Some people never give up.  What better illustration of the adage “blood is thicker than water,” can we find than such stories as the Roach family, where “blood” has been made invisible across enormous space and time, yet never ceases in its draw on the psyches of family relations?

Our topic, the history of PK, is, it goes without saying, one which inevitably must contend with a great deal of suffering. This is one of the reasons its history has not yet been recorded for us. The temptation to turn away is too strong. When we add on the other problems inherent to the subject, its moral ambiguity, its psychological complexity, its polarizing political aspects, it becomes even more forbidding.

Yet if we want to understanding how we got where we are today (in respect to family dissolution) we are going to have to summon up the gumption that will allow us to enter the mental minefield that lay before us. This is one of the reasons the PK Papers are designed to be accessible and expansive – and why fictional representations and other popular culture sources are given such a prominent place. What we need to accomplish is to get the “feel” of out subject and to suspend judgment until later. Without compassion there can be no deep understanding. With this in mind, the first of   (following the introductory installment) will deal with one of the more positive aspects of the phenomenon: reunions.

Consider this fundamental distinction for a minute: that there are two basic types of child kidnappings – long term and short term. What makes the difference significant? In short term child kidnappings, whether the child is taken for ransom, or to be abused, or to be murdered, these criminal kidnappers have no interest in permanently altering the child’s identity. Yet when we look at all forms of long term child kidnapping – which includes children kidnapped to serve as soldiers (as in Sri Lanka and the Sudan), slavery, the Lebensborn program (the German government’s kidnapping 200,000 Polish children in order to “Germanize” them), the US government program of paying what were then called “kid snatchers” to kidnap Indian children and deliver them to boarding schools, fraudulent adoptions, malicious denial of access of child to parent caused by the other parent – we see the operation of a premeditated effort to “manage” the identity of the child through mental manipulation.

First let’s take a look at the problem of the PK victim child’s sense of identity.

Stories of reunions give us a chance to consider the problem of identity. Falsehoods perpetuated in cases of long-term child abduction create life-long difficulties for the child, whether or not the kidnapper is a family member, and whether or not the child grows up aware or unaware of the truth of the family history. Most victims of long-term kidnapping – even when they are unaware they were ever kidnapped, as often the case in fraudulent adoptions – carry within them an anxious desire for the truth whether it be conscious or conscious.

Bill Iahn Sr. and Jr. are record-breakers.

Out of the scores of long return PK reunions collected in   archive, the reunion of father and son that took place 58 years following the date of the PK is the longest – by a full five years. Only the 1902 53-year reunion of the Lewis brothers with their 90-year-old mother kidnapped by their gold-miner father comes close.

In 1945, little Billy Iahn was abducted by his mother, who taunted her newly divorced ex-husband, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge by telling him: “Take a good look! You’ll never see your son again.” Decades of diligent search efforts by the left-behind father and other members of the family turned up nothing. Yet the winning combination of a devoted extended family and new technology did ultimately made the an unexpected breakthrough. It happened in 2003 after Bill Iahn’s great nephew mentioned the mystery to a friend who happened to be a genealogy buff and with a minimal investment of time located the long-lost son living under another the name of William Treacy in Phoenix.

It was the tremendously popular hobby of amateur genealogy that made the difference. While the Iahn family had previously used internet genealogy sites to no avail, they had not anticipated updates made possible by volunteer buffs. A family reunion was made possible expressly because other families are devoted to reunions (even if only with traces of those passed on) and ceaselessly work to build up the databases.

We see lots of PK reunion pictures in the news these days, but this type of popular media image has been around for a while. The earliest depiction of a child and parent reunited following a PK incident found so far is a drawing from a newspaper from 1900 showing the Vaughn reunion; the second earliest is a photo from 1902 of the Perkins case.

Mrs. Clarence Perkins is seen receiving Ruby from the arms of an Atlanta police sergeant. Like so many PK cases, the culpability of the accused kidnapper is not unequivocal. In the news report the father said he had no intention of keeping the child from his mother and blamed the marital estrangement on the influence of the father-in-law. In-laws, as might be expected, are frequently the instigators of family breakups and are often principals in PK cases.

The story of little Muriel Irene Stein, reported as kidnapped by her father on August 23, 1905 at the age of 6 affords us a rare instance of newspaper record of a search campaign over an extended stretch of time. This type of coverage is, of course, not at all rare in our day, now that we have an enormous Missing Child network – and “Missing Child industry” – firmly in place, but such continuity in the visual record of a search effort was uncommon before the 1980s. The Stein case ends the course of its nineteen year newspaper career with a striking “before and after” pictorial treatment.

One of the most dramatic of all PK stories ever reported in the newspapers was that of the anonymous two little French speaking survivors of the Titanic, who could not tell their benefactors their family name. All they could offer concerning their identities to inquiries made in their native tongue was what the almost-four-year-old and his two-year-old brother considered their only names: “Lolo” and “Momon.”

They were cared after by another Titanic survivor in New York City while efforts were made to discover their identity. Photographs published in the papers led to their reunion with their French mother, who had no idea where her estranged husband had taken them.

For eighty-six years the story remained incomplete – deliberately so. For the elder boy Michel, who had been fourty-four months old when he lost his father, never forgot his father’s parting words as he was being prepared to be placed in Lifeboat D, yet the little son held those words so sacred that he vowed to never repeat them.

The fame of the Titanic disaster secured the Navratils a PK a permanent, if minor, place in history. And since the dead father had no voice and his son Michel chose to keep his story to himself, Titanic history buffs could assume what they might wish about the episode. Generally, the absconding father was imagined as a villainous figure. New light was thrown upon the subject however when 88-year-old Michel Jr., a retired professor of philosophy, broke his self-imposed silence and revealed his secret to Titanic historian Charles Haas. On August 27, 1996 Hass escorted the one-time “Titanic Waif” to the grave of his father he previously never knew existed in far off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The aged Michel Jr. described the minutes leading up to his and his little brother’s delivery to the lifeboat:

“My father entered our cabin where we were sleeping. He dressed me very warmly and took me in his arms. A stranger did the same for my brother. When I think of it now, I am very moved. They knew they were going to die. I don’t recall being afraid, I remember the pleasure, really, of going plop into the lifeboat.”

But it was the words of his father in the form of a message to his estranged wife that had for eighty-four years been kept from the rest of the world:

“My child, when your mother comes for you, as she surely will, tell her that I loved her dearly and still do. Tell her I expected her to follow us, so that we might all live happily together in the peace and freedom of the New World.”

The following year Life Magazine reported the story, filling out some of the missing details of what led Michel Sr. to take such a drastic step:

“Navratil’s father, a bankrupt tailor, had discovered that his wife was having an affair with an Italian cavalry officer. Stealing away with sons Michel and Edmond, he booked passage on the Titanic, hoping for a better life in America. “My father’s idea was that we would never see our mother again,” says Michel Navratil.” [Tala Skari, Life Magazine, Jun. 1, 1997, p. 68]

Some PK reunion pictures are particularly moving when they display a striking family resemblance. They silently but eloquently convey to us the a sense of a family “belongingness” while at the same time underscoring our realization of just how unspeakably brutal are these forced family estrangements.

Even in the poorly reproduced photo below we can see that there is no doubt that 39 year-old Mr. Bixler, who grew up without knowing his real family name, has ultimately succeeded in locating his true father, Mr. Wilhite.

The Wilhite reunion came about because the left-behind father, a Kansas truck farmer, had the luck to run across article that the Ohio-based son who, going on faint memories of the geography of his childhood odyssey, asked be placed in Kansas newspapers.

In 1893, while out of town, the Emporia, Kansas widower A. A. Wilhite’s mother-in-law abducted his son to Ohio and not long after that she died. The three-year old was left by the kidnapping grandmother with a man named Bixier, whose own mother informally adopted the child.

The Bixiers took the boy in without apparently making much or any effort to ascertain the identity of the orphan, as is so often the case of kidnapping victims who are raised by non-family members who were not party to any kidnapping. Adopters often have little concern for ascertaining the true identities of their new charges. Following the painfully attenuated reunion the case still retained an element of mystery in that neither left-behind father nor abducted son could “fathom the reason for the kidnapping.” The delighted Bixier decided he would change his name back to Wilhite.

Five year old Arlene, who had lived with together with her maternal grandmother and parents in Chicago since her birth, was kidnapped by her paternal grandfather when her father was on her death bed. Her mother died two years before the father. It was when the Aileen’s grandfather came from Michigan in October to visit his mortally ill son that he snatched the girl from the bedside “disregarding the protests of his son.” The father, Roy Shafer, died three days later. The motivation in this case seems to have been greed. The senior Mr. Shafer had tricked the maternal grandmother, Mrs. French into signing a document giving him guardianship and consequently control of the child’s $20,000 inheritance. The court succeeded in arranging the return of the girl. The money issue was as yet unresolved at the time of the photo.

Like the preceding two Wilhite pictures, this photo of the Weiner family is a “look-alike” reunion double-portrait of father and son, this time representing a 2 ½-year separation come to an end. It was only because of the death of his mother, and the incarceration of her con man second husband that led to the recovery. In this case, the people who the boy was left with made the proper enquiries, learned the child’s identity and helped him find his way back to his real family.

This is a different kind of reunion. The happy souls are shown following the mother’s fresh resolution to turn over a new leaf. Mother and son had been separated by the recovery of the abducted boy by the left behind father, yet now mother has decided to share with father and has promised the court to refrain from any further kidnappings.

Eight year-old Jon Vincent Apablasa Jr. is the descendant of prominent two families, one based in Los Angeles, the other in Mexico. In 1933, when the parents divorced in Los Angeles the mother violated her agreement by spiriting the 2 year-old baby to Mexico. It took the father six years to get his son back yet unlike many parental kidnapping stories this one (for the time being, at least) seems to have been dealt with in a sensible, humane manner.

Seldom do we see such a beaming smile on the face of a man with a broken nose and two black eyes, yet Edwin R. Schuler, with his daughter Kari in arms is grateful. The day earlier, his former wife’s carefully planned attempt to abduct Kari – involving a waiting private plane and four rough-and-ready male assistants – was foiled by Edwin’s 17-year-old brother. Little Kari’s young uncle rushed to the assistance of his beleaguered brother and despite having on his own part taken two punches to the stomach managed to crawl to the next door neighbor’s house where a deputy sheriff happened to reside.

The papers reported that in the divorce proceedings seven months earlier the mother had not been granted “visiting privileges” but gave no explanation why.

The Goodwin / McMasters picture is obviously, unlike the preceding examples, not a posed one. In 1977 the syndicated photo was seen by millions across the country. This was a reunion story with a twist. Chad, originally abducted by the father Dave Goodwin from the mother Donelle McMasters in Tennessee, had been re-abducted by the mother with the assistance of a legendary anti-PK activist. The story, as related by The Associated Press told of an all too common scenario in which left-behinds and children fail to get the assistance they need:

“Mrs. McMasters tried to recover her son through the legal system but failed. She spent $10,000 for private detectives without success. Finally, she hired “Mean Gene” Austin, who for 14 years has been in the child-custody kidnapping business. It took Austin five days to locate Goodwin and Chad in Aurora, Colorado.” Austin prided himself in working outside laws that protect lawlessness. We will hear more from him in future .

Tyrel and Theodore Israel went through a special kind of hell before they were reunited. New York Times investigative journalist, Nina Bernstein (author of the groundbreaking exposé, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, 2001) in an article showing how the New York foster care system deliberately abuses families, described how St. Joseph’s foster care agency actively thwarted the reunion of the kidnapped child with his devoted father at every turn. As Ms. Bernstein reported:

Mr. Israel had filed suit for custody of Tyrel in Family Court in Brooklyn when Tyrel was a baby, months before the authorities accused the child’s mother of abandoning him in a Bronx homeless shelter to pursue her drug habit. But Mr. Israel said that when learned that Tyrel was at St. Joseph’s, a Brooklyn foster care agency, and sought custody, “I ran up against a brick wall.” ["When the Foster Care System Forgets Fathers," New York Times, May 4, 2000]

In the end, Tyrel got to go home with daddy with the help of a tough lawyer wouldn’t take (an illegal) “no” for an answer and forced the court system to release the kidnap victim to his loving father. Later on St. Joseph’s and other law-breaking foster care agencies made case settlements (the details of which the agencies stipulated had to be secret) to some their victims, including Tyrel.

Some searching parents are more vocal than others. Danny Steyne, seen below at the moment of his 2006 reunion with his daughters Christy and Abby, 6 years following the kidnapping. The father managed to arrange a 2000 TV talk show appearance on the Dr. Joy Browne Show, had the girls’ picture on a Missing Child notice included on an IRS form, set up an ambitious website on the case and in 2003 recorded a religious hard rock album including a 9 minute song about the PK and his faith that his children would come back to him titled “I Expect You.”

There were several occasions when the publicity nearly brought about the longed-for reunion, yet the mother caught wind in time and quickly uprooted the children again and found a new hiding place.

Finally, on February 2, 2006, a North Carolina State Trooper pulled Joyce over for speeding and the search was over. But Steyne was not one to gloat over the success. Instead he revealed a measure of wisdom not always found in the hearts of reunited left- behind parents.

“If there’s one unfairness in this whole thing, it’s been Christy and Abby,” Danny said. “It’s just not fair. I’ve wept over that in the past week. It’s not fair. I’ve been watching what they’ve had to walk through. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that they should have to walk through this time with their mother in jail.”

But on the part of the kidnapping parent: no regrets.

Beneath the sags and wrinkles of the recently reunited Bill Jr. and Sr. the very same spark of rapport is seen in the December 2003 reunion photo as in the pre-kidnapping photo from May 1944.