The Last Place You'd Look (12 page)

• Fingerprint your child and keep both the fingerprints and the child’s Social Security number in a safe, accessible place.

• Teach your child how to call you. Have him or her memorize phone numbers where you can be reached, if the child is old enough. Explain collect calls and let the child know how to make one.

• Make sure your child’s dentist maintains up-to-date dental records and keep track of where his or her medical records are located.

• Make certain all schools, day care centers, babysitters, and anyone else who might have care and control of the child are aware of outstanding custody orders. If you have reason to believe abduction is a possibility, put the other caretakers on alert. Provide them with a photograph of the noncustodial parent so they can better identify him or her, and give orders to be notified if the noncustodial parent shows up unscheduled or if the child fails to arrive when expected.

• Establish rules about where your children can go, including whose car they can ride in and whose homes they can enter. Make sure your children understand these rules.

• Listen to what your child says. Sometimes there are clues that a noncustodial parent may be planning a kidnapping and they may not seem significant until viewed in hindsight.

• Keep a DNA sample. One way to do this is to take a swab of the inside of your child’s mouth with a clean, dry cotton swab or a used toothbrush kept in a brown paper envelope stored in a cool, dry place.

• Reinforce with anyone who has possession or control of your child—even a friend’s mom or the soccer coach—that the child is not allowed to leave or deviate from a preapproved schedule without your permission.

• Assess possible abduction factors and ask the court to consider ordering supervised visitation and other provisions that will help circumvent kidnapping attempts.

• Retain three certified copies of the court order granting you custody.

• Keep records on the other parent, including address, phone number, physical description, photograph, any identifying numbers (like a driver’s license), birth date, background information including prior places of residence, relatives, friends, hobbies, habits, vehicles, and access to other resources such as bank accounts and cash.

• Talk to your lawyer about flagging airlines and speaking with police or the prosecutor’s office if the threat seems imminent.

• Know the proper authorities and resources available to you if an abduction attempt occurs or is successful.

The Hague Convention, mentioned earlier, is an important component for remedying international parental abductions. The convention was put in place in part to reduce the harmful effects of international abductions and to promote the rapid and lawful return of children kidnapped and taken abroad. It doesn’t always work that way, though: not all countries have signed the convention and of those that have signed not every one is always in compliance.

The Philippines is not a Hague Convention signatory, nor does the United States have a treaty governing child abduction with that nation. A child who falls victim to a parental kidnapping and is taken from the United States to the Philippines, therefore, would be subject to Philippine laws and the way their courts interpret them.

Furthermore, parental abduction is not a crime in the Philippines, as it is in the United States; instead, it is considered a civil matter. It is traditional in that country for children under the age of seven to be placed with their mothers unless authorities deem them unfit. And, although the United States and the Philippines have a standing extradition treaty, parental abduction is not extraditable. Laws that vary so much from nation to nation make an already-difficult situation even more frustrating, especially when a parental kidnapping involves multiple foreign countries.

A nation that is a signatory of the Hague Convention, like the United Kingdom, would in theory offer more assistance to the aggrieved parent than one that is not. However, even convention signatories are not always cooperative, resulting in what can turn into years of haggling in court over the return of a child. In all fairness, other countries have complained that the United States is also slow in righting wrongs in cases of parental abduction when a child has been removed to the United States. When viewed under the lens of world opinion, Americans don’t always practice what they preach.

According to KlaasKids Foundation (www.klaaskids.org, established in honor of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, who was abducted by a stranger from the bedroom of her California home and slain), “family kidnapping is committed primarily by parents, involves a larger percentage of female perpetrators than other types of kidnapping offenses, occurs more frequently to children under six, equally victimizes juveniles of both sexes, and most often originates in the home.”

Some believe because the kidnapped child is with a parent, he or she is safe; however, these abductions deprive the remaining parent of the child’s company and can lead to a much more sinister conclusion.

According to the OJJDP, parental kidnappings have the potential for many negative effects on the targeted child. Abducted children can be

• exposed to psychological harm;

• forced to live a fugitive existence;

• subjected to having their names and appearances altered;

• prevented from attending school;

• coerced into believing their left-behind parent does not love them, was abusive, or is deceased;

• coached to fear authority figures such as police;

• neglected or mistreated; and

• killed.

Parents run with their kids for a variety of reasons, but the most common motivators are power, control, and revenge: they want to hurt the other parent, deprive him or her of the child’s companionship, and show that parent “who is boss.” And every so often, the parental abductor does the unthinkable, as in the case of Lindsey and Sam Porter, ages eight and seven, whose father, Daniel, picked them up for a weekend visit on June 5, 2004.

At the time, Daniel and his wife, Tina, both of Independence, Missouri, were going through an acrimonious divorce. Tina Porter later told investigators that the kids were excited about spending time with their dad. A judge had granted Daniel weekend visitations with his children despite his history of substance abuse and threats toward Tina. When her husband collected the kids, Tina reminded him to have them back by six o’clock on Sunday night. Later that day, Tina told investigators, Daniel began to send her a series of strange, menacing messages.

Tina said the text messages led her on a bizarre search for her children, a kind of macabre scavenger hunt in which Daniel would direct Tina to different places where he claimed to have hidden either clues to Lindsey and Sam’s location or had stashed the children themselves. He also called with repeated suicide threats. Tina later told reporters she appealed to police, who pointed out that because the couple was still married, Daniel had as much right to the kids as she did—the equivalent of an official shoulder shrug.

The time to return the kids came and went. A frantic Tina again contacted police and begged for help. She said she was told to give Daniel a little more time. The next morning officers launched a search. Monday night, Daniel was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of an impairing substance in a nearby jurisdiction, but because there was no hold put on him, he bonded out of jail. Two days later, authorities located Daniel again, and after a bizarre confrontation in which they shot out the tires on his truck, he was apprehended and questioned as to the whereabouts of his children.

Daniel told anyone who would listen that the kids were “in a better place.” Charged with both parental abduction and kidnapping, he was tried and sentenced to eight years imprisonment because the children had not yet been found.

Three years after their father picked them up for a weekend outing, the skeletal remains of Lindsey and Sam were found in a wooded area near Independence, a place where Daniel once liked to hunt. Daniel murdered them a few hours after he picked them up from their mother.

“Daniel had actually taken them, put them face down, shot them in the back of the head, and buried them in a grave that was less than three feet deep,” says one individual involved in the case who asked not to be named. “It was horrible.”

Authorities say Daniel told them that after taking his kids to a fast-food restaurant for breakfast, he drove them to the wooded area, where he spread out a blanket, blindfolded them, and had them lie on the blanket. He then shot them both at the same time, a gun in each hand.

R

Not every case of parental abduction ends in such a terrible way. Jake Schmidt, a private investigator who works out of Beverly Hills, California, takes on a few pro bono parental abduction cases each year. He once heard of a situation involving a little boy believed to have been abducted by his noncustodial father and taken to Mexico.

Schmidt says that Colton O’Neal’s mother and his stepmother, frustrated by the inability of local police to track the missing child, approached the feds for assistance. The women claimed they got the brush-off, so they launched their own initiative, establishing a Web site, giving interviews critical of law enforcement, and snagging Schmidt’s attention.

In one month, Schmidt was able to find the boy and bring him home. The child had been missing for a year and a half before being reunited with his family.

The California private operative has a long list of cases of children he has located who were taken by noncustodial parents. He found little Everett and Celestia Langille (who were ages one and two, respectively, when they were abducted) in Los Angeles after their father, Michael, was discovered working there—far from their kids’ home in Pennsylvania. The children were reunited with their mother, Nicole, after evaporating for five months—a long, agonizing time for the young mother who, as Schmidt remarked when he found them, was robbed of seeing her young son take his first step.

“The first thing I tell any client is to have reasonable expectations about what can be done, and don’t base [those expectations] on movies and television,” Schmidt says, adding, “Most people don’t have reasonable expectations.”

Family abductions are the most common type of child abduction, and child abductions are more common than most realize: according to the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART-2), which was released in 2002, more than 200,000 children are reported as abducted by family members each year. Another 58,000 kids are taken each year by nonfamily members, and about 115 of what are referred to as “stereotypical” kidnappings occur in which ransom demands are made, the kidnapper plans to keep the child permanently, or the victim is killed.

The NISMART report broke down the statistics on family-abducted children even further: of a total of 203,900 abductions classified as family abductions for the purposes of the report, 117,200 are classified as “caretaker missing,” a subcategory that the report’s authors defined as “the caretaker did not know where the child was, became alarmed for at least an hour, and looked for the child.” In 56,500 of the family abductions studied, the child was reported as missing to authorities.

That’s another number that bears closer scrutiny: not all children who are abducted by a parent are reported missing. In fact, the majority are not reported because many times the custodial parent is aware of the child’s whereabouts. One example of this takes place when a child is on a visitation with the other parent and is not returned at the appropriate time.

Family abduction ranks second to running away as the most common reason a child goes missing. Of family-abducted children, the fathers took 53 percent, while mothers are responsible for 25 percent. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members abducted the remainder of those children.

The good news is that 46 percent are returned within a week; 21 percent are returned within a month of their abductions. The majority of kids taken by a family member are recovered in a short amount of time, but other custodial parents, like Stephen Watkins and David Goldman, must launch complicated and expensive searches for their children.

In the excellent government resource,
Family Abduction Prevention
, author Patricia M. Hoff outlines the following steps a parent should take when searching for a child:

• File a missing persons report with the appropriate law enforcement agency.

• Request that the agency enter your child into National Crime Information Center Missing Person File with a child abduction flag.

• Request the issuance of an Amber Alert.

• Contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

• Search for information under any aliases the abductor may be using (think maiden, middle, and former names, and so forth).

• Keep a record of every person and agency with whom you come in contact, and stay in touch with them.

• When your child is located, follow up with the agencies and individuals who assisted you with your search.

In addition to the above suggestions, it also helps to network with missing persons organizations, including the clearinghouses in each state (a full list of these clearinghouses can be found in
Family Abduction Prevention
or at www
.klaaskids.org). Another exceptional resource can be the organizations that belong to the Association of Missing and Exploited Children’s Organizations (AMECO), whose member organizations offer various levels of support and advice for families whose children are missing. One of those sites belongs to Kelly Jolkowski, founder of Project Jason (www.projectjason.org).

Many of the people Kelly helps through her Web site and work have children who were the targets of parental abductions. But there are others who advocate for children kidnapped by a parent for a very different reason. They are members of an underground network that helps women who claim to be fleeing abusive partners for the sake of the children.