Book-It 'o11! Book #24
The Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one and two, just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Lost and Found: The True Story of Jaycee Lee Dugard and the Abduction that Shocked the World by John Glatt
Details: Copyright 2010, St Martin's Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "A MISSING DAUGHTER
In 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her morning walk to the school bus. The search for Jaycee made national headlines, and the case was repeatedly featured on America’s Most Wanted. But despite her family’s tireless efforts, Jaycee’s disappearance remained a mystery...
A PAROLED CRIMINAL
Then, in August 2009, a registered sex offender named Phillip Garrido appeared on the University of California, Berkeley campus alongside two young women whose unusual behavior sparked concern among campus officials and law enforcement. That visit would pave the way for shocking discovery: that Garrido was Jaycee Lee Dugard’s kidnapper…
A HOUSE OF HORRORS
Jaycee’s story was revealed: For eighteen years, she had lived in an outbuilding on the Garrido property in Antioch, CA, just two hours away from her childhood home. Kept in complete isolation, she was raped by Garrido, who fathered her two daughters. When news broke of Jaycee’s discovery, there was a huge outpouring of relief across the nation. But questions remain: How did the Garridos slip past authorities? And how did Jaycee endure her captivity? This is the story of a girl-next-door who was Lost and Found."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This case has fascinated me since it broke and I'd gotten sucked into the tide of a rather tawdry true crime series and couldn't help myself.
How I Liked It: Thankfully, unlike the last book I read in this genre, this book transcends (well-- mostly) the slap-dash, half-assed, rush-to-press nature of the series.
The author offers a backstory of the perpetrator that takes up a third of the book, but unlike the dawdling filler that made up the last book of this kind I read, this backstory is actually directly relevant to the case at hand. The author covers the horrific crimes that predated the 1991 kidnapping that makes all the more incomprehensible what many found so incomprehensible: how exactly did this man, of all people, get away with this for eighteen years? We learn about Phillip Garrido's largely uneventful early life (although after a serious motorcycle accident at sixteen which required surgery, Garrido's father declared his son was a completely different boy and it was then that he fell in with a "bad crowd" and started destroying his mind with heavy drug use) and the warning signs that slowly arose and multiplied (an aspiring rock-musician, Garrido also displayed an interest in pornography that creeped out friends and band-mates alike). By twenty-one, after multiple arrests for drugs, Garrido brutally and repeatedly raped a fourteen-year-old girl and was saved from jail only due to the fact the traumatized girl refused to testify (it was later revealed that Garrido's defense attorney threatened to portray her as a "slut and whore" if she took the stand).
Four years (which included a brutally physically abusive marriage and a banishment by his band-mates for his increasingly sick and perverted behavior, including attempting to lure young girls to their gigs) later, Garrido kidnapped a nineteen-year-old girl in South Lake Tahoe and lured her into his car before handcuffing and brutally raping her. She managed to escape and never pressed charges. Towards the end of that year, Garrido kidnapped and raped another woman, this time taking her to an elaborate dungeon he'd created in a corner of a rented warehouse, decked out with drugs and various rape tools (the police report noted handcuffs, a douche, and a vibrator with several attachments among them). For eight hours, Garrido brutally raped the woman in nearly every manner imaginable and was stopped only by cops at the door, on patrol investigating a string of warehouse robberies. There to investigate the rather suspicious-looking sight of the out-of-state car parked in front, made all the more conspicuous by the scant frost on the windows (as compared to the other cars) as well as the torn-off door lock on the warehouse door, Garrido's victim took a chance and escaped naked to the police.
Eventually at trial in 1977, Garrido confessed to frequent public masturbation, occasionally while peeping in women's windows. He was evaluated by several psychiatrists and earned a life sentence in Nevada and fifty years in federal court. The judge allowed him to start serving his sentence in federal prison due to Garrido's plea that the facilities and psychiatric treatment would serve him better there. Both the acting judge and the prosecutor mistakenly believed that it would be at least thirty-three years before Garrido would be eligible for federal parole before being returned to Nevada to complete his sentence. However, under the law at the time, Garrido would actually be eligible for parole after serving merely a third of his federal time or ten years of a life sentence (or of a sentence of thirty years). This was one of many horrific "slips". Garrido walked out of prison in 1988 with a brand new wife, a Jehovah's Witness, both eventually settling in to live with Garrido's elderly mother in Antioch, California, after his time in a halfway house in Oakland, however not before finding his victim (the one he'd gone to jail over), and buying a drink and attempting small talk with her at the casino in which she then worked. The horrified woman had registered with a federal victim notification program the year before to contact her if Garrido was ever released. They had assured his his earliest possible parole date was 2006. After Garrido left the casino with the promise that he'd see her again, she quickly contacted the authorities and within a few days met with Garrido's parole agent, who informed h er that he had gotten a degree in psychology in prison and had taught classes to other inmates, insuring his speedy release. In the years that followed, a string of child murders and abductions took place around several areas connected to Garrido (his mother's home, the halfway house, his former home in Nevada) often occurring within as few as three miles. The author contends that the police never even questioned the convicted abductor and rapist and only twenty years after the fact reactivated the cold cases to investigate Garrido's possible involvement.
The author keeps a quick (but respectful) pace, building to Garrido's abduction of Jaycee Dugard and opening the second third of the book with a chapter giving Dugard's backstory and then, the abduction.
The book intersperses the community and world at large's reaction to the disappearance (from the "Summer of Terror" in the neighborhood to the "check-in" interviews in the paper every few years to a computer generated photo of how Dugard would appear at then-age twenty) to Dugard's life in Garrido's captivity (including the births of her two daughters and Garrido's later founding of a bizarre "church" based on his claims of interacting with angels, revelations about schizophrenia, and strong belief of the second coming of Christ). The book gets bogged down a bit by trotting out seemingly anyone that had any interaction with Garrido whatsoever, especially if they noted the young woman hef frequently passed off as his daughter or the two little girls that, depending on who was asking, were his nieces, his daughters, or a friend's children. Finally, we reach part three wherein Garrido is eventually discovered through his bizarre "recruitment" behavior (he and Dugard's two daughters were passing out leaflets) on a San Francisco campus wherein Garrido made the unfortunate mistake of visiting campus police headquarters to broker holding a major event on the main campus.
Through a series of suspicions and checking names and papers, Garrido is called into the parole office with his wife, Dugard, and his two daughters. After a prolonged interrogation, we get one of the moments of the book it promised; Dugard tearfully admits her real name and her story to police.
The reunion with Dugard's family and the breaking news and ensuing media frenzy the author occasionally treats sloppily. He veers almost into shlock when making a character out of one of Nancy Garrido's defense attorney, by the author's pen, a loud-mouthed, heavy-drinker who brags about his book and movie deal at a heavily-populated country club. The author also throws in bizarre asides to various characters coming out of the woodwork (a pornographer wants to do a "non-exploitative" film about Dugard's life; Dugard's biological father, never present before, suddenly appears for the highly publicized trial and runs his mouth for the cameras), perhaps to cement the effect of the tawdry media feeding frenzy, but when juxtaposed with earnest and heartfelt statements from Dugard's close family, it comes off as granting the same attention to the exploiters as to the victim. Also, at times, it's downright distracting: Oprah's alleged personal call to the Dugards for the coveted first-interview with Jaycee focuses more on the legendary talk show host, devoting pages to Oprah's interview with a gossip TV show containing quotes about her fevered desire to get the exclusive.
The last section isn't completely bereft, however. The author asks pretty much the universal question of this case: how did this happen? He charts various police reports of suspicious activity reported by neighbors throughout the years, as well as the fact Dugard actually met Garrido's parole agent. He doesn't directly cast blame, but he allows for those involved to voice theirs, including a quote from Dugard's stepfather who angrily refers to the police as "Keystone Kops" more interested in collecting their paychecks than doing their jobs.
The book peters out (as of course, a book of this type will do) with a rather quiet epilogue.
Still, as the genre goes, this is undoubtedly one of the better offerings.
Notable: Some annoyingly sloppy writing occurs early on.
“Perhaps the only precedent for this strange case is Austria's Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his own daughter Elizabeth for almost a quarter of a century, fathering her seven children. In 2008, I wrote a book about the case, Secrets in the Cellar, but in many ways the Jaycee Lee Dugard tragedy is even more disturbing and heartbreaking as it should never have happened in the first place.” (Acknowledgements)
Of course, the correct way that should read (is the author saying that the horrors suffered by Elizabeth Fritzl should have happened?) is not "it never should have happened in the first place" but "it was by nearly every standard utterly preventable."
An editor should've easily caught that, even (or perhaps especially) in an acknowledgements section.
Title: Lost and Found: The True Story of Jaycee Lee Dugard and the Abduction that Shocked the World by John Glatt
Details: Copyright 2010, St Martin's Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "A MISSING DAUGHTER
In 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her morning walk to the school bus. The search for Jaycee made national headlines, and the case was repeatedly featured on America’s Most Wanted. But despite her family’s tireless efforts, Jaycee’s disappearance remained a mystery...
A PAROLED CRIMINAL
Then, in August 2009, a registered sex offender named Phillip Garrido appeared on the University of California, Berkeley campus alongside two young women whose unusual behavior sparked concern among campus officials and law enforcement. That visit would pave the way for shocking discovery: that Garrido was Jaycee Lee Dugard’s kidnapper…
A HOUSE OF HORRORS
Jaycee’s story was revealed: For eighteen years, she had lived in an outbuilding on the Garrido property in Antioch, CA, just two hours away from her childhood home. Kept in complete isolation, she was raped by Garrido, who fathered her two daughters. When news broke of Jaycee’s discovery, there was a huge outpouring of relief across the nation. But questions remain: How did the Garridos slip past authorities? And how did Jaycee endure her captivity? This is the story of a girl-next-door who was Lost and Found."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This case has fascinated me since it broke and I'd gotten sucked into the tide of a rather tawdry true crime series and couldn't help myself.
How I Liked It: Thankfully, unlike the last book I read in this genre, this book transcends (well-- mostly) the slap-dash, half-assed, rush-to-press nature of the series.
The author offers a backstory of the perpetrator that takes up a third of the book, but unlike the dawdling filler that made up the last book of this kind I read, this backstory is actually directly relevant to the case at hand. The author covers the horrific crimes that predated the 1991 kidnapping that makes all the more incomprehensible what many found so incomprehensible: how exactly did this man, of all people, get away with this for eighteen years? We learn about Phillip Garrido's largely uneventful early life (although after a serious motorcycle accident at sixteen which required surgery, Garrido's father declared his son was a completely different boy and it was then that he fell in with a "bad crowd" and started destroying his mind with heavy drug use) and the warning signs that slowly arose and multiplied (an aspiring rock-musician, Garrido also displayed an interest in pornography that creeped out friends and band-mates alike). By twenty-one, after multiple arrests for drugs, Garrido brutally and repeatedly raped a fourteen-year-old girl and was saved from jail only due to the fact the traumatized girl refused to testify (it was later revealed that Garrido's defense attorney threatened to portray her as a "slut and whore" if she took the stand).
Four years (which included a brutally physically abusive marriage and a banishment by his band-mates for his increasingly sick and perverted behavior, including attempting to lure young girls to their gigs) later, Garrido kidnapped a nineteen-year-old girl in South Lake Tahoe and lured her into his car before handcuffing and brutally raping her. She managed to escape and never pressed charges. Towards the end of that year, Garrido kidnapped and raped another woman, this time taking her to an elaborate dungeon he'd created in a corner of a rented warehouse, decked out with drugs and various rape tools (the police report noted handcuffs, a douche, and a vibrator with several attachments among them). For eight hours, Garrido brutally raped the woman in nearly every manner imaginable and was stopped only by cops at the door, on patrol investigating a string of warehouse robberies. There to investigate the rather suspicious-looking sight of the out-of-state car parked in front, made all the more conspicuous by the scant frost on the windows (as compared to the other cars) as well as the torn-off door lock on the warehouse door, Garrido's victim took a chance and escaped naked to the police.
Eventually at trial in 1977, Garrido confessed to frequent public masturbation, occasionally while peeping in women's windows. He was evaluated by several psychiatrists and earned a life sentence in Nevada and fifty years in federal court. The judge allowed him to start serving his sentence in federal prison due to Garrido's plea that the facilities and psychiatric treatment would serve him better there. Both the acting judge and the prosecutor mistakenly believed that it would be at least thirty-three years before Garrido would be eligible for federal parole before being returned to Nevada to complete his sentence. However, under the law at the time, Garrido would actually be eligible for parole after serving merely a third of his federal time or ten years of a life sentence (or of a sentence of thirty years). This was one of many horrific "slips". Garrido walked out of prison in 1988 with a brand new wife, a Jehovah's Witness, both eventually settling in to live with Garrido's elderly mother in Antioch, California, after his time in a halfway house in Oakland, however not before finding his victim (the one he'd gone to jail over), and buying a drink and attempting small talk with her at the casino in which she then worked. The horrified woman had registered with a federal victim notification program the year before to contact her if Garrido was ever released. They had assured his his earliest possible parole date was 2006. After Garrido left the casino with the promise that he'd see her again, she quickly contacted the authorities and within a few days met with Garrido's parole agent, who informed h er that he had gotten a degree in psychology in prison and had taught classes to other inmates, insuring his speedy release. In the years that followed, a string of child murders and abductions took place around several areas connected to Garrido (his mother's home, the halfway house, his former home in Nevada) often occurring within as few as three miles. The author contends that the police never even questioned the convicted abductor and rapist and only twenty years after the fact reactivated the cold cases to investigate Garrido's possible involvement.
The author keeps a quick (but respectful) pace, building to Garrido's abduction of Jaycee Dugard and opening the second third of the book with a chapter giving Dugard's backstory and then, the abduction.
The book intersperses the community and world at large's reaction to the disappearance (from the "Summer of Terror" in the neighborhood to the "check-in" interviews in the paper every few years to a computer generated photo of how Dugard would appear at then-age twenty) to Dugard's life in Garrido's captivity (including the births of her two daughters and Garrido's later founding of a bizarre "church" based on his claims of interacting with angels, revelations about schizophrenia, and strong belief of the second coming of Christ). The book gets bogged down a bit by trotting out seemingly anyone that had any interaction with Garrido whatsoever, especially if they noted the young woman hef frequently passed off as his daughter or the two little girls that, depending on who was asking, were his nieces, his daughters, or a friend's children. Finally, we reach part three wherein Garrido is eventually discovered through his bizarre "recruitment" behavior (he and Dugard's two daughters were passing out leaflets) on a San Francisco campus wherein Garrido made the unfortunate mistake of visiting campus police headquarters to broker holding a major event on the main campus.
Through a series of suspicions and checking names and papers, Garrido is called into the parole office with his wife, Dugard, and his two daughters. After a prolonged interrogation, we get one of the moments of the book it promised; Dugard tearfully admits her real name and her story to police.
The reunion with Dugard's family and the breaking news and ensuing media frenzy the author occasionally treats sloppily. He veers almost into shlock when making a character out of one of Nancy Garrido's defense attorney, by the author's pen, a loud-mouthed, heavy-drinker who brags about his book and movie deal at a heavily-populated country club. The author also throws in bizarre asides to various characters coming out of the woodwork (a pornographer wants to do a "non-exploitative" film about Dugard's life; Dugard's biological father, never present before, suddenly appears for the highly publicized trial and runs his mouth for the cameras), perhaps to cement the effect of the tawdry media feeding frenzy, but when juxtaposed with earnest and heartfelt statements from Dugard's close family, it comes off as granting the same attention to the exploiters as to the victim. Also, at times, it's downright distracting: Oprah's alleged personal call to the Dugards for the coveted first-interview with Jaycee focuses more on the legendary talk show host, devoting pages to Oprah's interview with a gossip TV show containing quotes about her fevered desire to get the exclusive.
The last section isn't completely bereft, however. The author asks pretty much the universal question of this case: how did this happen? He charts various police reports of suspicious activity reported by neighbors throughout the years, as well as the fact Dugard actually met Garrido's parole agent. He doesn't directly cast blame, but he allows for those involved to voice theirs, including a quote from Dugard's stepfather who angrily refers to the police as "Keystone Kops" more interested in collecting their paychecks than doing their jobs.
The book peters out (as of course, a book of this type will do) with a rather quiet epilogue.
Still, as the genre goes, this is undoubtedly one of the better offerings.
Notable: Some annoyingly sloppy writing occurs early on.
“Perhaps the only precedent for this strange case is Austria's Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his own daughter Elizabeth for almost a quarter of a century, fathering her seven children. In 2008, I wrote a book about the case, Secrets in the Cellar, but in many ways the Jaycee Lee Dugard tragedy is even more disturbing and heartbreaking as it should never have happened in the first place.” (Acknowledgements)
Of course, the correct way that should read (is the author saying that the horrors suffered by Elizabeth Fritzl should have happened?) is not "it never should have happened in the first place" but "it was by nearly every standard utterly preventable."
An editor should've easily caught that, even (or perhaps especially) in an acknowledgements section.