For 18 years, Jaycee Dugard never said her own name. And, she said, she never tried to flee from Phillip Garrido, the predator who used a stun gun to abduct her from her South Lake Tahoe bus stop at age 11.
At first, Dugard told an El Dorado County grand jury, the threat of being shocked again kept her in line - that and the lock on the shed where she was stashed.
Garrido had a temper, and he would fire up the Taser so Dugard could hear the "zappy noise." There were dogs, too, in her backyard prison outside Garrido's home near Antioch.
Years later, she felt trapped, not knowing how she could make money to support two young daughters - now teenagers - fathered by Garrido. Ultimately, she convinced herself she was performing a greater good, feeding the compulsions of a fiend who might not need to steal another child.
"He said he needed help with his sexual problem, that he had a real problem, and that, you know, I was helping him," Dugard, now 31, said in her testimony, portions of which were released after Garrido and his wife, Nancy Garrido, were sentenced Thursday in Placerville.
"He didn't say that, that he would take somebody else," Dugard said, "but the impression I got was that I was helping prevent something."
Judge Douglas Phimister released a 157-page transcript, redacting specific accounts of sexual assault. The testimony from Sept. 21 is nonetheless disturbing, an account of a little girl who comes to rely on the very people who stole her childhood and who doesn't understand that her real family is still looking for her.
The transcript does not give insight into parole officers' failure to find Dugard earlier, for which the state paid her a $20 million settlement. It does reveal a new and unsettling detail - that the Garridos often videotaped children playing at parks.
Dugard's testimony starts with the fateful day, June 10, 1991, when she went to catch her school bus, only to see a car pull up, hear a man start to ask for directions and feel the Taser jolt.
"All of a sudden, his hand shoots out of the car window, and I feel this shock," Dugard said. "All of a sudden, I'm in the car, and there's something on top of me."
Hidden under a blanket on the floorboards, she said, she was asked if she wanted something to drink. "And the man said, 'I can't believe we got away with it,' and he started laughing."
Back at the house in Antioch, Dugard said, she told Phillip Garrido that her family couldn't afford much of a ransom. She asked, "When can I go home?" But he only said, "This is what we're going to do," before leading her to the shed.
Dugard was repeatedly raped by Garrido, who called the extended attacks "runs." Her captor brought her food and called her "Snoopy." She didn't meet Nancy Garrido, who had been in the car in South Lake Tahoe, for weeks.
Sometimes Nancy Garrido would seek to help Dugard, saying, "I'll take this run for you." But when her husband violated his parole and returned to prison for four months in 1993, she kept watch.
"At night she would come in, and we would eat dinner together and watch TV," Dugard said. "But usually she would just lock the door and leave."
Dugard's captors were methamphetamine addicts, Dugard said. And Phillip Garrido started to hear voices in the walls. But he also spoke of changing his ways, and of becoming a real family. The last time he raped Dugard, she said, was the day her second child was conceived.
Dugard eventually chose a name for herself - "Alissa" - and went about a life that had some trappings of normalcy. She helped Phillip with his printing business, and he put in an above-ground pool. Dugard was given her own tent. Birthdays were celebrated.
"Just trying to be normal, I guess," Dugard said.
She recalled writing in a journal that she wanted to be free, but would never leave.
"I didn't know what to do," she said. "I couldn't leave. I had the girls. I didn't know where to go, what I would do for money or anything. I didn't have anything."
So astray was Dugard that when police and parole officers first interviewed her in August 2009 - a day after Phillip Garrido drew suspicion during a trip to UC Berkeley with the girls - she said she was "Alissa Franzen," a relative from out of town.
Confronted with the truth by a female officer, she still couldn't say her name. "I said that I can't, because I hadn't said my name in 18 years," Dugard said. "I wrote it down. And then I wrote my mom's name."
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