Neighbour Mike Rogers
Mr Rogers says 'perverts' in the area were regularly invited over by Garrido for sex, beer and drug parties and that the Garrido home was, in effect, being used as a brothel.

He watched groups of men arriving at the house on hot summer nights. They carried crates of beer. Mainly of Mexican appearance, they lit bonfires, played music and shouted and laughed late into the night.

They also took it in turns to enter a tent erected amid the junk in Garrido's backyard. 'I saw them entering the tent one by one,' he says. 'I saw them bobbing up and down and I thought, "My God, there is something sexual going on in there".'

Mike Rogers, 49, told the newspaper that he once peered through the garden fence during an 'excessively loud' party next door. 'These guys were unsavoury looking men,' he says.

'What I saw was not normal,' he said. 'Eight to 10 men, mostly Mexican, would gather in a line in his garden drinking beer, yelling and screaming and swearing.

'They normally had a bonfire and I saw them entering the tent one by one. On a number of occasions I saw them bobbing up and down through the window and I thought, 'My God, there is something sexual going on in there'.

'They were drinking beer and smashing the bottles on the ground. I thought they had a prostitute or something in there. I thought it might have been some kind of sex party or something. It happened quite often. They were different men each time.'

The men gave each other 'high-fives' when they emerged from the tent.

'I just hope that sicko wasn't pimping out Jaycee or those children. The thought makes me sick.'

But, despite being disturbed by what he had seen, Mr Rogers said he didn't think he had enough evidence to call police.

'I'd told my brother about the parties and he agreed that unless they got really out of control I should keep out of it,' he said.

Christine Murphy who was the first wife of Phillip Garrido described him as a monster, and that he continually hit her. Phillip Garrido was an aspiring musician with no valid income. Murphy recounts that he continually smoked marijuana and dropped LSD. He had sexual perversions and wanted his wife to engage in group sex, which she refused. It wasn’t until Phillip Garrido was arrested for the rape of Katherine Gallaway that Christine Murphy found a way to escape.


Neighbour Dana Crandell
Neighbor Dana Crandell, 35, used to play near the yard as a kid and now works at the local Savemart, where Garrido would shop "with two young girls."

"Years ago, my brother heard someone in the back yard having sex. At the time we just thought it was him and his girlfriend. They had a hot tub back there. "There were wooden shutters on the house that he would always put up, and he always locked his gate."

Until three years ago, Garrido, 58, acted as caretaker of the house next door to his property, which also has a number of sheds and outbuildings which have now been cordoned off by police.


Neighbour Damon Robinson
Damon Robinson, who now lives in the house, said all the locks were turned around so people could be locked in, rather than locked out.

'It took me a while to realise, but Garrido had access to all of these buildings. At first I didn't even realise they were part of my land because there are wire fences splitting up the yard.

'When I moved over in one of the sheds there was a music player, a couch, a mattress and a VCR. He really wanted the VCR back when I found it.

'There had been times when I could hear music coming from there at night. Maybe he was taking the girl over there for a change of scenery or something a little nicer than he had in his yard, I don't know.'


Janice Gomes
Janice Gomes remembers the day she met Garrido. She was in a beauty salon getting her nails done when he came in soliciting business. It was 1994, she recalled, and "he told me his wife just had a baby."

Gomes and her husband used Garrido for their home-cleaning businesses, and he also printed brochures and tickets for Gomes' National Community Empowerment Program, a nonprofit public safety group.

Nine years ago, after 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild was abducted from the nearby city of Vallejo, the group decided to update its tip sheet for parents. Gomes recalled that Garrido made suggestions.

"He said, 'You might want to put that parents should never let their children go to the bus stop alone,' " Gomes recounted. " 'Children are no match for an adult.' "

Like many print shop customers, Gomes said Garrido's religiosity began to deepen. Last October, he came to their offices, especially excited, waving a document.

"When the FBI reads this and this comes out," he told her, "this is going to be a beautiful story. It's going to be worldwide. It tells how God healed me from pornography and prostitutes."

He handed Gomes the papers. She threw them away.

"He's so happy right now," Gomes speculated. "This is the worldwide thing he's talking about."


Erika Pratt, 25, who stayed next door two years ago, said she was continuously "freaked out" by Garrido's behavior and that when she popped her head over the fence she saw his secret compound. There were tents, sheds and pit bulls, she said, and water hoses leading from her house next door.

"He had little girls and women living in that backyard, and they all looked kind of the same," Pratt said. "They never talked, and they kept to themselves."

Erica Pratt was the woman that called the police in 2006 to report Phillip Garrido as a psychotic and a sex addict. Obviously, she saw some sexual activities happening in that backyard from her side of the fence. Also, Phillip Garrido took water from her side of the property to run the shower and the swimming pool.


A blank stare
Haydee Perry, 35, who lives next door, said that when Phillip Garrido helped her jump-start her car a month ago, he had a young girl clinging to him in a manner that struck her as strange.

"She stayed close to him at all times," Perry said. "It wasn't normal behavior. She had a blank stare on her face. Now it seems like a cry out for help."

A Web site containing statements from Garrido and others called "Voices Revealed" talks about a turnaround that allowed him "to open doors that will honor the creator and his eternal purpose for mankind."

The site also indicates that he gave a demonstration in Pittsburg last month with a homemade box to prove "the creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world."

Mary Thomas, accountant at J&M auto dismantlers in Pittsburg, near where Garrido set up his revival tent, said he "was always very professional and spoke the word of God whenever he talked."

Garrido had a printing business, making business cards for J&M and others in the area. Tiffany Tran, who runs Furniture Gallery in Brentwood, said she had seen and done business with "Phil the printer" for six years, as recently as last week.


A little different
She recalled Garrido as being "a little different" and said he constantly talked about religion and showed her a device through which he claimed he could control sound with his mind.

"Some people have a story behind their smile, some don't - he did," Tran said. "He was happy-go-lucky, but you knew there was a story behind it."


Pratt said people came and went from the property, but the core group consisted of two girls about 4 years old, one girl about 11, another girl about 15 and a young woman about 25. They were all blond, she said.

Pratt said she had called Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies to investigate, but that officers "told me they couldn't go inside because they didn't have a warrant. So they just told him they'd keep an eye on him."


Neighbor Dana Crandell, 35, used to play near the yard as a kid and now works at the local Savemart, where Garrido would shop "with two young girls."

"He came into the supermarket where I work and I met the little girls," she said. "I said to him, 'I didn't know you had daughters.' He said, 'Oh, yeah, these are my girls.' He always talked about God. He always talked about his recordings.

"I saw the girls three different times. They were hanging on his arms, asking 'Can we get this, can we buy this?' He just got milk and the bare necessities and always paid with cash.

"I played back there as a little kid. He always peeked over the fence. He was real neighborly, but he never let anyone come onto his property. I never knew that existed back there.

"Years ago, my brother heard someone in the back yard having sex. At the time we just thought it was him and his girlfriend. They had a hot tub back there.

"There were wooden shutters on the house that he would always put up, and he always locked his gate."

Another neighbor, Dante Consetti, has lived in the area for decades and often worked outdoors.

"I worked in the yard for years and I didn't hear a thing," he said.

Residents said they frequently saw Garrido but tended to avoid him and his religious rants and his penchant for singing gospel songs.

"He came around to my place and he wanted to sing," said Sam Kovisto.

"It was always gospel singing and religious stuff. I told him to get lost and not come on my property."

Kovisto said he saw the little girls a few times and "knew he was on the sex offenders registry."

"Since I first saw that guy, I knew there was something not right about him," he said. "He thought he was God. He was crazy."

Another neighbor, Erika Pratt, 25, reported seeing pit bulls on the property.

Some of the neighbors knew he was a registered sex offender. But they said they didn't know he'd been convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1976.

Many of the homes surrounding Garrido's are rentals.

Garrido moved into the house -- which had been owned by his mother Patricia's now-deceased husband, Herschel Franzen -- after he got out of prison.

He and his wife and alleged co-conspirator, Nancy, lived in the main home with Patricia, who is said to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Even Garrido's family had their suspicions -- but apparently never asked too many questions.

Garrido's brother, Ron, who lives in nearby Brentwood, yesterday recalled how Phillip visited an aunt in 2007, with two little girls in tow.

Phil told the relative that he was watching the kids for a neighbor, but she didn't buy it, Ron said.

"My aunt told me, 'I swear that oldest girl is his daughter. She's got his eyes.' "


Deepal Karunaratne, a Sri Lankan-born estate agent who employed Garrido to print his flyers and business cards, said he believed "Phil and Nancy" when they introduced him to their blonde blue-eyed "daughter", Jaycee.

"Only he said she was called Allissa, and one of her daughters was called Scarlett," he told The Sunday Times last week.

"Jaycee was part of the family business, running the printing press in the back yard. I would see her in work overalls, covered with ink, negotiated with her when she could not complete my order. She was always polite and professional. Or wearing jeans and a blouse standing outside the house with Nancy, who did all the bookkeeping."

He added that he and Jaycee exchanged regular phone calls and e-mails.

"He [Garrido] would not let me see the press or the backyard: he said it was a trade secret. I was aware there were two little girls there, although I did not know they were living in tents. They went out to movies and to eat, nothing exceptional or strange," he said.

His testimony is backed up by Ben Daughdrill, who last year met a woman who was introduced as Allissa when he went to Garrido’s house to pick up some business cards. "She was the design person; she did the art work; she was the genius," said Daughdrill, who also communicated by phone and e-mail with Jaycee.

Both Karunaratne and Daughdrill are now haunted by what was uncovered last week. For Karunaratne, two recollections are particularly telling and troubling.

"Over the last three years he [Garrido] grew more intense about his religion. He said that God was speaking to him through this machine, and asked me to listen through headphones and sign a form saying I’d heard the voices too.

"I heard nothing but did it, to be polite. But he seemed to grow more crazy every time I saw him. He said he was being attacked by angels. He was melting down.”

The second cold finger running down the estate agent’s spine is Garrido’s account of a day recently when he took Jaycee and the girls on a "mission" to a nearby town called Pittsburg.

"He told me he had set up a stall to hand out his tracts, and all the family was helping him. His car broke down on the way home, and he phoned me up for a lift back. I told him to take the bus."


Maria Christenson -
Garrido did printing work for a Pittsburg recycling center for more than a decade, and he did it well.

Some of the receipts and envelopes came with lovely children's designs, said Maria Christenson, owner of Christenson Recycling Center. His daughter did them, Garrido proudly told her.

"There was nothing weird with him at the beginning. But I noticed a year ago he just went off the deep end," she said.

That's when Phillip and Nancy Garrido - charged Friday in the 1991 abduction and sexual assault of Jaycee Dugard - came into her office, shut the door and asked for a $2,000 advance. They needed a new bathroom and had plans to start a backyard church, they told her.

"He started preaching and doing all this stuff. He was telling me about his voices. And then he said, "You know I've been to prison, and I don't masturbate anymore." Out of the blue," she said. "Then he started crying, and she was crying. I was looking at them - what is this about? I got freaked out."


Christine Murphy
Just 19 when they married, Christine worked at a Reno casino to pay the bills because Garrido, an aspiring musician, had no real income. She says he took LSD or smoked marijuana every day, and he became violent when she refused to go along with his sexual fantasies.

"What did he ask you to do?" McInerney asks.
"Multiple partners is what he wanted, I wouldn’t go for that," says Christine.

When Garrido saw another man flirt with his wife, Christine says he took out a safety pin and dug it into her face. The scar is still visible. And when she ran away, Garrido carried out what was probably his first kidnapping.

"He pulled up in front me and we got in an argument and he grabbed me and threw me in the car," she says of the incident.

Four years into the marriage, Garrido was convicted of kidnapping and raping a woman and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

"Honestly [I was] relieved, it was my exit out," Christine says of Garrido's sentence.

Christine later remarried and had four children. She had no idea that her ex-husband had been released from jail until she heard the news about the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

"It made me sick to my stomach," she says of Dugard's ordeal.

Christine says she has total sympathy for what Jaycee has gone through these last 18 years.

"What do you want to say to Phillip Garrido right now?"

"Nothing. The only person I have anything to say to is the victims: Just be strong, take it one day at a time."


Sources
Erika Pratt

Ron Garrido, Erika Pratt, Sam Kovisto, Dante Consetti,

LA Times - Pursuing God and Sex

Bonding with Phillip Garrido

Karunaratne and Ben Daughdrill

Profile of Phillip Garrido - Juror thirteen

Christine Murphy - With InsideEdition