Jaycee Lee Dugard Found: History of the Search

Jaycee Lee Dugard, the South Lake Tahoe, California eleven-year-old kidnapped 18 years ago, remained the object of interest and speculation from the day she was snatched off the street near her home, to the moment she surfaced earlier this week at a police station near San Francisco.

Although Jaycee Lee's case moved to a back burner after about 1992, it continued to simmer as various agencies and individuals sought to solve the mystery.

The FBI was involved from the start, and continued so throughout the all the years the Dugard girl remained missing. The agency maintained a web page requesting information about the kidnapping, which is still online.

Here' a sampling of some of the investigative and support activity that transpired, first reported in the Reno Gazette Journal:

American's Most Wanted profiled Jaycee Lee Dugard's disappearance in 1991.

Also in 1991, People Magazine profiled Jaycee Lee's kidnapping in a three-page spread.

In 2001, more than 100 people marched in South Lake Tahoe to mark the 10th anniversary of Jaycee Lee Dugard's disappearance.

In June 2002, investigators dug up the yard of a Truckee, CA priest accused of molesting three girls in the 1970s, in a search for clues to Jaycee Lee Dugard's disappearance and that of another missing Northern California girl. The search yielded no evidence.

In 2007, The Charley Project, which profiles over 7,500 cold cases of missing people, mainly from the US, profiled Jaycee Lee Dugard's disappearance.

In 2004, the Dugard case was posted to an A&E cable channel chat board under the topic, "What should be the criteria for opening a case that has turned 'cold'?" The topic apparently was generated on April 17, 2004 by a poster identified as "DoSearches." The topic garnered a number of comments, some of them accusing Jaycee Lee's mother and stepfather of engineering her disappearance.

Stepfather endures official suspicion

Jaycee Lee Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, was for a time considered a suspect in her disappearance by both the FBI and local law officers.

According to the Associated Press, Probyn said, "It broke my marriage up. I've gone through hell, I mean I'm a suspect up until yesterday."

Dugard parents were subjects of rumors

But it wasn't just law enforcement that had its suspicions about Probyn. Some comments on the A&E chat board cast both the mother and stepfather as wanton villains.

One poster, identified as "Warkes," claimed to be a private investigator and talked about "many discrepancies and questions in the version of what happened by Carl Probyn. If any of the posters know anything about this case in hard facts, I would like to talk to them."

"DoSearches" said, "That area (South Lake Tahoe) is SO 'small town'...if you know what I mean! Like WHY the 'right' things weren't done in the beginning. There seems to be a nasty 'web' there. The FBI was/is involved, but I later was disillusioned by the people in the local office on another matter."

Two months earlier, "DoSearches" had opened the topic on the chat board by saying that, "I wish and (sic) outside agency would re-open the Jaycee Lee Dugard case. She was sold by mother and stepfather into prostitution in Central America for their drug debts. They both had so many friends in the Eldorado County Sheriffs (sic) Department that the case never went anywhere. A private detective in that area has a lot of information on the case, but no one will listen to him."

And chat board member "cinema," apparently in response to Warkes' comment, wrote: "Listen you should contact me. I am doing work on this and would like to talk to the PI who you say has a lot of info. I should also say the FBI has not closed this case. I am very serious about getting this PI to get in touch with me."

Discussion on the board regarding Jaycee Lee Dugard ended after October 2007 until August 27, 2009, when several new comments appeared attacking earlier postings about the potential guilt of Jaycee Lee Dugard's parents.

Sources

A&E, http://boards.aetv.com/forum/What-Should-Be/439
abcnews.com
The Charley Project, http://www.charleyproject.org/
"Timeline: Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping," Anjeanette Damon, Reno Gazette-Journal, August 27, 2009
"Jaycee Lee Dugard's Stepfather Carl Probyn Talks About Her Return," huffingtonpost.com