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
Safeguard-Yeah, I’m trying to learn to use his tactics on him but so far not so good. I have learned, however, to use “the blank look” quite well. I’ve been doing that for awhile now and to my surprise my emotions have followed my actions, they are becoming pretty blank concerning him. I found in 23 years nothing has ticked him off more. Not that I am trying to tick him off but it sure is nice not to be his mirror anymore. I love how you have learned to use his tactics on him. It is delightful to read it coming from a non-spath to a spath. I got a chuckle out of your post.
Hi Superkid10.
I agree with both Ox and Skylar. You need to act on this one. That part is not even a question. The only question is how to do this in a safe way.
Skylar makes a good point, and I had thought of that when you explained your situation. These brats lie all the time, usually to gain something, and they also threat all the time, usually to get a specific response out of you. I would immediately question what my own first instinct is to make sure that’s not what he was trying to get me to do. For example, you have to consider that he might expect you to talk to the cops. So…why would he want you to do this?
Unfortunately even having to sort through such utter madness is exhausting to say the least, because you are basically challenged to outsmart someone who uses all their (wasted) mental power on manipulation. It’s very hard to win this chess game, but our lives are at stake, so we must!
About your comment related to my exspaths words, those still aren’t the best. I WISH so much I could dig these up: He wrote letters to HIMSELF and me as other women pretending to be in love with him for years. He cyber bullied me as these “other women” and one of them was a psychologist who was trying to convince me that I had Asperger’s syndrome and a few other mental disorders. I actually didn’t start to snap out of his spell until a month ago when I had this sudden feeling…OUT OF NOWHERE…in my head that said: FIND A WAY TO TRACK THOSE IP ADDRESSES. This was because in part I had found a draft in his own email that was written to him from someone named Elisha. When I confronted him, did he deny it? Oh, that’s not even the start of it. HE TRIED TO CONVINCE ME THAT I HAD WRITTEN IT!!!!!!!! He told me that I wrote it and blacked it out, because I “did that a lot.” I did things and then blacked out. (bullshit gaslighting<—my new word)
So, after over a year of dealing with various mean, long-winded, "gorgeous" women who were all madly in love with him, I did the reverse IP look up. They all went to him. All of them. I learned this at the end of this July. I confronted him, and he told me that he would prove to me that these women exist, and he told me that I would feel SO STUPID when I learned that he had never lied to me. He was planning to hire a model and train her in Q&A. I know this because he later CONFESSED that it was him and then wanted me to think of him as so righteous for not going through with his plan to further lie! He kept trying to emphasize what he could have done, but didn't do, and expected some sort of approval from me, like okay he's cured now!
By the way, check out the names of these women: Anna, Melissa, Daniella, Lydia, Fiona, Aurora, Elisha. They all end with A.
Anyways, this is when I found Love Fraud and started suspecting he is a sociopath. I am glad I told him he's an spath, because I want him to KNOW why I left. I really needed to be able to say to him that he is WRONG and point to a HUGE volume of literature to back me up, that way he couldn't twist this and say that he was healthy. When I showed him the list of sociopath traits, he said point-blank: Yup. I display all of these, but I am not a sociopath baby. I just have been having a fugue episode for the past year and a half because I was scared of you. I bought this crap for about another 2 weeks (his magic over me was still pretty strong).
Then I came to Love Fraud and posted his psycho email. And YAY I am on 4 days NO CONTACT and this is SO HARD but worth it in every way imaginable. No contact is the best feeling ever, though it's hard.
Here is fugue episode for those wondering what I/he Was talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state
Panther
So you too became a great sleuth, as did I. I never thought to check IP addresses. The thing with my spath is that he was what skylar calls a failed spath. And he tells truth and lies.
Four days is a great start.
It is a long hard journey.
Safeguard
Wow! Fantastic observations!
He doesn’t want to commit to anything or create a pattern of being UNDERSTOOD and KNOWN because he prefers to be s SNAKE. It’s who they are.
Yuck.
Panther,
your story would be so funny, if it wasn’t so sickening. Just like mine. When I read other peoples’ stories, I ask myself, “how could they fall for that?” then I say, “oh wait, I did too!” LOL!
It’s just that we aren’t prepared for such preposterous behavior. These people wear the MASK OF SANITY, so we assume they must be sane. But they aren’t. They are morally insane. The human mind is a thing of wonder. Reality flexes and bends with the winds of change.
If I could just meet your spath, I would like to slap the crap out of him. Oh please!
Superkid: Yeah, I used to sarcastically joke that I was the one woman FBI. He loved when I’d try to catch him. That was part of the game for him. He told me that he intentionally made mistakes because he wanted to get caught. This made me realize that my catching him a reward for him too, like a scientist putting a mouse in a maze with cheese and getting really excited when his mouse finds the cheese.
Skylar: He wears the mask of sanity like you wouldn’t believe, but you’d sniff him out in two seconds. He is TOO SANE if you catch my drift. In person, he comes off as the guy that gets along with everyone, even people that are impossible to get along with. He’s this tall, dark, handsome guy with these magnetic eyes that glare into you as though trying to disarm you by appearing “cute” and “sweet.”
The last thing these spaths need is to be attractive.
Panther, if those are photos of your X you probably need to take them down.
Yeah, they were, but why take them down? I did already…just not sure why.
Unless someone is publicly “outed” by being arrested etc. Donna does not want them to be able to come here and find their name blasted or their photos either. If your X is arrested and there is a photo article about him, put up a LINK TO THE NEWSPAPER, but to just put your X’s photos up and say “he is a psychopath” could be considered slander or liable and make LF liable for legal problems.
You notice I put up an article yesterday about a guy I knew who was arrested and it linked to a photo of him as well. I put up my P son’s name as well, but he is a prisoner in the Texas prison system. I’ve put up other names of people who were arrested or convicted and in prison, but there is nothing they can do about it because it is PROVEN TRUE. You notice even newspaper say “an alleged” X. So that’s what it is about, just to protect LF.
justus5,
“That blank look”.
I’m working on that. I am still way too emotionally triggered by spath-speak. I have anger flare-ups whenever I sense manipulative bs. I am in the Post Depressive, Anger phase of things. I have two modes I live in: Hunkered down in the fox-hole, or out and ready for battle…It’s a process. ~sigh~
SK: Intentionally vague.
That’s it exactly. I always seemed to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, never getting plans right, misunderstanding what I suppose to know/do… wrong day, wrong street, how could I be so stupid? Didn’t he just tell me?
Spath-Speak is like a foreign language. I am quite proficient in it now.