Creepy Phil - There's one near you.

PLACERVILLE, Calif. A woman who was snatched from a bus stop as an 11-year-old child in 1991 turned up Thursday after being held for the past 18 years in isolation in a backyard compound (above) by a convicted sex offender who fathered two children with her, police said.

I don't know about you (and never will) but when I'm driving or walking along the street, I look at the houses and wonder, "What's going on in there?"

Part of it is my instinctive curiosity and part of it is fueled by that scene in "Silence of the Lambs" when Agent Starling stumbles on Buffalo Bill's house, which is a seemingly innocuous suburban dwelling, but instead is the center of oddball behavior.

As it turns out, Jaycee Dugard and her two children were living there as prisoners, authorities say. The heavily wooded compound was arranged so that people could not view what was happening, and one of the buildings was sound-proofed and could only be opened from the outside.
Neighbors knew there were children living there. Damon Robinson has lived next door to the Garridos for more than three years and his then-girlfriend in 2006 told him she saw tents in the backyard and children.

His neighbors knew he was a registered sex offender. Kids on his block called him "Creepy Phil" and kept their distance. Parole agents and local law enforcement regularly visited his home and found nothing unusual, even after a neighbor complained children were living in a complex of tents in his backyard.

Tents in the backyard. You can see them in the photo above as little blue squares. Sure, the neighbors. I can't get away with playing my stereo too loud and this jackass fathers a family in tents in his backyard. That makes good nonsense. Neighbors reported the sounds of children playing, but neglected to report anything because they didn't want to get involved. Nobody wants to cause trouble. Or, if they did, it didn't do any good.

A neighbor called 911 in November 2006 and described Garrido as a psychotic sex addict who was living with children and had people staying in tents in his backyard.
The investigating officer spent a half-hour interviewing Garrido on his front porch but did not enter the house or search the backyard, Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf said. The deputy, who did not know Garrido was a registered sex offender even though the sheriff's department had the information, warned Garrido that the tents could be a code violation before leaving.

Well, a stern warning should take care of it.

"Hey, those tents are a code violation."
"OK. I don't want to violate any codes." God forbid the codes are violated.

"None of the children have ever been to school, they've never been to a doctor," El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said. "They were kept in complete isolation in this compound, if you will."

Yes, I will. That's the part that confounds me. I'm not big on doctor visits, but in 18 years I've had 36 dentist check-ups, a few caps and fillings and at least ten trips to the doctor for some illness or other. How does one get away without seeing medical help for 18 years?

So here's the other end of the deal. If this nitwit could figure out how to keep a young girl captive for 18 years, don't you think that there's a sicko manual for such behavior? This guy isn't the Louis Pasteur of weirdos - it's some sort of thought-out systematic behavior of which he probably isn't the only practitioner.

The next time you're wandering around, checking out the neighborhood, maybe you too should wonder, "What's going on in there?"