When your child is abducted: One woman's nightmare

Jennifer and her six-year-old son, Ian*, are playing Lego on the living room floor of their home in Hamilton. Jennifer is Princess Leia to Ian’s heroic Luke Skywalker. Constructing intergalactic scenarios of good versus evil out of these venerable building blocks is a regular ritual for mother and son. Ian’s goal is to reach Jedi status.

Jennifer, tired after a day running her environmentally friendly cleaning business, patiently goes through the motions. Then Ian surreptitiously slides Darth Vader
out from behind the couch for the final battle. “Uh-oh,” she stammers, playing along. “Here comes the bad guy.”

Ian looks at the villain in his hand for a long minute, then says, in an innocent way only a child can, “Is my daddy a bad guy?” Jennifer considers her words, then responds softly and slowly: “Your daddy is not a bad guy. He just didn’t know how to be a good daddy.”

A change in routine
It was Sept. 26, 2003, when Jennifer received a phone call from her son’s day care in Hamilton, checking to see if it was OK that Ian’s dad, Ed, pick him up early. Jennifer met and married Ed in South Korea, his homeland, after moving there to teach English. The couple had recently separated when the call came.

Although they were sharing custody of Ian, this was Jennifer’s day to pick him up, so she phoned Ed and asked what was going on. He told her he had just gotten a new job and wanted to celebrate by taking Ian to the mall to buy him something. “I never had any worries,” she says.

“I knew if there was any happiness in his life at all, it was because of Ian.” Jennifer told Ed she’d meet him at 4 p.m. back at the apartment they once shared.

She knew Ian was gone
When they hadn’t shown up by 5:30 p.m., Jennifer felt a knot in her stomach. She looked around the apartment and noticed things missing – the suitcases weren’t in the closet and some of Ian’s clothes weren’t in the drawers. The clincher came when she couldn’t find Fluffy, the big stuffed dog Ian slept with every night. She knew if Fluffy was gone, Ian was, too. At 6 p.m., now in a panic, she called the police.

It was too late. Ed was already on a plane with Ian, travelling the 15-hour flight back to his hometown on a small island off the coast of South Korea. He never left a note, so Jennifer imagined the worst. “I fully believed they were dead in some roadside hotel; that Ed had killed Ian and then himself.” Three agonizing days later, Ed called her from Korea. He told her he was going to stay there and never wanted to see her again.

Ed and Jennifer met 14 years ago when she was 27. Jennifer had landed a job teaching English at a Korean university and Ed, who was trained as a metallurgical engineer, was one of her adult students. The two hit it off immediately and were living together on the university’s campus three months later.

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