After being imprisoned as a sex slave for almost two decades and forced to bear the children of her captor, Jaycee Lee Dugard had one thing to say as she was reunited with her family yesterday: “I’m sorry.”

“She is very remorseful,” said her stepfather, Carl Probyn. “She feels really guilty for bonding with this man. There’s really a guilt trip here.”

America was shocked by the abduction of Jaycee as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed 11-year-old from a bus stop outside her home in 1991.

The case went cold despite intense press interest. The next time anyone heard from her was on Wednesday, 18 years after she was snatched, when she turned up at a parole office in the town of Concord, California. Accompanying her was her suspected kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, 58, his wife, Nancy, 55, and two children.

According to witnesses, Ms Dugard was in good health but uneducated . “She looks almost like when she was kidnapped,” said Mr Probyn, whose wife and daughter were yesterday spending their first full day with her since her disappearance. “She looks very young. She doesn’t look 29 at all.”

She has remained in good health in spite of giving birth to two of her captor’s children in a back garden compound of outhouses and tents, where she spent all her teenage years and most of her twenties. Ms Dugard gave birth to the first child in 1994, when she was 14. The second was born in 1998.

“I have babies,” was the first thing she told her mother, Terry Probyn. Ms Dugard owes her freedom to an unnamed female security officer at the University of California, Berkeley, who saw Phillip Garrido handing out leaflets on Tuesday and became suspicious of his behaviour.

She wasn’t the first person to think of Garrido as odd. The former business card printer gave up his job a few years ago to establish his own “church”, named God’s Desire. Some of his former customers said he was “kind of nutty” but also “happy-go-lucky” and probably harmless.

Among Garrido’s beliefs was that he could manipulate sound waves with his mind — a possible side-effect of his experiments with LSD in the Seventies. His most recent blog entry declared that, “the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world”.

These were thought to be among the messages that Garrido had decided to hand out to students at Berkeley on Tuesday. However, it wasn’t his homemade pamphlets that caught the attention of the security guard, but his helpers: two glazed-eyed girls, aged 11 and 15, and a woman in her late twenties, supposedly named Allissa.

Garrido’s decision to take the girls with him was a fateful one. Within 24 hours it would lead to the extraordinary conclusion of an 18-year-long child abduction case and expose a sex crime of horrifying cruelty.

After the campus security officer asked for Garrido’s ID, she ran a background check and discovered that he was on parole. What she didn’t know was that he was a registered sex offender who had kidnapped a woman from South Lake Tahoe in 1976, driven her to a warehouse in Reno, Nevada, and raped her. Garrido and his victim were found when a patrol officer called after seeing a car outside at 2.30am.

When Garrido answered, the victim screamed and the officer walked in to find pornographic magazines, a projector, sex toys, a theatrical spotlight, wine and a tub of hot water.

Convinced that something was wrong, the Berkeley security guard called Garrido’s parole officer and explained how the two girls with him had refused to make eye contact. The parole officer was surprised. In spite of repeated visits to Garrido’s home in Antioch, California, the officer had never seen evidence of children.

Garrido was then ordered to report to his office in Concord. He took the girls with him the next day, along with Allissa and his wife, Nancy, whom he had met in prison, when she was visiting another prisoner. It was during questioning that the true identity of Allissa emerged. She was Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had been abducted in 1991 from a bus stop in South Lake Tahoe as her stepfather watched helplessly from his driveway. Police believe that she spent most of the past 18 years hidden in Garrido’s compound.

Garrido’s house is thought to belong to his mother, who also lives there, although she has suffered from severe dementia for years. Garrido’s wife is suspected of acting as his accomplice. She was described as “a robot” who would “do anything he asked her to” by the suspect’s brother.

Garrido said yesterday from jail that he had been misunderstood. “The last several years, I completely turned my life around and you’re going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim,” he said. “If you take a step at a time, you’re going to find the most powerful heart-warming story revealing something that used to be understood.”

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