Moms of the Missing, page 7
“People have warned me about the perpetrators, because they are very dangerous, but what more can they do to me? They have already taken everything from me. In the beginning I even thought about shooting one of them, but today I do not want to harm them, and I would not know how to,” Cindy says.
Immediately after the abduction Cindy was also very determined to make sure the perpetrators were punished for their crimes, but today that is not important to her.
“If someone goes to jail it is just icing on the cake. I just want Christina back,” the mother says, “and I know that one day she will be coming home. We get so many leads and one of them will lead me to her.”
4
FAMILY ABDUCTIONS
Every year more than 200,000 American children become victims of a family abduction: they are kidnapped or concealed by a parent or another family member who violated another person’s custodial or visitation rights.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has reviewed cases of 16,264 children who were abducted by a parent or family member between 2008 and 2018. Almost two-thirds of the victims were between the ages of 0 and 6 years…and their mothers were most likely to be the abductor. In fact, mothers accounted for 54 percent of all family abductions while fathers accounted for 36 percent. In the remaining cases the abductor was another family member (not a parent) related to the victim. Still, women are most often the abductor and account for 60 percent of all family-related abduction cases.
Most often, the children who are victims of a family abduction are returned safely to their home. Only 5 percent of the cases the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reviewed have not been solved. In those cases, the abducted child is still missing.
However, the claim that family abductions aren’t harmful to the child—because, after all, they are with a family member—is a myth. Often, a child is not abducted as a result of the perpetrator’s love for the child, but out of anger or the desire for vengeance against a spouse. The parent or family member who abducts the child also often has a history of marital instability, domestic violence, or child abuse. And when the perpetrator abducts the child, the abductor’s problems increase, inflicting further harm and damage to the child.
After the abduction, the parent often has no job, struggles financially, moves residences a lot, and keeps the child in hiding—outside of any interaction with the surrounding community—harming the child’s social skills and the possibility that the child will have a healthy upbringing, as the children who are victims of family abductions are at times prevented from obtaining medical care. Parents have even been known to dress the child in clothes that do not conform to the child’s gender, and to raise the child as though the child is a member of the opposite sex, in order to try to hide the child’s true identity.
A majority of all children abducted by parents or family members are quickly returned to the parent who has custody rights of the child. In the cases reviewed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the mean duration of time the abducted children were missing for was six months. But not all children who are victims of family abductions are returned that quickly.
For more than three decades, Louis Zaharias has been searching for his two children, Christopher and Lisa Mae, who were abducted by their mother. Since the perpetrator of family abductions is most likely to be the abducted child’s mother, the example given here is told through the father’s eyes.
A Home Of Sadness
Missing: Christopher Louis Zaharias and Lisa Mae Zaharias
Dates of Birth: Christopher, 03/25/1984; Lisa Mae, 08/18/1986
Missing From: Mission Viejo, California
Missing Since: 11/20/1987 (3 years old and 1 year old)
Classification: Family Abduction
Interview: Louis Zaharias, father of Christopher and Lisa Mae
When Louis walked into Western State University he was determined to focus on his studies. However, his mind quickly wandered off as he laid eyes on the girl at the reception desk. Love had struck on the first day of law school in Fullerton, California, on August 22, 1977.
Susan was without doubt the most beautiful girl Louis had ever seen, and instead of making his way to the law library he approached the receptionist.
“She was my thunderbolt, as we Italians call it,” Louis says. “I just could not help it. I walked straight up to her, introduced myself, and invited her out. But my Bronx accent was so heavy that she thought I introduced myself as Huey and not Louie. Afterwards she would always tease me in a loving way by calling me Huey.” The Italian man laughs as if it were only yesterday when he fell in love with Susan.
But when he is brought back to the present day, forty-two years after first falling for Susan, his voice trembles, and he breaks down in tears. Because love would soon turn to estrangement and a lifetime of grief that not even Louis’ tough upbringing could have prepared him for.
Louis grew up in the Bronx, and when he was seventeen years old his father abandoned the family. Louis was so saddened by his father’s actions that he began to cultivate a violent and angry nature.
“In the streets of New York I saw everything from race riots to random violence. And I participated myself. I became a very aggressive and combative kid. All my knuckles were broken, I had my teeth knocked out, my nose broken, and I was stabbed twice. It was a very tough life,” Louis recalls of his childhood in the Bronx, where violence and drug abuse were each other’s daily companions.
Like most of his friends who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Louis became a drug user at an early age. When the twenty-three-year-old New Yorker matriculated at Western State University nothing indicated he would live to become an old man.
“But when I met Susan,” Louis recalls, “she brought humanity and warmth into my life, and she changed my perspective.”
At the beginning of their relationship both Louis and Susan did drugs, one time to the extent that Louis overdosed. Susan saved his life.
“Susan gave me CPR and a solution of valium. Susan is the reason I am alive today. For that I will always be grateful,” Louis says.
However, Susan’s parents were not grateful. They did not approve of their daughter’s new boyfriend, because he was an Italian-Catholic from the Bronx. Louis’ background did not fit in with their values and their way of life in Oklahoma, Louis recalls.
“They were white Anglo-Saxon Baptists leading the life of rich oil people. And they did not like an Italian greaseball like me,” he says.
Susan’s family therefore gave their daughter an ultimatum. Either she would leave Louis, or they would leave her.
“She chose me, and it aroused their anger,” Louis recalls. “They accused me of having stolen their daughter, and they wanted revenge at any cost.”
Louis says Susan was hurt by her family’s ultimatum, and that several times she tried to restore the relationship, writing letters to her parents, telling them of her love for Louis and begging them to accept him.
“She would write the letters with me sitting next to her. She really tried to make things right,” Louis says.
A letter from Susan’s private collection written in April 1979 said:
Dear mom, I hope you don’t take anything I say wrong, but I just have to speak my mind. It has been building up for a year now and I won’t let it go for another year without making at least one last plea. It has been one year since I have seen you and I really can’t believe you have carried your hatred for that long. When will you stop this? When will you accept Louis? He never made me leave home. I wanted to so I could be with him all the time…
Susan insisted on restoring the relationship with her family. And her family slowly started communicating with her after they received Susan’s letters. Louis also wrote letters to help with the reconciliation, but they were ignored, he says.
“They hated me. For the ten years I was together with Susan I had no name. They would always refer to me as ‘the Italian greaseball’, and I was never invited for any family events. When we got engaged and married they also refused to come to either celebration,” Louis says.
He says that from the very beginning Susan’s family embarked on a mission to destroy the family he and Susan were creating. Louis asserts that Susan’s family even tried to kidnap Susan a year after the couple met.
“We were visiting her aunt, and before I could get in the house they slammed the door shut and locked Susan up against her will. I could not get inside the house, and I had to call local Villa Park police, who forced them to open up,” Louis says.
LOCKED IN THE CAR
Despite their troubled family life Louis and Susan were determined to create their own family. In 1984 Susan gave birth to their first child.
“When I held Christopher in my arms for the first time, I felt like I was holding God,” Louis tenderly recalls.
He felt blessed that Susan had given him the child—a baby that, living the life of a drug addict, he never dared to dream of. But after the birth of Christopher, having a family and Susan’s love made him give up his everyday drug use. Louis went into rehab, and in 1982 he got a job in New York. Everything was for the first time moving in the right direction. Suddenly he could be the father he never felt he had himself.
Two years after Christopher was born, Lisa Mae joined the family.
“My own mom had a tough life, but when she had grandchildren I saw the change,” Louis says. “She became a happy person, and she adored Susan for having brought her grandkids. She adored her more than she had ever adored anyone else,” he says.
For Susan, life as a mother of two small children was hard, in spite of being loved and adored.
First, the couple tried making things right in 1985 by moving to Mission Viejo, California, where Louis was offered a new position. Susan felt pleased about the move, as the California girl never could stand the cold and snow in New York. But the move could not shift the pain she felt as a result of her parents’ disapproval of Louis and the stress motherhood brought into her life.
“She was overwhelmed with two kids. And I was not there to help her,” Louis acknowledges. “Two years after moving back I started a new job, and I was away fourteen to fifteen hours every day. At the same time, Susan suffered postpartum depression traumas from her pregnancy, and she began self-medicating. That triggered her addiction.”
According to Louis his wife became a far worse drug addict than he had been; it did not help that they would occasionally use together. Whenever an anniversary or a holiday came around, Louis’ mother would take care of the children while the parents escaped to a nearby hotel.
“I had gotten out of smoking what today is known as crack. I overcame the day-to-day addiction by the help of Susan. But at times we would have our ‘vice’ weekend. We would get an eight ball of cocaine, go to a hotel, and have a sex-party weekend. Besides that we always smoked pot, but after becoming a father I never did mushrooms, acid, or any other hard drugs again,” Louis says.
Instead, his wife started doing hard-core drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, according to Louis. He says he eventually discovered that while he was working, a typical day for his wife would entail putting the kids in the car and driving with them from drug dealer to drug dealer.
“The kids were locked in the car from morning to evening while she was doing drugs. Later, her two closest friends would even give sworn testimonies about this,” Louis says.
It was not until people came knocking on his door that he realised how addicted his wife had become. When they knocked, they wanted money. Susan was in charge of paying the family’s bills, but she paid the local drug dealers with Louis’ paycheque instead. His wife’s addiction became even more obvious the day the water company came to collect an outstanding debt. It turned out Susan had committed cheque fraud in the amount of more than $6,000. Louis says the sheriff’s Fraud Unit came to his house sometime in November 1987 to arrest Susan. That was a few days before she took off with the children.
“My mother had come out to look after the children,” Louis recalls, “and when she opened the door there was no longer any chance of Susan hiding [the fact] that she had been spending our money on drugs instead of paying the bills. Suddenly, we owed everyone money, and she committed credit card fraud trying to cover it up,” Louis says.
When he came home that night he confronted Susan. An argument broke out between the couple. Louis spent the night on the couch, but when he woke up in the morning he never imagined how the day would end.
Louis says that that morning, Susan started kicking and hitting him. A neighbour later testified to having seen the attack, dispelling the allegations of domestic violence Susan filed against Louis.
“She was ninety-five pounds, I was over two hundred pounds but I could not stop her. Thank God a neighbour saw her attacking me, so I was not the only one who knew what was happening. I just [told myself] ‘I have to get out of here’ because I did not want to hit her back. I just wanted to calm things down and go to work. But I could not go there because my arms and neck were bleeding,” Louis says.
Instead, he checked in to a motel and cleaned up and hoped that his mother would be able to calm Susan down by the time he went back home a few hours later.
When he came home Louis realised that he was not the only one who had been assaulted. According to Louis his mother was lying on the sidewalk when he approached the house.
“Susan had beat the shit out of her and just left her by herself in the street,” Louis says. He suspects that Susan combined cocaine and methamphetamine earlier that morning; the combination of drugs would have made her extremely aggressive. But it also apparently made her take off with the kids.
“On November twentieth, 1987, my nightmare began when I suddenly became the victim of parental family abduction. I might have had a tough upbringing, but never as a child did I suffer the pain I now would as an adult,” Louis says about the day on which he sought help from authorities.
A TERRIBLE MISPERCEPTION
Each year more than 200,000 children are abducted by family members. Most of them come home shortly after being taken. But back in the 1980s, before the days of AMBER alerts, law enforcement hesitated launching big investigations immediately after a disappearance when dealing with family abduction cases. Often, it was difficult to determine, right away, which parent was entitled to be with the kids and what the reasons were when a parent took off with a child.
“Law enforcement felt it was a civil, domestic matter,” Louis says.
Furthermore, Louis says that in the late 1980s there was a dark shadow hanging over any issue relating to the relationship between a husband and his wife. The husband was automatically considered the guilty one when things went wrong, Louis says. He adds that only in recent years has it been generally acknowledged that women can also be violent and unfit as parents.
“Back then it was horrible. It took a long time before police realised that my kids had been abducted, that it was serious, and that I was the victim. In the beginning they considered me a wife beater, and that was why she had taken off. However, I am forever grateful to the witness who came forward to reveal the truth of the situation,” Louis says.
He filed a parental kidnapping police report, but Susan had gone to a relative’s house in Riverside, California, where she filed a fraudulent domestic violence report against Louis, saying she was hiding the children from him on that basis.
It took more than forty days to convince the police that Louis was not guilty. Only then, in mid-February of 1988, did law enforcement finally issue a warrant for Susan’s arrest.
“While waiting for the police to wake up we lost important time in the search for my kids. Forty days is a lifetime when it comes to searching for abducted children, and when the police got things straight Susan had taken off. Had police acted right in the beginning they could have gone directly to Riverside and picked up the kids. End of story. Now the nightmare has continued for more than thirty-one years,” Louis says.
According to Louis, law enforcement later admitted to their mistakes. In 2007, he received an email from the assistant district attorney handling the case, saying that if law enforcement had known in the beginning what they know now they would have dealt with the case in a completely different way.
“But it does not help me that they admit twenty years later they screwed up. I needed their help back then,” Louis says.
According to Louis, when the crimes occurred it also was difficult for him to earn the sympathy and help of other people. When people hear a child has been taken by another parent, they often ask: “How bad can it be?” Louis says.
According to him this question arises out of a terrible misperception.
“They think the other parent had good reasons for taking the children, and, after all, they are still with a parent. But it is quite bad. Often, the children are taken by a parent that is abusing drugs, that is abusing the child, and [that isn’t] the children’s primary parent in the first place. It is unbelievable that a parent can inflict such an abuse on their own children. They take the children out of selfishness. Not love,” Louis says.
From his own experience as a drug abuser, Louis knew the danger being on the run with Susan posed to Christopher and Lisa Mae. According to Louis, Susan suffered from a heart condition and needed treatment. Louis was afraid she would not get it while living in hiding. So to survive she would need the help of other people, and Louis never doubted where she would get it.
“When she started abusing drugs she became vulnerable and paranoid. She was an easy target when her family began to influence her mind. I am not in doubt they set her up [for] taking the kids away,” Louis candidly states.
