He was the prime suspect — until yesterday.
Carl Probyn, stepfather of long-missing kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard, was the last one to see the adorable, pigtailed 11-year-old before she was abducted near her home in Meyers, Calif., south of Lake Tahoe, on June 10, 1991.
“Being the stepdad made me [a] suspect,” said the 60-year-old Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War, now a wallpapering contractor. “It’s been a long road.”
A road littered with pain and loss.
Probyn said he saw someone reach out and grab his stepdaughter from a car that then sped away.
“As soon as I saw the door fly open, the driver’s door, I jumped on my mountain bike and I tried to get to the top of the hill but I had no energy,” he recalled. “I rode back down and yelled at my neighbor, ‘911!’ ”
Probyn said Jaycee’s kidnapping led to the breakup of his marriage to Terry, the girl’s mom, although he remains close with her and the 19-year-old daughter they had together, Shayna.
Having police grill him added to his ordeal.
“I’ve never been in jail a day in my life,” he said. “My last speeding ticket was in 1977.”
But in the years following the kidnapping, he took no less than three FBI lie-detector tests.
“They were fishing,” he said. “I have no fault with them. I can’t knock them for what they were doing.”
He said authorities suggested that the child had been abducted by a drug gang over a supposed debt owed by Probyn.
On occasion over the long years since the nightmare began, his beautiful stepdaughter’s case would be revisited by the media. It was once featured on “America’s Most Wanted.”
Finally, relief came Wednesday.
“Mom has something to say to you. Are you sitting down?” Shayna asked her father in a phone call, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Jaycee had been found.
Carl and Terry cried for about 10 minutes, he told the newspaper.
He said the FBI had called his wife, who lives in Riverside, Calif., at her work number and told her the improbable, wonderful news.
And to prove it, agents put Jaycee on the phone.
“My wife said that who she spoke to remembers everything,” Probyn said. “My wife and Jaycee were joined at the hip.”
And yesterday, nobody was more elated at the rescue than Probyn.
“It’s a miracle that we got her back,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “How do you get 18 years back. . . . I just hope she can have a decent life from here on out. Her life kind of stopped at 11.”