Diary excerpts show Calif. woman held for 18 years had conflicted emotions, longed to be free

Dugard diary shows conflicted emotion on captivity

SAN FRANCISCO — Jaycee Dugard, the Northern California woman who was kidnapped as a child and held prisoner for 18 years, kept a diary in which she wrote of longing for freedom and feeling both emotionally trapped and protective of the man charged with raping her, court documents filed Thursday show.

“It feels like I’m sinking. … this is supposed to be my life to do with what I like … but once again he has taken it away,” Dugard wrote in an entry dated July 5, 2004, almost five years before she surfaced last summer with the two daughters fathered by her alleged captor Phillip Garrido.

“How many times is he allowed to take it away from me?” she wrote. “I am afraid he doesn’t see how the things he says makes me a prisoner.”

El Dorado County prosecutors quoted three portions of Dugard’s diary in the court papers seeking a protective order barring Garrido and his wife Nancy from trying to contact Dugard or her children, now 12 and 15.

The motion came in response to papers filed last week by the Garridos’ defense lawyers trying to force prosecutors to tell them where Dugard is living and if she has a lawyer. A hearing is set for Feb. 26.

District Attorney Vern Pierson said Dugard’s writings show that Phillip Garrido controlled her in the past and was trying to exert continued psychological pressure on her from jail.

Dugard, now 29, has “emphatically stated to our office that she does not want any contact with the defendants or their attorneys,” Pierson said in the documents. “The people ask this court to protect Ms. Doe and to, once and for all, put an end to the defendant’s manipulation.”

The papers referred to Dugard as “Jane Doe” because she was 11 when she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.

The documents also reveal new details about Dugard’s captivity, saying she was kept in a building in a hidden compound inside the backyard of the Garridos’ Antioch home for the first 18 months after her abduction then prohibited from leaving the yard for the first four years.

In another diary entry, dated more than two years after Dugard was snatched from the street outside her South Lake Tahoe home, Dugard wrote, “I got (a cat) for my birthday from Phil and Nancy … they did something for me that no one else would do for me, they paid 200 dollars just so I could have my own kitten.”

A decade later, however, Dugard wrote of the complex emotions surrounding her situation and Phillip Garrido.

“I don’t want to hurt him … sometimes I think my very presence hurts him,” she wrote. “So how can I ever tell him how I want to be free. Free to come and go as I please … Free to say I have a family. I will never cause him pain if it’s in my power to prevent it. FREE.”

In the court filing, Pierson said Dugard and the two daughters she had by Garrido when she was 14 and 17 had been instructed by the Garridos to run to the hidden backyard if anyone ever came to the door.

He also described a plan that Phillip Garrido allegedly hatched to stay in contact with Dugard if he was ever arrested. Dugard told prosecutors Garrido instructed her to request an attorney who could communicate directly with his “without law enforcement knowledge,” the papers state.

Since Garrido’s arrest, he has tried repeatedly to put the plan into action, Pierson said.

On the day he was arrested and Dugard’s identity was revealed, Garrido advised her to get a lawyer. The next month, Garrido sent a letter to a Sacramento television station stating he wanted to reach Dugard “by attorney mail only.”

In January, Garrido’s lawyer wrote Dugard saying, “Mr. Garrido has asked me to convey that he does not harbor any ill will toward (Ms. Doe) or the children and loves them very much.”

Dugard interpreted the “ill will” remark to mean she was not following the plan and that the letter was another way of manipulating her, the papers state.

Phillip Garrido’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Susan Gellman, wrote in an e-mail that contacting a witness to determine what happened is part of her job as a defense attorney, and the information she has been seeking is a matter of routine in criminal cases.

“For the district attorney to hint that it is somehow improper or nefarious is disingenuous to say the least,” Gellman wrote. “I am not the ‘tool’ of any man, as he has been intimated in today’s filing.”

Nancy Garrido’s court-appointed defense lawyer Stephen Tapson did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

The Garridos have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The couple also are requesting permission to visit each other in jail, where they are being held on $30 million and $20 million bail, respectively.

Pierson opposed that request, too, blasting efforts by defense lawyers to portray the pair as the parental figures who deserve jailhouse visits so they can discuss the welfare of their “family.”

“The defense utterly fails to recognize that Jane Doe and her children were not their ‘family,’ but were in fact captives — they were victims,” Pierson wrote. “The unfortunate reality is that Ms. Doe and her children may not have fully realized they were captives and victims because the defendants controlled their reality.”