SAN FRANCISCO — Jaycee Lee Dugard was not only a kidnapped captive of Phillip Craig Garrido, living for 18 years in his back yard, but also the creative force behind his specialty printing business, according to the firm’s customers.
They knew the 29-year-old Dugard as “Allissa” and believed Garrido when he said she was his grown daughter. Mostly, they knew her as the courteous, professional young woman who, in telephone calls and e-mails, helped them order business cards, fliers and posters.
“He told us up front he works with his daughter. He said Allissa did all of the graphic design and he did all of the printing,” said J.P. Miller, who hired Garrido in August to advertise his Orinda, Calif.-based company, A&J Hauling.
Miller said the woman never gave any indication that she had been snatched from a South Lake Tahoe street at age 11 and forced to bear two children with Garrido, as police say. If Miller sent her a suggestion over e-mail, he said, “she’d fire it right back to me with the changes.”
The interaction that Miller and others had with Dugard, while limited, sheds light on the living arrangement in a squalid compound on Walnut Avenue, where police say the kidnap victim resided with Garrido and their daughters, ages 11 and 15, along with Garrido’s wife and elderly mother.
Dugard apparently developed emotional ties with her attacker, Dugard’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, said last week. Experts say Dugard probably suffered from Stockholm syndrome, a condition in which captives become sympathetic to their captors.
“We had Jaycee for 11 years, and they had her for 18. After that long, you bond,” Probyn said from New York, where he was doing a series of TV appearances. “That’s probably what kept her alive — the fact that they all bonded. It was almost like a little family.”
Probyn said Dugard is with her children, her mother, her sister and her aunt at an undisclosed location, where they are receiving help from counselors. Probyn said he was told by Dugard’s mother that his stepdaughter looks similar to how she looked at age 11, that she is an excellent mother, and that she and her daughters face a difficult adjustment.
“They’ve never been to school, never been to a doctor, never been to a dentist,” Probyn said. “They’re just hugging and holding each other. This will take months, if not years.”
Meanwhile, in Antioch, Calif., police agencies continued searching Garrido’s property last week, in an effort to determine if he might be linked to any unsolved homicides in eastern Contra Costa County. Police said some of the victims’ bodies had been found near Garrido’s printing clients.
Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy Garrido, have pleaded not guilty to 29 charges of rape and kidnapping.
They were arrested when Dugard told a state parole officer that she had been kidnapped 18 years ago. The officer was interviewing the family after being told that Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender, had behaved strangely with his two young daughters on a visit to the University of California, Berkeley.
Photographs show Garrido’s backyard compound consisted of tarps and large tents, under a thicket of tree branches, outfitted with beds and dressers, toys and knickknacks, and an odd collection of books — some about crime and many about cats. A “Welcome” sign hangs from one tree.
Ben Daughdrill of Oakley, who used to run the hauling business now owned by J.P. Miller, was another customer of Garrido’s who had dealings with “Allissa,” speaking with her and even seeing her at Garrido’s house.
He, too, said she gave no indication she was a kidnap victim.
“She was very professional, very polite, just like any other secretary or anyone you’d meet at a place of business,” said Daughdrill, 37. “If I was requesting something, he’d say he’d have his daughter send it over. He’d say, ‘I’ll get Allissa right on that.’Â ”
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