If she's lucky Jaycee might eventually recover from her unspeakable ordeal at the hands of kidnapper Phillip Garrido, but the 18 years he stole from her life can never be regained. Ray Chesterton writes how a monster robbed an innocent young girl of her childhood.
Theft is not one of the 29 charges sex-obsessed religious fanatic Phillip Garrido is facing. It should be.
Garrido, a gaunt, sullen-looking predator, robbed Jaycee Lee Dugard of the precious gift of childhood when he kidnapped her from a bus stop not far from her house in California when she was 11 years old.
For the next 18 years he kept her prisoner in a hidden garbage dump in his backyard, subjecting her to unending obscenities including rape, which resulted in her mothering two children, who were delivered in a rundown shed without medical help.
Jaycee became the child that time forgot. Memories of a past, happier life were buried deeper and deeper as birthday after birthday went by, slowly erasing memories of anything except the reality of living in squalor and forced to submit to Garrido's sexual debauchery.
For Jaycee, the choice was stark: accept the new reality of her life — or go crazy.
Psychiatrists and welfare officers are already working on repairing the fragile minds of Jaycee and her daughters, who have only just learnt that the woman they thought was a sister is their mother.
But there is no human remedy for the irreplaceable loss of childhood and its magical moments and life-long memories. Her 11-year-old world of enchanted fantasies, fairies and expectations was torn apart by the brutality and degradation inflicted by Garrido for the next 18 years.
She was an angel in a man-made hell, a grubby mattress in the barn with a crude shower and outhouse her only familiarity. Psychiatrists say it will take hundreds of hours of intense therapy to erase the pain and mental trauma inflicted on Jaycee.
