Last week I discussed Philip Garrido, a psychotic and psychopathic individual who allegedly with the help of his wife kidnapped Jaycee Dugard at age 11 and held her 18 years. This week I would like to discuss the some of the details of Nancy Garrido’s life that have been reported by reliable news sources.
The Details
Nancy Garrido is 54, her maiden name is Bocanegra. She was born born in Texas, the second child of a family of five or six children. She has been married to Phillip 28 years. According to the New York Times, “Gail Powell, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Public Safety, said Nancy Bocanegra was visiting an incarcerated uncle when she met Mr. Garrido, a tall, lanky and deep-eyed sex offender who was serving a 50-year sentence for the 1976 rape and kidnapping of a casino worker from South Lake Tahoe, Calif.”
The couple married in the prison and did not live together until Phillip’s release 7 years later. Nancy never had children, but is reported to have been a caregiver. She cared for Phillip’s elderly mother and worked as a nurse’s aide.
Several people who knew Nancy described her as submissive, depressive and quiet. Others said she appeared kind and caring.
Nancy’s employer reportedly said this about her work with developmentally disabled adults, “The people she worked with really liked her.”
Questions
The same employer also questioned “How could it be that this other situation was happening at the same time? It’s impossible to understand.”
People are also asking why Nancy participated in this crime. They are questioning whether she was under “the spell” of her husband, and whether she was “brainwashed.”
My questions
I wonder why we allow sex offenders to marry in prison. He had a history at least one other arrest, “It seems likely that Ms. Garrido knew all too well of her new husband’s sexual history and proclivities. In addition to his rape and kidnapping conviction, Mr. Garrido had also been arrested in a 1972 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Antioch, Calif., the Bay Area suburb near where he had grown up and where he and Ms. Garrido would settle with his mother after his release from prison in 1988,” said the New York Times.
Is there any legal reason why sex offenders or other psychopathic felons should be allowed to marry while they are in custody? They can’t vote, why should they marry? I think we allow these offenders to marry because some still believe that “love” can rehabilitate them; that marriage makes it less likely they will reoffend. (Lawyers reading this please comment!)
I contend that this marriage facilitated his re-offense and that sociopaths often could not do what they do without the help of witting and unwitting accomplices. The best thing for society is to isolate these people. We are more likely to be suspicious of an offender who lives by himself. Marriage and family just give them the false facade of normalcy.
There is data showing that generally speaking marriage prevents re-arrest of felons. We don’t know if that applies to psychopathic sex offenders. We also don’t know if marriage protects against re-offense versus just re-arrest. My suspicion is that married psychopaths just get away with more.
Why would a woman marry such a man? Many serial killers have a following of women and other women have married offenders serving life sentences. It is noted that Nancy had an uncle in the same prison, and that is how she met Phillip. Perhaps the presence of other antisocial individuals in her life desensitized her to their dangerousness.
Many have questioned why Phillip was released after serving only one fifth of his sentence. I wonder if it had anything to do with this marriage and the fact that Phillip’s mother allowed the couple to live with her after his release.
All family members who render aid to psychopathic offenders have moral culpability to any subsequent crimes they commit. When you do something nice for a psychopath, a perverse reverse Karma is created. The psychopath will use the “nice” to perpetrate evil on someone else or even you. In this case, a kindness bestowed upon a psychopath will result in bad Karma for you.
The fact that sociopathy/psychopathy is a spectrum as opposed to an absolute category is confusing for people. In the same way, the spectrum that defines the spouses, family members, and associates of sociopaths/psychopaths is also confusing. Let’s be open to the real likelihood that Nancy is also psychopathic and selected Phillip for that reason.
What about the caretaking behavior? What about Nancy’s assertions that she loves and misses the victims? This week I came across another important statement regarding psychopathic individuals and love. It came from a book chapter written by three psychopathy experts:
“they (psychopaths) may also be prone to express intense affiliative impulses directly. Because such attractions are not based on empathy (for) or a mature appreciation of another person, these positive affectional links are often likely to be fleeting, tenuous, and based on illusory perceptions of others” (emphasis added).
To translate the difficult vocabulary, psychopaths do experience affection and intense impulses that feel like “love” to them. It is not all just a sham or a lie. That is why psychopaths are able to fool people. It is not that victims and family members are always so gullible that they fall for the lies. Sometimes the people in a psychopath’s life correctly read the “positive affectional links” and “intense affiliative impulses”.
What we all need to understand is that the presence of these impulses and feelings doesn’t tell us anything about a person since even psychopaths have these. What tells us most about Nancy’s inner world is the crimes she is alleged to have perpetrated.
Please if you are in the life of a psychopathic person, particularly an offender or sex offender consider carefully what I have said here.
Sources for this blog
LA Times
NY Times
The Clinical and Forensic Assessment of Psychopathy: A Practitioner’s Guide (Personality and Clinical Psychology Series) by Carl B. Gacono (Editor) Chapter 8
Justus5,
We used to talk and joke about the “psychopathic play book” and would say, Something (jokingly) like “Yea, that is in the Play book, page 141, paragraph 4″….actually there is a book that I read and did a book review here on LF about that is ALMOST THE PLAY BOOK…it is called “The 48 Laws of Power” and gives play by play rules to live by that would make you a psychopath…this guy also wrote a book called the Art of Seduction….on telling how to seduce someone sexually. If there IS a P’s PLAYBOOK, I think this book is IT.
And oh, yes, they can adapt their behavior to new intell….but they do not get the meaning of words that are emotional. They may know the meaning of the word CHAIR but they do not know the meaning of “love” or “empathy” so they can only try to fake it.
Oxy- They don’t know the meaning of genuinely either, they just use it because it adds more “color” to their words. They don’t need to read either of those books though, they were programmed from the beginning. We need to read those books so we know the rules to the game we are playing with them.
Skyler-I am trying to keep your name up because I really want you to see what I posted above.
Panther
Oh my goodness. What a great post. The wacky wacky wacky things he said! They make no sense!
Justus5,Actually, that was why I read the book, so I could see how the various levels of POWER (read control) could be used. The author was supposedly educating people on how to AVOID this, but believe me a sharp psychopath would have used it as a text book in a PhD course on psychopathy and how to do it. And let’s face it, some are better at it than others. Some just are low end liquor store robbers, but others are Bernie Maddoff and destroy thousands of people at once.
Skylar, Oxy
I have a question. I know you’ve been targets – death threats from your spaths. Or worse.
My spath has a gun and a gun permit. But he’s now undergoing mental health counseling – thank god – he told me a few weeks ago now”sombody’s got to die” but refused to answer what that meant. Is he going to kill me?
Anyway, I’m wondering, since he’s under the care of a mental health professional, and he’s told his therapist about this “sombody’s gotta die” idea – is that therapist bound to report him to authorities or to a database? Might the authorities pull his gun permit?
What should I do with this?
He’s not inpatient, he’s out patient, but he’s threatening and unstable.
Superkid,
I would call the following
1) sheriff/police chief and talk to them about what you just said
2) the therapist (the therapist can’t talk to you, but they can LISTEN to what you have to say)
3) The therapist’s supervisor and tell them what you have done about reporting to the police
A therapist is a MANDATED REPORTER and if a person is a danger or says he is a danger to himself or others the therapist must DO something about it.
A person who has a gun permit and threatens someone
The TELLING YOU “someone’s got to die” is in my view a TERRORISTIC THREAT and can be prosecuted by the DA….but the DA is the one who will have to make that determination.
You might be able to get his permit pulled at least…..BUT at the same time….if you get his permit to carry concealed pulled he can STILL have a GUN and even a restraining order or order of protection (BTW if found out yesterday that “restraining order” and “order of protection” and “no contact” order are NOT the same in Arkansas, actually the OP violation is a crime in itself and the violation of the other two are NOTHING. Doesn’t make sense to me but that’s the way it is. Anyway, hope that answer your question, but I WOULD TAKE IT AS A THREAT AND I WOULD TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. VERY SERIOUSLY.
Superkid,
The only problem I have with Oxy’s advice is that spaths all lie.
If it was my spath saying that, then I know his real intent is to scare me into doing something to make me look crazy and then denying it. That’s why you NEED TO HAVE A RECORDER. Whether or not it is legal in your state, I don’t know, but you should at least have evidence of what he said, because when it comes to spaths, the biggest problem is that nobody believes us. Don’t talk to him on the phone so that he is forced to use email, which you can save.
My advice is never respond predictably – change the typwriter keys, never do anything that makes you look crazy, never do anything that he will know you did, never show fear or do anything that a fearful person would do.
It might be a good idea to talk to your local police chief though, because you need to get a feel for what kind of response you can expect from the police. For all you know, he has cops in his backpocket just like mine did.
Justus,
Hi, are you referring to the post you made about the word “genuinely”? Yeah he did use that word ALOT, now that you mention it.
The truth about his mother is that SHE WAS calling me all the time, asking me: “what’s wrong with Spath?” “Why did he call me up and call me a c**t?” That’s what happened when he lost it and was breaking up with me. He went bazerk on his mom as well.
You see, his hatred toward me and all women, was completely centered on his hatred for his mom, which he had hidden very well for the 25 years I knew him. He did try to triangulate us, but it never worked – at least not on my end and she never seemed to hate me, either. I didn’t LIKE her a lot, but I had compassion and empathy for the struggles she had endured.
Sorry- catching up but had to post this-
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justus5 says:
Panther-that is why I haven’t called my P/N a spath to his face yet. Something told me that would be a bad idea, then he would have one more card to play to “act normal”.<<<
BINGO! Exactly why I won't let on to anything containing the word spath around the house. Just another way to manipulate and undermine and discredit everything and anything they can.