Witness: Jaycee's Kids Seemed Normal
A business customer of Phillip Garrido who has known him for about 10 years says the young girls that the convicted sex offender is now believed to have fathered appeared and behaved like normal kids.
Garrido, who printed business cards for Cheyvonne Molino and her husband's companies throughout the past decade, would sometimes bring two young girls (now 15 and 11) with him as he toured his clients' businesses. Molino said Garrido was "very nice and polite. He did business, you know, amicably. He came in, he took our orders, normal business person."
Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show," Molino said she has met the entire family, including Jaycee Lee Dugard, whose 18-year-long disappearance ended last week with the stunning revelation that she has been living in a backyard tent compound of the Garrido home, and bearing Garrido's two children, since she was snatched off the streets of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., in 1991.
Molino said she knew Garrido well. "I met his daughters, I watched them grow up."
Garrido reportedly took one or both of the young girls with him as he toured clients of his printing business, either to discuss work or to hand out religious literature. "We got to see them more and more over the summertime, three or four times a week," Molino told "Early Show" co-anchor Julie Chen. "They were very nice and polite. They'd come out and deliver water on 102 degree weather days with their dad, stay about 10, 15 minutes, and go to the next location."
Molino had invited the Garrido daughters to her own daughter's birthday party last month. She said Garrido dropped them off and they stayed from 7 to 9:30 p.m. "And then as the older kids got to dancing more, because his 11-year-old was there, a lot of my friends took their kids about 9:30, 10:00, as he did. He dropped them off, he picked them up."
She described as "very inaccurate" remarks by UC Berkeley police who spotted Garrido and the girls on campus last week and described the girls as behaving in a "robotic" fashion. Molino said that they acted like normal kids.
"I saw the kids 30 minutes after they left Berkeley in T-shirts and shorts and jeans. They weren't in the 'Little House on the Prairie,' as she quoted, outfits," she said.
Molino said people believed Garrido had serious problems, which some had attributed to an accident years before. "I can't say. Sometimes he'd go around singing. He'd say 'Jesus loves you,' but then there are a lot of people that talk about their religion. There weren't any signs that he was abnormal up to the day he decided to let us know what his secret was, that he had taken Jaycee 18 years earlier."
Molino told Chen that she believed Nancy Garrido is even more responsible for Dugard's captivity that he was. "We know that he had serious problems. We know that. Everyone has said they've always thought something was wrong with him. But for her to go along with this, I feel like she might even be the mastermind behind this."
Molino said that while Phillip Garrido was in jail for four months in 1993 on a parole violation, there was ample opportunity for Nancy to free Dugard. "She could have been a victim, but now she's also implicated in doing so."
Read more stories on the Dugard case at CBSNews.com:
Bone in Backyard: Is it Human?
Garrido Revealed Rape Fantasy in Testimony
Jaycee Lee Dugard's Daughters Cried When Their Father, Phillip Garrido, Was Arrested
Slideshow: Inside Jaycee Dugard's Terror Tent
Slideshow: Jaycee Lee Dugard Found Alive
Dugard had also met Dugard, who has been sighted accompanying Garrido or his wife, Nancy, on several occasions, and described the young woman as "normal."
She said she believed Jaycee, now 29, was Garrido's oldest daughter.
"She was the graphic artist. If we had a problem or new designer, she had an idea. Most of the contact came through him, but you could always call her at any time or e-mail her."
More coverage from Crimesider:
Cops Search Suspect's Home
Why Didn't Jaycee Escape?
Exclusive: Reporter Remembers Girl's Abduction
Garrido: Dugard's Girls "Slept in My Arms Every Single Night"
Molino said she was shocked by the revelations this week. "I'm still shocked. I go to sleep at night and then I wake up and I remember, 'Oh, my gosh, I forgot, we're still dealing with this.' It's hard to forget."