Katie Hall was a 25-year-old casino worker when Garrido kidnapped her in 1976, transported her to a sex den he kept in a storage unit and raped her numerous times. She escaped when a police officer spotted her missing vehicle and is convinced that Garrido had intended to kill her.

Garrido told the court that he could not resist his impulses.

'I had this fantasy that was driving me to do this, inside of me, something that was making me want to do it, without no way to stop it,' Garrido told the court.

Often under the influence of the hallucinogen LSD, he said that he would hang around schools and satisfy his urges in public while watching girls as young as 7.

'I have done it by the side of schools, grammar schools and high schools, in my own car,' Garrido said in court testimony obtained by The New York Daily News.

Garrido's first wife, Christine Murphy, revealed further details. She left him in the wake of his first rape conviction, and described how Garrido once tried to blind her after he believed another man had flirted with her.

'He took a safety pin and went after my eyes,' Murphy told television show Inside Edition.

But perhaps the biggest mystery is not what went on in the mind of a sick individual, but in the failure of the justice system to deal with him.

Garrido was sentenced to a 50-year prison term after his 1977 conviction, and according to sentencing guidelines should have served at least two thirds of his sentence. Instead he was released after just 11 years, and three years later began his awful crime against Jaycee Dugard.