From the time she was an 11-year-old, blue-eyed, freckle-faced blonde until she was a 29-year-old woman with two children, Jaycee Dugard was kept locked away in a shed by a couple police say abducted her.

She was more than 160 miles from home, and her family had no idea where she was.

Nobody else knew she was there except the couple that snatched her off the street in front of her house in South Lake Tahoe, California, in 1991, and took her straight to the soundproof shed, police said.

Jaycee’s pocket of Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s backyard in Antioch, California, was so overgrown no one even knew it existed.

Dugard and her two daughters are “in good health, but living in a backyard for the past 18 years does take its toll,” Undersheriff Fred Kollar said.

[...]

“You could walk through the backyard and never know there was another set of living circumstances,” said Kollar. “There was nothing that would cause you to question it. You can’t see it from either adjoining property. It was presumably well arranged.”

She was reunited Thursday with her mother, who was overjoyed to learn the ordeal was over and the daughter she feared dead was actually alive and well.

Jaycee’s stepfather, the last person to see her in 1991 and a longtime suspect in the case, said he was overwhelmed after doing everything he could to help find her. He said the news that she was found was like winning the lottery.

“To have this happen where we get her back alive, and where she remembers things from the past, and to have people in custody is a triple win,” he told The Sacramento Bee.

Yes! Chalk one up for the good guys…