When your child is abducted: One woman's nightmare

Signs of trouble
There were signs of trouble within their first year together. Once, Ed got so angry at a perceived slight by a male friend that he ran outside and uprooted a small tree with his bare hands. Jennifer had to calm him down so he wouldn’t go after the guy. But there were good times, too. “Ed was optimistic about life back then and could be fun to be with,” she says. Eventually Ed’s stepmother put pressure on them to get married. “I went along with it,” says Jennifer. “There seemed to be no good reason not to.”

After they were married for a year, Ed began to change. He criticized Jennifer’s attempts at Korean cooking and suggested she lose weight. “He’d get angry and frustrated, going a day or two without talking to me,” she says. “Soon, he was staying out late with business colleagues and coming home drunk.” Then, in early 2000, Jennifer became pregnant. “We decided to stay together but he told me then that he had been thinking about leaving me. I remember wishing he had left before I got pregnant.”

Over the years they had enjoyed three trips to Canada, and Jennifer began to believe Ed would be more content here, without the intense pressures of the Korean business world. In early 2002, they moved to an apartment in Hamilton, where Jennifer had family, with plans to start a business offering home stays, tour guides and English lessons.

Separation
Months later, the business hadn’t taken off. Ed couldn’t find a job and was ashamed he couldn’t support his family. He withdrew, spending hours surfing the Net and sleeping on the couch. When Jennifer would come home from her job at a local college and ask Ed what he did that day, he’d bark at her, telling her it was none of her business. She began to tiptoe around him, careful not to set him off. “I’ve never been a passive person, but in that situation I just changed,” she says.

They separated in February 2003 and shared custody of Ian. “It was hard to leave Ian with him, but I believed he was a good father,” says Jennifer. Ed begged her to come back, and after five months she relented, mostly for Ian’s sake. The reunion was short lived. He’d yell at Ian and frighten him. After two months, Jennifer left for good. A few weeks later, she told Ed she was no longer going to pay the $800 rent on the apartment. The next day Ed abducted Ian.

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