The Morning That Changed Everything

Terry Probyn will never forget the sound of her daughter’s scream.

It was June 10, 1991, a bright Monday morning in South Lake Tahoe, California. The mountain air was crisp and clean, carrying the scent of pine trees and the promise of summer vacation just weeks away. Eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard had woken up excited about finishing fifth grade, her blonde ponytail bouncing as she pulled on her favorite pink windbreaker.​

Terry was a single mother, working two jobs to support Jaycee and her younger sister. That morning, she’d kissed Jaycee goodbye and watched from the doorway as her daughter walked down the hill toward the school bus stop—a walk she’d made hundreds of times before. It was less than 300 yards from their home, a straight shot down a quiet residential street in Meyers, California.​

Carl Probyn, Terry’s boyfriend and Jaycee’s stepfather, was in the garage working when he heard it—a scream that would haunt him for eighteen years. He ran outside just in time to see a gray sedan pull up beside Jaycee. Two people jumped out.​

What happened next unfolded in seconds. A man grabbed Jaycee. She screamed. Carl saw a woman—later identified as Nancy Garrido—use what appeared to be a stun gun on the child. Jaycee’s small body went limp. They threw her into the backseat of the car like a bag of groceries.​

Carl ran after them on his bicycle, pedaling furiously, screaming for help. But the car sped away, disappearing down the winding mountain roads. He called 911 immediately. Within minutes, police arrived. Within hours, a massive search was underway.​

But Jaycee was gone.

Terry came home from work to find her world shattered. Police cars filled the street. Neighbors gathered in worried clusters. And her daughter—her beautiful, bright, eleven-year-old daughter—had vanished.​

“I knew she was out there somewhere,” Terry would later say, her voice breaking. “I held onto her and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t let go. My heart was shattered, and that void could only be filled by her. I just held on”.​

The statistics were brutal. Most children abducted by strangers are killed within the first few hours. After 24 hours, the chances of finding them alive drop to almost nothing. After a week, hope becomes a cruel illusion that parents cling to because the alternative is unthinkable.

But Terry Probyn refused to stop hoping.

Every night for the next 6,575 nights, Terry would step outside her home and look up at the moon. She would whisper to it, as if the moon could carry her message to wherever Jaycee was: “I’m still here, baby. I’m still waiting. Come home”.​

“That’s one of my survival techniques,” Terry explained years later. “I needed to stay connected, finding something that we shared, and stayed connected with that kid. And it got me through”.​

Two days before Jaycee was found—eighteen years later—Terry would work a double shift, come home exhausted, look up at a full moon and say: “OK, Jaycee, where are you?” Her younger daughter came out to see who she was talking to. “The moon,” Terry said. “Just the moon”.​

What Terry didn’t know—what she couldn’t have imagined—was that somewhere 120 miles away, in a hidden compound behind a house in Antioch, California, Jaycee was looking at that same moon.​

The Journey Into Darkness

Inside that gray sedan on June 10, 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee regained consciousness to find herself in the backseat with Nancy Garrido. Her body ached from the stun gun. Her mind reeled with confusion and terror.​

From the front seat, she heard a man laugh. “I can’t believe we got away with it,” Phillip Garrido said to his wife.​

Jaycee pleaded with them. “Please take me home. Please. My mom needs me. Please”. But her pleas fell on deaf ears.​

The Garridos drove for hours, eventually arriving at their home at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch—an unremarkable house on an unremarkable street in an unremarkable California suburb. But behind that house, hidden behind fences and tarps and overgrown vegetation, was a nightmare.​

Phillip Garrido had constructed a series of sheds and tents in the backyard, invisible from the street, invisible even to neighbors who lived just feet away. He dragged Jaycee, her head still covered with a blanket, into this maze of structures.​

He pushed her into a tiny shed—barely larger than a closet—that he’d soundproofed. Inside was a bucket for a toilet, a sleeping bag on the floor, and nothing else. He handcuffed her, then removed all her clothes, leaving the eleven-year-old girl naked and terrified.​

“There are trained Doberman Pinschers outside,” he told her. “If you try to escape, they will attack you and kill you”. There were no Dobermans. But Jaycee, handcuffed and terrified in a soundproof shed, had no way of knowing that.​

Garrido bolted the door from the outside. And Jaycee was left alone in the darkness.​

For the next week, her only human contact was Garrido himself. He would bring her fast food—McDonald’s, Burger King—and talk to her about his religious delusions, his belief that he was a chosen servant of God. He forced her to shower with him, the first time she’d ever seen an unclothed man.​

Then, a week after the kidnapping, Phillip Garrido raped eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard for the first time.​

He would continue to rape her at least once a week for the next three years. She remained handcuffed. She remained locked in that shed. Her childhood ended in that darkness, replaced by a nightmare that would last nearly two decades.​

The Search That Never Ended

Back in South Lake Tahoe, the investigation consumed the community. Thousands of volunteers searched the forests and mountains surrounding the town. Jaycee’s face appeared on missing children posters across California, then across the nation. The FBI joined the case. Psychologists profiled her likely captor. Every lead was pursued.​

But Phillip and Nancy Garrido weren’t on anyone’s radar. Phillip was a registered sex offender—he’d spent time in federal prison for a 1971 kidnapping and rape in Nevada. But he lived in a different county, in a different part of the state. His name never came up in connection with Jaycee’s disappearance.​

As weeks became months, the daily searches wound down. The media moved on to other stories. Friends and family members began to speak in past tense about Jaycee, though Terry Probyn would immediately correct them: “She is. Not was. She is“.​

Carl Probyn carried his own burden of guilt. He’d been there. He’d seen it happen. He’d chased them on his bicycle. And he hadn’t been able to stop it. “You blame yourself,” he would later say. “You think, what if I’d been faster? What if I’d done something different?”​

The marriage between Terry and Carl would eventually crumble under the weight of that tragedy. But Terry never stopped looking. She kept Jaycee’s room exactly as it had been. She celebrated every birthday—twelve, thirteen, fourteen—setting out a cake and singing “Happy Birthday” to an empty chair.​

And every night, she looked at the moon and whispered: “I’m still here, baby.”

What Terry couldn’t have known was that in that hidden compound in Antioch, Jaycee was looking at that same moon through a crack in the tarps and thinking the exact same thing: My mom is looking at the moon too. She hasn’t forgotten me.​

That shared moon—that simple celestial connection—became Jaycee’s lifeline to hope.

 

Eighteen Years in the Shadows

Inside that soundproof shed in Antioch, California, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard spent the first weeks of her captivity believing she would die there.​

Phillip Garrido had told her about the “trained Doberman Pinschers” outside—vicious dogs that would tear her apart if she tried to escape. There were no dogs. But handcuffed, naked, and terrified in that tiny shed with only a bucket for a toilet, Jaycee had no way of knowing that the dogs were just another lie in a prison built from lies.​

He brought her McDonald’s and Burger King, the greasy fast food a bizarre kindness in the midst of horror. He talked to her for hours about his religious delusions, his belief that he was a “chosen servant of God,” that “demon angels” had told him to take her. He forced her to shower with him—the first time she’d ever seen an unclothed man.​

And one week after the kidnapping, he raped her for the first time.​

She was eleven years old.

For the next three years, Phillip Garrido raped Jaycee at least once a week. He would go on multi-day methamphetamine binges he called “runs,” during which he forced her to keep him company, to perform sexual acts, to listen for the “voices in the walls” he claimed to hear. These binges would end with him sobbing and apologizing, promising to be better, only to threaten hours later to sell her to people who would “put her in a cage”.​

Seven months into her captivity, Garrido introduced Jaycee to his wife, Nancy. The woman brought the terrified child a stuffed animal and chocolate milk, tears streaming down her face as she apologized. For a moment, Jaycee felt hope—another woman, surely she would help, surely she would understand.​

But Nancy Garrido was no savior. She alternated between motherly concern and cold cruelty, jealous of the girl her husband was raping, blaming Jaycee for her own victimization. When Phillip failed a drug test and was briefly returned to prison, Nancy simply took over as Jaycee’s jailer.​

The Lost Identity

The Garridos had a plan: they would erase Jaycee Lee Dugard and replace her with someone else entirely.

When Garrido discovered that Jaycee was writing her real name in a journal about some kittens he’d given her—kittens that would later “mysteriously vanish”—he forced her to tear out the page. It was the last time Jaycee would be permitted to say or write her own name for eighteen years.​

She became “Allissa.” She was never allowed to see a doctor or dentist. She was never allowed outside without supervision. Eventually, Garrido built an 8-foot fence around the backyard and erected a series of tents and sheds where Jaycee lived, hidden from the world just beyond those walls.​

Neighbors sometimes heard sounds. Patrick McQuaid, who lived next door, recalled meeting a young girl through the fence shortly after Jaycee’s kidnapping. She said her name was “Jaycee” and that she lived there. Then Garrido appeared and took her back inside. McQuaid thought nothing of it. Why would he? It was just a man, his wife, and a girl in their backyard.​

The Daughters

In 1994, when Jaycee was fourteen years old, she realized something was wrong with her body. She was gaining weight, feeling nauseous. She didn’t understand what was happening until Garrido told her: she was pregnant.​

Pregnant. At fourteen. With her rapist’s child.

Garrido gave her no prenatal care. No vitamins. No doctor visits. Nothing. On August 18, 1994, at fourteen years old, Jaycee went into labor alone in that backyard compound. Nancy Garrido acted as midwife, though she had no medical training.​

Jaycee gave birth to a baby girl. She named her first daughter.​

Four years later, in 1998, the nightmare repeated. Jaycee was eighteen years old when she gave birth to her second daughter, again with no medical assistance, again in that hidden compound behind the Garridos’ house.​

Two girls, born in captivity to a mother who was herself still a child when she was taken. The daughters grew up knowing only the world behind that fence, believing that Phillip Garrido was their father and that this strange, isolated existence was normal.​

Jaycee raised them as best she could. She taught them to read using whatever books Garrido provided. She played with them in the small space they were allowed. She tried to give them some semblance of childhood, even as her own had been stolen.​

And every night, when she could see the moon through a crack in the tarps, she thought of her mother Terry, 120 miles away in South Lake Tahoe, and wondered if Terry was looking at that same moon, wondering where her daughter was.​

Terry was.

The World That Forgot

Back in South Lake Tahoe, the investigation had long gone cold. After the initial massive search in 1991, after the posters came down and the helicopters stopped circling, the case files were put in storage.​

Terry Probyn never forgot. She celebrated every one of Jaycee’s birthdays alone, singing “Happy Birthday” to an empty chair. She kept the porch light on every single night for eighteen years. And she looked at the moon and whispered: “I’m still here, baby. I’m still waiting”.​

Her marriage to Carl Probyn crumbled under the weight of guilt and grief. Carl had seen it happen. He’d chased them on his bicycle. He’d called 911 immediately. And it hadn’t mattered. “You blame yourself,” he would later say. “You think, what if I’d been faster? What if I’d done something different?”​​

Meanwhile, Phillip Garrido was under parole supervision the entire time he held Jaycee captive. He was a registered sex offender—convicted in 1976 of kidnapping and raping a woman in Nevada. He’d been sentenced to fifty years in federal prison but served only eleven before being paroled.​

Parole officers visited the Garrido home dozens of times over eighteen years. They never looked behind the fence. They never asked about the girls living in the backyard. They never noticed anything amiss with the convicted rapist who had somehow acquired a teenage “niece” and two young “daughters” who had no birth certificates, no school records, no evidence they existed at all.​

The system failed Jaycee Dugard at every turn.

The Breakthrough

On August 24, 2009, Phillip Garrido walked onto the campus of UC Berkeley with two young girls—aged eleven and fifteen—and asked permission to hold a religious event.​

Something about the situation struck campus police officers Lisa Campbell and Ally Jacobs as wrong. The girls seemed strange—robotic, pale, dressed oddly. They didn’t make eye contact. They stood too close to Garrido, as if afraid to be more than a few feet from him.​

“There was something off,” Officer Campbell would later recall. “These girls just seemed… not right. Like they’d never been around other people before”.​

The officers ran a background check and discovered that Garrido was a registered sex offender on parole. They contacted his parole officer and reported their concerns: Why was a convicted rapist walking around a college campus with two young girls?​

The parole office ordered Garrido to come in for a meeting. He arrived on August 26, 2009, with his wife Nancy, the two girls, and a young woman he introduced as “Allissa”.​

Parole officers began asking questions. Who were these girls? Where did they go to school? Where were their birth certificates?​

“Allissa” told them the girls were her daughters. She said Garrido was a “changed man,” a “great person,” “good with her kids”. When pressed for identification, she became defensive, agitated. She claimed to be a battered wife from Minnesota hiding from an abusive husband.​

But something didn’t add up. The parole officer called the Concord police.​

When a police sergeant arrived and began asking more pointed questions, Phillip Garrido finally broke.

“I kidnapped her,” he admitted. “I raped her”.​

Only then did “Allissa” speak her real name aloud for the first time in eighteen years: “I’m Jaycee Lee Dugard”.​

 

Coming Home

The phone call came to Terry Probyn on the afternoon of August 26, 2009.

“We found her,” the voice on the other end said. “Jaycee is alive. She’s been found.”

Terry’s knees buckled. For 6,575 days—eighteen years, two months, and sixteen days—she had looked at the moon every night and whispered to her daughter. For 6,575 nights, she had left the porch light burning. For 6,575 mornings, she had woken up to an empty house and an aching void where her daughter should have been.

And now, impossibly, miraculously, Jaycee was coming home.

“I can’t even describe it,” Terry would later say, tears streaming down her face. “It’s like… your heart has been shattered for eighteen years, and suddenly all the pieces are trying to come back together at once. But they don’t fit the same way anymore. The shape has changed.”

The Reunion

The reunion took place at a police station in Concord, California. Terry walked into a room and saw a woman—twenty-nine years old, with long blonde hair and eyes that held eighteen years of unspeakable trauma—standing there with two young girls.

This was her daughter. Her Jaycee. The eleven-year-old girl who’d left for school in a pink outfit was now a grown woman with children of her own.

Terry opened her arms. And Jaycee, after eighteen years of captivity, after eighteen years of being told she was “Allissa,” after eighteen years of being unable to say or write her own name, finally stepped into her mother’s embrace.

They held each other and wept. No words seemed adequate for that moment—the impossible reunion that Terry had prayed for but never truly believed would happen.

“I’m so sorry,” Terry whispered over and over. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Mom,” Jaycee said, her voice hoarse from years of rarely speaking above a whisper. “You never stopped looking. I knew you were out there. I knew you hadn’t forgotten me.”

Standing nearby, Jaycee’s two daughters—ages eleven and fifteen, the same ages Jaycee had been when taken and when she first became pregnant—watched silently. They had been told their entire lives that “Allissa” was their older sister and that Phillip Garrido was their father. Now, suddenly, their entire reality had shifted: “Allissa” was their mother, their “father” was a kidnapper and rapist, and this crying woman was their grandmother.

The psychological damage to everyone involved was incalculable.

The Aftermath

Within hours, news of Jaycee’s rescue exploded across the nation. The story dominated every major news network. How had an eleven-year-old girl been held captive for eighteen years, living in a backyard compound less than 200 feet from a main street, giving birth to two children with no medical care, and never been discovered?

The answers that emerged were damning.

Phillip Garrido had been on parole for a previous kidnapping and rape conviction the entire time he held Jaycee. Parole officers had visited the Garrido home at least sixty times over those eighteen years. Not once did they look in the backyard. Not once did they ask who the teenage girl and two young children living there were.

In 2006—three years before Jaycee was found—neighbors called 911 to report that children were living in tents in the Garridos’ backyard. A Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy responded but never entered the backyard, never checked on the children, never investigated further.

Jaycee could have been rescued three years earlier. Her daughters could have been spared those additional years of isolation and abuse.

“I can’t change the course of events, but we are beating ourselves up over this,” Sheriff Warren Rupf said at a press conference, his voice breaking. “We missed an opportunity to rescue Jaycee.”

The system had failed her at every turn—from the initial kidnapping investigation that never looked at registered sex offenders in neighboring counties, to the parole supervision that never noticed a convicted rapist had somehow acquired a teenage “niece” and two daughters with no birth certificates or school records.

Justice, Such As It Was

Phillip and Nancy Garrido were arrested and held on $1 million bail each. They were charged with kidnapping to commit rape, twenty-eight counts of forcible rape, and numerous other charges related to Jaycee’s captivity and the births of her daughters.

In April 2011, both pleaded guilty to avoid trial. Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life in prison. Nancy Garrido received 36 years to life. Both would be eligible for parole in 2034, though it’s unlikely either would ever be released.

From his jail cell, Phillip Garrido gave bizarre interviews claiming that what he’d done would be seen as a “powerful, heartwarming story” once people understood it. He spoke of “making people smile” and insisted that Jaycee would say positive things about him.

He was delusional until the end, unable or unwilling to comprehend the magnitude of his crimes.

The Long Road to Healing

For Jaycee and her daughters, the rescue was not the end of the nightmare—it was the beginning of a different kind of struggle.

Jaycee hadn’t seen a doctor or dentist in eighteen years. She’d never learned to drive. She’d never had a job. She’d never had friends her own age. Her entire adolescence and young adulthood had been stolen, replaced by isolation, rape, and the impossible responsibility of raising two daughters in captivity.

Her daughters had never been to school. They’d never played with other children. They’d never seen a doctor. They believed the world was a dangerous place full of demons and that their “father” was protecting them. Now they had to learn that their “father” was a monster, their “sister” was their mother, and the only world they’d ever known was a lie.

The psychological rehabilitation would take years—perhaps a lifetime.

But Terry was there. After eighteen years of waiting, she finally had her daughter back. She helped Jaycee enroll in online courses. She supported her through therapy. She helped raise her granddaughters, giving them the childhood they’d been denied.

And every night, even though Jaycee was home, Terry still looked at the moon. But now, instead of whispering into the darkness, she could walk down the hall to Jaycee’s room and say goodnight in person.

Where They Are Now

Today, Jaycee Dugard is in her mid-forties. Her daughters are adults now—healthy, educated, thriving despite the trauma of their early years.

Jaycee wrote a memoir, “A Stolen Life,” which became a New York Times bestseller. She established the JAYC Foundation (Just Ask Yourself to Care) to help families recovering from abduction and trauma. She’s given interviews, done speaking engagements, and become an advocate for other survivors.

In a 2016 interview, Jaycee spoke about the concept of Stockholm Syndrome—the idea that captives develop affection for their captors. She bristled at the suggestion that she’d felt anything but survival instinct.

“The phrase Stockholm Syndrome implies that hostages cracked by terror and abuse become affectionate towards their captors,” she said. “Well, it’s degrading, you know, having my family believe that I was in love with this captor and wanted to stay with him. I mean, that is so far from the truth that it makes me want to throw up. I adapted to survive my circumstance.”

Her daughters, now in their twenties and thirties, have chosen to live private lives away from the media spotlight. Jaycee has said they’re doing well, that they’re strong, that they’re healing.

And Terry? She finally got to stop looking at the moon and wondering. Her daughter came home. It took eighteen years, but she came home.

The Lesson

The story of Jaycee Lee Dugard is many things: a horror story about systemic failure, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a mother’s unwavering devotion, and a reminder that hope—even when it seems foolish, even when statistics say to give up—is sometimes all we have.

Terry Probyn never stopped looking. She never stopped believing. She kept the porch light on for 6,575 nights, and on the 6,576th night, her daughter finally came home.

“Don’t give up,” Terry said to other parents of missing children. “Don’t ever give up. Even when everyone tells you it’s hopeless. Even when years pass. Keep looking. Keep hoping. Keep the light on.”

Because sometimes—not often enough, but sometimes—the impossible happens.

Sometimes, after eighteen years in darkness, a stolen girl finds her way back to the light.

Sometimes, the moon carries messages farther than we ever dreamed.

And sometimes, love really is strong enough to bring someone home.