Las Vegas woman relieved now that Phillip Garrido is behind bars

Katie Callaway Hall stared at the television, trembling.

The news said the man on the screen had kidnapped a little girl 18 years ago and held her captive in his backyard.

His face had aged over the years and the news anchor mangled his name, but Callaway Hall recognized him anyway.

He was the one who took her that night so long ago.

He was the one who did so many unspeakable things.

He was the one who haunted her dreams and stalked her life.

Now, she thought, he could never hurt her again.

Now she could stop living in fear.

• • •

Callaway Hall was 25, a single mom of a 7-year-old son, when Phillip Garrido entered her life one chilly evening in November 1976.

Then known as Katie Callaway, she was headed to her boyfriend's house with a carload of food for dinner when a young man with a ponytail tapped on her window in a grocery store parking lot.

His car wouldn't start. Could she give him a ride?

She looked him over and let him in.

"He didn't look like what I thought a rapist should look like," she said Friday during an interview at her Las Vegas home.

She followed his directions around South Lake Tahoe, Calif., as he guided her to what she thought was his friend's house. He told her to stop in front of an empty lot, then he struck.

The man, who was unarmed, grabbed the back of her neck and forced her head into the steering wheel.

"All I want is a piece of ass. If you do everything I say, you won't get hurt. I'm serious," he told her, according to trial transcripts.

He handcuffed her, moved her to the passenger seat and used a leather strap to bind her head to her knees. He tossed a coat over her and drove off.

She asked him when she would be back.

"Maybe I will bring you back tomorrow," she testified he told her.

She asked him where they were going.

"Far away. I've got a shed. I've got it all prepared," he told her, according to the transcripts.

He drove across the state line to a storage unit in Reno, which housed a carpeted room adorned with a dirty mattress, sex toys and pornographic magazines.

He raped her again and again for more than five hours. As the night wore on and the assaults grew more violent, Callaway Hall eyed a pair of large scissors and considered her escape.

But it was a knock on the shed door that ended her night of terror.

Reno police officer Clifford Conrad had noticed a car with California plates outside the storage unit, and upon a closer look he saw the broken lock on the door. He knocked until Garrido rolled up the door and emerged wearing jeans and nothing else.

He told the cop he was just having some fun with his girlfriend. Then Callaway Hall jumped out from behind the plastic sheeting that served as a makeshift wall inside the unit.

"Help me," she screamed as she ran, naked, out of the storage shed.

Garrido was arrested. She was finally freed after being his captive for eight hours.

Callaway Hall sent Conrad a Christmas card that year, thanking him for saving her life.

Garrido was charged in federal court with kidnapping across state lines. He was convicted at trial on that charge and sentenced to 50 years to life in federal prison. He was also convicted on state rape charges and sentenced to five years to life in prison.

Callaway Hall had testified at the trials, but didn't follow them closely. She didn't even watch the sentencings, she said.

"I was hoping if I just forgot about it ... it would go away. But it didn't," she said.

It took her two years after the attack before she could stand within "grabbing distance," or about 10 feet, of strangers, she said.

She also cried a lot and had nightmares of Garrido chasing her.

Thanks to support from her family and friends, Callaway Hall was able to move on without letting the ordeal ruin her life. But the fear still lived below the surface.

Callaway Hall didn't feel safe until moving to England in 1980, she said. She returned to the Lake Tahoe area five years later to be closer to family and friends.

In 1987 she registered with a federal victim notification program that would let her know if Garrido was ever released. At the time, his first possible parole date was in 2006.

She thought she'd be safe for a long time.

• • •

Callaway Hall's roulette table was quiet when the stranger sat down one Friday afternoon in 1988.

Since returning from England, she was back to work as a casino dealer, this time at Caesars Palace at Lake Tahoe.

She didn't recognize the man sitting in front of her, but something about him made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

He bought some chips and ordered a drink, saying he hadn't had one in 11 years. He finished his cocktail and made small talk before cashing out his chips without ever placing a bet, she said.

As he stood to leave, he looked at her.

"Hope to see you again real soon, Katie," Callaway Hall recalled him saying.

It was him. It had to be.

She called for security, who caught up to the stranger and checked his ID. It wasn't Garrido. At least that's what his ID said.

Callaway Hall rushed to the pay phone during her breaks. She called his last prison. Then a jail in San Francisco. Then a halfway house. Finally, a parole officer.

She couldn't believe what he told her.

Garrido had been released in August 1988 after serving 11 years in federal prisons and seven months in Nevada. She never got the federal notification letter because it wasn't forwarded to her new address.

Callaway Hall was convinced the stranger at her table had been Garrido. And he knew how to find her.

Within three months she packed up and moved to a small town in Central California, telling her friends and family to carefully guard her whereabouts as she hoped to slip into obscurity.

"I knew how dangerous this man was. I knew. Just in the short time I spent with him, I knew what he was capable of," she said. "I had to put my invisible cloak on and disappear."

She took up real estate, but not without precautions.

She never shared her car with clients, she made clients leave their ID at the office if they gave her a bad feeling, and she kept her photo and name out of a San Francisco Bay Area advertising campaign.

Yet from time to time, a mystery woman would call Callaway Hall's real estate office claiming to be a long lost friend. Callaway Hall believes the mystery woman was Garrido's wife, helping him track her down.

"He was hunting for me," she said.

• • •

In 1995 Callaway Hall bumped into some old dealer friends during a visit to Las Vegas. They told her about the money they were making, and that was enough to lure her back to the casino floor.

She moved to Las Vegas and took a job as a dealer at Bally's.

She felt safer in the big city. More anonymous. Harder to find.

That didn't change the fact that Garrido was still out there somewhere.

"I've always lived with this, just under the surface, with this fear, but I always had to be aware that someone was coming after me," she said.

She met her husband, Jim Hall, during the 2002 Laughlin River Run, where he was playing saxophone at a concert. The deadly biker gang brawl that broke out that night didn't interfere with their romance, and they married eight months later.

She changed her last name to Hall and stopped using her maiden name of Callaway, which she hoped would make it even harder for Garrido to find her.

She wondered where he was but didn't dare try to find him. That just might lead him back to her.

• • •

Jim Hall was upstairs at his home in The Lakes neighborhood when his wife screamed, "Oh my God!"

He rushed downstairs, sure that his father had another heart attack. Instead he found his wife in front of the television.

"She pointed at the TV saying, 'That's the guy,'" Jim Hall said.

Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were the top of the news Aug. 27 after authorities in Northern California charged them with kidnapping 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991 and holding her captive for 18 years. Garrido was also suspected of fathering two children with Jaycee, now 29.

Callaway Hall, 57, shook for hours after seeing his face again.

She had spent the past 33 years looking over her shoulder in fear of the man who had "totally destroyed my faith in humanity and the decency of people," she said.

Now he was back in jail.

"I wasn't afraid anymore. He couldn't hurt me anymore," she said.

After Garrido's name surfaced, reporters dug into his past, discovered his convictions and began looking for Callaway Hall. Soon her home phone was flooded with calls from news organizations from around the world looking for perspective from one of Garrido's earliest victims.

Callaway Hall began a weeklong media blitz that took the couple from Los Angeles to New York. They have appeared on Larry King, Good Morning America and Inside Edition, among others. They have an appearance lined up on Dr. Phil in a couple of weeks.

Callaway Hall, who is using her maiden name again, has relived her horrifying night over and over again to show the world the "evil" she saw in Garrido. Retelling her story doesn't get easier, but it's necessary, she said.

"I'm going to make sure in 10 years down the road he doesn't slip through the cracks again," she said.

Contact reporter Brian Haynes at bhaynes@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0281.