KEN RITTER
Associated Press Writer
LAS VEGAS – A Nevada woman who was abducted and raped in 1976 by California kidnapping suspect Phillip Garrido said Thursday she believes he deserves the death penalty, although his crimes wouldn't qualify him.
"I think he should be executed," Katherine "Katie" Callaway Hall said in a telephone interview from New York City, where she and her husband have been describing her encounter with Garrido in network television and radio interviews.
"Don't let him on the streets again," she told The Associated Press. "He did this to me. He is dangerous and he is a liar. Don't let him out. Don't let this happen to anyone else."
California has the death penalty, but only for murder cases with special circumstances, such as the slaying of a police officer or killing for financial gain.
Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy, 54, were arrested last week and face 29 charges in the kidnapping, rape and imprisonment of Jaycee Lee Dugard. She was 11 years old when she was snatched outside her home in South Lake Tahoe in 1991. They have pleaded not guilty.
The maximum penalty for convictions on the most serious charges would be life in prison.
Hall was 26 and working as a Lake Tahoe casino dealer when Garrido knocked on the window of her Ford Pinto outside a grocery store and talked her into giving him a ride three days before Thanksgiving 1976.
She said he handcuffed her and drove to a soundproofed storage unit in Reno where he spent several hours sexually assaulting her before a police officer noticed a broken lock and found them.
Then known as Katie Callaway, she testified at Garrido's trials. He was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison and five years to life in Nevada. Records show he served 11 years in federal prisons and seven months in Nevada before he was paroled in California in August 1988.
The Associated Press as a matter of policy avoids identifying victims of sexual abuse by name in its news reports, but Hall allowed her name to be used because, she said, "I want to make sure everyone knows who Phillip Garrido is."
Now 57 and married to Jim Hall since 2002, Katherine Hall said she believes Garrido kept tabs on her over the years. She cited telephone calls to a real estate office where she worked in Patterson, Calif., before she moved to Las Vegas in 1995.
"It was always the same woman, always acting like a long-lost friend trying to find me," Hall said.
She said she believes Garrido approached her in November 1988, when she was dealing blackjack at Caesars Tahoe casino. Garrido had been paroled three months earlier to a halfway house in Oakland, Calif.
"He says, 'Hi Katie,' and started asking probing questions," Hall said, recalling how the man obtained casino chips but never placed a bet, and had her summon a waitress to get him a drink.
"What he said to me was creepy. He looked at me and said, 'I haven't had a drink in 11 years, Katie,'" Hall recalled. "He leaned over the table and said, "Hope to see you again real soon, Katie.'"
Hall said she signaled casino security, who stopped the man and checked his identification, but the name wasn't Garrido.
"He convinced everybody – the authorities, his parole officer, his mother, everyone – that he wasn't a bad guy, that I was the one crying rape, that I was lying," Hall said. "He's a horrible person. I think prison just turned out a smarter criminal with him."
Hall said she was stunned to hear Garrido's name on a news report about Dugard having been found living with Garrido and his wife in Antioch, Calif.
"I said, 'Jim! Oh my God! This is the man who kidnapped me!'" she recalled. "It meant, to me, that my fears had been justified."