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
Dear Skylar,
I realize now that there are PLENTY of “false prophets” and FAKE christians in churches, but there are also some good people.
I read a sermon the other day about Jesus’ parable of the farmer who planted wheat and his hired hands realized taht “tares” (which is a plant that LOOKS like wheat but is a weed) was in the fields, and they asked him if he wanted them to try to pull up the weeds, and he said “No, leave them for now and when the wheat is ready to harvest we will pull them out.”
It is only before the harvest that you can tell the wheat from the tares (weeds) and if you try to tear out the weeds that LOOK like wheat you will do more damage than if you just leave them for a while….very interesting parable and I didn’t really understand it until I was shown that “tares” APPEAR just like wheat (in other words, the field is the church, and the wheat the good people and the tares the false christians) so there will always be false christians in every church and always be people who APPEAR on the outside to be “good people” but aren’t.
What do we talk about here so much THE MASK OF THE PSYCHOPATH—-they appear to be good people (some of them) when they are WEEDS.
Sometimes we are unable to “weed” our garden due to circumstances, but eventually, we can for sure see what we need to do and WEED it.
My son and I were talking last night about how there is so much similarity between the way they mask themselves, and waht their real intentions are. How they attract our PITY and in reality they are WOLVES out for our flesh (I know, real wolves don’t eat people!) but anyway, you get the idea of what I mean, they are out for themselves and hide under the “sheep’s clothing”—and believe me a sheep is pitiful, it is defenseless and stupid and seems born trying to die or kill itself and NEEDS someone to look after it. But these WOLVES covered with a sheep skin are anything BUT helpless.
ps skylar:
I have NO problem manipulating a psychopath at all. It does not seer my conscience to mislead them….being “honest” with them would be like a general telling the enemy where he plans to attack next!
We know they play the game with lies, and I do nto feel we are obligated to tell THEM the truth about our plans or what we are thinking. Too many times we have told them the TRUTH and had it BITE us in the butt. NO MORE! That tactic doesn’t work—-so manipulate away!
Skylar, I finally had time to take a look at this letter.
I don’t even know where to begin. This guy is NUTS! I can also clearly see how he makes his moves. SICK SICK SICK. But I wonder….does he actually KNOW what he’s doing, because he actually seems to think that his behavior and twisted rationality is logical somehow. I mean, he told you that he sat in front of your parents’ house and then approached your mom when she basically came out of the safety of her home.
This letter is sooo helpful, because I see my ex ALL OVER THE PLACE in here, and seeing another person with that same, twisted, SICK logic–someone I have no emotions for and cannot sway me–makes it crystal clear how truly deranged it is.
I am so sorry you had to put up with that. What a nightmare!
I hope he’s stopped hanging around you and people you care about. Yuck!
Oh, and by the way, his “campfire” analogy is just HILARIOUS when you look at it from a different view, because it’s so ridiculous, yet he manages to use it in this very orchestrated way, like he really worked to make a masterpiece out of this little piece of garbage he sent you. Oh, you attack the flame! Oh, no! Don’t attack the poor poor flame of love!
Oh, no. You did. You did attack the poor, little flame of innocent love. 🙁 <—-That's my sarcasm again. How come no one ever gets my sarcasm? 🙁
Skylar- I have to agree with panther’s post about seeing my spath in yours… I haven’t read the letter of which everyone speaks, but my spath otherwise known as the vortex, duped his parents into paying him to make repairs on our/their house (long story) as well as paying for the materials too. Any question or wonder that he overinflated his time and everything involved, or that he has yet to complete all of the work? Way to go there sport! Sticking it to your enablers huh?
He also had a ‘friend’ help him out, padded the time/ hence money for him too, then kept part of what they paid for the friend’s time as well. Besides all of that, he kept some of the ‘friend’s’ tools to boot. Talk about kicking someone while they are down…
Aaaaaack!
Dear Phoenix,
Yep, SOP (standard operating procedure) for a s-path!
Oxy- no kidding huh? BTW- you’ve got mail…
Skylar- I just scanned back through and read the letter. I would keep a copy handy by the lou. Makes for good bathroom reading material if nothing else. Bwahahahahahaha! Cry me a freakin river with those crocodile tears baby!
SOP? How well does all of this fit the bill?
Mine is much the same, when pinned down on something he has done, fall on your back, play submissive and throw the ‘Victim’ card. If that doesn’t work, accuse your accuser of the same actions, but he can’t ever seem to remember an instance of it happening the other way around to support his claims. Of course not!
Then there’s the game of “ask me a question”. You already reached a predetermined ‘answer’ in your mind, but want me to try to explain my life away, hoping somehow you will see the truth and understand me…. Yeah, sorry but no. I have already played this pointless game. There is no winning with you, no changing your mind, I can just rattle on and talk ’til I runout of breath, logic and reason. You are still stuck on your pressumed answer and there is no changing that.
Sorry but I will need to think of a few more to post. Unless of course anyone else can add to the mix.
Just thought of a another one as soon as I hit “Post’. *sigh*
When you point something out, they ask for an explanation. Then they want an explanation with examples. You provide them with several. To which they ask- what do you mean by that? Asking you to explain it all again. I don’t understand- explain it again. This can go on until you have explained the same thing, the same examples 4 or 5 times or more. When they will ask you to explain it all yet again. Because they are not listening, because they don’t care.
Phoenix,
It’s frustrating trying to talk to them as if they were normal.
I told spath, “talking to you is like talking to a brick wall. nothing I say matters. Can’t you hear me?”
He would just continue with the same old BS – just as if I hadn’t said a thing.
If you like campfire of my love, you would LOVE the recording I made of him crying. It’s so pathetic and so obviously faked.
Hi Phoenix & Skylar,
Geez, reading your post’s…I must of drove her crazy! I’d say back to her “waddya mean, waddya I mean?” LOL