SACRAMENTO — State parole agents failed to properly supervise Phillip Garrido for a decade and missed obvious clues that could have led them much earlier to Jaycee Dugard, whom he is accused of kidnapping in 1991 and harboring in his Antioch backyard, a prison watchdog reported Wednesday.
Many warning signs were overlooked or ignored, according to Inspector General David R. Shaw. Utility cables led to a hidden backyard compound where Garrido kept Dugard and the two girls he fathered by her. Data from the satellite tracking device the state made him wear could have alerted his parole agent to his presence in that area, had it been reviewed.
Federal parole records, not obtained by the state, noted that he had a soundproof room in his yard. Young girls had been spotted at his house but did not trigger further investigation.
Last year, Shaw's report says, Garrido's parole agent met a 12-year-old girl at Garrido's house, accepted his explanation that she was his brother's daughter and did nothing to verify it.
"No one can know, had the parole agents done everything right, whether we would have discovered Jaycee and her children any sooner," Shaw, who conducted a two-month investigation, told reporters Wednesday. "However, our investigation revealed that there were missed clues and opportunities to discover their existence sooner than they did."
The state prisons chief, Matthew Cate, acknowledged "serious errors" and said his department had improved its supervision of high-risk offenders and would continue to do so to protect the public from this sort of "abject evil."
"We obviously deeply regret any error that could have possibly resulted in the victims living under these conditions for even one additional day," Cate said.
Garrido and his wife are accused of kidnapping Dugard outside her South Lake Tahoe home when she was 11. Local police agencies also have been criticized for missing chances to find her earlier. So have federal officials for imprisoning him for just 11 years for a rape and kidnapping in Nevada in 1976, though he received a 50-year federal sentence and five years to life in Nevada.
El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson, from whose area Dugard was kidnapped, praised the report and lamented that California's budget woes could lead to "further reduction in funding which is necessary to ensure the incarceration of dangerous criminals and their supervision."
