It was the last week of fifth grade, back in 1991, when Jaycee Lee Dugard left her home for the school bus stop, walking toward the oncoming traffic as her stepfather had taught her.
The towheaded 11-year-old was halfway to the bus stop when she heard a car approaching from behind.
"And I didn't think it was weird at the time, but it kind of pulled in close to me," she recalled last September during secret testimony. "And I thought he was going to ask for directions because he started to say something."
Instead, Dugard said, she was hit with a stun gun, dragged into the back seat and driven away.
"And I heard voices in the front, and the man said, 'I can't believe we got away with it,' " she said, "and he started laughing."
This is the firsthand account of one of the most notorious child abductions in the nation's history, recounted by Dugard in her own words during her testimony before a secret El Dorado County grand jury last September.
Portions of the testimony were released Thursday by court order, providing the first glimpse into Dugard's memories of the day Phillip and Nancy Garrido came cruising through the South Lake Tahoe area looking for a victim.
El Dorado Superior Court Judge Douglas Phimister described it as "shopping for a victim" when he sent the Garridos off to prison Thursday morning for kidnapping and raping Dugard and holding her hostage for 18 years.
"What was the conversation in the car?" Phimister mused aloud as he sentenced Phillip Garrido, 60, to 431 years to life and Nancy Garrido, 55, to 36 years to life.
"Should we select this one?" he imagined the Garridos saying. "Should we choose that one? What are we looking for ?
"You basically went shopping for a child to steal. You brought blankets to cover her up."
The Garridos' sentencing and release of the grand jury transcript marked the end of a criminal case that has captured worldwide attention since Dugard was found alive in August 2009.
The details of the horrors she faced during her 18 years in captivity were not made public. Phimister sealed portions of the transcript that he said were "just plain pornographic."
"In reviewing the transcript, I find that some of the testimony is absolutely disgusting," the judge said. "The specific descriptions of some of the events that occurred would shock adults, even adults who have a distorted view of intimacy."
In the testimony that was released Thursday, Dugard describes the early days of captivity, when Phillip Garrido began the sexual assaults that would continue for years and result in the births of two daughters and her confusion over why she had been taken.
"I was very scared," she said. "I didn't know who he was. I didn't know why he was doing this. I just wanted to go home.
"I think in the bathroom I kept telling him that, you know, 'I don't know why you're doing this. If you're holding me for ransom, my family doesn't have a lot of money.' "
But money held little interest for Garrido, a sexual predator and convicted rapist.
" In the beginning he said that I was helping him and that, you know, he had a sex problem and that, you know, he got me so that he wouldn't have to do this to anybody else," Dugard testified. "So I was helping him."
Garrido's obsession with sex extended to a collection of dozens of homemade videotapes that police found buried in his Antioch backyard, doused in acid in a failed attempt to erase them.
Dugard recounted being locked behind barred windows in a shack in that backyard, where Garrido would force himself upon her in visits that became known as "runs."
She described the Garridos' warped attempts to forge a family bond with her, like the time he gave her a cat until it kept urinating in her shack and he took it away.
Or the time they came to her on her 12th birthday "and they gave me some Barbie stuff because they knew that I liked to play with Barbies."
Or how Nancy Garrido finally persuaded her to start calling her "Mom" and how they let her pick a new name, Alissa.
Nancy Garrido seemed especially troubled by the kidnapping, Dugard said, and "would always start crying and tell me how sorry she was and she can't believe he did it.
"She was so hoping that he got a headache that morning."
Dugard described the day her identity was discovered, after Phillip Garrido reported to his parole office with Dugard and her daughters, and a police officer took her away and asked her real name.
"And I said that I can't, because I hadn't said my name in 18 years," she said. "I wrote it down. And then I wrote down my mom's name."
Dugard's mother, Terry Probyn, finally got the chance to confront her child's abductors Thursday as she described to a packed courtroom the anguish she had suffered.
Standing at a lectern, a box of tissues under the microphone, Probyn recalled giving birth to Jaycee on May 3, 1980, calling her "a true miracle and a gift from God."
She told Garrido of the pain and anger she felt after he took her daughter and of the questions she asked herself night after night.
"Where is she?" she said. "Is she cold? Is she hungry? Is she hurt? My baby was gone and all my dreams turned to nightmares."
Then she turned directly to the Garridos: "It was you, Nancy Garrido, and it was you, Phillip Garrido, who broke my heart.
"You took something that didn't belong to you. You took my baby. I hate you both."
Both Garridos had their lawyers read statements expressing remorse for their actions. And Nancy Garrido kept her eyes locked on Probyn through tears, something her lawyer, Stephen Tapson, said later was an effort to show Probyn how sorry she was.
Phillip Garrido never looked at her, choosing to stare at the floor the entire time she spoke, even when Probyn read a statement from her daughter.
"I choose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence," Dugard said in her statement.
"Everything you have ever done to me is wrong," she added. "What you and Nancy did to me was reprehensible. There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions."
Phimister, who spent nearly two years overseeing the case, had his own lecture for Garrido. He sentenced Nancy Garrido first, denied her request to be able to meet with her husband one last time and had her taken away.
He then turned his attention to Phillip Garrido.
"This court has imposed tens of thousands of sentences in criminal cases," the judge said. "You fall into a special category in this court
"This is probably the third case where I've sentenced someone where I am of the view that you lack a soul. What you did to this child is beyond horrible."
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