After 32 years, Katie Callaway Hall thought she had put away the horrible things that Phillip Garrido did to her during eight hours of terror long ago. But when the man accused of kidnapping and raping Jaycee Dugard for 18 years locked eyes with Hall in a California courtroom, it all came rushing back.
“It took me by total surprise, my reaction, and I can’t even explain why — except to tell you on some deep, subconscious level, I reacted to this man in a way I didn’t expect to,” Hall told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Friday from Sacramento, Calif.
“I expected to be really strong and to go in there and be really strong and to face him,” Hall said.
Instead, everything that Garrido had done to her came rushing back.
Face from the past
A day earlier, Hall and her husband, Jim Hall, had attended Garrido’s first court hearing on the Dugard charges in Placerville, Calif. Hall said she went to the hearing because she wants to make sure that Garrido spends the rest of his life in jail.
When Garrido was brought into the courtroom, his eyes caught Hall’s and locked with them. In 1977, when he was convicted of raping Hall over eight hours in a rented storage unit, she had not been able to look him in the face. On Thursday, she returned his baleful glare.