They were pale, according to Campbell’s account. They wore drab dresses. Their affect was flat in a way that was hard to define but easy to notice. They seemed unusually subdued for children of their apparent ages. Their answers to questions felt rehearsed, like responses delivered rather than thoughts expressed. And they weren’t in school.
“She was meant to be found that day,” Jacobs later said of the encounter—a statement that reflects the sense, shared by the people involved, that the sequence of events that followed had a quality that retrospect would always make feel like inevitability, even though at each moment it was not inevitable at all.
—
## What Officer Ally Jacobs Saw
Officer Ally Jacobs was thirty-three years old in August 2009 and working as a police officer for the UC Berkeley Police Department. When Campbell called her to describe the man who had come in seeking the permit, Jacobs ran a background check on Phillip Garrido before his return visit.
What the check revealed was immediate and significant: Garrido was a registered sex offender, on federal parole for kidnapping and rape.
On August 25, when Garrido returned to the office as scheduled, Jacobs sat in on the meeting. Garrido brought the two girls again. He gave Campbell and Jacobs a copy of his book. He talked about having turned his life around.
When the girls were asked about school, they gave what Jacobs later described as rehearsed answers. The younger girl offered a stock explanation for a bump near her eye. Their responses were not spontaneous.