"I was always looking for a way to get away," says Christine Murphy, talking about the darkest time of her life...her marriage to Jaycee Lee Dugard's accused kidnapper Phillip Garrido.

"He's a monster," she says.

Christine and Phillip Garrido were high school sweethearts in northern California.

But there were early signs that Garrido was no Prince Charming.  Christine says Garrido was accused of raping a teenager while she was dating him.  She believed him when he told her the teen was lying.

"Why did you marry him?" asks INSIDE EDITION's Diane McInerney.
"I was in love with him," Christine says.

When they eloped in 1973, Christine was filled with optimism about the future. But she says life with Garrido quickly became a nightmare.

"He started to get controlling, he started hitting me," she says.  "He smacked me, he told me to grow up."

Just 19 when they married, Christine worked at a Reno casino to pay the bills because Garrido, an aspiring musician, had no real income. She says he took LSD or smoked marijuana every day, and he became violent when she refused to go along with his sexual fantasies.

"What did he ask you to do?" McInerney asks.
"Multiple partners is what he wanted, I wouldn’t go for that," says Christine.

When Garrido saw another man flirt with his wife, Christine says he took out a safety pin and dug it into her face.  The scar is still visible.  And when she ran away, Garrido carried out what was probably his first kidnapping.

"He pulled up in front me and we got in an argument and he grabbed me and threw me in the car," she says of the incident.  

Four years into the marriage, Garrido was convicted of kidnapping and raping a woman and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

"Honestly [I was] relieved, it was my exit out," Christine says of Garrido's sentence.

Christine later remarried and had four children.  She had no idea that her ex-husband had been released from jail until she heard the news about the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

"It made me sick to my stomach," she says of Dugard's ordeal.

Christine says she has total sympathy for what Jaycee has gone through these last 18 years.
 
"What do you want to say to Phillip Garrido right now?"

"Nothing. The only person I have anything to say to is the victims: Just be strong, take it one day at a time."