Jaycee Dugard-Case Closed
Mr. Schiff: Hello I'm Neal Schiff and welcome to Inside the FBI, a weekly podcast about news, cases, and operations. The long ordeal is finally over and not only Jaycee Dugard and her family are relieved, but law enforcement personnel around the country as well. In 1991 Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped from her neighborhood in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was 11. She was not seen again until this week, 18 years later. FBI Special Agent Chris Campion of the Sacramento Field Office has been the case agent on the case from the beginning.
Audio Report HERE
Mr. Campion: "From the very first call of the very first day, our agents were out there covering leads shoulder-to-shoulder with the sheriff's department (El Dorado County Sheriff's Department), from our (FBI) South Lake Tahoe RA (Resident Agency) first of all, and then also from our Sacramento Division and Reno offices pulling people in. So that within a couple of days, we had approximately 50 FBI folks working hand-in-hand with at least as many state and local partners during the initial response."
Mr. Schiff: With the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office heading the search, no stones were left unturned and Campion was there.
Mr. Campion: "The lead agency is the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department and they did a fantastic job of responding to this. We also pulled in our local partners. In a small resident agency, we have very good local partner cooperation, so the South Lake Tahoe Police Department worked quite closely with us; the California Highway Patrol; the California Department of Parole and Probation. Basically everybody with a badge within 50 miles was somehow involved in this case in the first few weeks."
Mr. Schiff: We asked Campion about the many people who worked on this case over 18 years.
Mr. Campion: "I would even not want to guess the number of man hours, man years, really, of effort that was put into this case. Everyone was so concerned because it was such a tragic and shocking case for this community and for the region, that we got tons of calls, and we really diligently followed every lead that we possibly could to its logical conclusion, including some leads that were very promising at the beginning, and led us into all sorts of different investigative techniques using Title III court-ordered wiretaps, using confidential informants who were making recordings in various situations. We had basically every single technique that the FBI uses was employed in this case."
Mr. Schiff: We wondered if any leads over nearly two decades may have taken investigators close to Jaycee and her kidnappers.
Mr. Campion: "I wish I could say that there was, and we've gone through and checked our records and my memory is no, we didn't have any thing that remotely was close to these people. We had the vehicle description and we have the vehicle that was used in this abduction-we're very confident we have the actual vehicle. It looked like a lot of the vehicles that were stopped in the ensuing days, weeks, and years that we checked out countless leads of look-alike vehicles, look-alike subjects to the composite drawing of the female suspect based on our witness statement. We checked, literally thousands of those leads and these people just did not come up on the radar screen at all for whatever reason."
Mr. Schiff: And now we come to this week. How did this come to a conclusion?
Mr. Campion: "Well, the bottom line is very good police work by a couple of key people. It's my understanding at this point that an officer at the University of California Police Department for UC Berkeley had contact with Mr. Garrido and he raised her attention level, and he was with two younger girls. She determined that he was a sex offender, and that, gets that sixth sense that law enforcement people sometime have that something wasn't right here, and she did the right thing. She called his parole officer, the parole officer did what he was supposed to do, got to the bottom of it, and the whole thing came out at that point. Since then, we've been working with El Dorado County , the FBI, a lot of different agencies; the Concord Police Department did a fantastic job when they got the initial information to try to make sure that this case is rock solid, getting all of the evidence collected, properly documented, and doing our investigation the last day and a half."
Mr. Schiff: Campion has been in contact with Jaycee's mother and Jaycee herself.
Mr. Campion: "I have been in contact with Jaycee's mother, Terry. Over the years, on a regular basis, we call and check in-hopefully on an annual basis-I usually try to call on Jacyee's birthday. So Terry, right now, is understandably just ecstatic. When I called her she was beside herself with joy and I was present when she was reunited with Jaycee yesterday morning. It was a very emotional scene-both of them were just overjoyed to be with each other again. There's going to be a period of adjustment, no doubt, but they're doing very well at this point. And the two daughters are probably as happy as Jaycee is to be part of this family as well."
Mr. Schiff: One thing can be said: law enforcement everywhere doesn't give up.
Mr. Campion: "Absolutely. We can tell you several thousands of people that didn't kidnap Jaycee Lee Dugard. We were, I think, as diligent as we possibly could...a whole litany of investigators, from the original case agent Chick McDevitt-I worked closely with him, he was my partner in the RA-through the Sheriff's Department Investigator Jim Watson who started out, and everybody who inherited the case afterward, right down the line, both with the FBI and the Sheriff's Department, never lost faith and kept on working it."
Mr. Schiff: We'll be hearing more in the future. For now, we at the FBI tip our caps to the many hundreds and hundreds of police officers who worked overly hard in trying to find Jaycee Dugard and the kidnappers. More about how the FBI works with law enforcement partners around the world on the Internet at www.fbi.gov. That concludes our show. Thanks for listening. I'm Neal Schiff of the FBI's Office of Public Affairs.
