Anyone who’s followed the story of Jaycee Dugard, kidnapped and held captive for 18 years, has to be especially puzzled and horrified by Nancy Garrido, wife of Phillip Garrido, the man who forced Jaycee to bear him two children when she was still in her teens.

How could she have witnessed such abuse and not tried to stop it?

“In some ways, to me, she is the real monster,” Cheyvonne Molino, who knew the Garridos in their town of Antioch, Calif., told a reporter. “She is a woman and should never have let this happen.”

Frighteningly, the Garridos’ relationship appears to have been headed from the beginning toward just such a horror as Jaycee’s kidnapping. Nancy, 54, met her future husband in 1981 amid overtones of violence, perversion and crime. He was in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., serving a 50-year sentence for repeatedly raping a 25-year-old woman in a storage shed — eerily similar to the kind of shed in which he would later lock Jaycee. And while he was serving time, Garrido showed even more signs of a twisted mind: He composed and recorded suggestive songs about young girls.

The thought of getting involved with someone like Garrido would be unthinkable for most people. But “these are damaged women,” Sheila Isenberg, author of Women Who Love Men Who Kill, tells BettyConfidential.com. Isenberg, who interviewed three dozen women who were involved with either killers or men serving more than 30 years in prison, adds, “They were abused — physically, sexually or psychologically — in their family or a marriage.”