Photo by Brad Horn
SPARKS - When Reno police officer Clifford Conrad knocked on a storage shed door in 1976 and arrested Phillip Garrido on rape and kidnapping charges, he had no idea that three decades later his good police work would be news across the world.
Nor could Conrad understand Saturday why Garrido, arrested Wednesday for allegedly kidnapping a South Lake Tahoe schoolgirl and holding her captive for 18 years, was ever freed from prison so he could harm someone again.
"I thought he got sentenced to 50 years to life, so how he got out after 10 years I'll never know," the former Reno cop and retired Veteran's Administration biomedical engineer said from the living room of his Sparks home. "Someone dropped the ball. I guess a lot of people dropped the ball his whole life."
Conrad had been with the police force for four years when, on Nov. 23, 1976, he was working the graveyard shift, patrolling Mill Street in northeast Reno. A car with California plates was parked outside a storage unit, and from his patrol car, Conrad could see light shining from underneath the shed door.
He called the license number into dispatch, then got out to investigate.
"I banged on the door and did announce myself as a police officer and he did open the door right away," Conrad said.
As the door rolled up, Conrad could see the large unit was bizarrely decorated.
"It looked like a movie set. He had stage lights and curtains and rugs. He had it all," Conrad said.
With Garrido standing there shirtless, a woman emerged from behind a curtain hung to divide the room.
"She said, 'Help me, I've been kidnapped and raped,' or something like that," the 66-year-old recalled. "I told her to put some clothes on."
Conrad said it had been his experience that claims of rape didn't always pan out, so he took the woman's words with a "grain of salt," he explained. And Garrido was so calm, standing there saying nothing.
"The thing I remember most is it took me a good 15 minutes to really determine he committed a crime," said Conrad.
When the victim re-emerged, the patrolman asked her sit in the back of his car while he talked with Garrido.
In answer to Conrad's question of what Garrido and the woman were doing: "He just said they were boyfriend and girlfriend and they were just having consensual sex," Conrad remembered. "He didn't seem nervous or anything like that until we found out what was really happening."
Backup arrived a few minutes later, with news Conrad hadn't expected.
The license plate he asked dispatch to check belonged to a vehicle suspected in a kidnapping in Lake Tahoe earlier that day.
"That's when I arrested him," Conrad said.
Retired Reno Detective Dan DeMaranville said he was sleeping when the phone call came that he had to interview Garrido.
At the police station, he sat down with the rapist.
"First I advised him of his rights, then I tried to get a rapport going with the guy, 'cause if they don't like you they won't talk to you. And I thought, this is a nice-looking guy, why is he doing this? He was tall, athletic-looking," recalled DeMaranville. "I said why the hell are you resorting to this? And he said that's the only way he gets sexual gratification. That's how he gets off."
The set-up at the shed supported Garrido's comment, said DeMaranville.
"It wasn't a spur-of-the moment thing. He had handcuffs and a bed and marital aids. The whole thing," he said.
There was no doubt in either officer's mind that the collar they nabbed on that November night was a bad guy.
So news that Garrido was out of prison was nearly as stunning as what he stands accused of in the Jaycee Lee Dugard case, said DeMaranville.
"I was shocked when I found out he'd been out of prison all this time. So much for the so-called justice system. There is not a justice system, it's a legal system," said DeMaranville, who retired from the force in 1990. "This guy should have been castrated while he was in prison."
Conrad said the arrest for which he received accolades was one of the best things he did in his seven years as a police officer. Garrido not serving his full sentence was a travesty.
"I always thought someone should at least serve a third of their sentence before they were eligible for parole," Conrad said. "I want to see what they do him this time."