The Killer Book of Cold Cases (11 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
In June 2002, firefighters responded to a call reporting the shoulder injury a juvenile had received while swimming in a pool at the Garridos’ home. Though the parole office had no record of there being children or a pool at the Garridos’ house, the incident was not relayed.
As time went by, Garrido (who, in the opinion of the author and a number of psychiatrists, was insane) got more and more obsessed with religion. He talked often about his ability to use his mind to control sound and blogged regularly about his efforts on “God’s Desire Church.”
On August 24, 2009, Garrido demonstrated very clearly just how crazy he was. He visited the San Francisco office of the FBI and delivered a four-page essay detailing his thoughts on religion and sexuality and describing how he had cured his own criminal sexual behaviors. And then he did something that would finally unravel the case.
On the same day he visited the FBI, he stopped at the University of California at Berkeley and met with special-events manager Lisa Campbell to discuss the possibility of holding a Christian event on campus as a part of his “God’s Desire” program. Noting that Garrido’s behavior seemed strange, Campbell asked him to make an appointment and return the next day. She also notified campus police officer Ally Jacobs about her concerns.
When Jacobs ran a background check, she discovered that Garrido was on parole for rape. Jacobs attended the meeting with Campbell, and when Garrido arrived with two girls, he introduced them as his daughters. Jacobs noticed the girls’ strange behavior throughout the meeting, and afterwards she left a message with Garrido’s parole office describing the unusual meeting.
This time, the cops did their job correctly. Parole officers arrived at Garrido’s house and searched it but found only Nancy, his wife, and his elderly mother there. The officers took Garrido back to the parole office where he told them that the girls with him at UC Berkeley were relatives who had accompanied him with permission from their parents. Still not convinced by his story, parole officers asked him to return with the girls to follow up and discuss the UC Berkeley visit.
The next day, the parole officers questioned the blonde woman with Garrido who said her name was Alissa. When the parole officer said that she looked too young to be the mother of the two young girls and asked her age, she said that she was twenty-nine and that everyone thought she was too young. When asked to explain their relationship again, Garrido said that all three were his nieces, children of his brother. Garrido claimed that his brother was divorced and so the girls were living with him and Nancy. Parole officers asked Alissa for identification, but she wasn’t carrying any. At this point, the parole officer called in the Concord police.
As they waited for the Concord cops, Alissa changed her story. She said she was from Minnesota and had been hiding in California from an abusive husband. She said she was terrified of being found and didn’t want to give any identifying information. Alissa continued to lie, while in another room Concord cops questioned Garrido separately, a standard police tactic. Garrido finally admitted that he had kidnapped Alissa and that he was the father of the two younger girls. As the questioning continued, Alissa finally admitted that she was the 11-year-old girl in pink who had been scooped up and abducted. She was Jaycee Dugard.
Garrido and his wife were arrested, and an FBI agent put Dugard on the telephone with her mother, Terry, who got the call she had been waiting eighteen years for.
Why didn’t Jaycee call her mother or father or the police during the eighteen years she was held by Garrido? The main explanation, we think, is that she exhibited what is known as “Stockholm syndrome,” a term used to describe a situation in which a captive expresses adulation and positive feelings toward his or her captors that appear irrational in light of the danger. Essentially, people who are held captive see a periodic lack of abuse from their captives as indicating kindness. The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27 percent of kidnapping victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.
Following Jaycee’s return home, her mother said Jaycee and her daughters were in good health and their reunion was going well, though slowly. Her stepfather said his stepdaughter had developed a significant emotional bond with Phillip Garrido, and the younger girls cried when they learned of their father’s arrest. According to Jaycee Dugard’s aunt, Tina, Dugard’s reappearance is an important event for families of other children who have been missing a long time because it shows that there is hope even in long-term cases. Elizabeth Smart, another girl who was abducted, has stressed the importance of focusing on the future with a positive attitude as an effective approach to accepting what has happened.
Three weeks after her release, Jaycee Dugard made a request to gain control of the pets at the Garrido compound.
On July 1, 2010 the California State Assembly passed A.B. 1714, appropriating $20 million to settle claims brought against the state by Jaycee Dugard, her mother, and her daughters.
In 2009, Garrido and his wife initially pled not guilty to charges including kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment. However, in April 2011, they changed their plea to guilty. Phillip was sentenced to 431 years in prison while Nancy received thirty-six years to life.
In 1928, a 10-year-old girl named Grace Budd was kidnapped and Will King, a detective in the New York’s Missing Persons Bureau, set out to find her. It is hard to imagine someone doing a better job.
King pursued the case every day for weeks that turned into months and then years. And eventually more than six years had passed since Grace Budd disappeared with the kindly old man who had identified himself to her parents as Mr. Howard. He had said he was taking her to a party, which cops learned was at an address that didn’t exist.
King worked like a dog on the case. In fact, his superiors started to worry about him—and their worry proved well founded.
Will King, working night and day on his other cases as well as the disappearance of Grace Budd, had a physical collapse and was confined to a hospital for three months. Before he was discharged, his doctors warned him about overexerting himself, and the department, also concerned for his health, assigned him to a desk job.
Of course, he did not stop. He followed every lead, however thin, and continued his pursuit of the kidnapper.
Besides the overall frustration of not solving the case, he encountered promising leads that didn’t pan out. To King, each was a new hope, a new road that could lead him to the promised land, but each ended in nothingness.
Then, on November 11, 1934, Will King got a telephone call from Delia Budd, the mother of the abducted girl. She had received a letter from someone, and it looked like it was about Grace. Did he want to see it?
He sure did. Edward Budd, Grace’s father, brought the letter over unopened, and King carefully opened and read it. The contents of the letter were later read into the court record and would stun and repulse people because the kidnapper described how he had murdered and eaten the little girl. But what excited King was the handwriting. He did not have to be a graphologist to know that the spidery-inked handwriting was written by the same man who had written the earlier telegram to the Budds—Mr. Howard.
All King had to determine was where the letter writer was.
What followed was a masterpiece of detective work on the part of Will King.
He noticed that the legal-sized envelope had an emblem and some initials on it and that they had been scratched over. But holding the envelope up to the light, he could read them clearly enough: NYPCBA. A check of the phone book revealed that they stood for the New York Private Chauffeurs Benevolent Association at 627 Lexington Avenue.
King went to the headquarters and explained his business to the president of the association. The president was concerned that King suspected one of his members, but King was noncommittal.
What he wanted to do, he said, was check handwriting samples of members.
Working over seven hours, until past midnight, King checked the handwriting samples on applications for the NYPCBA. None was close to the handwriting of Frank Howard.
King took another tack. Within a few days, he spoke in front of the seventy-five-member group, asking if anyone had used any of the NYPCBA envelopes or had taken any for personal use. He made it clear that no one would get in trouble by admitting that, but he was vague about why he wanted to know.
He waited in the president’s office. Then a small, red-haired man named Leo Sicoski came in. After King reassured him that nothing dire would happen to him, Sicoski admitted that he had taken some of the envelopes and used them while he lived at 622 Lexington Avenue. He might have left some around.
King went over to the address—and was disappointed yet again. The room had not been rented since Sicoski had left it and was boarded tight. A canvass of the neighborhood proved fruitless: No one knew of anyone who looked like Mr. Frank Howard.
Stymied, King went back to Sicoski. Could he remember anything else?
Sicoski did remember something. Before 622 Lexington Avenue, he had lived at 200 East 52nd Street. He had left some NYPCBA envelopes there on a shelf behind the bed.
King hastened over there.
It was a flophouse, and this time he found something. He asked the landlady if she knew anyone who looked like Mr. Howard.
She did. It sounded like Albert Fish, she said, who had room number 7.
King looked at Fish’s signature on the register.
Albert Fish and Frank Howard were the same man! And where was Fish now?
The woman didn’t know, but he periodically returned to pick up a check from the Civilian Conservation Corps sent by his son, John.
King checked it all out, and then he set up a stakeout, taking a room at the top of the stairs that gave him a view of the intersection at 52nd Street and Third Avenue.
He smoked; he exercised; he ate canned food. He stayed awake more than twenty hours a day.
Fish did not show.
Then on December 12, King decided to take a break from his routine and went to join Christmas shoppers. He was away for two hours, and as soon as he returned to his room, he heard rapid-fire knocking on the door.
It was the landlady.
Excitedly, she told him that Fish was back. That he had come by a half hour earlier and that she had told him his check wasn’t in (although it was). She didn’t know how long he would be around.
King strapped on his .38 and went to Fish’s room. He knocked. The person inside invited him to come in.
Inside, sitting on the bed, was a man who perfectly fit the description of Frank Howard: a little, white-haired, baggy-eyed man with watery blue eyes.
King told Fish that he wanted to see him about some letters he had written, that he wanted Fish to accompany him to headquarters. Fish agreed mildly.
King brought him downstairs, and then, just as they were about to exit the building, Fish whirled, straight razors in both hands. But King quickly subdued and shackled him. He had gotten a glimpse of the real Albert Fish.
And within two years Fish was where he belonged—in the electric chair.
Q.
How many children are criminally abducted and murdered each year in the United States, and how much do authorities know about these killers and incidents?
A.
The abduction and murder of a child is a very rare event in the United States, with only 100 incidents a year in the entire country. But each of these situations is a desperately dangerous one because of the small window of time to track the perpetrator down: Most kids (74 percent) are murdered within three hours of their abduction. As the report “Case Management for Missing-Children Homicide Investigation,” developed by Washington State investigators in combination with the Department of Justice says, “Family involvement in this type of case is infrequent (9 percent). The youngest females, one to five years old, tend to be killed by friends or acquaintances (64 percent), while the oldest females, sixteen to seventeen years old, tend to be killed by strangers (also 64 percent). The youngest male victims (one to five years old) are most likely to be killed by strangers (also 64 percent), as are the teenage males (thirteen to fifteen years old, 60 percent, and sixteen to seventeen years old, 58 percent).”
Q.
What is the average age of homicidal child abductors, and what are some facts about them?
A.
The average age is around 27. They are usually unmarried (85 percent), and half of them (51 percent) either live alone (17 percent) or with their parents (34 percent). Half are unemployed, and if they work, it is at unskilled or semi-skilled labor occupations. Therefore, the killers can generally be characterized as “social marginals.”
Almost two-thirds of the killers (61 percent) have prior arrests for violent crimes, with slightly more than half of the killers’ prior crimes (53 percent) committed against children. The most frequent prior crimes against children were rape (31 percent of killers) and other forms of sexual assault (45 percent of killers). About 67 percent of prior crimes were similar in M.O. to the murder committed most recently by the killer. Commonly, the killers were at the initial victim-killer contact site for a legitimate reason (66 percent). They either lived in the area (29 percent) or were engaging in some normal activity.
Most of the victims of child abduction-murder are victims of opportunity (57 percent). Only in 14 percent of cases did the killer choose his victim because of some physical characteristic of the victim. The primary motivation for the child abduction-murder is sexual assault.—Department of Justice
Q.
What percentage of the world’s population are pedophiles?
A.
About 4 percent, says Dr. John Bradford, head of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa. Also, if a person becomes a pedophile, he—or, in rarer cases, she—most likely had been assaulted by a pedophile.
Q.
What percentage of pedophiles can be treated in a way that cures their addiction?
A.
None, or 0 percent. The author learned this from a conversation he had with Ed Balyk, PhD, then chief psychologist at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenal, New Jersey, a euphemistic name for a prison that housed about 1,000 sex offenders. Dr. Balyk treated both rapists and pedophiles. When I protested that 0 percent seemed an inaccurate answer because of the many psychological treatments available, he said:
“Let me ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“Do you like women?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think you’ll ever stop liking them?”
“No.”
“That’s the same answer pedophiles would give. Except they like kids.”
Q.
Are pedophiles repeat offenders?
A.
Statistics back Dr. Balyk’s statement. About 4,300 pedophiles were discharged in 1994 from prisons in fifteen states. Approximately 3.3 percent became repeat offenders soon after release, but over time the incidence becomes much higher because pedophilia is a condition that cannot be curtailed by treatment nor cured. The degree of compulsion was confirmed by an ex-inmate and lawyer who Dr. Balyk met by chance on a street in a New Jersey town. The dialogue went like this:
Dr. Balyk: “So how are you doing?”
Lawyer: “Okay. Getting ready to go back inside.”
Dr. Balyk: “But you just got out.”
Lawyer: “I know but I can’t stop myself. And eventually I’ll get caught.”
A few months later, Balyk said, “that is exactly what happened.”