Jaycee Dugard and the triumph of hope

Editor's note: This story has been updated to avoid specific references to Jaycee Dugard's hometown, for the sake of her continued privacy.

It was 2009 when Jaycee Dugard made international headlines and put a spotlight on the cracks in the American justice system when she was rescued after 18 years in captivity at the hands of a disturbed sexual predator.

When she and her family looked for somewhere to recover from the tragedy and trauma, they found Sonoma Valley a place of healing.

'The little ranch in [the Valley] was smaller than I expected, but charming all on its own,' she told a packed house at the Green Music Center during Wednesday's Women in Conversation, a celebration of female entrepreneurs and empowerment. She was followed by speaker Dr. Tererai Trent, a child bride in Zimbabwe who set a goal to get her PhD in America, and let nothing, not the five children she raised nor the three jobs she had to hold down to make ends meet, stop her from achieving that dream.

Dugard was a bright, blond 11-year-old who was walking to school in her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood on June 10, 1991. That's when a car pulled up in front of her, blocking her way.

'At first I wasn't alarmed because nothing bad had ever happened to me,' she said.

That's when Phillip Garrido, a man with a long history of sex crimes, shocked her with a stun gun. With the help of his wife, Nancy, they loaded the girl into their car, covered her with a blanket and drove her hundreds of miles from her home. It was the beginning of 18 years of pure hell, during which Dugard was locked in a backyard shed, repeatedly raped and exposed to horrors no person, let alone any child, should ever experience.

Her kidnapping demonstrated a disturbing gap in the justice system. Garrido was on parole, having served just 10 years of a 50-year sentence for the rape and kidnapping of another woman, Katie Calloway, in 1976. He was regularly monitored, but again and again, parole officers missed the signs that something was not right at his Antioch home. Neighbors had even told the officers that they had seen children in and around the house, but no one ever checked that outdoor shed where Dugard was held prisoner.

'I probably could have been rescued years earlier,' Dugard said. 'There were days I thought that I had lost my hope.'

Three years into her captivity, at age 14, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Three years after that, she birthed a second daughter. Somehow, she and her children managed to build a life together, albeit one she never wanted.

'I learned to think like a predator but act like prey,' she said. 'Fear ruled me.'

Dugard and her daughters were rescued when two alert police officers at UC Berkeley, Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, noticed something amiss. After 18 years, Garrido trusted Dugard enough to bring her on day trips to pass out religious literature at college campuses around the Bay Area. Something about Garrido with this three young, timid girls, who would not make eye contact or directly engage the officers in conversation, just didn't seem right.

After learning that Garrido was a registered sex offender, the officers brought them all in for questioning. At first, Dugard says she was too afraid to speak the truth, fearful she was not yet safe from the clutches of their captor. But she found her voice and, at 29, was finally free and quickly reunited with her mother, who had never given up hope her daughter might one day come home.

'None of us would ever been the same, but the question was: What would we be in the future?' Dugard said.

Dugard was drawn to the Valley because of Rebecca Bailey, a longtime area psychologist who specializes in loss and separation. 'During my first days of freedom, choices did not come easy to me,' she said.

However, when she heard she could work with animals under Bailey's care, the choice was obvious. Bailey uses a popular technique that involves working with horses that are uniquely attuned to human emotions.

'It was so different and more natural to me than sit-down therapy,' Dugard said.

The family found a new normal. They rode horses, cooked meals together and learned how to have a voice after years of being silenced.

Thanks to a $20 million settlement from the State of California for failing to properly monitor Garrido, Dugard was later able to buy her own home in the Valley, where she keeps horses along with a myriad of other creatures. She likes to garden and cook, but she wanted her story to benefit others.

Working with Bailey, she launched the JAYC Foundation, which helps families dealing with loss, trauma and separation. Their clients range from families recovering after murder and international kidnappings, to those who lost their homes during last October's wildfires.

'Sometimes life can be really unfair, and smack you upside the head with a double trauma. For me, that happened last October,' Dugard said, sharing the devastation she felt when Bailey's ranch, was consumed by the flames. 'The place I went to heal and rejuvenate after my trauma burned down.'

Today, Dugard is helping Bailey with efforts to rebuild and feels optimistic about the future.

'It all comes down to choices again,' Dugard said. 'I choose not to let what happened to me rule my life or immobilize me with fear.'

Women in Conversation is a twice annual event hosted by the Press Democrat.