Jaycee Dugard's daughters didn't know she was their mom, and more good, bad, and ugly tales of maternal ties in the Dugard case

Let's start with the bad:

Jaycee Dugard's two daughters didn’t know she was their bio-mom:
Up until their father, Phil, was taken into custody on charges of kidnapping and rape, his two daughters, 11 and 15, who lived in his secret back yard lair in Antioch, didn’t know that the woman they knew as their big sister was actually their mother.

So reveals the stepfather of Jaycee Dugard, in the new issue of People magazine. People says:

It would seem like more than two girls could bear: The man they called "daddy" turns out to be a registered sex offender thrown in jail, and now they've been told the woman they thought was their big sister is really their mother. This is what Angel, 11, and Starlit, 15, have faced since the arrest last week of Phillip Garrido, charged with the 1991 abduction of Jaycee Dugard, now 29.

As an 11-year-old, Dugard was snatched from near her home in South Lake Tahoe. She remained missing for 18 years. Actually, she was, according to authorities, kidnapped by Garrido, a convicted rapist and registered sex offender, and his wife, Nancy Garrido.

Nancy Garrido turns out to have worked in a nurturing, caring profession, as a state-licensed nurse’s aide, for a Contra Costa nonprofit. Her work for this nonprofit spanned the time she may have been helping her husband keep Dugard prisoner and “under sexual attack,” according to the Contra Costa Times.

Dugard was brought to a home in a semi-rural area of unincorporated Antioch that Phillip Garrido shared with Nancy and his elderly mother. There, Dugard was confined to a shed and then, at some point, forced to bear his two children. She wound up helping to raise the two girls, and perhaps also growing up with them along the way, while the three shared quarters together in makeshift tents and sheds erected in secret by Garrido.

The Bad and the Ugly: Nancy Garrido misses her family

Nancy Garrido is allegedly the woman who actually grabbed Dugard as she walked the few blocks from her South Lake Tahoe home to her school bus. Now, in jail and facing kidnapping and rape charges, Garrido has told her lawyer that she loved Dugard and the daughters Dugard bore with her husband of 28 years. She regarded Dugard and her daughters as her “family.”

Nancy Garrido, tears running down her face, nodded as her husband confessed
to a business acquaintance that angels were speaking to him and had helped him
forswear his sexual compulsions.

This, according to the Los Angeles Times, which adds that Nancy Garrido remains a largely mysterious figure in this horrible story: "Acquaintances and family members have described her as being under her husband's control and a believer in his religious convictions."

So much under his control that, for more than a month in 1993, she was apparently "the sole jailer of the then-13-year-old Dugard while her husband was in prison for a parole violation."

And the nurse’s aide apparently helped deliver Dugard’s two daughters. As police said, Dugard never received medical attention during her pregnancy and birth, and her daughters have never been to a doctor or to school.

Nancy Garrido's attorney made the rounds of the morning network TV shows Wednesday, saying that Nancy Garrido misses Dugard and her daughters.

"What she said that I can tell you about is that there came a time when she felt they were a family, and she loved the girls very much, and she loved Jaycee very much," Gilbert Maines, Garrido's court-appointed lawyer, said on NBC's Today.

In the Good category, feminine and maternal intuition leads to Dugard’s rescue:
It took two female officers and mothers to finally realize what male parole agents and sheriff's deputies failed to get--that there was something dangerously and suspiciously weird about this Garrido character and the demeanor of his two daughters.

Again, according to People magazine:

Jaycee's fate finally changed on Monday, August. 24, when a UC Berkeley female cop grew suspicious of Garrido after he came to campus with the two daughters looking for an event permit to distribute religious flyers.

"He was clearly unstable," Lisa Campbell, 40, the UC Berkeley police manager of special events said at a press conference late Friday. And her mother mode went into gear when she watched Jaycee's 15-year-old stare "straight up in the air."

Campbell stalled Garrido, and asked him to return on Tuesday, August 25. Meantime, she went to fellow officer Ally Jacobs, 33, who ran a background check on Garrido and discovered he was a sex offender.

When Garrido returned to campus with his two daughters on Tuesday, Jacobs and Campbell were both there. "I'm a mother, so police mode turned into mother mode," says Jacobs, whose gut feeling told her something was wrong with the girls.

According to Jacobs, both daughters were robotic, extremely pale to the point of being almost gray, and with non-responsive bright blue eyes.

Garrido confessed to the officers that his "life had changed" and that he was "on parole for a rape and kidnapping that happened 33 years ago." As Jacobs watched, the girls "sat there with no emotion."