Lost and Found (6 page)

“I automatically thought about gas stations around the area,” she said, “that are self-service and would be open that late at night. I tried to be aware . . . even though I couldn’t see.”

When Garrido asked if she was expected anywhere, Katie said her boyfriend was waiting for her to come over with the dinner.

“That is where I was going,” she told him.

“Is anyone going to miss you tomorrow?” he asked.

“Well,” she said. “I have to get my son off for school at seven in the morning and I have to be at work at nine.”

“If you’re real good,” he told her, “I will try and have you back by dawn.”

A little while later, Katie, who was still lying handcuffed under the coat on the passenger floor, realized that they were now driving through Stateline into Nevada. She recognized the three stoplights in quick succession, and the noise of the casinos. Soon afterward, he pulled off the road and took the coat off her. Then he announced he had to tape her mouth and blindfold her, to stop her crying out for help at the gas station.

Katie begged him not to blindfold her, explaining she wore contact lenses, and could not stand tape being placed over her face and eyes. Garrido told her to take her contacts out first, but Katie said she was unable to unless he unlocked her handcuffs. He refused and then he taped her mouth shut, placing the coat back over her without bothering with the blindfolding.

A few minutes later, Garrido pulled into a gas station, stopping in front of a pump. Lying on the floor by the front passenger’s seat completely bound and gagged, Katie was terrified. Before getting out of the car to fill up at the pump, Garrido warned her not to scream for help, or he’d come back and hurt her.

Then he attempted to fill the Ford Pinto with regular gas, but when the nozzle would not fit, as it only took unleaded, he threw a fit.

“He jumped back in the car very nervous and upset,” Katie recalled. “He started up the car and demanded to know why the gas nozzle wouldn’t fit my car. He just started yelling at me . . . that I had done it on purpose so he couldn’t put gas in the car.”

Now Katie was terrified he was really going to hurt her. She desperately tried to speak, but was unable to make a sound with her mouth taped shut.

“You’re trying to tell me something—right?” asked Garrido.

Katie nodded her head.

“Okay,” he said. “I am going to take the tape off a tiny little bit. If you try to scream, you are going to get hurt.”

Garrido then pulled back the tape a little, and Katie managed to say, “Unleaded.”

He then put the tape back over her mouth, pumped unleaded gas into the car and drove away.

Five minutes later, he pulled over to the side of the road. He had calmed down, saying he knew she was uncomfortable and removed the tape from her mouth. He also took off the strap that bound her neck to her knees, loosening the handcuffs a little.

He then lifted Katie over the front seats, laying her facedown on the back seat, and throwing his coat back over her.

Then he headed east on Highway 50, back toward the Nevada border.

“He seemed very nervous,” she later said, “very uptight . . . and scared.”

As the coat was slightly open, Katie could just see out of the back window, and she now tried to see where he was taking her. At one point, just over the Nevada border, she recognized a distinctive brick house, a few miles past Zephyr Cove.

As Garrido had told her it would be a long drive to their destination, she now tried to strike up some kind of rapport with her kidnapper in order to survive.

“I was terrified,” she later testified. “I tried to engage him in some normal conversation to try and figure out what kind of person had abducted me, what was going through his mind, how best to cope with the situation that I was in to get myself out of it alive. I was trying to keep myself alive.”

When she asked his name she took him by surprise.

“Phil,” he replied, but immediately realizing his mistake, said it was actually “Bill.”

Then she asked why he had selected her. Garrido then replied it was her fault, because she was so attractive. She asked what turned him on about raping young women. Garrido thought for a second, replying that it wasn’t the pain. He said it was just a fantasy that he had to live out, and he had no real control over it.

Trying to relate to her attacker, Katie pretended she too fantasized about being raped. She said maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if he didn’t hurt her, and only wanted to give her pleasure.

She then asked if he was married. Garrido said he was and that he and his wife shared a “very heavy” and “happy” sex life. She was aware of what he did and understood his needs, he said, even buying the handcuffs from a pawn shop store.

“He was happily married,” Katie recalled. “And that the main reason he was doing this was because of a sexual urge. That he just really enjoyed it, and he had done it twice before.”

Phillip Garrido said none of his friends knew what he was really like, and would never believe him capable of something like this.

Soon afterward, Katie Callaway recognized they were passing through Carson City, when they hit a stoplight outside a casino and she saw a billboard. Her abductor then headed north on U.S. 395 toward Reno, as she lay helplessly bound in the backseat of the car.

Phillip Garrido now began talking about religion.

“He talked a lot about Jesus on our ride,” she later told police. “Telling me how he was going to turn himself over to God next year, because Jesus was the way. And on and on . . . did I understand what he was saying about God?”

He then started talking about his wife again, slipping up saying, “My wife said Phil the other day.” This mistake was not lost on Katie, who kept calling him “Bill,” so he wouldn’t realize she now knew his real name.

When she mentioned being a 21 dealer in a casino, Garrido chuckled, saying so was his wife. When Katie asked if he was from Reno, he then became evasive, saying just because his wife did casino work they could be from Las Vegas or many other places.

He then asked if she had ever taken LSD.

“I said yes,” she recalled. “I said yes to everything. ‘Oh, yes,

I have done this. Oh, yes, I have done that.’ ”

At one point, when she mentioned wanting a marijuana joint to relax her, Garrido said the stuff he had waiting for her where they were going was so good it would blow her head off.

At around 9:00
P.M
., Phillip Garrido stopped the car and turned off the engine.

“Okay, we’re here,” he announced, as he got out of the car to open his shed. Katie Callaway was certain they were in Reno, as she had heard planes and recognized the treetops of the Reno Valley, through the back window.

A couple of minutes later, he returned in an agitated state.

“I lost the key,” he snapped. “I can’t get in. I knew I heard it drop at the lake. I should have picked it up.”

He then announced they were driving to his car, so he could get a crowbar and pry open the lock of his shed door. They then drove along a dirt road for five minutes, finally stopping at a white building, before getting out. Katie could hear him hunting around in another car for a tire iron.

He then came back, complaining he couldn’t find one and asking if she had one. Katie told him there was one in her trunk and where the key was.

“I was thinking,” she later explained, “if I just let him go on with his own fantasy . . . I’d be safe until I had a better chance to change the plans.”

Garrido soon found her crowbar and drove back to the shed. He then spent the next fifteen minutes trying to force open the lock. As she lay handcuffed on the back seat under the coat, Callaway could hear the sound of a rock band playing so she thought they must be outside a discothèque.

Finally, her abductor managed to break the lock and returned, putting the crowbar back in the trunk.

“He told me he was going to have to blindfold me,” recalled Katie. “Then he lifted me out of the back seat, and he led me into the shed, as he called it.”

Back in Stateline, David Wade began to worry when there was no sign of Katie Callaway. She should have arrived around 7:30
P.M
., and when she didn’t he kept looking out of the window and watching the clock.

At around 8:00
P.M
. he called Forrest Dougherty, who worked with Katie at the Harveys Lake Tahoe casino, asking if she’d seen her. Dougherty said that she had seen her earlier, pulling out of a parking spot in front of Ink’s Al Tahoe Market. She had been with a dark-haired man, and she’d watched them drive east on Highway 50.

Wade then called South Lake Tahoe police to report Katie missing. But he was told that a person had to be missing for forty-eight hours before he could file a report.

6

“
JUST IMAGINE THAT YOU WERE IN ROMAN TIMES
”

Phillip Garrido led his terrified captive into his warehouse in handcuffs, closing the rolling aluminum door behind them.

“Here we are,” he told her. “You can open your eyes.”

He then left, saying he was going to park her car around the side of the building. He promised to unlock her handcuffs when he returned, warning her not to try to escape, as he would be watching.

After he left and rolled down the door, Katie Callaway took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She saw a stack of half-opened storage boxes by the door, with china and other items visible.

Directly in front of her was a wall of Visqueen plastic sheeting, obscuring the rest of the warehouse.

“It was freezing in there,” she recalled. “I didn’t know where I was. I thought I was out in the middle of the desert.”

A few minutes later he returned, locking the door from the inside. As he released the handcuffs he warned Katie there was no escape for her.

He then led her through a succession of three heavy rugs suspended from the ceiling, making her feel disoriented, like being inside a maze.

“I couldn’t see,” she said, “because there were several partitions in the front of the door. I didn’t even know the size of the room, because of the way it was set up.”

Behind the final rugged partition was a room, which he’d carefully prepared like a stage set. Then he turned on the colored spotlights and ordered her to undress.

“I saw a dirty mattress on the floor,” she later remembered, “with a red holey satin sheet and a filthy fake fur blanket. He had colored stage lights focused on the mattress and a projector on the floor with some film in it. I asked him if they were porno films, he said yes. There were also stacks of pornographic magazines.

“And then I saw the three solid walls were covered in carpet, which really scared me because I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, he’s tried to soundproof this room.’ ”

At one end of the shed, she could hear the muffled sounds of a band practicing, assuming they came from another part of the warehouse and were made by her abductor’s friends.

When Katie said she needed the bathroom, he found a little red jar for her to urinate in. Then as she undressed she noticed a gleaming new silver trash can full of water, with an electric heater on the outside, which he used to wash her with warm water. There were also two bottles of cheap wine, a jar of Vaseline, some disposable douches and a vibrator with three attachments, lying by the mattress.

“I took my clothes off,” she later testified, “and it was freezing in there. I got under this filthy, furry, fake fur blanket that he had on this old mattress. It was filthy, but I was freezing. He sat on the mattress and I was shaking so badly.

“I was terrified. I think that he felt sorry for me, and he told me I was the only person that ever made him feel bad for doing this.”

Then Garrido opened a bottle of cheap wine and offered her a glass, saying it would stop her shaking and relax her. She accepted half a glass, but he then started drinking the wine heavily. Later, he would claim to have taken four doses of LSD, to increase his sexual pleasure.

“He was a lot calmer,” said Callaway. “But he would get very distant looks, like he was kind of spaced off. And all of a sudden he would come back to me.”

For the first half-hour, Phillip Garrido sat on the bed fully clothed, chatting to Katie, who was shivering under the covers. He turned on a radio, tuning it to a local Reno rock station.

“He told me I was making him feel bad because I was terrified,” she said. “And that if I fought him it would turn him on more and make him more aggressive.”

He spoke of renting the warehouse under an alias, and preparing it for several weeks. He said he also used it for his band to practice in but expected to be evicted soon.

Garrido then began to explain why he had kidnapped her, and the more he talked the more sexually excited he became.

“He was trying to put me at ease,” said Katie, “by trying to assure me that he wasn’t going to hurt me. It was a sexual fantasy that he had planned. He said things to me like, ‘Just imagine if you were in Roman times and you had to do everything the man said if you were a slave.’ ”

Finally, Garrido stopped talking. Then he began taking his clothes off, neatly placing them on an old battered brown chair. She noticed an ugly burn-type scar on his left shoulder.