A man and his wife have denied abducting California woman Jaycee Lee Dugard when she was a child and holding her in their home for 18 years. Phillip and Nancy Garrido denied 29 charges including kidnap, rape and false imprisonment when they appeared briefly in court in El Dorado County. Ms Dugard was bundled into a car in the county in 1991 on her way to school. Police are also searching the Garrido home in Antioch for clues to several prostitute murders in the 1990s. Several bodies in the unsolved murders were dumped near an industrial park where Mr Garrido worked. Ms Dugard and two children she bore in captivity in Antioch, 200 miles (320km) away from where she was abducted, were freed this week. They are staying at a motel near San Francisco after being reunited with Ms Dugard's mother. Police apology Phillip Garrido, 58, a convicted rapist and kidnapper, is suspected of fathering Ms Dugard's children while he kept her in his backyard. He and his wife Nancy, 54, are accused of abducting her in the town of South Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. She was forced into a car as her stepfather Carl Probyn looked on. Mr Probyn tried in vain to give chase on a bicycle. Police have admitted that they missed an opportunity to uncover what was happening at Mr Garrido's home in November 2006, when a neighbour alerted them to suspicious behaviour there. "The caller said Garrido was psychotic and had a sexual addiction," Sheriff Warren Rupf told reporters. But the investigating police officer only spoke to Mr Garrido and did not enter his property to carry out a search. "I'm first in line to offer organisational criticism and to offer my apologies to the victims and accept responsibility for having missed an earlier opportunity," said Sheriff Rupf. 'A disgusting thing' Fred Kollar, undersheriff in El Dorado County, described finding a makeshift compound in the backyard consisting of sheds, tents and outbuildings. The true identity of the backyard's inhabitants only emerged after Mr Garrido was called in along with his "family" for a parole office hearing on Wednesday. Suspicions had been aroused when Mr Garrido, who has a printing business, was seen acting suspiciously towards the children as he tried to enter the University of California, Berkeley, campus to hand out religious literature. Diane Doty, a neighbour, has said she often heard children playing in the backyard. "I asked my husband, 'Why is he [Garrido] living in tents?'" she said on Thursday. "And he said, 'Maybe that is how they like to live.'" The alleged abductor has himself told a US TV channel that his story was "heart-warming". "It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around," Mr Garrido told KCRA television from El Dorado County jail. Court records show that Mr Garrido was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 25-year-old woman in South Lake Tahoe in 1976. A judge El Dorado County Superior Court in Placerville on Friday ordered them held without bail and a further court hearing has been scheduled for 14 September. Source: BBC