What an incredibly horrible story, this one. Yet, at the same time, there's a large ring of *hope* to it, as well, I think? I'm sure more details/interviews with the family, etc. will emerge as time goes ... but it's hard to really comprehend how compromised the lives of any of these people are, now, after all this time. I heard on the news this morning that the young woman DID speak to her birth mother soon after the rescue ... but all that she was reported to have said (I suspect she said more than just this one thing, however) was something to the effect that she was "sorry that she had allowed herself to 'bond' with her adbuctor(s)". I won't speak for anyone else, but I think it's entirely understandable that she did. She was just 11 when this nightmare began! Frightened children create their safety zones wherever they can find them. Clearly, the man [use of the word is loose, indeed] involved is a beast. But, sorry, I can't say too much better for his partner in this, either. The young woman/mother will likely be years getting her life together (if, realistically, she ever can). And those tragic "grandchildren"! Luckily, they're young enough where hope comes into the picture, yet again. I can't imagine what sort of "reality" thses folks have come to believe this world is about.

But, bottom line? The odds of ever finding this girl alive after all this time were about as close to zero as can be gotten. Yet? She survived. That's a true light at the end of many tunnels, perhaps. I wish them all (except the two demons that perpetrated this crime, that is ) the best as they try to grow out of this mess. I really can't imagine what their lives have been like.

Story here ...

Punch this into google maps : 1556 Walnut Avenue Antioch : and you'll see some the blue tents in the backyard of that house!

(one of the neighbours, who was interviewed by a journalist, said she lived in 1554)

What a bizarre story indeed! What puzzles me is that none of the neighbours ever heard noises from any of the children, either from the daughter, or from her two subsequent children.

gtho, do you have a link to that interview?

>> gtho, do you have a link to that interview?

I did have, until I killed my pc .. I had x47 IE screens open! It's one of these pages, but none of them ring a bell .. none of them look like the one I was reading. She was interviewed by one of the local papers.

google search : Diane Doty 1554 walnut avenue

Not a fairy tale ending but I`m sure that the parents are delighted that she has been found ALIVE.

Good luck to the young woman and I hope that her children learn to cope with their own difficult situations and circumstances of birth.

Now they're investigating him regarding the deaths of prostitutes.

The wife was also charged - if he's planning on mounting an insanity defense, it's a lot harder to convince people that BOTH husband and wife were equally insane on the same topic.

Thanks for those links gtho. Well, after reading pages of news items and posts, it seems that the system broke down several times in this horrendous case. The parole officer (for his prior sex offender conviction) was unaware (!!) of anything untoward during his regular visits, police were called several times regarding sightings of young girls on the property, but mishandled the situation. Neighbours who knew he was a prior sex offender had seen the girls, albeit briefly.

One thing that really bothers me about this case was that for his prior conviction of kidnapping and rape he was sentenced to 50 years, but only served eleven. Had he served what the judge deemed he deserved, this would never have happened.

My heart goes out to all those concerned, the daughter, her daughters, the stepfather that for so long was a suspect, the mother, their broken marriage due to the stress... it's one big mess.

Scroll down through this story and listen to the interview with the suspect. He says he did terrible terrible things in the beginning but has turned himself around and when the truth comes out we will all see this as a powerful, heart warming story. I guess he did a good thing by not killing the girl, so that cancels out all the bad? Yeah....he's nuts.

Oops, forgot the link....


http://news.aol.com/article/jaycee-dugar...hillip%2F643351

Since he ADMITS doing terrible things, doesn't that ruin any chance of an insanity defense? It shows he knew right from wrong.

I live in this county, Antioch is down the road a piece.

This is just getting more bizarre by the minute. Kind of a comedy of errors. Here's a link similar to the one wayman71 gave, but with a bit more detail.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_kidnapped_girl_found

I really don't know what else to say about it all...
Except maybe I smell a TV movie in the very near future. *sigh*

Hi neighbor, I thought I might hear from you but I'm sorry it's such a sad occasion in many ways. it's good that she is still alive and will get to see her real family though. I'm also in the same county as Taesma. Just drove by there today and was thinking about that poor kid living in that nasty looking backyard and having children with this madman.

I have to say that I've lived in so many places and had my share of weird neighbor situations crop up, and sometimes the authorities do not have the right to enter people's property without major warrants or suspicion even if you sound an alarm and call the police or child protection services. This guy had really covered up the dwelling with junk. I think the person who deserves credit for doing his or her job is the campus security officers at nearby UC Berkeley who spotted the suspicious behavior with the young girls too.

Another thing that occurred to me is that with the advent of homeschool being so common, people may have a tendency not to report truancy from school the way they might have in the past. Plus most of them knew that the guy was some kind of odd religious person as he'd tried to preach to a few of them. So, sorry to say this, but, some people prefer to homeschool for religious reasons and this might have been the assumption of some people who spotted the daughters.

A few comments on the local papers' accounts of this say that the cops give tickets if your trees aren't trimmed or for parking the wrong direction on the roadways, but this parolee wasn't checked enough.

They say she's staying in a motel now...I hope that she's safe tonight.


Edited to add link to Contra Costa Times about campus security officers: http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_13224535

Two women officers noticed the girls' zombie like behavior.

I am so happy that these women were doing this good a job in a city where there are a lot of street people, and students, and odd behavior to sort out in addition to crimes. There were a spate of crimes this past year with a guy attacking women wearing dresses for example. Students were warned about it.
The women officers asked the right questions of the girls about where they went to school etc though...bravo.

I saw on a news program, that a neighbor HAD reported to the Sheriff (or local Police) that there were children in the yard. The neighbor knew the man was a sex offender, so she reported it...The investigators dropped the ball...This was THREE years ago!

I also feel very bad for Jaycee Dugard's stepfather, who had been considered a suspect in the case up until she was finally found. His marriage to Jaycee's mother ended because of it.

I pray for Jaycee and her children, and hope they all get the help they need. What a terrible, unspeakable crime.

I'm glad this case didn't end up like most missing persons cases. My mother always says "as long as there's life, there's hope." However, the man and woman who held her captive should be strung up for the rest of their lives in a jail cell.

Yes, isn't this all a rapid-fire series of messes after messes? As always, though, I'm getting a little weary of the media coverage and how they're doing it (although I must say I'm glad they're not poking microphones into this family's faces as they privately reconnect). Does it really help anything, in terms of moving forward, to "blame" the cops who missed this detail or forgot to look 'there' over the course of 18 years? Or the probation officer who, based on what I've always heard, is no more or less lax in his duties than any other large percentage of them sometimes get (too bad the worse for him, though, since he's ended up caught in a now highly-publicized case this time). Let's have a whack at those unattentive neighbors, then, Matt Lauer ! While I'm not saying that any of these mentioned deserve any special credit for being especially *good* at whatever it is their assignments are/were -- I don't think their "sloppiness" is purposeful now. The only possible good that might come from blaming anybody or anything (aside from the blatantly guilty kidnappers and/or perverts, o' course) is that, maybe, more care will be taken by all parties (and even you and I) in the future. But pointing fingers, now, will NOT get that young woman's 18 years back. Or that family's 'fracture' on its way to being fixed. To be honest, I think the wretched *blame game* helped get this case cold to begin with, yes? I'm sure, at the time, the best (and maybe even most 'logical') course was to simply assume that "the stepfather more than likely did it". Starting there? The case got colder and colder. Someone's [probably] responsible. Whew. Now we feel better? In the meantime, a two-decade nightmare was getting its roots, and no one really seemed to pay attention or look deeper. As the press does its "right fighting" (ratings-friendly) dance now? Let's hope all that matters is that the innocents in this case get their due time to heal. Stringing up the police department, etc. (and its parade of mistakes) will not help them do that. Not in the short term, anyway. But that's only my opinion. I reckon there's no real 'right' answers in such 'wrong' overall circumstances. The mainstream press has not always been known for their forethought, anyway, have they?

One good thing, though, that occurred to me yesterday. That business of Jaycee almost immediately apologizing to her mother for having "bonded" with Mr and Mrs. FreakZone. At first, I thought that odd. But then I thought further. That's a very good sign. It indicates that, against all odds, that grown woman who's probably stuck, in many ways, in an 11-year old sensibility knows what is *right/normal* vs. *wrong/abnormal*. One might think that set of values would have been thoroughly brainwashed out of her by now. But, clearly, it is not. So, hopefully, with that 'core' in place? Maybe, just maybe, getting her back (in the true sense of it) won't be as hard as I might have thought. Her two kids, though? My heart breaks at the thought of the work required for them to endure.

But, I agree. Where there's life? There's hope. Such a disturbing, yet thought-provoking, case, however ...

edited to correct misspelling

I agree with your assessment of things a significant amount of the time, Gatsby, but I'm taking a bit of an exception here. Living in the area where this is happening is perhaps putting a bit of a different spin on this all for me. There's been a problem in recent years with a significant amount of police stupidity, arrogance, laxness, etc around here. Not especially Contra Costa County, but really the entire Bay Area. And I think the citizens are getting a bit fed up with authorities dropping the ball or not being held accountable for their mistakes. Not necessarily the individuals involved, such as the parole officer, but the people in charge, and frankly the whole system which allows police and others to cover up for each other and flat-out lie about their mistakes.

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The only possible good that might come from blaming anybody or anything (aside from the blatantly guilty kidnappers and/or perverts, o' course) is that, maybe, more care will be taken by all parties (and even you and I) in the future. But pointing fingers, now, will NOT get that young woman's 18 years back.

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I think blame is required here, because the authorities must be held accountable for their (lack of) actions. The fact that they spent all those years blaming the stepfather to me just points to the arrogance of the authorities--there couldn't possibly be another explanation, could there? More than one neighbor expressed concern over the goings-on at that house, and it wasn't investigated. The man was a parolee, not a 'law abiding citizen', and as such had to abide by rules that most of us don't. I can't believe they couldn't find some reason to investigate further.
And I agree, no, blaming will not give Jaycee her 18 years back, but it certainly could help prevent this sort of thing happening again to some other parents' children.

Edited to add: And if it turns out that this guy is also a serial killer, as they're suspecting...well, I might have even less polite things to say.

Taesma is right as I'm in the same county. We have a great disparity of income levels in this county in particular and one side of the county kind of in denial that problems exist in the other half. A friend of mine works with the homeless in this county and people ask her, 'what homeless? Here?' There are some areas here that have a median home price of a million dollars for a modest house and Antioch is probably closer to 200000 but I'm only guessing. It may be a bit more. The outlying communities here are some of the only places people can afford to live if they work in San Francisco.

I'm just thinking over and over that, the fact that a lot of people tend to assume that people have the right to homeschool their kids in whatever way they choose means that, no one figured out that the kids weren't in school.
Neighbor quarrels can go on and on for years and so, when someone gets a weirdo living next to them, they are often not real keen on calling them on anything. This is not an excuse, but, just a comment on the way people lead their lives. So some people must have shrugged it off as, 'guess he's home schooling them.' or, 'I guess the authorities know something I don't'. When you buy a house here, you can just look up things on the net to see if there are any child molesters living nearby.

I'm almost certain that I heard that the wife may have been a Jehovah's Witness who met the guy in a prison visit when he was serving time in Leavenworth Kansas for the rape in Lake Tahoe. Most people are familiar with the custom of dragging children along with you to bear witness. Could it be that people chalked up the odd behavior and children acting cowed when spotted with the guy to the Jehovah's Witness thing?

I'm trying to say that in the states, some people under the guise of religious freedom will let things happen when normally their common sense would kick in. As several people actually did call this anomaly in, the authorities who didn't pursue it are going to be held accountable though.

The real heroines are still the campus police at UC Berkeley because they used their mothers' instincts when they talked to the girls and though they deal with a lot of unbalanced people at Berkeley every day of their job, they knew there was something up. Because my daughter worked and studied there and you cannot walk five feet without getting solicited by someone who is obviously out of whack or preached at on a street corner, these officers stuck their necks out and enabled the family of the girl to finally have some resolution.

Someone did bring up the fact that they actually expected the guy to come back in for the second appointment though...which is amazing that he did as he must have wanted to be caught. I did find that odd that they'd assume that he'd just come in and submit to an examination of his actions if he really were abusing the children.

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The real heroines are still the campus police at UC Berkeley because they used their mothers' instincts when they talked to the girls and though they deal with a lot of unbalanced people at Berkeley every day of their job, they knew there was something up. Because my daughter worked and studied there and you cannot walk five feet without getting solicited by someone who is obviously out of whack or preached at on a street corner, these officers stuck their necks out and enabled the family of the girl to finally have some resolution.

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Absolutely! I spent my teen years in Berkeley, went to high school there, and considering the tolerance for people of all types there (I knew some of these 'interesting' people, spent time with them, many are city fixtures. Being a street person in Berkeley isn't always seen in quite the same way as in most places ), I'm quite impressed with the alertness of these campus police officers.

Have read through the press reports and the posts here on FT, perhaps I am a little slow, or perhaps have misunderstood the reports.
Q, how on earth can all this happen under the neighbours full view for so many years >>>?
OK, so someone informed the police a few years ago, and it is a criminal act that this was not followed up, BUT, if the people living in and around this despicable act feel in any way vindicated they really should have a word with themselves.
Personally I would hate to live in such a callous and self centred community.
What a sad tale of neglect.

I guess none of the neighbours or people involved were aware of the recent case in Austria, surely that would have made then go hmmm.

As the plot thickens even more ...

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