SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Nancy Garrido spent years caring for her elderly, bedridden mother-in-law while a girl kidnapped in 1991 was allegedly held prisoner in the backyard of the home she shared with her husband.
When Phillip Garrido went to prison for six weeks on a parole violation, the former nursing assistant watched over Jaycee Dugard, authorities said.
"You can reasonably infer from the charging document that the wife was doing that," said former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, who is acting as a special spokesman for the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office.
The emerging details paint a conflicting portrait of the 54-year-old woman charged with her husband in the kidnapping and rape of Dugard, who authorities say had two children with Garrido during her 18 years in the backyard in Antioch. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Dugard's stepfather Carl Probyn said Nancy Garrido fit the description "dead-on" of the woman who pulled his stepdaughter into a car in South Lake Tahoe nearly two decades ago.
But on CBS's "The Early Show" Wednesday, he said his client loves and misses the two girls her husband fathered with Dugard and said she saw them all as a family.
It was unclear if the lawyer would claim Garrido was coerced into aiding her husband. But such a claim could be undermined by her silence about Dugard's captivity while her husband was held at a jail facility for six weeks in 1993 on a parole violation, said criminal defense attorney Michael Cardoza, a former San Francisco Bay area prosecutor.
"There are too many facts in the case and too many opportunities for her to make it right that she did not take advantage of," Cardoza said. "No jury will believe that for those 18 years she was under duress that whole time."
Public records provided no clear picture of her life before she met Phillip Garrido, a divorced former musician who had worked odd jobs and had a history of drug abuse.
They were married in 1981 while he was serving time at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., for the Nevada kidnapping of a casino worker who was sexually assaulted for five hours in a storage unit. The wedding was conducted by the prison chaplain.
In 1988,the couple returned to Contra Costa County in California, where Phillip Garrido was raised. Nancy Garrido became a certified nurse assistant in 1989, according to California Department of Public Health records. Her certification expired in 1995 when she failed to renew it.
Nursing assistants are on a low rung of the medical profession and cannot work without the supervision of a doctor or nurse. But Nancy Garrido's training might help explain how Dugard could deliver two babies and now have two healthy daughters, ages 11 and 15, even though authorities said none of them had seen a doctor.
Neighbors and customers of Phillip Garrido's printing business said they saw little of his wife.
"The wife was like a hermit," neighbor Damon Robinson said. "She looked like she had no spirit."