Woman's murder unsolved but not forgotten

She springs out of bed. Red lights on her clock radio flash 4:20 a.m. "Where is Simone?"

That question has passed Linda Sandler's lips a thousand times in the past 15 years. Especially in the dead of night, when her subconscious transports her back to July 24, 1994, when she was startled awake and knew – with a mother's intuition – that she would never see her daughter again. "I woke up thinking `this is wrong,' " Sandler says now. "Something is wrong."

It would be another nine agonizing nights before her worst fears were confirmed, but chances are good 21-year-old Simone Penni Sandler was already dead by the time her mother fumbled for the phone to call York Regional Police.

To this day her murder is a cold case mystery. No motive, suspects or leads. And while police re-ignited their investigation 18 months ago at the family's request, they have once again hit only dead ends.

Back in 1994, officers arrived at the Sandlers' home within 20 minutes that humid summer morning. But when they learned Simone had just crossed the threshold into adulthood, they backed off. Maybe she had slept out with a boyfriend, they suggested, or had skipped curfew. When the Sandlers contacted Toronto police in the following days, officials said their hands were tied, the family alleges in a complaint filed to the York Regional Police Services Board. Even though Simone had been working near the Eaton Centre on the afternoon she went missing, York police would have had to enlist the services of Toronto police in order to get help from them.

But they didn't, the document shows. An investigation did not start for an entire week. An ocean of time, detectives say today, for invaluable strands of evidence to uncoil, witnesses to slip away and leads to vanish.

Their inaction may have lasted even longer if a couple driving along Lake Shore Blvd. E. the following Saturday had not spotted something bobbing in the Keating Channel.

Simone's body was bloated and battered. She was naked from the waist down. A green garbage bag was knotted around her neck as she floated in the Don River among the empty potato chip bags, Styrofoam cups and construction debris.

The consummate ingénue, Simone was sweet and pretty, shy and trusting. Petite and fair-skinned with flaxen-coloured curls, she loved to pose for pictures, bake carrot muffins and work out at the YMCA. But her parents admit she lacked savvy and street smarts.

Fresh off her first year in hospitality and tourism at Humber College, Simone took a summer job with a now-defunct casting company called Actors and Models Studio.

Her office was a sandwich board parked at gritty Yonge and Gerrard Sts., between the now-shuttered La Maison croissant shop and the Evergreen Youth Shelter. Her task was recruiting passersby to become extras on film and TV shoots.

Getting through those long summer days downtown was tough at first for Simone. But quickly, she struck up a partnership of sorts with the street rats and homeless kids who hung around the area.

Implausible as it seemed for this sheltered Thornhill girl to carve a niche among these social misfits, Simone was absorbed by the group, even falling for a new boyfriend. "Joe," tattooed but attractive, was a year older. He had a way about him, detectives said, and certainly "knew how to work it." Later on, "friends" would say that Simone was often seen holding Joe's hand. But others said the two broke up a week before her disappearance.

The group invited her to gatherings in the wooded areas off Cherry Beach to smoke marijuana around sandpit bonfires. Detectives would later place Simone at one of these "parties" the night she disappeared. But they will never really know how she spent her last hours.

Her case was fraught with challenges, says Mark Mendelson, one of the original investigators.

Detectives could never crawl out of the weeklong black hole in their investigation. The river's toxic waters removed any hint of a murderer's DNA. Other evidence was probably washed away in a thunderstorm four days after Simone's body was discovered, forcing police to call off their search for clues.

While there are always more tests in the works, and evidence can be found in the unlikeliest places, detectives say, even today's technology has failed to detect a flake of dead skin or a single strand of hair on the garbage bag tied around her neck. Biologists methodically separated each knot in the plastic weapon, recently dissecting it with fresh intent, but found nothing.

After Simone's body was discovered, an autopsy merely concluded she had died of strangulation. The body was so badly decomposed that dental records were used for final identification. There had been an unsuccessful attempt at rape.

"It was one of those nasty investigations," Mendelson says. "Every time we thought we turned a corner and answered a question, we didn't. We just picked up three more questions." Perhaps, the biggest impediment was the quality of witnesses – the homeless kids Simone had befriended, the wayward youth, the hot dog vendors. Sure, they recognized the girl who had become a local fixture. But could they shed light on what happened to her? Who did it? A resounding no.

There were many fruitless attempts to find people and confirm alibis. Even a $100,000 reward offered in 1998 for information yielded nothing.

The last time Stephen Sandler saw his daughter was the Saturday she disappeared. She smiled at him, mid-stride from across the street.

"Do you want a lift to the subway?" he called out. "No thanks, Dad," she said, a hand at her face shielding her eyes from the sun's glare. Today, the Sandlers are left with that vision, the hurt as fresh as the day their daughter went missing.

Over the years, the family has accumulated part of their pain in a bulging red folder. Documents burst out the sides – explanations, apologies and promises from top York police brass, government officials and politicians that something like this will never happen again.

The Sandlers toyed with legal action against York Regional police, believing that Toronto officers might have located their daughter sooner had they gotten the go-ahead to proceed with an investigation. But the Sandlers decided against a legal course of action.

It won't bring back Simone. Nothing will. Not even finding her killer.

"But someone should not be getting away with this," Linda and Stephen both said. "If they do find out, it will at least give us some sense of closure."

Pregnant women warned to protect against H1N1

Since more than 10 percent of the H1N1 swine flu fatalities in Brazil were pregnant women, doctors in Japan are asking expectant mothers — who have a higher risk of developing complications if infected — to wash their hands and take other precautions.

The Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an organization of OB-GYN doctors, is calling for pregnant women with suspected swine flu symptoms to get treatment at fever clinics and general hospitals rather than OB-GYN clinics to prevent the H1N1 virus from spreading to other expectant mothers during the epidemic.

JSOG is recommending Tamiflu and Relenza for pregnant women who catch the new flu. A guideline in the United States says the two antiviral drugs have no negative side effects on babies. The organization is also urging the government to give expectant women priority for swine flu vaccines.

The figures announced Wednesday by the Brazilian government sent shock waves around the world. Of the 557 people who died, 58 were pregnant. No such deaths have been reported so far in Japan.

The government is expected to formally place expectant mothers on the vaccine priority list in September.

"Pregnant women comprise only about 1 percent of the population but the number of deaths (among those women) is high," Hisanori Minakami, a professor at Hokkaido University who belongs to JSOG, said during a meeting Thursday to discuss the priority list for new influenza vaccines. "I have a sense of crisis."

Women are also concerned.

"I'm worried about the higher risk of pregnant women but I'm also worried what will happen to my newborn baby," said a 42-year-old woman in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, who is close to giving birth.

She wears a mask when she needs to go out and avoids crowds. "But I don't know which department to be treated at when I am infected," she said.

When women are pregnant, their immunity to viruses weakens, putting them at higher risk of complications. Seasonal and new flu viruses can lead to pneumonia and other diseases.

JSOG is urging pregnant women with potential flu symptoms — fever, runny nose, sore throat and cough — to call a general hospital and get treated early.

Nationwide, total swine flu deaths grew to seven Saturday when a woman in her 30s in Tatsuno, Hyogo Prefecture, died after contracting the virus, the municipal government of Himeji said the same day.

She was preceded by a female cancer patient, also from Hyogo, in her 60s, the Kagoshima Prefectural Government said.

The woman, from Makurazaki, Hyogo Prefecture, had cancer of the digestive system and a tumor that spread to her lungs after surgery, local government officials said.

She was treated with Tamiflu on Friday after being entering a hospital complaining of a sore throat, coughing and a 38-degree fever she had developed the previous day, officials said. But her condition worsened, and she died early Saturday, becoming the nation's sixth swine flu fatality.

In Shiga Prefecture, a 5-year-old boy infected with swine flu showed signs of resistance toward Tamiflu, the prefecture said Saturday, becoming the fifth Tamiflu-resistant patient in the country.

Prefecture officials said the virus is likely to have mutated in his body.

Although the boy was given Tamiflu, he showed no signs of recovery and was admitted to a hospital, the officials said, adding he has now fully recovered from the virus.

Let Malaysians advertise Pendet and wayang

We Indonesians are simply overreacting in our response to Malaysia's use of the Balinese Pendet dance in promotional TV spots. We are acting like a big brother and bullying our younger brother. And such responses will not help us become a better nation.

First, it was a small protest from a group of Balinese people, the rightful owner of the dance, then unfortunately it grew into a nationwide condemnation of Malaysia.

Just read the comments posted at www.thejakartapost.com or many other Internet forums discussing the issue, and you will easily find many condemnations from Indonesians against Malaysia, some even urging the government to ganyang (invade) Malaysia, invoking memories of the time Indonesia was in confrontation with Malaysia.

Unwisely, the government responded in the same way, with the tourism minister summoning the Malaysian embassy's top official and sending a letter of protest to his counterpart in Kuala Lumpur.

But it did not stop there. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono joined the fray, calling on the Malaysian government to deal more carefully with "sensitive" cultural issues between the two countries.

Our responses have really gone too far. Just read this news from Antara: Diponegoro University (Undip), one of Indonesia's leading institutes of higher learning, has stopped admitting Malaysian students for the 2009-2010 academic year in an expression of "nationalism".

"We have done it as a concrete expression of our sense of nationalism," Undip rector Susilo Wibowo said Tuesday as quoted by Antara, after attending a ceremony to mark the induction of new students.

But we don't know the real reasons behind it. It could be because there were no Malaysian students applying to study at the university this academic year, which begins in July.

The point here is that we just overreacted to this issue, or worse, we tried to bully one of our closest neighbors.

Malaysia uses various Asian cultural expressions, especially Chinese and Indian, in its tourism campaign "Malaysia Truly Asia". China and India have never protested Malaysia's use of their cultural heritage in its tourism campaigns.

Why then are we so angry whenever Malaysia uses our cultural heritage, including the Pendet, batik and wayang in their tourism campaigns? In reality, though, Malaysia has never claimed the Pendet as their dance, batik as their craft or wayang as their performance.

These are Indonesian cultural expressions brought to Malaysia by the millions of Indonesians who moved there, mostly as migrant workers.

If it's an issue of rights, we don't have copyrights for most of our cultural products. Much, if not the majority of our cultural heritage, was created by our ancestors for the good of society and mankind.

For instance, many of our best classical Javanese gamelan compositions were written by anonymous composers. They were composed for the kings and the people, and the composers deliberately did not put their names there, much less copyrighted them.

Before Indonesia existed, anyone could play these compositions, even people from outside the Javanese kingdom. Now that Indonesia exists, does it mean nobody outside Indonesia can play and use them in their tourism campaigns, even if they have gamelan groups in their own countries?

Currently, hundreds of gamelan groups exist outside Indonesia. If they wish to promote their groups or if their country wishes to use these gamelan groups to promote tourism, they have every right to use gamelan images in their campaign.

Thus instead of getting angry or sending letter of protests or stopping admitting Malaysian students, we should be more positive and collaborate with the Malaysian government to promote our culture in that country.

When there are more Malaysians dancing the Pendet and playing the gamelan and to Indonesian pop songs, it will only mean more benefits, and not losses, to Indonesia. It will mean more commerce and tourism between the two countries.

Not only that, it would also strengthen cultural ties between the two nations.

Similarly, if Malaysia advertises more Indonesian cultural heritage, it would bring more benefits than losses to us.

Let says, Malaysia advertises the Pendet, and tourists go there because of the advertisement. There is a great chance these tourists will continue on to Bali to see the Pendet at its source. So it not only saves us precious advertising dollars - which we rarely ever spend anyway - but also brings in dollar from more tourist visits.

So let Malaysians dance our Pendet and play our wayang and advertise them. It will only do good things for us in Indonesia.

Fears as Chinese food pours in, farmers claim lost markets and biosecurity risk

CHINA is supplying an ever increasing quantity of food to Australian consumers, raising concerns about food safety and the capacity of local farmers to compete with cheaper imports.

According to the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service, between January 1 last year and May 31 this year more than 4200 tonnes of prawns were imported from China into Australia.

This was in addition to 153 tonnes of frozen broccoli and cauliflower, 65 tonnes of fresh apples, 95 tonnes of fresh pears, 325 tonnes of garlic, 72 tonnes of peas and 4292 tonnes of peanuts and peanut butter. Last year, imports of Chinese vegetables rose by 35 per cent from 2007, making it the second-biggest importer, behind New Zealand. As imports have risen, local production has declined.

"Chinese imports are putting the industry in Australia on a very unsound footing and I think Australians should be very concerned about food security," said Tasmanian vegetable grower Mike Badcock, a former chairman of peak body Ausveg.

Mr Badcock said Australian producers faced higher costs due to stricter standards.

"The biggest problem we have got is the government attitude that we have to meet the market, but it is not a fair market and I think the government is playing a very risky game for a short-time cheap product. Once the Chinese have ruined our industries in Australia the prices will go up," he said.

Mr Badcock cited the example of the Australian garlic industry. He said Chinese garlic, a quarter the cost of the local product, had flooded the market. "But once they ruined the producers of garlic in Australia, they put the price back up."

He said 90 per cent of garlic now sold in Australia came from China.

Federal Minister for Agriculture Tony Burke said 98 per cent of the fresh produce in Australia was locally grown. "The question that needs to be asked when deciding whether fresh produce should be allowed to be imported is whether or not there is an unacceptable biosecurity risk. Our systems for assessing that are rigorous and science-based," Mr Burke said.

But opposition spokesman on agriculture John Cobb said: "When we look at the stuff that is coming in and competing in Australia with Australian products, it is staggering."

He argued that when the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme came in, Australian products would become even more expensive.

Australians were alerted to food safety problems in China last year after melamine was found to have been added to baby formula. Six infants died and nearly 300,000 were hospitalised.

In the US, 1950 cats and 2200 dogs died after eating food contaminated with melamine. Melamine-tainted products were also fed to pigs, fish farms and chickens.

A US Department of Agriculture report last month said the most common reasons Chinese products were refused entry to the US were "filth", unsafe additives, inadequate labelling and lack of proper manufacturer registration, and potentially harmful veterinary drug residues in farmed fish and prawns.

Trevor Anderson of the Australian Prawn Farmers Association worries about the risk of diseases such as white spot and yellow head virus that exist in China but not in Australia.

He said a number of antibiotics had been found in Chinese prawns that resulted in bans and restrictions into the US, "who are much more rigorous than we are about these things".

Mr Anderson said Australian farms were run under "rigorous environmental standards".

"Not only are the Environmental Protection Authority watching every step we make, we are watching each other. We have a clean, green image to protect," he said.

How Retirees Can Spend Enough, but Not Too Much

By RON LIEBER
Published: August 28, 2009

When you retire, you’ll probably want to visit your grandchildren more than once each year. Perhaps you’ll aim to give money each month to charity or your religious congregation.

The amount you have saved will clearly matter a great deal in whether you can do these things. But so will your portfolio withdrawal rate — the percentage of your assets that you take out each year to pay your expenses. You want it to be high enough to afford fun and generosity but low enough that you have little risk of running out of money.

Until a few years ago, the standard advice was that 4 percent or 4.5 percent was about the best you could do. So if you had $500,000 in savings, 4 percent would give you about $20,000 in your first year of retirement to augment Social Security and any other income. Then, you could give yourself a raise each year based on inflation. At 3 percent inflation, you’d end up with $20,600 in the second year of retirement and so on from there.

More recently, however, several studies have suggested that withdrawing 5 percent or even 6 percent was possible — and still prudent.

Retirees rejoiced.

And then the stock market fell to pieces.

In the wake of the carnage, people who hope to retire anytime soon will probably be starting with a kitty smaller than they had expected just a few years ago. So an extra percentage point on the withdrawal rate matters even more than it might have in 2007. It could be the difference between traveling to see family or not, or it could determine when you get to retire in the first place.

But could it also lead you on a path toward ruin? This week, I went back to two of the researchers who had come up with the more generous formulas to see whether they’re sticking by them. Not only are they staying the course, but one is telling his clients that they can take out as much as 6 percent of their money during the next year.

How can they justify something like this after the year we’ve just had?

Setting a Rate

Here’s one big reason to be suspicious about applying that same 4.5 percent withdrawal rate to all people, no matter when they retire: Should a person who had the bad luck to retire in March 2009, at the stock market’s recent bottom, spend 4.5 percent of, say, $350,000, or could they spend a bit more? After all, people who retired a year or two earlier with the same portfolio, before the bulk of the stock market’s decline, might have started with 4.5 percent of $550,000 (and taken inflation-adjusted raises each year from that initial amount until they died).

It didn’t seem right to Michael E. Kitces, a financial planner and director of research at Pinnacle Advisory Group in Columbia, Md. He said he was uncomfortable with all the decisions made based on “the day you happen to come into my office and the balance on that day.”

In fact, he started looking into this before the market collapsed, and his research ended up suiting the conditions of the last year perfectly. He tried to figure out whether one could estimate how much better or worse stock market returns might be in the years after big declines — and whether the answer might allow for a more generous initial withdrawal rate.

What he concluded was that the overall market’s price-earnings ratio — taking the current price for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index divided by the average inflation-adjusted earnings for the past 10 years before the date of withdrawal — was predictive enough to produce guidelines. Then he came up with the following suggestions for a portfolio of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds meant to last through 30 years of retirement.

If the ratio was above 20, indicating that stocks were overvalued, than a 4.5 percent withdrawal rate was prudent given that the stock market was likely to fall. But if it was between 12 and 20 (the historical median is roughly 15.5), a 5 percent rate was safe, tested against every historical period for which data was available. And if it was under 12 — a level it almost got to earlier this year — a rate of 5.5 percent would work.

The most recent figure was 17.67, which suggests a 5 percent withdrawal rate for current retirees. It had been above 20 until October 2008.

Mr. Kitces gets his ratios from a set of data that the Yale professor Robert Shiller creates and stores on Yale’s Web site , at http://bit.ly/3gexz. I’ve provided a link to that data (Mr. Kitces uses column K in the Excel spreadsheet there) and to all of the other research in this column in the online version of this story.

Making Adjustments

Jonathan Guyton, a financial planner with Cornerstone Wealth Advisors in Edina, Minn., looked at the 4.5 percent baseline and asked a different question: Couldn’t it be a whole lot higher if a client was willing to forgo the annual inflation raise when conditions called for a bit of thrift?

And if so, under what conditions would that happen — and would people be willing to, in effect, cut their own retirement paycheck?

It didn’t take Mr. Guyton long to find out. Two studies he worked on in 2004 and 2006 led him to the following conclusions about a portfolio meant to last 40 years: Using Mr. Kitces’s research to establish a baseline initial withdrawal rate of up to 5.5 percent (or 5 percent given valuations at the moment), the initial withdrawal rate could rise another whole percentage point, to 6.5 percent, if at least 65 percent of the money was in a variety of stocks, as long as the owner followed a few rules.

First, if the portfolio lost money in any given year, there would be no raise at all for inflation. And if the size of the withdrawal, in dollars, in any year amounted to an actual percentage rate of the remaining portfolio that was at least 20 percent more than the initial withdrawal rate, retirees would have to take a 10 percent cut in their annual allowance that year. Then, the increase for inflation would build on that new base the following year.

While Mr. Guyton also put a “prosperity” rule into place that allowed for a 10 percent increase in particularly good years, 2008 tested his “capital preservation” rule first. So he cut his clients’ withdrawals by 10 percent.

How did they take it? “Many of them said, ‘Really, that’s all?’ ” he recalled. “Keep in mind how dire things seemed.”

Others blanched, noting that they had played by the rules and didn’t cause the financial crisis. But they came around when Mr. Guyton gave them a good talking to. “For us to maintain the same degree of long-term financial security for you that you said you wanted, this is what you need to do,” he told them. “It’s a system. And the great thing about a policy is that it leaves no doubt about what you are supposed to do.”

Another cut of 10 percent might severely hurt their purchasing power, but the stock market’s performance since March suggests that it won’t be necessary in the coming months.

The Real World

The actual execution of these strategies requires a bit more work. You need to figure out what stocks and bonds should make up your investments in the first place, for instance, and how best to minimize taxes when you sell each year.

All this together seems complicated enough to suggest to a cynic that it’s just a ruse to keep a client coming back each year for costly checkups. That said, surviving retirement without a big pension that never runs out isn’t easy, and paying a bit of money each year in exchange for help in prudently raising your withdrawal rate by 20 percent does not strike me as completely insane.

Retirees also have to wonder whether the market will behave in the future as it has in the past. Or whether retirees can realistically stick to a strict budget. “Even if you tell me that spending fluctuates a bit here and there, we still have to start somewhere,” said Mr. Kitces. “What on earth is your alternative? Are you not going to give any spending recommendations whatsoever?”

Mr. Guyton solves this issue for clients who can afford it by carving out a separate discretionary fund. Retirees can spend that money on anything, but once it’s gone, it’s gone, unless they manage to replenish it out of their regular annual withdrawal.

There are still plenty of retirees and advisers who will balk at what appears to be outsize aggressiveness, whatever the studies indicate. To them, Mr. Guyton suggests an entirely different consideration.

“The only problem is you run out of money? I don’t buy that,” he said. “For a lot of people who lock in on a 4 percent figure, it’s a formula for regret. They get 15 years in and look back at all of the things they didn’t do. And now their health is gone.”

Lotto shakeup looms

Rob Ferguson
Robert Benzie
Queen's Park Bureau

The Liberal government is set to clear house at the troubled Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation in a mad scramble to pre-empt another eHealth-style spending scandal, the Star has learned.

Three informed sources said OLG chief executive Kelly McDougald is fighting for her $400,000-a-year job, which she got two years ago with a mandate to reform the error-prone monopoly that oversees everything from casinos to the popular Lotto 6/49.

Sources said late yesterday that the Liberals hope to short-circuit an expected onslaught from the Progressive Conservatives when the Legislature returns Sept. 14 and are concerned about the impact of any new controversy on the Sept. 17 by-election in the mid-town Toronto riding of St. Paul's.

"Something big is up," a senior government official confirmed.

"By next week, OLG will look much different. And by the time this is over, they'll be forced to clean up their act."

McDougald has already been reprimanded by the Liberals for a series of problems at the gambling agency – including awarding foreign-made Mercedes-Benz cars as casino prizes at the same time as the province was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler.

An audit last winter also found:

A Good Samaritan treated shabbily when he tried to turn in a cache of lost tickets;

A malfunctioning slot machine erroneously informing a player he'd won $42.9 million when the maximum payout was $9,025;

A misprinted scratch-and-win ticket that led a man to believe he had won $135,000 when he hadn't.

But the straw that broke the camel's back appears to be Liberal fears of a reprise of the eHealth Ontario debacle at OLG.

The Tories, repeating their successful strategy that exposed spending run amok at the electronic health records agency, are seeking thousands of pages in OLG documents under freedom of information legislation.

Records sought include expense accounts of senior executives, spending on leased, owned and rented venues, such as luxury boxes at sports stadiums, contracts for consultants as well as travel costs.

So far, the Tories have been stonewalled in their request for information as the Liberals try to beat them to the punch by taking pre-emptive action.

"The concern is she's been running OLG like it's a private-sector company when it's a government agency," said one Liberal insider.

McDougald was not in her office yesterday afternoon and did not return emails and calls from the Star.

She was put in the top job after previous troubles at the Crown agency, where it was found that lottery retailers, employees and their families won $198 million in prizes over 13 years, dating from 1996.

"Any CEO that's running a large organization under public scrutiny certainly feels under the gun," McDougald, a former Bell Canada and Nortel executive, told the Star in March.

OLG officials were also unavailable for comment yesterday.

The Liberals were reluctant to talk on the record because negotiations on the future of the OLG executive team are expected to continue through the weekend and into next week.

Premier Dalton McGuinty issued warnings to government agencies like OLG in the wake of the eHealth scandal – which saw consultants paid $2,700 a day while expensing $3.99 bags of cookies to taxpayers – that such spending no longer passes the sniff test and must stop.

Tory MPP Norm Miller (Parry Sound-Muskoka) said the party has been trying since January to glimpse the inner workings of OLG.

"So far, we've been getting rebuffed. It certainly looks a lot like eHealth because with that we had to be very persistent – it wasn't just ask once and get the information. It certainly makes us suspicious."

Miller said the Tories targeted OLG because the organization "has had quite a few problems."

He added that voters would likely see through any OLG shake-up that seemed to be politically motivated.

The eHealth scandal continues to dog the Liberals, who are watching the issue resurface in the St. Paul's by-election.

Sex slave tip-off: 'girls stared into my soul'

Two American policewomen say they became suspicious of accused kidnapper Phillip Garrido when his young daughters' behaviour caused them to feel "weird and uneasy".

Garrido, 58, and his wife Nancy, 54, pleaded not guilty yesterday to 29 alleged offences including kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment, following the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard on Wednesday.

The blonde schoolgirl was snatched outside her home in 1991 aged 11, and was imprisoned for 18 years.

During her captivity Garrido fathered two daughters, aged 11 and 15, with Ms Dugard.

The police officers saw Garrido with the two young girls at the University of California at Berkeley on Wednesday (local time).

Garrido was trying to hand out religious literature propounding claims he was able to channel the voice of God.

Allie Jacobs says something about the girls did not feel right.

"They were extremely pale. In comparison to Phillip they were extremely, extremely pale," she said.

"[They had] bright blue eyes just like him, and I just got a weird uneasy feeling.

"I was looking at the younger daughter, who was sitting across from me, and she was staring directly at me.

"It was almost like she was looking into my soul - that's how her eyes were so penetrating."

Ms Jacobs says the girls told her they did not go to school, but were given lessons at home.

She says the younger daughter sounded robotic and rehearsed when she explained a bruise around her eye as a birth defect.

Garrido was subsequently summoned to a meeting Wednesday with his parole officer.

The parole officer, having previously visited the Garrido home, found it strange that in addition to his wife Nancy he brought along two girls and a woman he called "Allissa."

Ms Dugard's real identity emerged during the course of the meeting and Garrido and his wife Nancy were detained.

Garrido is now also being investigated over the deaths of prostitutes in the 1990s.

However, questions are now mounting about how Garrido was able to hold Ms Dugard captive for 18 years, along with the two girls she bore him, despite neighbours' warnings to police that something was amiss.

Secret garden

Ms Dugard was confined in a makeshift prison of sheds and tents in what police have described as a "backyard within a backyard" at Garrido's home in Antioch, around 80 kilometres east of San Francisco.

Police in Contra Costa County admitted on Friday that they had received a tip in November 2006 and failed to follow it up properly.

Sheriff Warren Rupf issued an apology over the missed opportunity to rescue Ms Dugard, saying law enforcement officials were distraught over their failure to discover Garrido's crimes earlier.

"I can't change the course of events, but we are beating ourselves up over this and are the first to do so," Mr Rupf said.

Mr Rupf said the sheriff's deputy who responded to the tip never entered the house or checked the backyard, missing an opportunity to rescue Ms Dugard.

Others of Garrido's neighbours said they had no idea that anything was wrong.

"It's kind of embarrassing to be here this long and not know what's going on. How could that go on under all of our noses?," one neighbour, who gave his name only as Steve, said.

New details suggested that Garrido was able to cultivate a normal public persona, taking on jobs and even allowing Ms Dugard to interact with other people.

A man who once hired Garrido for a printing job told The New York Times on Saturday that he had met, exchanged emails and regularly spoken on the phone with a woman who was introduced as Garrido's daughter Allissa.

Ben Daughdrill said the woman never suggested that she was being held captive or tried to identify herself as Ms Dugard.

Her stepfather Carl Probyn said Ms Dugard appeared to have formed a relationship of sorts with her abductor.

"Jaycee feels that she has real regrets for bonding with this guy," Mr Probyn told reporters outside his home in Orange, south of Los Angeles.

Mr Probyn said Ms Dugard, who was reunited with her mother and half-sister on Friday, was struggling to come to terms with what had been inflicted upon her and experts said it could take years for her to recover.