Kidnapings

When San Diego County native George Norman Harrison opened his Tijuana pizzeria in 2007, he plastered the El Mirador neighborhood with fliers and hired a team of delivery boys to zip up and down the shanty-lined hills on motor scooters. Business was good, and he told his family he liked the low cost of living in Mexico.

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

For kidnap victims like Jaycee Lee Dugard, recovery is rare. A full portion of her life -- her entire teens and 20s -- was poisoned by her abduction at age 11 and the 18 years of brutal captivity and deprivation that followed. So uncommon are situations like hers that mental health experts have few examples to guide them. They can turn to the case of Natascha Kampusch of Vienna, kidnapped at age 10 on her way to school in 1998 and held for 8 1/2 years before escaping. After an apparent recovery that included her own television talk show and celebrity dating, she retreated into her apartment and rarely leaves it now. Or they can look to Elisabeth Fritzl of Amstetten, Austria, dragged into a dungeon by her father at 18 and held for 24 years as she gave birth to seven children.

Dawn Cordy always knew her neighborhood was an easy place to hide -- a semirural San Francisco suburb where housing is cheap, sheriff's cruisers rarely appear, residents don't snoop and registered sex offenders have found a refuge. It's a small, scruffy, unincorporated island largely surrounded by the hard-knock city of Antioch, a region synonymous with the foreclosure crisis in the Bay Area but now linked to yet another outrage. This is where Phillip Garrido, who was charged last week with rape and kidnapping, allegedly held Jaycee Lee Dugard for 18 years and fathered her two children in a warren of tents and soundproofed outbuildings behind his gray cinder-block house on Walnut Avenue.

After Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted and went missing for 18 years, Meghan Dorris, an elementary school classmate, went to college and traveled the world: Egypt, Costa Rica, Spain, Japan, Jordan. Two years ago, Dorris returned home. She remains close to high school friends, attends their weddings and keeps tabs on their growing families. "I just wonder what Jaycee would have done," Dorris, 28, said Sunday as she walked through town, a crisp breeze rustling aspens, sun sparkling on the cerulean lake.

Investigators searched several properties owned by a client of accused kidnapper Phillip Garrido on Wednesday, seizing a computer and other items, a Contra Costa County sheriff's spokesman said. Garrido, 58, and wife Nancy, 54, were arrested Aug. 26 and remain jailed in El Dorado County on kidnapping and rape charges in connection with the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, with whom Garrido allegedly had two daughters. Investigators searched three properties in Pittsburg, Bay Point and Pleasant Hill near the city of Antioch, Calif.

The mother of a kidnapped 3-year-old boy made a desperate plea for his release Tuesday before draping herself over his picture and sobbing. "Please, I am asking them to release my son and give him back to me," a distraught Maria Rosalina Millan implored in Spanish during a news conference at the San Bernardino County sheriff's station. "He doesn't owe anything. I don't owe anything. He's a good boy."

Pale and struggling to hold back tears, a 28-year-old Sunday school teacher appeared in court for the first time Tuesday to face accusations of kidnapping, raping and killing an 8-year-old Central Valley girl. Melissa Huckaby, who was wearing a red prison jumpsuit with her hands and feet cuffed, appeared disoriented when she was ushered into the packed courtroom and faced a wall of TV camera crews, photographers and reporters.

Phillip Garrido, who was convicted in a 1976 kidnapping and rape, was arrested four years earlier for allegedly drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl near his hometown, police in Antioch, Calif., revealed Thursday for the first time. Garrido was arrested last week on suspicion of kidnapping and raping Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was 11 when she was snatched from her street in South Lake Tahoe in 1991 and was allegedly kept in a hidden backyard warren of sheds and tents for 18 years.

Phillip Garrido, the man accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting Jaycee Lee Dugard, was paroled by the federal government two decades ago after a 35-minute jailhouse interview in which he spoke of his crime, his prison experience and future plans, the U.S. Parole Commission said Friday. Garrido, charged with abducting Dugard 18 years ago, was released from federal custody after serving only 10 1/2 years of his 50-year sentence for a 1976 kidnapping. Cranston Mitchell, vice chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission, said two commission examiners met with Garrido in Lompoc, Calif.