Once, Phillip Craig Garrido wanted to be a rock star.
Before he turned 17, Garrido was "just a normal high school kid" in Brentwood, relatives and acquaintances say - a teenager who played bass in a band and was so handsome girls jostled for his attentions at high school dances. He went out with, and later married, a pretty, athletic member of the school a cappella choir.
He could have had a fine future, they say.
But after a trip to the emergency room in 1968 for a motorcycle wreck in which he slammed his head, Garrido began the transformation from quiet teenager into a dope-smoking hippie, then a chronic cocaine and LSD abuser - and finally the most notorious sexual predator in the world today.
Garrido made stabs at normalcy over the years, devoting himself to the Jehovah's Witness faith with second wife Nancy Garrido in the late 1970s and picking up carpentry and drafting skills in prison. He had plans to study computer programming in college, and even after he served more than a decade in prison for kidnapping and rape, he launched a successful business card enterprise.
But nothing, it seemed, could tamp down his lust for compulsive sex and hard drugs in his middle years - and later, authorities say, a need for a sex slave to give birth to his offspring.
Wrong turn
Authorities are still unraveling the full narrative of what Garrido, now 58, did between his 1969 graduation from Liberty High School in Brentwood and his arrest with his 54-year-old wife Aug. 26 on suspicion of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard when she was 11, raping her and imprisoning her at their Antioch-area home for 18 years.
But it's clear from interviews with relatives, former classmates - and Garrido himself, in court records - that he took the promising start handed him as a "spoiled" son and destroyed it as soon as he was on his own.
Court records show that even as he was raping his first confirmed victim, Katie Callaway Hall, in a Reno storage unit in 1976, he bragged to her of having previously kidnapped two other girls, in the Bay Area and in Las Vegas. Police say he tried to snatch another woman just before he abducted Hall in an LSD-fueled frenzy.
Garrido also told authorities during his trial for the Hall rape that he was a Peeping Tom who flashed 10-year-old girls and masturbated in public, and Antioch police revealed Thursday that he was once charged with drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl in 1972.
And authorities say this was all before he cruised a South Lake Tahoe neighborhood in 1991 - near where he'd kidnapped Hall 14 years before - and spotted the 11-year-old, blond and blue-eyed Dugard. "I want that one, the pretty one," he reportedly told his wife, and the next day the couple allegedly came back and snatched her.
Now, neighbors and customers of Garrido's business-card outfit who are asked to describe what he's been like in recent years paint the picture of an oddball who sang loud show tunes as he walked down the street and claimed to channel the voice of God through a box.
Those who grew up with him say that man doesn't match up with the kid they knew back then. That he allegedly created a squalid, secret lair of tents and shacks in his backyard for Dugard and the two girls he is accused of fathering by her is all the more incredible to them.
'Pretty twisted'
"You know, we were all partying back then, smoking some weed, but I knew when to quit," said Mike Kelley, 58, a classmate whose band the Village Drunks competed for dance gigs with the Garrido Band in high school. "I guess Phil didn't.
"He was a real nice guy growing up, clean-cut and pretty smart," Kelley said. "He was just a normal high school kid. But then when the hippie scene came along, he really got into it, you know, with the moccasins and fringe coat and all.
"Before long, he got pretty twisted."
A ceaseless abuse of cocaine, pot and LSD, Garrido said in mid-'70s court records, started after high school - but some say it began before then, in his senior year.
"You should have seen him back then, what a sweet kid he was before he changed," Garrido's father, 88-year-old Manuel Garrido, said at the rural Brentwood home where he's lived for all of his son's life.
"Phillip had a motorcycle accident in 1968 when he was 17, and that ruined him," his father said. "I remember the emergency room calling me and saying, 'We have to operate on his head,' and I said, 'Do whatever you can.' "
Garrido sat in the big brown lounger where he spends most of his time now, watching ceaseless news reports about his youngest son and shook his head. A tear rolled down one cheek.
"They didn't do enough," he said. "My son was ruined after that. The drugs, crazy behavior, all that stuff started then."
Handsome young man
High school yearbook photos from Garrido's first three years show an attractive young man with no involvements in any activities; his only interests were in playing rock bass and maybe pursuing a carpentry career, friends recall.
Former teachers say he got average grades - despite a relatively high IQ of 110 - and he doesn't appear at all in his senior yearbook. His father says that was because he skipped the start-of-year photo session because of injuries from his motorcycle wreck.
Garrido's high school girlfriend, Christine Perreira - who married him in 1973 - was from a respected Portuguese-heritage family in Brentwood. She was two years younger than Garrido and involved in a cluster of clubs, from a cappella choir to the track and gymnastic teams.
Larry Lindsey, a Brentwood deli owner who has known the Garrido family all his life, said Garrido's mother, Pat, was a successful real estate agent and school-parent leader. Garrido's father was a forklift driver who, by many accounts, spoiled Phillip.
"You should have seen Phil in early high school," said one classmate who, citing the notoriety of the case, asked not to be identified. "He was the cutest. ... (Girls) wanted to dance with him at all the dances."
But Steve Lucchesi, a bandmate of Kelley's, said he had a feeling things were turning sour for Garrido late in high school.
"We went to his house to talk about music equipment, and I remember his bedroom was painted entirely black," Lucchesi said. "It was the first time I'd ever seen black lights - he had those weird psychedelic posters of the time, and they lit up under the lights.
"He was definitely getting out there."
By then Garrido had formed his band with other Brentwood musicians, with himself on bass. They specialized in Creedence Clearwater Revival and Beatles songs at local dances.
"He was good," Lucchesi said, "but we kicked his band's ass in the Battle of the Bands."
Marriage goes bad
Perreira, now Christine Murphy, has said since Garrido's arrest that their 1973 marriage turned ugly not long after they eloped from Brentwood, with him beating her and denying rumors that he had raped a girl in high school. "He tried to gouge my eyes out," she told a TV reporter.
In her efforts to make the marriage work, Murphy evidently overlooked Garrido's rape arrest in 1972. Charges were dropped after the girl refused to testify, police said last week.
The couple settled in South Lake Tahoe, where Murphy became a blackjack dealer at Harrah's Casino and Garrido tried to jump-start his music career. But by then he was already heavily abusing LSD, cocaine and marijuana, and an urge to kidnap and rape wouldn't leave him, he said later in trial testimony.
So in 1976 he randomly picked a victim much as he picked his wife: Hall, who was another Harrah's blackjack dealer.
His wife divorced him while he was incarcerated for the Hall rape.
Romance in prison
Psychological evaluations after he went to prison show that Garrido had mental disorders including voyeurism and impulse neurosis. Dr. Charles Kuhn, who examined Garrido, said, "I certainly do," when asked if he believed the prisoner "would be a menace to the health, safety and morals of himself and others without psychiatric treatment."
A few years later, while studying carpentry and drafting in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, he also was writing love songs to little girls, an acquaintance claimed last week. He began attending regular Jehovah's Witnesses worship, and later he met fellow Witness Nancy Bocanegra. She was visiting her imprisoned uncle, began a romance with Garrido, and in 1981 they were married while he was still behind bars.
The life path Bocanegra took from her birth in Texas to that fateful prison visit is far less known than her husband's. Former work acquaintances say she was an accomplished nursing assistant in Contra Costa County before quitting to stay home five years ago.
Barbara Maizie, executive director of Contra Costa ARC, a nonprofit group that helps children and adults with special needs and disabilities, said Nancy Garrido worked for her from 1994 to 1998. She came with "excellent references" and was "capable and well liked," Maizie said.
After Phillip Garrido was paroled from prison in 1988, the couple moved to the Antioch area and the Walnut Avenue home of his mother. For many years, the couple maintained what appeared on the outside to be a relatively normal life - even as the couple allegedly installed Dugard in their secret backyard warren after she was kidnapped in 1991.
Phillip Garrido briefly returned to prison for a parole violation in 1993. It's not known what Dugard's situation was, but speculation has focused on whether responsibility for keeping the girl imprisoned fell to Nancy Garrido.
Neighbors and acquaintances say that, until recently, the couple were mostly known for his business-card enterprise and her nursing assistant work.
Lindsey said the Garridos came to him in the early 1990s to try to sell him business cards, "and they were so quiet and nice I actually made a comment that Phil needed more of a pressure-time kind of approach."
Meanwhile, back in South Lake Tahoe where Dugard had been kidnapped, her parents, Terry and Carl Probyn, held annual vigils and eventually split up in their pain over her disappearance.
Bizarre behavior
By 2000, there was still no hint back in eastern Contra Costa County that the Probyns' daughter was alive and captive - but the bizarre behavior that would eventually betray Phillip Garrido to authorities was beginning.
Garrido started a business called God's Desire and held demonstrations meant to show he could channel the voice of God. He began to proselytize to customers, inviting them to sparsely attended tent revivals he held in parking lots. Neighbor boys nicknamed him Creepy Phil.
Stephanie Harvey of Antioch said she and a friend visited Garrido two years ago at his home, where he insisted guests put on headphones connected to a black box - "to hear God," Harvey said.
Teacher, artist, mother
In the meantime, authorities say, Dugard was giving birth to Garrido's daughters, now 15 and 11, and filling the roles of teacher to her girls and artist for Garrido's card business.
She and the girls reportedly remained imprisoned in the backyard compound - kept from school and doctors - and whenever neighbors encountered them through holes in the fence, Garrido nailed up new boards to block the view.
However, along the way, Dugard taught her children enough that they learned computer games, her aunt said last week, and their tents became lined with Furbee toys and books about cats and by popular authors like Dean Koontz. And as the children grew, Garrido loosened up on them.
In recent years, the girls could be heard splashing in an above-ground swimming pool, and Garrido even took them out to buy paper or grab hot dogs at the Wienerschnitzel in Antioch.
Then, finally, came last month - and Garrido slipped up. An Aug. 25 trip with the girls to UC Berkeley to try to distribute literature about his religious rantings raised police suspicions. The next day, a parole officer interviewed the family in Concord and discovered Dugard's identity.
Now, as those who know Garrido pick through their memories of him, they wonder why nobody caught on to his hidden life sooner.
"It's such a terrible shame," said deli owner Lindsey. "The Garridos were always a respectable family here in Brentwood.
"You just never know, do you?"
