Nancy Garrido loves and misses the two girls that her husband allegedly fathered with Jaycee Lee Dugard, her lawyer said today.
Speaking from prison, Mrs Garrido allegedly said that she saw Jaycee and her girls as part of the family.
Gilbert Maines, her lawyer, told CBS’s The Early Show today that his client seemed distraught, and that her state of mind could be an issue when her case came to court.
"I would describe her like a ship without a rudder," he said.
“She’s distraught. She’s scared. She seems to be a little lost. She doesn’t seem to be able to really focus well at the moment.
"What she said that I can tell you about is that there came a time when she felt they were a family, and she loved the girls very much, and she loved Jaycee very much.”
He added: “That seemed a little strange under the circumstances.”
Mrs Garrido and her husband Philip have been remanded on 29 charges of kidnapping Jaycee, raping her and imprisoning the schoolgirl for 18 years in their garden.
Mr Garrido’s claimed that Nancy was under her husband's spell, describing her as “a robot" who would "do anything he asked".
According to reports, it was Mrs Garrido - who apparently once worked at a children's centre as part of a child abuse prevention programme - who allegedly snatched Jaycee from the street while her husband drove the car.
The assistant district attorney says that Mrs Garrido is charged with rape based on the basis that she participated in it by aiding and abetting the crime.
In 1993 there was a four-month period when she was Jaycee's sole jailer while her husband served time in jail for breaching his parole on an earlier conviction for rape and imprisonment.
Mr Maines acknowledged that it was "a fair question", how Mrs Garrido could argue she had no control over Jaycee's fate when she was alone with Jaycee for four months and did nothing to free her.
“The argument goes to her mental condition at the time, not so much what physically happened," said Mr Maines. "I don’t know that I can argue successfully that she didn’t know what was going on.”
He said that he will seek to have his client evaluated by experts to determine her state of mind.
Nancy, now 54, met Garrido while he was serving 11 years in prison for rape. They were married while he was still behind bars. The marriage is childless.
The Garridos were arrested last week after police officers at the University of California, Berkeley, became suspicious of Phillip when he visited with the two girls to ask if he could hold a religious event on campus. Alarmed at the children's manner, they contacted Garrido's probation officer.
Justice officials were then astonished to discover Jaycee at the Garridos' home in Walnut Avenue in the California town of Antioch.
An 11-year-old schoolgirl when she was kidnapped outside her home in the South Lake Tahoe area in 1991, she had been living with her two children in squalid tents and huts in a screened off part of the back garden for nearly two decades. The children, aged 11 and 15, had never been to school.
Police and probation officers had called at their home on numerous occasions previously but failed to notice Jaycee, even after a neighbour complained three years ago about the children living in tents.
Since the Garridos' arrest, police have searched the property for evidence that might connect Phillip to the unsolved murders of nine women in nearby town. That search turned up an unidentified bone fragment.
In separate interviews on ABC and NBC today Mr Maines said Mrs Garrido realised why she was in jail.
Source:The times
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