Safety Last

I don't do much crime writing around here, but when the freakiest sex crime of the year is a local story, it's hard to avoid. Police: Kidnap Suspect Fathered Victim's Kids

Phillip Craig Garrido was already known as an oddball who said he could channel the voice of God through a makeshift box, but on Thursday, the eccentricity took on an aura of horror.

Eighteen years ago, authorities said, he kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard on her way to catch a school bus in South Lake Tahoe. Ever since then, they said, he kept her prisoner in a squalid backyard compound near Antioch, raping her and fathering two daughters by her - the elder of whom is now 15.

Those girls also were housed in sheds and other outbuildings in the backyard, which had been walled off so it couldn't easily be seen by neighbors or other outsiders, authorities said.

Law enforcement is coming in for some serious criticism, as Garrido was "on their radar" for virtually his entire adult life, starting with a disturbing Las Vegas kidnapping that ended with an outrageously light sentence: Nevada Cop Who Busted Garrido Questions How He Got Free

Long before Garrido abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard, Reno Police Officer Clifford Conrad caught the psycho raping a 25-year-old casino worker he also had kidnapped.

"Someone dropped the ball," the retired Conrad, 66, told the Daily News. "I thought he got sentenced to 50 years to life, so how he got out after 10 years, I'll never know. I guess a lot of people dropped the ball his whole life."

Garrido was indeed sentenced in 1977 to 50 years for the kidnapping conviction and life for the sexual assault - but he inexplicably served only 11 years behind bars.

Three years after his release, Garrido snatched Jaycee, 11, near a South Lake Tahoe school bus stop in 1991, and kept her as a sex slave for nearly two decades.

And, once he was in the Bay Area, he could count on the revolving cast of CA's overlapping law enforcement agencies, each with their own turf, that never quite managed to catch on to Garrido's crimes. It is to their collective shame that this case was ultimately resolve by a UC Berkeley campus police officer: 18 Years of Missed Chances

Authorities struggled to explain Friday how they missed opportunity after opportunity over 18 years to discover Phillip Craig Garrido's alleged backyard prison compound for girls - some admitting to bungling, others giving Garrido credit for outwitting them.

During the time prosecutors say Garrido, a registered sex offender, kept Jaycee Lee Dugard prisoner, he had two daughters with her and allegedly housed all three in tents and sheds in a walled-off backyard on unincorporated land near Antioch. State and federal agencies had the job of watching over him during those years, and local law enforcement had the responsibility to investigate any suspicion of criminal activity.

But despite that monitoring - including twice monthly visits recently by a state parole officer - Garrido's lair escaped discovery.

(snip)

The leader of one local law enforcement agency, however, admitted Friday to a sloppy investigation that missed an opportunity to rescue Dugard and her girls nearly three years ago from the man some neighbors called "Creepy Phil."

Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren Rupf said that after a neighbor called 911 with a report that young children were living in squalor in Garrido's backyard, the responding deputy never asked to look at the yard and concluded that at most he was dealing with a code violation.

"We are beating ourselves up over this," the sheriff said at a news conference in Martinez. "I'm first in line to offer organizational criticism, offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility."

One problem is that the Exclusionary Rule so beloved of defense attorneys and ACLU-types prevents an officer from doing more than a cursory investgation without some obvious, suspicious activity going on right at that moment. Getting a 911 call from a concerned neighbor doesn't cut it in the quest for probable cause. Still, the deputy in this case did a half-assed job. How hard was it, back in 2006, to run a computer check on Garrido as a parolee or a registered sex offender? I'll bet it wasn't hard at all; he just didn't bother. Did he try to talk with the complaining neighbor? Doesn't look like it. He thought he was dealing with a "code violation," so did he report that? Of course, not.

A bigger problem - and the factor that really allowed Garrido to remain obscure so long - is society's ambiguous treatment of sex offenders, especially pedophiles, as manifested in our sex crime statutes. On the one hand, the rapist of an adult woman is treated in the eyes of the lawas being just below that of a murderer. Pedophiles generate revulsion among the citizenry, but the punishment regime just doesn't seem as strict as it is for rapists. To be blunt, there are a lot of people out there willing to bring civil rights claims on behalf of pedophiles. Sex offender registries remain very controversial, despite their obvious utility. So do laws restricting sex offenders from places where children gather. Suggestions that pedophiles be subjected to life sentences, death sentences, or chemical castration are often treated as out of bounds by the civil rights crowd.

It is a harsh world, and pedophilia and sexual perversions like that of Garrido are a brutal fact of life. Yet he, and other pedophiles quietly go about their work for decades with protection, intended or not, from those who just don't think their crimes demand a high level of punishment.