Former FBI agent Chris Campion, who was involved in the case and who has spoken publicly about it, described the investigation as never having gone cold in the operational sense—meaning there was always someone responsible for the file, always an agent to whom the case was assigned, always a record being maintained. Whether active investigation resources were consistently being deployed to the case in the years between 1991 and 2009 is a different question, one that reflects the practical reality of investigative bandwidth across an agency that carries enormous numbers of cases simultaneously.
What Campion’s account suggests, in the statement he made about having approximately thirty agents in the Bay Area after the identification, is that the resolution of the case generated an immediate and significant federal response—the response that follows the end of a case rather than its active investigation. The thirty agents were there because the case had been resolved, not because the resolution was imminent.
Campion’s call to Terry Probyn—”You knew all these years she was alive, and I apologize”—is among the most emotionally resonant documented moments in the public record of the case’s conclusion. It contains within it a specific claim: “You knew all these years she was alive.” The factual basis for that claim is not entirely clear from the public record. Whether Terry Probyn had been told by investigators at some point in the investigation that Dugard was likely alive, or whether Campion was expressing something more like conviction or hope in the retrospective certainty of the recovery, is not fully addressed in the available accounts. The apology, however, was straightforward: the case had taken eighteen years to resolve, and that span reflected failures that the FBI agent acknowledged.