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
Ana,
someone here posted that you could actually short circuit spath speak, by asking, “what do you mean by that?”
I can’t remember who posted that.
Skylar,
Thanks! Good to know. She thought she was so smart and of course everyone else was a moron. I made her explain herself to the minute degree, cause ya know she was a “genuis” and I was just a stupid “c” word. LOLOOLLLL
I didn’t even realize I drove her nuts…how comforting! I also used to stare at her face, like I was trying to memorize it…gee, I guess I was “star struck” Lawdy.
i was very laid back from years of meditation – i would just be with people. didn’t ask tons of questions, just let people be as they were. i had interacted with hundreds of people with that approach and was only truly sorry for it twice – spath and n ex gf.
IF i had asked or pushed (but, oh the spath was so sick and on the verge of dying all the time) the response would have caused so much cog. dis. in me, i think would have gotten out a lot sooner.
the times i did push, i got an array of responses from the various ‘characters’: evasiveness, feigned memory loss, more lies (direct ones, as to be distinguished from evasiveness and feigned memory loss), sullenness, silence, and at the end, pure curdling rage and threats.
it used to drive the n ex mad that i wasn’t a big story teller – didn’t talk a lot about my far past, and only a bit about my recent past. i was busy with today. i was very clear within myself that i didn’t want to bond about the trauma in our lives. many of the lesbians i have known are huge on this (thank ye lord that the 80’s are looong gone – it was the decade of trauma bonding)
I believe she didn’t trust me because of this. I also believe she was fishing for shit she could use on me. I am so thankful that my natural state protected me.
Hi Skylar,
Oh, yours is a professional crying machine too?
Mine didn’t get into crying until he started researching spaths. Yes, when I accused him of being an spath, he went on a buncha site, including this one, and read up on what we normal people consider crazy.
OUT OF NOWHERE he became super emotional. The timing was so obvious and uncanny. Suddenly he felt sooo bad for the way his actions had hurt me that he was bawling all the time. He even said words primer plucked from an spath related blog, but the hilarious thing was that he didn’t know HOW to use them. He said to me once, “Look back at those previous emails! Look at all of the empathy I have displayed!” Okay, my quote is a little off, but it was very close to this. He was commanding that I acknowledge his empathy, or else! It came off like, “Dammit, I gave you that emotional crap that you wanted, now give me all my toys back!”
Skylar, the way you make humor out of all this is really like a breath of fresh air. It’s nice to know others have been through this with these whackos and come out the other side with something to laugh about at least.
I am so glad I found Love Fraud. Sheesh. I really really cannot say that enough. There should be more places like this. We need an AA for victims of psychopaths.
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”.
Here I found some great DIRECT quotes straight from the lion’s mouth. By the way, I was actually thinking it might be a good idea if we all got together and opened a website called “Letters from Real Sociopaths” or something like that, or “Straight from the Lion’s Mouth.” Rather than just articles about them (which are great and have their place), it would be all direct spath talk. This could help other people identify their current suppressor by looking at tactics that other sociopaths have used. Just a thought.
So, here are some lines in what he thought was a romantic message. Can you pick up why this creeped me out a little?
….
I am madly drawn to you. I want to f**k you every second of every day. It never ends. A year and a half and it never diminished but became more. It’s passion at its prime.
I only want you to be safe, happy, and at peace. It’s care at its top.
I am, I was , and I’ll always be loyal to you. It’s respect on a top level.
I want you to find your own path, follow your own success, and attain your own dreams. I want to see you success. It’s selfless love without a doubt.
I am afraid of you. I am afraid you’ll never understand what I gave you, give you, what I’ll give you. I am afraid you will always think of me as a psychopath. I am afraid you’ll never understand why I did what I did_fear. I am afraid you’ll never comprehend why I went insane, sociopathic, and compuslive lying. I am afraid I can never redeem myself for all the dishonesty, manipulation, tactics to keep me safe. I am afraid I’ll never have you fully.
I am in love, I am loving, caring and understanding. I am in love and I have embraced it without my ego in the equation. You make me cry, you call me a whino, you slash me, I accept. I deserve it and I have embraced you as you are. Your hurt me, I keep trying. I cannot respond, it’s not around here anymore. I am Jesus. Oh yeah.. To you alone though. You can hit me and I will keep turning my other cheek…
He goes on an on, but the line, “I am Jesus,” really creeped me out.
justus5
YES and that is EXACTLY the new edge he is walking away with. Now he can actually study himself and get better at what he does. He really changed after I told him I suspected he was an spath. He started a new approach, which was basically what kinda confirmed that I was probably right. He studied up and then altered his game to accommodate the new intel. And it was so obvious, like he had just gone back stage and put on a new suit for the occasion he realized normal people are all attending.
Skyler-you wrote, “My mother would never abandoned you she would always be attentive and genuinely concerned,…” Also, you wrote “My brothers would have never treated you
this way.” Holy… do they have a play book they use. Mine uses that tactic ALL THE TIME. ROTFLMAO Oh and the use of the word geniunely…they seem to like that word.
Panther-Thank God it took me a long time reading here to call him a spath (somewhere on the spectrum anyway) because by then I learned that they DO NOT change, won’t go for help and can’t be helped. So I reasoned that if I called him on it I would only serve to give him more ammo. He would just learn to wear better wool to hide the wolf beneath. I figured if he cared about his family his heart would open up, telling him he was a spath would serve no good purpose because there is no cure.