Aug 31, 2009 3:37 pm US/Central
Kidnapper-Busting Cop Is From Chicago Area
'Something Wasn't Right,' Lisa Campbell Tells CBS 2
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
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Former Chicago cop Lisa Campbell helped break an 18-year-old kidnapping case in California.
CBS
She's a Chicago-trained cop, and she helped set Jaycee Lee Dugard free.
What she did that broke the 18-year-old kidnapping case wide open after she became suspicious about Phillip Garrido.
CBS 2's Mike Parker talked by satellite Monday with Officer Lisa Campbell.
She was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Like her father and mother, she became a cop, first with the Cook County Sheriff, then with the Chicago Police Department.
She left for the warmer West Coast weather several years ago and joined the campus police at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
Now she's a newsmaker.
One week ago, Philip Garrido came to the UC Berkeley Police Department to get a permit for a campus event involving a group he called "God's Desire." He talked with Officer Lisa Campbell. The suspicions began.
"Mr. Garrido went on in a sort of like a rampage," Campbell said Monday. "He was very animated, he was extremely excited and clearly he appeared to be unstable."
With Garrido were two girls -- aged 15 and 11 -- now believed to be the daughters he fathered with long-missing kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard. The girls, Campbell told Parker, acted strangely, "robotic." It was "disturbing," she said.
"It was one of those things, years of experience and working with kids, working with school patrol in Chicago, working in the various departments that I worked in -- there are just things you get to know, and something just wasn't right with that situation," she said.
After a second meeting, along with another officer, Garrido's history as a sex offender was revealed, and the two officers notified his probation officer. Police swept into the compound and the story was revealed.
The story Garrido is hinting at in a jailhouse interview is dramatically different.
"Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house," he said. "You're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around. In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story."
"That certainly doesn't sound like a powerful heartwarming story, does it?" Parker asked Campbell.
"I think that in his mind, he's got a conviction and that's what he lives and that's what he believes," she said.
Officer Campbell does not believe she is a hero for helping to unravel all this.
"I feel that as though what I did is what Chicago police officers and officers across the country do every day," she said.
Parker later talked with one of Campbell's supervisors when she was in the Cook County Sheriff's department back in the 1990s. She worked in domestic violence court.
Sgt. Charles Merrill called her "one of the best deputies" he ever saw. As for her helping to crack this case, he said he wasn't surprised.
"I've always expected great things out of her," he said.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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