  in 1988.
    On June 10, 1991, Garrido and his wife, Nancy Garrido, used a stun  gun and forcibly kidnapped Dugard, then 11, as she walked to the school bus  stop near her South Lake Tahoe home.
    The couple took her to their home on Walnut Avenue just outside  Antioch, where they held her captive for the next 18 years.
    During that time, Garrido repeatedly raped Dugard and she gave  birth to two daughters fathered by him.
    She wasn't found until Aug. 4, 2009, despite numerous searches by  state and federal parole agents.
    Phillip and Nancy Garrido have since pleaded guilty to rape and  kidnapping charges. They were sentenced in June to life in prison.
    A memoir written by Dugard telling of her abduction, captivity and  survival was released in bookstores today. The book, titled "A Stolen Life,"  is published by Simon and Schuster.
    A statement released today by El Dorado County District Attorney  Vern Pierson said that law enforcement investigators knew that Garrido had  committed the previous assaults at the time that they were searching for  Dugard, but somehow Garrido never became a suspect.
    Pierson, along with Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Roseville, law enforcement  leaders and victims' rights organizations plan to discuss some of the  unanswered questions in the case at a public meeting in Sacramento on Aug. 3.
    Among those questions are how Garrido, a repeat kidnapper and  rapist with a history of kidnapping and raping women and girls in the Lake  Tahoe area, and who was a registered sex offender on federal parole, avoided  becoming a suspect in Dugard's abduction.
    The group also plans to discuss how Garrido managed to keep Dugard  hidden in his backyard for 18 years while he was on federal and state parole.
    The meeting will be part of a joint effort by Pierson and Gaines  to examine what went wrong in Dugard's case and create new legislation and  reforms to prevent those mistakes from being repeated.
    The hearing will include analysis of the many shortcomings in  federal and state parole supervision and shortcomings in the initial law  enforcement investigation of the case.
    In a report on the federal parole supervision of Garrido that was  released Thursday, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts  describes numerous failures by federal parole agents to adequately supervise  Garrido.
    According to the report, federal parole officers handled Garrido's  case for more than 10 years and, despite having classified him as "high  risk," they only visited his house 10 or 11 times.
    In the three years after Dugard was kidnapped, Garrido's parole  officer only made one attempt to contact Garrido at his home, but Garrido cut  the visit short, claiming he had to drive his wife to work. After that, all  contact for the next three years took place at the probation office, the  report states.
    Garrido was only found to be in violation of his parole once,  despite multiple drug tests showing that he was using methamphetamine,  according to the report.
    A report released in 2009 by California Inspector General David  Shaw also found that after reviewing the state's parole supervision of  Garrido, state parole agents missed numerous opportunities to discover Dugard  living in his backyard.
    According to Pierson, state parole officers visited Garrido's home  60 times over a 10-year period and failed to discover Dugard. They also  failed to investigate clearly visible utility wires running from Garrido's  house to the backyard compound where Dugard was being held captive.
    A video released today by Pierson shows a state parole agent  searching Garrido's house sometime between 2000 and 2007. During the brief  search, which appears to have been taped by Nancy Garrido, the parole officer  briefly glances into each room, but never goes in the backyard.
    "If the system had worked the way it should have, Ms. Dugard and  her two daughters would have been discovered merely 30 feet away," Gaines  said in a statement released Monday.
    Another video released today by Pierson's office appears to have  also been taken by Nancy Garrido. In the video she is pretending to tape  Garrido while he plays guitar in a park, but is actually recording young  children in a playground behind him.
    Pierson's office also released a psychological evaluation of  Garrido that led to his parole being granted in 1988.
    The clinical psychologist who examined him described him as "a  young man of average intelligence" who had "deeply held religious and  philosophical convictions".
    The report went on to say that that the likelihood that Garrido  would re-offend was minimal and recommended him for parole.
    The psychologist did, however, write that if Garrido were to  regress back to criminal behavior, he would most likely signal it by starting  to use drugs again.
    In a letter Garrido wrote to the parole board, he claimed that  drug use caused him to lose his "reasoning power."
    "Seven years of using made me fall from reality," Garrido wrote to  the parole board.
    According to the report on Garrido's federal parole supervision,  his parole officer largely ignored his positive drug tests.
    Information about the Aug. 3 meeting can be found at  www.senate.ca.gov/gaines.