A man and his wife have denied abducting¹ California woman Jaycee Lee Dugard when she was a child and holding her in their home for 18 years.

一名男子和他妻子否认诱拐了儿童时期的加利福尼亚州妇女Jaycee Lee Dugard并将其囚禁家中长达18年。

Layout of the back garden where Jaycee Lee Dugard is said to have lived

Phillip Garrido, 58, and his spouse²（配偶） Nancy, 54, denied 28 charges when they appeared briefly³ in court in Placerville, El Dorado County.

Ms Dugard was bundled into（乱塞进） a car in the county in 1991 on her way to school.

Police are also searching the Garrido home in Antioch for clues to several prostitute murders in the 1990s.

Several bodies in the unsolved murders were dumped near an industrial park where Mr Garrido worked.

Ms Dugard and two children she bore in captivity⁴ in Antioch, 200 miles (320km) away from where she was abducted⁵, were freed this week.

They are staying at a motel near San Francisco after being reunited with Ms Dugard's mother.

Police apology

Phillip Garrido, 58, a convicted rapist and kidnapper⁶, is suspected of fathering Ms Dugard's children while he kept her in his backyard.

He and his wife Nancy, 54, are accused of abducting her in the town of South Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

She was forced into a car as her stepfather Carl Probyn looked on. Mr Probyn tried in vain to give chase on a bicycle.

Police have admitted that they missed an opportunity to uncover what was happening at Mr Garrido's home in November 2006, when a neighbour alerted them to suspicious behaviour there.

"The caller said Garrido was psychotic（精神病的） and had a sexual addiction," Sheriff Warren Rupf told reporters.

But the investigating police officer only spoke⁷ to Mr Garrido and did not enter his property to carry out a search.

"I'm first in line to offer organisational criticism and to offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility for having missed an earlier opportunity," said Sheriff Rupf.

'A disgusting thing'

Fred Kollar, undersheriff（代理长官） in El Dorado County, described finding a makeshift（临时的） compound in the backyard consisting of sheds, tents and outbuildings.

The true identity of the backyard's inhabitants only emerged after Mr Garrido was called in along with his "family" for a parole（假释） office hearing on Wednesday.

Suspicions had been aroused when Mr Garrido, who has a printing business, was seen acting⁸ suspiciously towards the children as he tried to enter the University of California, Berkeley, campus to hand out religious literature.

Diane Doty, a neighbour, has said she often heard children playing in the backyard.

"I asked my husband, 'Why is he [Garrido] living in tents?'" she said on Thursday.

"And he said, 'Maybe that is how they like to live.'"

The alleged⁹ abductor has himself told a US TV channel that his story was "heart-warming".

"It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around," Mr Garrido told KCRA television from El Dorado County jail.

Court records show that Mr Garrido was convicted of kidnapping and raping¹⁰ a 25-year-old woman in South Lake Tahoe in 1976.