Lost and Found by John Glatt Read Free Book Online Page A

to try to escape, as he would be watching.
    After he left and rolled down the door, Katie Callaway took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She saw a stack of half-opened storage boxes by the door, with china and other items visible.
    Directly in front of her was a wall of Visqueen plastic sheeting, obscuring the rest of the warehouse.
    “It was freezing in there,” she recalled. “I didn’t know where I was. I thought I was out in the middle of the desert.”
    A few minutes later he returned, locking the door from the inside. As he released the handcuffs he warned Katie there was no escape for her.
    He then led her through a succession of three heavy rugs suspended from the ceiling, making her feel disoriented, like being inside a maze.
    “I couldn’t see,” she said, “because there were several partitions in the front of the door. I didn’t even know the size of the room, because of the way it was set up.”
    Behind the final rugged partition was a room, which he’d carefully prepared like a stage set. Then he turned on the colored spotlights and ordered her to undress.
    “I saw a dirty mattress on the floor,” she later remembered, “with a red holey satin sheet and a filthy fake fur blanket. He had colored stage lights focused on the mattress and a projector on the floor with some film in it. I asked him if they were porno films, he said yes. There were also stacks of pornographic magazines.
    “And then I saw the three solid walls were covered in carpet, which really scared me because I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, he’s tried to soundproof this room.’ ”
    At one end of the shed, she could hear the muffled sounds of a band practicing, assuming they came from another part of the warehouse and were made by her abductor’s friends.
    When Katie said she needed the bathroom, he found a little red jar for her to urinate in. Then as she undressed she noticed a gleaming new silver trash can full of water, with an electric heater on the outside, which he used to wash her with warm water. There were also two bottles of cheap wine, a jar of Vaseline, some disposable douches and a vibrator with three attachments, lying by the mattress.
    “I took my clothes off,” she later testified, “and it was freezing in there. I got under this filthy, furry, fake fur blanket that he had on this old mattress. It was filthy, but I was freezing. He sat on the mattress and I was shaking so badly.
    “I was terrified. I think that he felt sorry for me, and he told me I was the only person that ever made him feel bad for doing this.”
    Then Garrido opened a bottle of cheap wine and offered her a glass, saying it would stop her shaking and relax her. She accepted half a glass, but he then started drinking the wine heavily. Later, he would claim to have taken four doses of LSD, to increase his sexual pleasure.
    “He was a lot calmer,” said Callaway. “But he would get very distant looks, like he was kind of spaced off. And all of a sudden he would come back to me.”
    For the first half-hour, Phillip Garrido sat on the bed fully clothed, chatting to Katie, who was shivering under the covers. He turned on a radio, tuning it to a local Reno rock station.
    “He told me I was making him feel bad because I was terrified,” she said. “And that if I fought him it would turn him on more and make him more aggressive.”
    He spoke of renting the warehouse under an alias, and preparing it for several weeks. He said he also used it for his band to practice in but expected to be evicted soon.
    Garrido then began to explain why he had kidnapped her, and the more he talked the more sexually excited he became.
    “He was trying to put me at ease,” said Katie, “by trying to assure me that he wasn’t going to hurt me. It was a sexual fantasy that he had planned. He said things to me like, ‘Just imagine if you were in Roman times and you had to do everything the man said if you were a slave.’ ”
    Finally, Garrido stopped talking. Then