Jaycee Lee Dugard found alive

Eighteen years after an abduction that stymied police and terrified parents across Northern Nevada, Jaycee Lee Dugard - improbably, miraculously - has been found alive.

Authorities on Thursday painted a grim picture of the life Dugard must have lived since she was snatched from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood and held captive since the age of 11 in a backyard compound by a sex offender who allegedly fathered her two children.

El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said the now 29-year-old woman, who was "literally snatched off the street" as she walked to her bus stop in 1991, lived in a "hidden backyard within a backyard."

Dugard and her now 15- and 11-year-old daughters spent their time isolated in an arrangement of sheds and tents, he said.

During a press conference in Placerville, Calif., on Thursday afternoon, police revealed how Dugard was discovered 18 years after her abduction.

Kollar, who choked up when announcing that Dugard had been found alive, said a campus police officer saw Phillip Garrido, 58, handing out religious literature at the U.C. Berkeley campus with two young girls on Tuesday.

He said the officer thought the interaction between the man and the girls was suspicious. The officer questioned Garrido, and a background check showed he was on probation for kidnapping and rape convictions in 1977.

The next day, Kollar said, Garrido checked in with his probation officer, bringing with him his wife, Nancy, 54, the two girls and another woman going by the name of Allissa.

Because the parole agent had never seen the children or Allissa during visits to Garrido's home, he called Concord, Calif., police, who discovered Allissa's true identity, Kollar said.

"Subsequent interviews with Jaycee and the Garridos provided information that only the victim and the kidnappers could know," said Kollar.

He said the two girls are believed to be the children of Dugard and Garrido.

The Garridos were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and conspiracy on Wednesday.

A search of their Antioch home uncovered tents and outbuildings hidden behind a fence where it is believed that Jaycee and her two daughters were held captive.

"Having been there, its very, very conceivable - the way the house is set up, the way the backyard is set up - you could walk through the house, through the backyard and never know that there's another set of living circumstances back there," Kollar said. "You can't see over the fence with the shrubbery and the trees. You can't see the structures and you can't see it from any of the adjoining properties," he said.

The girls have never been to school or a doctor, said Kollar.

"They were kept in complete isolation in this compound," he said.

Also hidden in the backyard was a vehicle that matched the vehicle originally described in the abduction, he said.

When asked how long Garrido had been living at that property in Antioch, Kollar said the Garridos went there immediately after abducting Jaycee.

"Jaycee has been there ever since and the children were born there and lived there," he said.

The Garridos will appear in El Dorado County Superior Court this morning and charges are expected to be filed today.

On June 10, 1991, Carl Probyn was standing in his garage on Washoan Drive in Meyers when he saw his step daughter Jaycee get pulled into a vehicle by a man as she walked to her bus stop.

Probyn said he jumped on a bike to chase the vehicle but couldn't catch it.

Dugard was reunited with her mother on Thursday. She is with her children in a Bay area motel, according to police.

• F.T. Norton contributed to this report.