Phillip Garrido: Who Let this Monster Out of His Cage?
NEW YORK (CBS) Who allowed Phillip Garrido, the drug-crazed monster who gruesomely kidnapped and raped a Nevada woman in 1976, to see the light of day?
Photos: Jaycee Lee Dugard Found Alive
Photos: Inside Jaycee's Terror Tent
And how was his federal sentence terminated 28 years early while he allegedly kept Jaycee Lee Dugard—and the two daughters he allegedly forced her to have—in his backyard of horrors?
The questions are too many, and the answers too few.
"I feel that the system let society down, especially let Jaycee Dugard down," said Michael Malloy, the former Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted Garrido 30 years ago on rape charges and thought he put him away.
In 1976, Garrido abducted Katherine Callaway, a 25-year-old Lake Tahoe, Nev. casino worker. She is now named Katherine Hall. Garrido drove her—handcuffed and hogtied—nearly 60 miles to a mini-storage warehouse in Reno where, high on LSD, he raped her for eight hours.
Garrido was tried in federal court and convicted on kidnapping charges. He was sentenced to 50 years. Immediately afterward, he pled guilty to raping Callaway in Nevada state court and was given a life sentence.
"That's a sick mind and certainly not one that belongs out in society," said former U.S. Assistant Attorney Leland Lutfy, the federal prosecutor who thought he had put Garrido away for a 50-year sentence.
But it wasn't to be.
From 1977 to 1988, Garrido served his two sentences concurrently in the Lompoc Federal Correction Complex in northern California. During that time, he filed and lost an appeal to the 9th circuit federal court.
Then, just 11 years into a 50-year sentence, inexplicably Garrido was granted federal parole and transferred to Northern Nevada Correctional Center.
According to prosecutors Lutfy and Malloy, neither they nor the victim were asked to speak at his federal parole hearing. That wasn't unusual for the time, said Lutfy. But he was still stunned that Garrido, a violent offender, was able to appease a federal parole board.
"The whole thing was shocking to me," Lutfy said of Garrido's release. "To see evidence of his planning and execution of the crime and complete lack of remorse."
At the time, federal statutes granted parole reviews after ten years for prisoners serving a 30-year or greater sentence. But that still doesn't explain how Garrido, an admitted drug addict and violent rapist, passed muster.
Crimesider asked the Federal Parole Commission to explain how the decision was made to grant Garrido parole. Tom Hutchinson, the commission spokesperson, said they were still pulling records and could not fully answer the question at this time.
What they do know is that on Jan 22, 1988, Garrido was transferred to the Northern Nevada Correctional Center to serve the remainder of his state sentence for rape. At that time, he was on federal lifetime parole, according to Gail Powell, public information officer for the Nevada Dept. of Public Safety.
But only seven months later, Garrido was released from the Nevada prison and placed in a halfway house in Oakland, Calif.
Garrido was granted release after a five-person parole panel evaluated him based on a federal update progress report, which uses a risk assessment table, according to Powell.
Garrido was given a score of 6 out of 10, which is considered moderate. Crimesider asked to speak with members of the panel to understand that scoring; four are dead and one is in a nursing home. Powell said she does not know how that score was determined, but admitted that at that time, there was much more lenient assessment criteria. "It's day and night now," she said.
Photos: Jaycee Lee Dugard Found Alive
Photos: Inside Jaycee's Terror Tent
"If this same person were to cross our paths now he would never be paroled," Powell added.
But he was. And Garrido, now free to roam in California but prevented from crossing state lines, made his way to Nevada, where he confronted his rape victim, Callaway, in the casino where she worked, according to a Wednesday interview with Maggie Rodriguez on CBS' The Early Show.
Callaway said Garrido approached her and said, "hello Katie" and he was carrying fake identification. Callaway said she was shocked that Garrido was released and she contacted his parole officer.
Why wasn't Garrido arrested after Callaway told his parole officer that Garrido crossed state lines to make contact with her, a clear violation of his parole?
It was another opportunity missed.
"To have made contact with the victim under those circumstances, I can't believe something didn't happen to him as a result of that," said former federal prosecutor Lutfy.
But nothing did.
Callaway was terrified and felt she was forced to leave Tahoe and change her name, she told Larry King on Monday.
"I doubt that I'll ever get over what Garrido did to me," she said.
For some time Garrido lived in a halfway house in Oakland, Calif. He later moved into his mother's house in Antioch, Calif., the very home where police found a compound of tents and sheds that they say housed Jaycee Lee Dugard for nearly two decades.
Dugard was kidnapped in 1991, while Garrido was still under both state and federal parole.
Amazingly, on Jun. 8, 1999, while Jaycee, and the two daughters he impregnated her with, were allegedly living in captivity in Garrido's backyard, the Federal Parole Commission decided to terminate his sentence early, according to Dick Carelli, spokesperson for the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, part of the Justice Department.
The decision meant Garrido was no longer under federal parole.
Federal statute "requires the person to have their sentence terminated unless the commission finds a likelihood that the person is going to commit a crime," said Federal Parole Commission spokesman Hutchinson.
In theory, there was one last safeguard on Garrido. After his federal parole terminated, he was still under Nevada parole, which was administered by California, where he lived.
But even though Garrido wore an ankle bracelet tracking device and received visits from his parole officer, they did not find out about Dugard or the secret compound. And a sheriff's deputy, following up a neighbor's complaint that there were girls and tents in the backyard, left after concluding there was nothing more than minor building code violations.
A spokesperson for the California Parole Board, which was the only agency monitoring Garrido before his Aug. 27 arrest, did not return our calls.
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Photos: Inside Jaycee's Terror Tent
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