Kidnapings

A Lebanese citizen being held in a detention center here was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration. Unlike terrorism suspects who were secretly snatched by the CIA and harshly interrogated and imprisoned overseas during the George W. Bush administration, Raymond Azar was flown to this Washington suburb for a case involving inflated invoices.

The blond girls that Phillip Garrido introduced as his daughters were pasty white, even though it was the end of summer, and seemed robotic and unusually submissive. They called Garrido "Daddy." Two UC Berkeley police employees who interviewed Garrido and his daughters this week said at a news conference Friday that they knew something was wrong because the girls obviously were not normal. Police said Garrido fathered the girls with Jaycee Dugard, whom they say he kidnapped 18 years ago when she was 11 and kept in the backyard of his home in Antioch, northeast of Berkeley.

For years, neighbors knew something was off about Phillip Garrido, the registered sex offender now accused of abducting an 11-year-old girl and holding her for 18 years, much of the time in an overgrown backyard filled with sheds and tents. One neighbor even called 911, worried about children living in the yard. Authorities regularly visited Garrido's home in Antioch, northeast of Oakland, but never detected the presence of Jaycee Lee Dugard, whom Garrido allegedly kidnapped in 1991, or the two blond, blue-eyed girls officials say she bore him during her captivity.

Reporting from San Francisco, Orinda, Calif., and Antioch, Calif. -- As details continued to emerge about Jaycee Lee Dugard's alleged kidnapper, questions intensified Monday over how Phillip Garrido could have served only 11 years in prison after a 1976 rape and kidnapping for which he had been given a 50-year federal sentence as well as a life term in Nevada. Garrido was convicted of kidnapping in federal court for abducting Katherine Callaway in South Lake Tahoe on a November night nearly 33 years ago and driving her -- handcuffed and hogtied -- to Reno.

Phillip Garrido's kidnapping and rape of a young woman in 1976, as described in federal court documents, bore eerie similarities to his alleged abduction and captivity of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard. The trial transcript and court-ordered psychological evaluations reveal a deeply troubled man who craved violence for sexual satisfaction, meticulously planned the rape and was developing an obsessive interest in religion. And they show that Katherine Callaway, 25, may not have been his first victim.

As Phillip Garrido maneuvered the Ford Pinto toward the storage unit he had equipped as a hidden lair for raping women, he talked about his sexual fantasies, said Katherine Callaway, who was handcuffed and bound in the back seat. But that wasn't all. "He talked a lot about Jesus on our ride, telling me about how he was going to turn himself over to God next year because Jesus was the way," Callaway told police on a cold November morning in 1976 after Garrido raped her repeatedly over 5 1/2 hours.

A bone fragment recovered from the backyard of a home next door to suspected kidnappers Phillip and Nancy Garrido appears to be from a human, the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department said Tuesday. Sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee said an independent expert determined that the bone is "probably human," and investigators are sending it to the state DNA lab for further testing. Officials are hoping the state "can develop a DNA profile on the fragment," Lee wrote in an e-mail statement Tuesday afternoon.

The husband and wife accused of kidnapping Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago, holding her captive and raping her will be held in jail until they stand trial in the next year or 18 months. El Dorado County Superior Court Judge Douglas Phimister ruled Monday that bail for Phillip Garrido, 58, should be set at $30 million. But because the convicted sex offender is also on a so-called hold for violating parole, there is no chance he would be set free on bail. In setting the high amount for Garrido's bail, Phimister said he considered "the protection of the public, the fact that Mr. Garrido was on parole at the time these events occurred allegedly, the seriousness of the charge and the fact that the court must consider the injuries to the victim."

Investigators on Tuesday launched an exhaustive search of the home of accused kidnappers and rapists Phillip and Nancy Garrido and a property next door in connection with the disappearances of two girls two decades ago. Michaela Garecht, 9, was kidnapped in front of a Hayward store in 1988. Two months later, Ilene Misheloff, 13, disappeared after she was seen getting into a car on her way home from school in Dublin. By 4:30 p.m., investigators from several Bay Area law enforcement agencies had finished searching the adjacent property and about half of the Garridos' lot, removing some items, said Hayward Police Lt. Christine Orrey.

When an Orange County judge in 2003 sentenced gang member Antonio Nunez to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a crime, the defendant became one of the youngest in California history to get the penalty. Nunez was 14 when he sprayed an AK-47 assault rifle at police trying to thwart a 2001 kidnapping plot. In addition to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Nunez also was sentenced to four consecutive life terms on separate counts of attempting to murder four police officers.