Phillip Garrido

The tragic case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, abducted at the age of 11 and allegedly held captive for 18 years in a backyard complex of tents and outbuildings at an Antioch home, has raised a newly relevant question: How could the alleged kidnappers and their victims have hidden in plain sight for so long? And does the apparent failure of parole agents to detect the ongoing crimes show that reforms to the state's parole system are a bad idea? Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, who have been charged with 29 counts of kidnapping and rape, were well known to law enforcement officials.

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.

When Oprah Winfrey told her daytime viewers farewell last month, more than 16 million were watching. The Nielsen Co. reported Wednesday that the May 25 finale of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" drew 16.4 million viewers. This made the finale the show's most-watched episode in more than 18 years, since the February 1993 airing of its "Why I Love Older Women" episode, which was seen by 17.3 million viewers. "The Oprah Winfrey Show" averaged 8.2 million viewers during May. — Associated Press Obreht wins fiction prize Belgrade-born author Téa Obreht was the surprise winner Wednesday of Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel "The Tiger's Wife," a mystical, magical examination of the recent conflicts in the Balkans.

She watched "The Silence of the Lambs" as a girl and so related to Jodie Foster's character that she wanted to become an FBI agent and go after psychopaths. Instead, Ally Jacobs became a police officer at UC Berkeley, handling mostly garden-variety cases until one day in August when she helped crack the case that ended the 18-year kidnapping nightmare of Jaycee Lee Dugard. On Monday, the 1994 Santa Margarita Catholic High School graduate returned for alumni career day and told students that her brush with fame stemmed from trusting that voice in her head that told her that something wasn't right about the man later arrested and charged with Dugard's kidnap and rape.

Susan Kang Schroeder ticked off the facts of the case: A man bought a 5-year-old girl from Vietnam, used her as a sex slave for more than a decade and forced her to invite over friends whom he molested during sleepovers. "She was made to do every possible sex act," Schroeder said with a bluntness she honed as a prosecutor. But this wasn't a jury. It was the seven members of the Huntington Beach City Council. And if the aim of the Orange County district attorney's chief of staff was to grab their attention with the story of one of the county's most notorious pedophiles, it worked.