“A long, long time ago I kidnapped her and raped her,” Garrido told Santos, in the parole agent’s later account.
The woman who had called herself Allissa identified herself as Jaycee Lee Dugard.
She was twenty-nine years old. She had been abducted at age eleven. She had spent eighteen years in a hidden compound behind a house in a residential neighborhood less than 200 miles from where she was taken.
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## The Reunion
Jaycee Dugard was reunited with her mother, Terry Probyn, on August 27, 2009—the day after the Concord identification.
Former FBI agent Chris Campion, who had worked the case over the years and was notified immediately after the Concord identification, described his call to Terry Probyn. “You knew all these years she was alive, and I apologize,” Campion said he told her.
Campion and approximately thirty agents had gone to the Bay Area after learning of the kidnapping’s resolution. “This doesn’t happen here,” he told the gathered officers—meaning that the resolution of an 18-year abduction case through a living recovery was not a common outcome, and the people in the room understood the weight of it.
“The case never went cold,” Campion later said. “We were always working on it.”
Dugard’s daughters came with her through the process of identification and reunion. They were fifteen and eleven at the time—the older one born when Dugard was fourteen, the younger born when she was seventeen. They had grown up knowing only the world of the Garrido compound. They faced the challenge of encountering a larger world they had never inhabited.