Sex Crimes

Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret. "We argue a lot about the food," she says, wrinkling her nose. "To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy." There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature. Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers.

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.

A University of Southern California fraternity has been temporarily suspended as Los Angeles police investigate allegations that a female student and possibly others were sexually assaulted at the Lambda Chi Alpha house during a rowdy party this week. USC officials said three women had come forward reporting assaults at Lambda Chi Alpha early Wednesday and a campus crime alert was issued.

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.

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.

An Arizona man who allegedly stole the identity of a San Francisco physician and posed as a doctor running a West Los Angeles sperm bank has been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting two men, authorities said. Jeffrey Lynn Graybill, 40, of Phoenix is accused of pretending to be "Dr. Robert Richardson" and soliciting sperm donors for the nonexistent Fertility Clinic of West Los Angeles, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

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.

Roman Polanski rushed up to the British Airways counter at LAX in late January 1978 with an American Express card and an urgent desire to get out of town. He bought the last seat on an overnight flight to London and 15 minutes later, he wrote in his autobiography, watched Los Angeles gradually disappear out a jet window. The criminal case that Polanski was fleeing never went away, as his recent arrest in Zurich attests. But how a Los Angeles court would restart the case if Switzerland extradites the film director, 76, is a question complicated by the passage of decades and recent allegations of judicial misconduct.

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.

Saying he hadn't "slept well in days," Los Angeles schools Supt. David L. Brewer told parents at Markham Middle School on Thursday that he is investigating "how a policy and system we have in place failed" when an administrator previously investigated for allegedly having sex with a Foshay Learning Center student was transferred to Markham.