Thu, October 15, 2009 - 9:41:47

Trust your Intuition: Sweating the Small Stuff Solves the Jaycee Lee Dugard Mystery

With the release of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s photograph on People Magazine yesterday, our attention turns once again to the miraculous discovery of the missing girl, who abducted at age eleven, had been missing for 18 years.  Although her accused kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, had been visited at home by law enforcement on multiple occasions, Dugard remained hidden just a few feet away for nearly two decades.  And if not for a chance encounter with two local police officers who sweated the small stuff and trusted their instincts, the case that has captured the attention of the nation may never have been cracked wide open.

As an article on Oprah.com featuring an interview with University of California Berkley employees, police officer Allison Jacobs and police specialist Lisa Campbell, explains, it was intuition, not DNA or CSI that helped save Jaycee. 

When Garrido walked into the campus security offices at the University of California Berkley with two young girls this August to discuss hosting an on-campus event, Lisa Campbell immediately sensed that something was amiss.  But, instead of ignoring her concerns, she asked Garrido to return the following day and told her coworker about her bad vibes. “I said: ‘Ally, this guy is in my office. He’s got these two young girls. Something’s not right.”  And after that, Allison ran a background check.

As the pair soon discovered, Garrido was not only a registered sex offender, he was currently on parole for rape.  And after speaking with his parole officer, they made a shocking discovery: he had no knowledge of the two daughters who had attended both meetings at Berkley.  And within hours of Lisa and Allison’s report, police officers showed up on Garrido’s doorstep and found a now 29 year-old Jaycee in a hidden compound in the back yard. 

If not for paying attention to the small, non-verbal cues Garrido was giving —what forensic psychologist Anthony Pinizzotto calls “microbehaviors”— it is likely that Jaycee would still be missing, but thanks to their attention to detail, they made a miracle for the Dugard family. 

And it’s something you don’t have to have police training to do.  By going with your gut, you can tap into the primal, innate knowledge that each of us naturally possesses as human beings.  The challenge is to listen to the little voice inside of you, even when you don’t want to hear what it has to say.  Or, as Lisa Campbell so powerfully stated in her interview with Oprah Winfrey: “I think we’re one of the only species that ignores the instinct that we have. Don’t be afraid to question. You can always apologize if you’re wrong. Take that extra step.”

Posted by Linda and Robin