The connection between Garrido’s grandiosity and the campus visit is worth examining because it illustrates one of the ways in which the mechanics of detection can depend on the captor’s own behavior. Garrido chose to bring Dugard’s daughters to the Berkeley campus. He chose to leave a document with the FBI. He chose to seek a permit for a religious event. None of these choices were required by any circumstance external to Garrido’s own desires and beliefs. They reflected a level of self-confidence—or a failure of risk assessment—that made him visible to institutional actors who might otherwise never have encountered him.
In the context of his prior behavior, Garrido’s activities in August 2009 were not entirely without precedent. He had been known to his neighbors as a proselytizer. He had at various points interacted with law enforcement and public safety personnel in ways that had not previously caused any concentrated attention on his property. He had been visited by parole agents approximately 60 times over ten years. He had had GPS monitoring for over a year. None of it had revealed what was behind his fence.
The Berkeley visit was different in one respect: it brought him into contact with a person—Lisa Campbell—who had the professional background to find his behavior alarming and the access to a system—parole notification—that could receive and act on her concern.
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## The Fifteen-Minute Meeting
The Tuesday morning meeting on August 25, 2009, in which Officer Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell met with Phillip Garrido and the two daughters, lasted approximately fifteen minutes. It is the meeting in which the background check had already been run, in which the two women knew they were sitting across from a convicted sex offender and kidnapper who was on federal parole, and in which Garrido gave them his book and spoke about having turned his life around.