Bones found in California kidnap case probably old

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bone slivers found near the home of a California man accused of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard and holding her for 18 years did not yield human DNA and are probably old Native American remains, police said on Friday.

The four pieces of bone were found during searches of property surrounding the home of Phillip Garrido, who is charged, along with his wife Nancy, with snatching Dugard from a street near her South Lake Tahoe home in 1991, when she was 11, and holding her captive for nearly two decades.

Dugard, who is now 29, surfaced in late August after Garrido aroused the suspicion of campus police at the University of California, Berkeley and was questioned by his parole officer.

Authorities say the couple kept Dugard prisoner in a squalid compound of tents and sheds behind their home near Antioch, east of San Francisco, where Garrido, 58, raped her and fathered her two daughters.

"The DOJ Bureau of Forensic Services was not able to recover human DNA from any of the bone fragments," Contra Costa County Sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee said. "A forensic anthropologist says the bones are probably human, old and likely Native American."

Authorities had cautioned early on that Native American remains are commonly found in the area.

Lee said investigators were still following up on tips that Garrido had recently been seen in the company of two young girls, said to be six or seven years old.

"Numerous people have been interviewed and probation searches were conducted. Up to now, detectives have not found any evidence of these two young girls," Lee said.

Both Phillip and Nancy Garrido, 54, have pleaded innocent to 29 criminal counts that include kidnapping for sexual purposes, forcible lewd acts and rape.

Phillip Garrido served 10 years in prison for the 1976 rape of another South Lake Tahoe woman. He was arrested in 1972 for drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl, but was never prosecuted because she refused to testify in court.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb, editing by Anthony Boadle)