Jean · The Second Abduction

The Second Abduction Practice Makes Perfect

For years, my mother would repeat the mantra "All your father had to do was give us the house. Give us the furniture. Give us everything." Yes, give her everything and crawl into a hole and die.

Instead he woke up one day to an empty house, his children abducted. Today, the same act would land the abducting parent in prison. It is a serious crime, with serious consequences. In 1974, there apparently weren't as many selfish, vicious people willing to do something like that to the other parent. It wasn't a situation seen very often, and there was no case law or interstate protocol for dealing with it.

Shortly after the abduction, the State of California did finalized the divorce decree, granting custody to my father. What prompted Jean was selfishness and spite. Her life was not what she expected. She was not able to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, with whomever she wanted. In the words of my father's sister, who stayed with us for a few long vacations and kept in close contact with my father, "She had stopped being discreet" in her extramarital activities, her laisons with teenage men and even co-workers of my father.

And because my father finally understood this, and wasn't going to tolerate it or give in to her extortion, she must have decided that he deserved whatever he got. Jean would later use any number of excuses for why she "fled" to Massachusetts, all were interchangeable and depended on her mood, her audience, and the amount of alcohol in her system:

At various times she claimed:

• That she feared for her life (laughable, at best )
• That "the children missed their family in Massachusetts" (also laughable, I barely knew my family in Massachusetts, and being abducted and taken away from all my friends, school, and actitivies in California without even a "goodbye" was one the most traumatic experiences of my life).
• That she would go back just as soon as he gave her everything. (This much was probably true. It's also called "ransom")

Once in Massachusetts, we became the financial responsibility of my grandparents. My mother had not ever worked, and didn't plan to then, either. She planned to extort money from my father. She demanded child support payments, while refusing to allow him to speak with us or contact us by any means. She found a low rent apartment and went on Welfare. She kept us hidden inside and told us our father planned to kidnap us. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the one that had already abducted us.

She continued to destroy our father's image in our minds. In fact, she intensified the efforts. She told us he didn't care about us, that if he did, he would give us "our furniture. That furniture belongs to you kids". By this time she had received her distribution of her half of the marital assets. Right down the middle. Most of what she got was the equity in the motorhome, a small sum of money from the sale of the house, and items in her possession. "Our furniture" belonged to my father by virtue of equitable law. But she wanted everything. And as long as she didn't have it, she was going to destroy my father's life.

My father spent years trying to find us. When he did find out were we were (I'm sure he had a good idea we were in the same town as Jean's parents, she was never that clever and lacked the necessary skills or desire to support herself elswehere), she would instill fear in us by telling us our father was coming for us. She knew he was in town once, and even knew were we lived, and he came and knocked on the door. I remember vividly her terrifying my brother and sister, and making us go hide under the beds or in the closets, telling us he would kill her and us if he found us.

Cards and gifts that he sent to us via my mother's parents, and later to our actual address, were either thrown away or opened, checked for any evidence that they came from him, and rewrapped and given from "her". When my father called and asked to speak to us, she refused. She told him he could never have any contact with us unless he gave her money and "the furniture". Weird that the furniture kept coming up, like an obsession. Attached is a sound file made from a tape recording my father made from California. Both of my parents made many recordings of each others conversations, perhaps the laws regarding such recordings were more lax than they are today. Excerpts from call, November 21, 1975, the day after Thanksgiving:

Refusing Phone Contact - In this snippet, my mother refuses to allow my father to speak to us because he won't send her money. He has not seen us or spoken to us in 14 months, since she abducted us. She is still using this refusal of any contact as a way to hurt him. She wants him to pay her without having the ability to speak with or ever see us. This is perhaps the best documented example of the equation kids=money.

Admitting to Alienating Children - In this conversation, my mother has berated my father for not sending a full $300.00 a month, to supplement her welfare checks. This is with utter disregard for the fact that my father had legal custody of us, and that she was the abductor. She tells him (gleefully) that she is indeed telling his children negative things about him, and that he is trying to screw her over. Notice she says he's done nothing but try to "screwing her " first, then as an afterthought, rephrases to "the kids". This re-occurs throughout the lengthy recording, were repeatedly she talks about what she wants, then suddenly will say "the kid's want". In her eyes, it is not her fault that through the abduction of her children she is now living in a cheap apartment in Massachusetts. It is my father's fault for not giving her everything she demanded. Very sick.

Attached here is a complete transcript. Note the frequent slips were she says things like "My stuff" and backtracks to say "the kid's stuff". It was never about us, or what was ours, it was about Jean, and what she believed was hers. She kidnapped a man's children, took them three thousand miles away, and made him choose between being extorted for money while not able to see his kids, or giving her everything he had in order for her to come back (a situation that was financially impossible, but she literally did not care if he slept on someones couch, as long as she had the house), or leave everything - his career, his friends, everything, to go back to the East Coast and start over from scratch.

My brother and sister, being younger, were more susceptible to the brainwashing she was applying. Today, there is a recognized term for this, "Parental Alienation Syndrome". Being a victim, it is in my opinion one of the most vicious methods of harming another parent AND the children that any human being could ever engage in.

In the meantime, while my father was trying to find us so that he could have us returned to California were he had legal custody, my mother chose another route. Someone must have suggested to her than an annulment of their marriage would in effect negate any divorce decree, settlement, and custody order in California, since if the marriage was null and void, the divorce would have no effect.

She filed for annulment, claiming that after fifteen years she had just "discovered" that my father was <SURPRISE> still married in Arizona when they were first married and that she had <SURPRISE AGAIN> "no idea", and that he committed fraud, and hence the marriage should be annulled.

My father's council was apparently not very competent, but even so, the fact was that he was technically still married at the time they married and that seemed to support her contention of fraud. But that alone would not have been enough had he found that greeting card, previously mentioned, because if he had it in her own handwriting she clearly could not claim she was tricked or misled in any way. It would at least have given him an honest chance against a dishonest opponent. However, knowing my mother as well as I do, that would not have been the end of it. The next step would have been to declare it was a forgery, and try to sell it with every ounce of guile and femininity as she could muster, under oath, perjury or not.

That battle was lost, and the marriage was annulled. As yet another sign of my mother's character, she asked the court to grant her half of the marital assets. Not the assets she already had received half of, but half of what my father had left. That, and of course, alimony and child support.

The court did give her alimony in the amount of 1$ (one dollar) a year. The one dollar alimony was a legal slap in the face from the Judge's bench, and I think the message was clear. Child support was granted, to be paid directly to the Massachusetts Welfare Department. And the judge clearly saw through the trickery of the additional request for more of the marital assets, and denied it.

< - Previous | Next - >