Jaycee Dugard appearing on TV

Tonight, 20/20 is going to air an exclusive interview with Jaycee Dugard. Too bad I won’t be able to see it. Some details of it have already been released. According to the article, the story about Jaycee getting financial support from a church isn’t true, but she did get support from an “undisclosed benefactor.”

Jaycee has gotten a driver’s license and is working on her GED, so she can go to college. She is going through some kind of therapy program involving horses. Way to go, girl! I’m so glad she seems to be doing well.

Good Morning America, in conjunction with the latest Jaycee story, has done an article profiling other missing persons but it’s quite out of date. For Robert Wiles, the last MP listed in the article, they fail to mention the fact that four months ago someone was charged with his murder.

More details on Jon Venables

The London Daily Telegraph, quoting unnamed sources, says Jon Venables was sent back to prison because he got into a bad fight with a co-worker and he’s gotten in trouble for using drugs before:

Venables is said to have developed a cocaine and ecstasy habit after being released in 2001. His arrest in 2008 is said to have happened when plain-clothed policemen caught him taking cocaine in an alley outside a nightclub.

Venables, said to have been living alone in a bedsit in the north of England, is reported to have been recalled after losing his temper “without warning” at his minimum wage job, fighting with a colleague until they were pulled apart.

In another article in the same paper it says,

Cloaked under his new identity, he regularly drank eight pints of Strongbow cider as well as Cheeky Vimtos – a potent combination of the alcopop WKD and two shots of port – it has been claimed.

Venables also allegedly took ecstasy and snorted cocaine and kitty – also known as methadrone or MCAT – on his nights out in the city.

Sources said he often left his friends to wander the streets of Liverpool at night – waiting alone at the station for the first train home in the morning.

But they insisted he had never returned to Bootle – the district of Liverpool where he and Thompson abducted Bulger from a crowded shopping centre.

The 27-year-old is said to have attempted to flirt with women in bars and nightclubs, but to have difficulty forming long term relationships.

Yet other accounts I read just a few days ago claimed Venables was engaged to be married. They also said his co-killer Robert Thompson was living with a gay lover. I don’t know how much you can trust these unverified sources — though of course any source that reveals their name is going to get in big trouble for releasing that kind of information.

The Sun is saying Venables is now in isolation because the other prisoners figured out his identity (in spite of the beard he’d grown) and they don’t want him to get killed. If this is true, it’s only a matter of time before the general public also learns his new name too.

I wonder what the government is going to do with him — if they really are going to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. All I can do is shake my head in wonder. That boy was given an opportunity hardly anyone has — a chance, a glorious golden chance to start over with a completely clean slate. A chance he really didn’t deserve, given what he had done. And he blew it.