Victim of kidnap accused speaks out

KATIE Callaway was just going to stop for a minute to pick up some coffee for her boyfriend.

The 25-year-old blackjack dealer from Tahoe City, California, picked up the coffee, some cooking oil and rice and slipped back into her car, then began to back out. That was when Phillip Garrido tapped on the passenger window and asked for a ride.

It was November 22, 1976, and Katherine Gayle Callaway was about to begin a terrifying, night-long ordeal at the hands of a man who has become infamous worldwide since his arrest last week in the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard.
Katie Hall

In the 18 years that Garrido allegedly hid Dugard in the backyard of his mother's home in the town of Antioch, he was largely a mystery. On Tuesday, as federal officials downloaded hundreds of pages from his 1977 federal court trial into the US District Court computer system, a fuller, more disturbing picture of the 58-year-old Garrido and the ordeal Ms Callaway suffered emerged.

Evidence showed Garrido was a troubled young man with a sexual addiction so great that he would masturbate in drive-in theatres, restaurants, bars, public toilets and outside the windows of homes. But he was mentally stable enough to understand the charges he was facing, a psychiatrist told the court in 1977.

Ms Callaway's boyfriend at the time, David Wade, recalled on Tuesday how she would later tell him the young man who tapped on the car window ''looked all right''. The polite stranger with the ponytail pointed to a Mercedes-Benz parked nearby and said it was his but had broken down. Ms Callaway agreed to give him a ride. ''That was her first mistake,'' Mr Wade said.

It was about 7.20pm when she picked up Garrido. Ms Callaway barely spoke to Garrido, even as he kept asking questions about her. She turned on to the road towards Mr Wade's home. Garrido told her he lived just a little further up, to keep driving. She pulled over a couple of minutes later where he said he lived.

''I went to say, 'Here you go', and I looked, and there was an empty lot there,'' she testified.

That was when Garrido reached over and turned off the engine. He grabbed her by the neck, then held her hands.

''If you do everything I say, you won't get hurt,'' he told her. ''I'm serious.''

Garrido handcuffed her, put a leather belt around her neck and under her knees to keep her from looking up. Then he threw a coat over her and began driving. Ms Callaway said she tried to remain calm, to engage him in conversation.

''Why me?'' she asked. ''Well, it wasn't you intentionally, could have been anybody,'' he said. ''It just happened that you happened to be attractive, and that is a fault in this case.''

Ms Callaway could see they had driven into Reno, where they were parked in front of a warehouse. He pried the lock off and took her inside. Behind some heavy plastic sheeting, there was a mattress, with a ''red, old satin, holey, old sheet'', she said.

There were red, blue and yellow stage lights set up on the mattress, a movie projector and a stack of pornographic magazines. For 5½ hours, as a radio played in the background, occasionally giving updates on the time, Garrido raped Ms Callaway. He insisted she drink some wine and smoke some hash.

As the radio announcer said it was 2.38am, someone banged on the door of the shed. Garrido pulled on his jeans and boots, and went outside.

Reno police officer Clifford Conrad was standing outside. Conrad began to question Garrido when Ms Callaway poked her head out from behind the plastic sheeting.

''Help me,'' she said, according to Officer Conrad's testimony. ''She just said, 'Help me', again and she ran out.''

She was nude and screamed that he was trying to rape her, the policeman testified, but Garrido tried to talk his way out of the jam. He implied that Ms Callaway was his girlfriend and that he was married and lived down the street.

Ms Callaway later told Mr Wade that Garrido tried to play it off like he was having sex with his girlfriend, that the officer initially thought Ms Callaway was ''crazy'' and he sent her back into the shed to get dressed. He also let Garrido follow her in.

Inside, Garrido pleaded with Ms Callaway not to tell the police what happened. She assured him she wouldn't, Mr Wade said, then ran outside and repeated that she had been raped and kidnapped.

Garrido was arrested, and in 1977 was convicted in state and federal courts. He was released after 11 years of his 50-year sentence.

Ms Callaway is now married and lives with her husband in Las Vegas, where she is known as Katherine Hall. She is speaking publicly now about her ordeal and on Tuesday was in New York for television appearances. MCT