AP Photo
Eighteen years after Carl Probyn heard his 11-year-old stepdaughter scream as she was abducted on her way to catch the school bus, Jaycee Lee Dugard is believed to have emerged alive—after a convicted sex offender allegedly held her captive in his backyard, raped her repeatedly, and fathered her two children, California police announced at a news conference Thursday. Dugard and her daughters, now 11 and 15, were kept in a series of tents and sheds, which authorities described as a compound of soundproof walls, no electricity, and barriers to "inhibit outside viewing and prevent the victims from contact with the outside world"—all hidden, police say, in the backyard of Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s Northern California home. Dugard and her daughters are "in good health, but living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll," police said. The Garridos are in police custody. Dugard—who apparently gave birth to her first daughter at the age of 14, during the period of her imprisonment—was reunited with her mother on Thursday.