An explosive report slams authorities for allowing Phillip Garrido to "game" them for years. Never-before-seen video was also released Tuesday.
A new report from the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office says it's hard to ignore the role the mental health profession played in the failures surrounding the Jaycee Dugard case, saying Phillip Garrido "gamed" the system with the help of psychologists and psychiatrists.
"It's disturbing in terms of how many times he was in a position to where someone could step in and say, 'Hey wait a second. This guy is a very dangerous individual,'" said El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson.
After serving just 11 years of a 50-year sentence for the kidnapping and rape of Katie Callaway-Hall, a 1988 evaluation that helped Garrido get early release said: "Garrido is an above-average inmate who is likely to benefit society with things like raising family and not return to criminal life."
Once out on parole, a psychological report noted in October 1989, Garrido could be easily mistaken for a Contra Costa County yuppie.
Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991 and held captive for nearly two decades.
For most of those years, Garrido continued to get evaluations characterizing the sex offender as having an excellent prognosis for remaining crime-free.
Yet, as Jaycee told Diane Sawyer in an exclusive ABC News interview last month, that was not the man Jaycee knew, that she was living a nightmare, kept in a backyard compound and giving birth to two daughters fathered by her rapist.
"I can't imagine being beaten to death," said Dugard. "You can't imagine being kidnapped and raped. So it's just, you just do what you have to do to survive."
In April 1993, a counselor noted again Garrido's excellent prognosis for a crime-free life. Yet the following month, Nancy Garrido, Phillip's wife, is videotaping little girls they lured to the back of their van and encouraging them to do the splits. It's something interrogation tapes confirmed.
"The system as a whole failed, and we should all be angry about it," said Pierson.
State Senator Ted Gaines (R-Roseville) will soon introduce legislation that would force the state parole board to give psychiatric evaluations less weight when determining the release of a dangerous criminal.
