Picture of Kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard?

The picture on the business card shows a beautiful young blond woman with "Printing For Less" on it. As I look at the card and put two and two together, I've got to wonder, is this a picture of Jaycee Dugard, the recently found kidnap victim who was taken from Tahoe, Nevada and kept prisoner for almost 20 years?

In my sleuthing efforts today, I found a few references to Jaycee Dugard's business card picture but no actual picture of the card. I spent all day looking for the supposed business card and found it here in a slide show. It wasn't captioned as being Jaycee but it mentions that it was the business card of her captors, Phillip and Nancy Garrido, the owners of Printing for Less. Some of Garrido's printing customers have even stated that this was a picture of Jaycee, who they knew then as "Allissa".

The reason I had become interested with Jaycee's picture was because I was following up with the story of a young missing local girl. I noticed that Michaela Garecht, who was kidnapped 3 years prior to Jaycee, strongly resembled Jaycee Lee Dugard. Michaela's case had always remained a sad and heartbreaking story for me because the kidnapping occurred in my hometown of Hayward, Ca. Michaela was taken in broad daylight from the parking lot of a local store formerly known as Rainbow Market. 20 years after Michaela's kidnapping her mother Sharon Nemeth Murch has remained heartbreakingly steadfast in the search for her missing daughter. You can follow Sharon's amazing blog here at: http://www.thewonderingheart.blogspot.com/

Earlier on the news today I had seen a picture of Phillip Garrido from the 70's, some years before Michaela Garecht was kidnapped. I was shocked at how closely his picture looked like the suspects picture in the Michaela Garecht kidnapping from years ago.

Thankfully I was not the only one to take notice of the striking similarities. The local police are now searching the Garrido home to see if not only Jaycee lee Dugard was one of Phiilip Garridos victims but perhaps so was Michaela Garecht. Dublin police are also looking into ties with another local girl who went missing around that time, Ilene Misheloff, who disappeared from Dublin, Ca., a few miles from where I live.

So as to the picture of the smiling young woman on the business card who may be Jaycee Dugard.... I got to pondering today.... what is the public's (and mine's) obsession in seeing a picture of this young lady. Morbid curiosity?

I think it goes much further than that. I think our fascination is with the story itself. The story of a young girl kidnapped, raped and forced to become a mother at a young age to her kidnappers children. Not only kidnapped but forced to live in squalor in tents in the back of her captors home. As if that wasn't awful enough, we find out that Jaycee Dugard was also the public face for the printing business owned by her captor Phillip Garrido.

So one starts to wonder how could this be? How could a man as perverse as Garrido keep hold over this young woman? His victim that he not only had interact with his customers but even featured on the cover of his business cards?

After more research I found that perhaps Jaycee Dugard may have even had aspirations of being a model. Now did Phillip Garrido really think that his dirty deeds would never be uncovered? Perhaps he really did think that... After all, he seemed to fly right under the radar of probation officers noses for years. He even had the cops out to his place about complaints that women and children were living in the backyard... but for some odd and very strange reason this man escaped scrutiny even then. Perhaps in some sick perverse way he had made Jaycee and their daughters part of his family. So much so that even the world around them seemed to accept them as just that. Apparently he even fooled his customers for years about the true identity of Jaycee and her daughters. Even his own mother didn't know who Jaycee and her daughters really were and she lived with them! (the jury is still out on that one though)

Perhaps we will never know into the working of Phillip Garrido's criminal mind. Perhaps one day somebody will write a book about Jaycee Dugard's story and we can learn more about how a crime like this could go undetected for so long. Perhaps Phillip Garrido may even give us some insight into his thoughts so that we can better understand the workings of a criminally sexual deviant mind.

Questions still linger for me about this possible picture of Jaycee Dugard... Was this public display on a business card a public cry for help? Did she perhaps hope and wish that one day someone would recognize her as the little kidnapped Jaycee Dugard? And/or perhaps she is a victim of the the little understood Stockholm Syndrome in which victims begin to identify with their captor and form emotional bonds. I'm sure this is a possibility in this case, as how could the poor 11 year old not form some sort of a relationship with the only people that now took care of her? Who knows what awful threats that Phiilip Garrido may have mentally tortured her with on a daily basis? Perhaps threats of bodily harm to her real family?

We may never know the answers to all of our questions. One thing I know for sure though is there is one might happy family right now celebrating the return of their daughter Jaycee Dugard.

Miracles can happen and have for the Dugard family. Let's hope now for the sake of the Michalea Garecht and Ilene Miselhoff family that a miracle can happen for them too. Perhaps Michaela and Ilene are out there somewhere and afraid to come forward. For Michalea, Ilene, Jaycee and all the other children that have suffered at the hands of criminals like Phillip and Nancy Garrido, our thoughts and prayers go out to you and your families.

Best wishes for a safe and speedy return of all the Jaycee Dugards of this world.

(Dorsi Diaz is a freelance writer/publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area)