The California girl who was rescued after 18 years in captivity "bonded" with her kidnapper to survive, her stepdad said Friday.
Jaycee Lee Dugard "didn't try to get away," Carl Probyn said on NBC's Today show. "And it probably kept her alive. If she would have been really spunky and fight and tried to escape, maybe she would have been killed."
Jaycee, who was kidnapped from in front of her South Lake Tahoe home in 1991, had two kids with her accused abductor, a religious fanatic and convicted sex offender named Phillip Garrido.
Probyn said his step-daughter, whom he described as a "mellow girl" when she was kidnapped at age 11, appears to be physically fine.
"My wife said she looks almost like she was when she was kidnapped," he said.
But Jaycee, who is now 29, has been damaged by the ordeal.
"My wife says that Jaycee is really feeling guilty for bonding with this guy," Probyn said. "So she's really having a problem with that."
Ed Smart, whose daughter Elizabeth was rescued in 2002 after nine months in the clutches of yet another religious nut, said he doesn't believe Jaycee bonded with Garrido.
He conceded, however, that Jaycee's giving birth to two daughters by Garrido "complicates it more because certainly she had concern for her children."
"I think that in many cases, these children do try to escape, and after numerous attempts they feel it's hopeless, and so they try to survive," Smart said on CBS's The Early Show. "And that's not necessarily bonding with these monsters."
Jaycee was reunited with her parents on Thursday night after cops arrested Garrido, 58. They said the convicted rapist kept Jaycee hidden in a "secret backyard" and that one of the two children he fathered was the same age as the victim was when she vanished.
Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were being held on $1 million bail each. He was expected to be officially charged Friday with rape and kidnapping. She faces conspiracy charges.
Cops say Nancy Garrido was with her husband when they snatched Jaycee on June 10, 1991, as she was walking to her school bus stop.
In their first conversation Wednesday night, Jayce gave her mother a double jolt, Probyn said.
"I have something to tell you. I have babies," Jaycee told Terry Probyn, 50, who asked how many.
"Two," she replied.
"I gave up hope for 18 years, just went into recovery mode," said Carl Probyn, who witnessed the abduction but was too far away to stop it. "Now, I just won the lotto. It's just unbelievable."
Probyn said his estranged wife called him soon after getting word from the FBI that Jaycee was safe and healthy.
"She said, 'They found Jaycee. She's alive,'" said Carl Probyn, 60, who now lives in Riverside in Southern California. "We cried for about two minutes."
Garrido later called a KCRA3 reporter from jail and urged people to withhold judgement until all the details about the case to come out.
"What's kept me busy the last several years is I've completely turned my life around," Garrido said.
"And you're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, the victim - you wait. If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backwards and in the end, you're going to find the most powerful heartwarming story."
Lt. Fred Kollar of the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department said Garrido and his wife kept Jaycee for nearly two decades hidden the backyard of their home in the suburban San Francisco town of Antioch.
"My understanding is they went directly to that property right after the kidnapping," Kollar said. "The children were born there and they lived there since."
He said that Jaycee and her daughters, ages 11 and 15, were kept in a shack and two tents hidden behind a tree-lined, 6-foot-tall fence at the rear of the suspects' backyard.
Kollar said a plastic tarp covered the entrance to the covert camp, which had an outhouse and an outdoor shower.
"None of the children had ever been to school, none had been to a doctor, they were kept in complete isolation in this compound, if you will, at the house," Kollar said.
"She was in good health," Kollar said of Jaycee. "But living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll."
The big break in the case came Tuesday when campus cop Allison Jacobs spotted Garrido and the two young girls at the University of California, Berkeley.
Garrido was passing out religious tracts without permission at the university's famed Sather Gate, the scene of student protests in the 1960s. When Jacobs ran a background check on Garrido, she learned he was a registered sex offender on lifetime federal parole for a 1971 kidnapping and rape.
Jacobs contacted Garrido's parole officer, who called the convict in for a meeting Wednesday.
Garrido showed up to meet his parole officer with his wife, the two girls he fathered, and a woman named Allissa - who turned out to be Jaycee.
Hidden encampment
"The parole agent had visited \[Garrido's house\] and never saw Jaycee and the two children," said Kollar, adding that the backyard encampment was so well-hidden the parole officer never noticed it.
After being grilled by the parole officer, Garrido admitted he and his wife had kidnapped Jaycee in 1991.
Carl Probyn told The Daily News on Thursday that he felt vindicated after being eyed as a suspect in the case and being racked by guilt for not being able to save Jaycee from the kidnappers.
"I was a suspect probably until \[Wednesday\], I'm sure. I took four lie detector tests," said Probyn. "I'm the winner now. For the last 18 years, they \[the Garridos\] were the winners."
A law enforcement source suggested that Garrido abducted Jaycee to make her his sex slave.
"As to why a man would take an 11-year-old girl, it's not so he could send her to debutante school," the source told the Daily News.
Garrido was released from Leavenworth Prison in Kansas in 1988, after serving 17 years for taking a woman across state lines and raping her in a hotel room, a relative of Garrido told The News.
Records show Garrido was thrown back in jail for five months in 1993 for a parole violation. He became a religious fanatic, and an Internet blogger who claimed he could speak to God and hear voices in people's heads.
Neighbors didn't seem surprised by the twisted details police revealed.
Damon Robinson, 38, said he knew Garrido had girls living in his backyard and raised the red flag to sheriff's deputies over two years ago.
"I put it in the police's hands. What else could I do," said Robinson, adding the deputies investigated his complaint, but nothing changed.