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Dugard's Kidnapper Sentenced to 431 Years

Jaycee Lee Dugard, 11-year old girl who went missing in 1991 (inset) and Phillip Garrido is seen in court on March 17, 2011. (Credit: AP)

PLACERVILLE, Calif. — The couple who kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991 and held her captive for nearly two decades were sentenced to prison yesterday, after listening to angry and emotionally wrought statements from the victim and her family.

Philip Garrido, 60, received a term of 431 years in prison. His wife, Nancy, 55, was sentenced to 36 years to life. Both waived their right to appeal as part of their sentence.

Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held for 18 years, was not in the courtroom. But her mother, Terry Probyn, read a statement from Dugard, who is now 31.

“There is no God in the universe who would condone your actions,’’ Dugard wrote. “You stole my life and that of my family.’’

But, Dugard told the Garridos, “you do not matter anymore.’’

A tent is set up in the far backyard of a home in Antioch, Calif., where authorities say kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard lived. [AP]

Probyn also spoke of her own suffering as she wondered what had happened to her daughter after the abduction.

“I thought I was going insane,’’ she said, adding, “My baby was gone.’’

Hands shaking, her voice rose. “It was you, Nancy Garrido, and it was you, Philip Garrido, that broke my heart,’’ she said, adding: “I hate you both.’’

Judge Douglas C. Phimister of El Dorado County Superior Court was stern in a lengthy dissection of Philip Garrido’s life as an experienced and manipulative criminal who snatched Dugard off a South Lake Tahoe street and then raped and imprisoned her.

“You took a human being and turned them into chattel,’’ said Phimister. “You reinvented slavery.’’

The couple confessed and pleaded guilty in April to kidnapping Dugard and holding her at their home outside Antioch, Calif., a Bay Area suburb.

Philip Garrido, a convicted sex offender, raped Dugard, eventually fathering two girls by her. Dugard became pregnant with her first child at 13 and her second when she was 16.

In court yesterday, Stephen Tapson, a lawyer for Nancy Garrido, said she loved both Dugard and her two children. Of her sentence, Garrido said, “I deserve every moment of it.’’

In August 2009, authorities discovered Dugard after campus police at the University of California, Berkeley, alerted parole authorities to Philip Garrido’s suspicious activities and statements made on campus.

It was soon discovered that Garrido, who had served 11 years in prison for the rape of a Nevada casino worker in 1976, had been holding Dugard at his home and in a secret backyard compound constructed behind it.

Tapson had long maintained that Nancy Garrido did not rape Dugard but that she was aware the sexual abuse was going on.

Tapson said that both Nancy Garrido and her husband had become addicted to methamphetamine and that the drug had fueled their actions.

But she pleaded guilty to both kidnapping and forcible rape.

Philip Garrido was sentenced on an array of crimes that Phimister outlined in exhaustive fashion yesterday, adding that he believed that Garrido had tried to hide his crimes and play up any mental illness to avoid punishment.

The Garridos married in 1981 after meeting in a federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., where he was serving time and where she had gone to visit a relative.

Dugard, who plans to publish a memoir next month about her experience, now lives with her two children in a secret location. In July 2010, the state of California settled a claim with her and her children that state parole agents had not adequately monitored Garrido.