ANTIOCH _ Specially trained canines sniffed around a home Sunday where convicted rapist Phillip Garrido held Jaycee Dugard captive for more than 18 years.

Cadaver dogs were used as police looked for evidence that might link Garrido to open murder cases in the area. By early evening, the search was concluded but authorities said they would return to the house on Monday to resume their search.

A neighboring house was also searched but Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jimmy Lee emphasized that Garrido’s neighbor, Damon Robinson, was not a suspect. Rather, Robinson’s house was being searched because of Garrido’s connection to it.

“We know Phillip Garrido had access to the property,” Lee said. “It looks like he lived in a shed on that property.” The house was vacant in 2006, but Lee said authorities did not know when Garrido might have lived there.

Meanwhile, Jaycee Lee Dugard was secluded with her mother and daughters in the Bay Area.

“They’re basically trying to make this less painful for the girls,” said Jaycee’s stepfather, Carl Probyn. “They’re just trying to bond and get it together a little bit.”

Eighteen years after Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted from a bus stop on her South Lake Tahoe street, her name has gained new prominence.

Details of the story about Dugard, 29, who re-appeared Wednesday afternoon in Concord for the first time since her kidnapping June 11, 1991, are available in our Contra Costa Times story.

The search term “jaycee lee dugard” was the top item on Google Trends at 10 a.m. today and remained there as of just a few minutes ago.

Google Trends is an hourly-updated “snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time.” The search engine has given the search term a ranking of “volcanic.”

Update, 1:40 p.m.: The search term “phillip garrido” has entered the Google Trends top-20 list at No. 20 with a ranking of “medium.” Garrido, a resident of unincorporated Antioch and a registered sex offender, was arrested in connection with the Dugard case after a Wednesday parole hearing in Concord.

Update, 5 p.m.: The search terms “jaycee lee dugard” and “phillip garrido” were briefly at Nos. 1 and 2 on the Google Trends’ top-100 “hot trends” list before their displacement this evening. Other related terms now trending include “jaycee lee dugard press conference” at No. 2, “philip garrido” at No. 3, “el dorado county sheriff” at No. 8, “kidnapped girl found years later” at No. 9, “nancy garrido” at No. 11, “god s desire” at No. 15, “1991 kidnap victim found” at No. 44, and “carl probyn” at No. 74.

Two people were shot dead – one of them a toll taker – at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge Tuesday evening after the driver of a shuttle van armed with a shotgun opened fire and then fled toward Richmond.

The vehicle, described as a white van with orange and black lettering with the words “Western Shuttle” stenciled along the side, entered the toll plaza and shot the unidentified toll taker before turning around and heading east. Information about the second fatality was not immediately available.

The driver was described as a black male or female with short hair, according to police broadcasts. The van was last seen headed toward Interstate 80, the broadcasts indicated.
Domenic Toboni of San Rafael said he was about 200 yards from the shooting.

“All I saw is the guy shooting into the toll plaza,” he said. “It was a
shotgun.”

Toboni said the gunman fired at least three times.

At the toll plaza, at least three dozen law enforcement units with officers from Richmond police, the California Highway Patrol, the Marin sheriff’s office and others secured the crime scene. One toll booth was sealed off with a body inside.

Traffic was snarled in both directions. Just before 7 p.m., five of the seven westbound lanes were closed including the two FasTrak lanes.

Contact Gary Klien at gklien@marinij.com and Jennifer Upshaw at
jupshaw@marinij.com.

Huckaby, who is due back in court Friday for further arraignment, has a 5-year-old daughter who was a playmate of Sandra’s, the 8-year-old from Tracy who was kidnapped March 27 and found dead 10 days later.

Huckaby, 28, was living with her grandparents and daughter in a Tracy mobile home park. She is charged with raping and killing the little girl, who lived nearby.

On April 16, less than a week after Tracy police arrested his ex-wife in connection with Sandra’s death, Johnny Huckaby asked a court in Orange County to give him custody of their daughter.

Melissa and Johnny Huckaby were married when she was pregnant. They moved to Southern California and divorced soon after, with Melissa getting full custody and Johnny at one point living in the Kansas City, Kan., area, where Melissa filed court papers earlier this year seeking unpaid child support from him.

Their daughter has been living with Melissa Huckaby’s parents, Judy and Brian Lawless, in the Southern California town of Cypress, according to court filings.

On April 6 Franco found a large black suitcase floating in a dairy farm pond near Whitehall Road. He thought it was suspicious, as it hadn’t been there two weeks ago when the pond was last drained, so police were called in at about 10 a.m.

After a day-long investigation, that had media helicopters hovering over the farm site to film shots of the suitcase, it was transported by San Joaquin County coroner’s officals and opened at their facilities.

Tracy kidnapping victim Cantu, 8, had been missing since March 27. She was last seen alive just two miles away from the pond, at the Orchard Estates Mobile Home park.

The suitcase would prove to a key piece of evidence in leading to the arrest of 28-year-old Melissa Huckaby, who told a local newspaper just a few days after Sandra’s body was found that she had a similar suitcase stolen from her driveway the day Sandra was reported missing.

Huckaby was arrested on murder, kidnapping and rape charges on April 10.

According a press release issued by Tracy police, the check will be handed over in a presentation expected to last about 30 minutes.

Although it was initially reported that the workers who found the body were refusing to accept a reward, last week police said about $20,000 would be given to an anonymous recipient — much to the chagrin of Los Angeles psychic Dana Pedlow, who claims she gave police key tips about the case.

Apparently, as Franco ended up giving media interviews, he’s no longer anonymous. According to one TV report, he planned to use the money to help his children attend college.

When you see a town in your midst reduced to a four-minute TV feature, complete with the sober voice of a broadcaster lamenting the loss of innocence, it gives one new perspective on how easy it is for the truth of a place to get lost in the spin.

A piece aired by Nightline last night, titled “American Gothic,” was the latest, following a long string including Nancy Grace segments, Dr. Phil and even a feature in People magazine.

The Nightline piece wasn’t bad (although I could have lived without 10 shots of the good old downtown water tower), but the title was a little much for a town of 82,000 that’s become a major residential hub for commuters working in the Bay Area.

Alluding to the classic 1930 Grant Wood painting of a stoic buttoned-up white Iowa farm couple really doesn’t have much to do with a Central Valley community where the population as of 2007 was about 30 percent Hispanic or Latino, with a long history of Portugese immigrants in the mix.

The posting is in response to our story about her beef with the Tracy police department.

Police and psychics working together to solve crimes isn’t anything new, but in the case of the Sandra Cantu murder case, this time it seems to be more a situation of Police vs. The Psychic.

The Los Angeles-based Pedlow, whose claim to fame is she predicted on live radio how a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., serial killer would be found, is upset because she swears she sent some tips to the Tracy police that identified where Sandra’s body would be found and is entitled to some of the reward money.

(Incidentally, Bay Area residents, Pedlow says she did undergraduate work in psychology and minored in criminology at Cal Poly and was offered a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley, but she instead went to New York to work on the radio.)

Here’s a few tidbits from her website biography:

“My life as a clairvoyant began at birth. It always was. It was never a choice, it was part of my identity. My listening to The Spirit within me, led to resistance from my parents. My persistence was greeted with hostility and denial in the beginning, then things were altered by defining moments in my life.

“One of my first defining moments occurred when I was 4 and a half years old. My father, sister, and I were taking a walk in Niagara Falls Park. My sister was learning to walk and was slow, so I ran ahead. In Niagara Falls, due to the forceful winds, metal trash cans at the park are placed in iron rod receptacles which shield them from tipping over due to the strong gusts of wind. I spotted a trash can and I turned around to “announce” to my father that there was a gun in that trash can. My father said, “no, there isn’t.” I remember the sense of frustration and anger that people were denying what I would “sense.” I said, “yes there is.” I ran ahead and proceeded to rock that iron rod container until both the trash can and receptacle were laying on the ground-against the protests of my father. I yelled there is a gun in there- “then he responded it is a toy gun.” I said “no it is not,” and I retrieved it.”

Late last week reporter Josh Richman managed to reach the Rev. Oliver Bittleston, pastor of the Clarkston First Church of God from 1982 to 1994, at his Clarkston home to ask him about the FBI’s visit to the church. Agents went there in connection with their investigation into murder suspect Melissa Huckaby and her family, including the Rev. Lane Lawless, whose Clover Road Baptist church in Tracy was searched as part of the Cantu investigation. Lawless was ordained in Washington state in the 1970s.

Bittleston said he’d just returned from a Clarkston grocery store, where he’d bumped into the church’s current pastor, the Rev. Bill Creutzberg, who was familiar with the FBI probe and subsequent media calls.

“I have absolutely no idea, I wish that I knew something,” Bittleston said. “The only thing we can do is if there’s any interrogation or investigation that involves the church up here, we’ll have to do it in the presence of our lawyers.”

Bittleston said he has not been contacted by the authorities and has “no recollection” of Lane Lawless or of “any connection” to the Cantu case. Asked if there’d ever been allegations of child abuse and/or molestation at the church, he replied, “At one time, there was some… but it was an adult not involved with any of that name (Lawless) that I’m aware of.”

“We at the church found an elderly person who was doing some not-good things, so it went to court and he was sent into state jurisdiction” – meaning state prison, Bittleston said. “I was called in on that but I can’t see where there was any connection there… Any time that a church is working with children you’re going to have a certain amount of that … but we took it right to the authorities and it was taken care of.”

Bittleston also recalled that sometime early in his tenure at the church, “as I recall there was a young fellow and he came and immediately wanted to be associate pastor. … I didn’t feel right about it, I asked for some references. I think he was at church once or twice and he was gone.”

Bittleston said he recalled neither that person’s name nor the year in which he visited the church.

Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune City Editor Craig Clohessy said his researchers couldn’t find anything in their archives about Lawless being in the area though they’ve “heard tell” that he had been at some point.

Lawless’ church web site biography states that he came to Tracy in 1981.

In addition to the nine seats pre-assigned on Wednesday by San Joaquin County Superior Court officials, 17 spots were given out by lottery at 11 a.m. this morning. There were 17 applications for those spots.

However, it’s likely that some members of the media didn’t bother making the trek to Stockton, thinking that they would be shut out. The court has also banned all cameras from the proceedings. A media attorney said that courts have pretty full discretion over how to allot access to the media in high-profile cases.

Huckaby, charged with kidnapping, raping and killing 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, is due to appear at 1 p.m. this afternoon.

To read all about this case, visit our archive of stories.