IN THE NAME OF
THE SISTER (Seven Days, June 1999)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY PETER KURTH
I've just returned
from Boston and the blackest day in my family's history. No diatribes, never fear – I haven’t got the
strength. After the noise dies down,
grief hits, when you least expect it. In
my case, it was in the car driving to Staples to buy copy paper. Buckets of tears, "out of the
blue.” Very disconcerting. Tragedy I can do, but sorrow is harder.
For those who don’t
know: On May 28, in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, my sister
Barbara’s former husband, Stephen Fagan, a.k.a. "Dr.” William Martin of Palm Beach, Florida, copped
a guilty plea to charges of kidnapping their two daughters in the midst of a
custody battle in 1979. The children
were raised in Florida under false names, first in the home of a Combat Zone
stripper who had moved to Key West – think “safe house,” children, think
pornography -- and later in Palm Beach, in the mansions of the two wealthy
widows Fagan has married since he went on the lam.
At the time of the
kidnapping, pending a final decision, the probate judge in Massachusetts had
ordered that my nieces remain in their mother’s custody. He specifically rejected the allegations of
neglect, abuse, and "unfitness" that Fagan -- at that time
vacationing in Europe with a girlfriend -- had brought against my sister. This detail wasn’t mentioned in any of the
press reports last week. All we saw was
the damning line: "Kurth has denied the charges.” It’s true, but small comfort, that editorial
opinion around the country has gone overwhelmingly against Fagan and his
unfortunate daughters, who seemed to relish their attack on Barbara in court.
"We want the
court to know that if we could retroactively give our father the consent needed
to take the action he did 20 years ago, we would, without hesitation,'' said
the elder daughter, Rachael, exercising her right to a "victim impact statement.” Retroactively, we might want to give these
girls a good spanking, but no one asked our opinion. The plea bargain, negotiated by Middlesex DA
Martha Coakley – the same Martha Coakley who won, then lost, the Louise
Woodward "Nanny" trial – was a done deal before we even heard of
it. Fagan escaped with no jail time,
only probation, a fine (which his current wife will pay, unless he pulls in
some cash from off-shore accounts), and the order that he perform 2,000 hours
of community service at a VA hospital in Florida. I guarantee you he won't be changing bedpans.
I’ll say it right
out, knowing that the coward will never show his face in a courtroom again: A
liar, a thief, a con artist, a forger and now a convicted felon has walked off
free, assisted by his wise-guy lawyer and a corrupt judicial system in the most
corrupt city in New England. Justice we
never expected. A show of decency we
thought was not out of line.
My sister has told
reporters: ''A lot of people have asked me how I feel. It's a question that absolutely stumps me,
because I feel many, many ways. If you
felt it, what I feel, this house would be in a shambles from the force of it.''
It was this I was weeping for in the car.
Have you noticed how
Hollywood actors cry in the movies? Demi Moore started it in Ghost. Stare at the camera, bite your lip and squirt,
without moving a muscle of your face.
Granted, we’ve seen this kind of thing in the courtroom, but that’s not
what crying is really like. Crying wants
to correct itself. It wants to be beaten
back or released completely, one or the other.
It distorts your face, blotches your skin, drips, chokes your
speech. You're a mess. No makeup men. Never the right lighting.
It happens that, as
my own family's drama plays out, I'm approaching that point in my biography of
Isadora Duncan when her two children drown in the Seine. This was in April 1913. Un accident stupide, as the French
say, nobody's fault. The car
stalled. The driver got out to crank the
engine. The car jerked forward and
tumbled into the water.
Plop! All over.
The moment Isadora last saw her children, as they drove away in the car,
was naturally burned in her mind. Her
dancing, which had been lyrical, filled with the joy of life, became sculptural
and stark – “a solitary figure in a flaming scarlet gown, dancing to the
sternest rhythms of the world's great music.”
She became "promiscuous," drank champagne, married a Bolshevik
and was banned in Boston, where hypocrisy was invented. She tried to overcome her loss, but, in the
end, it broke her.
"No one has
understood since I lost Deirdre and Patrick how pain has caused me at times to
live in almost a delirium," Isadora wrote.
"In fact my poor brain has been more often crazed than anyone can know….
I have reached such high peaks flooded with light, but my soul had no strength
to live there – and no one has realized the horrible torture from which I have
tried to escape. Some day if you
understand sorrow you will understand too all I have lived through, and then you
will only think of the light toward which I have pointed and you will know the real
Isadora is there."
There are so many
things that Barbara’s daughters don't know, so many things they never
learned. They don't know, for example,
that one of their great-uncles, Raymond Schindler, was for many years the
leading private detective in America, profiled in The New Yorker and
with his own table at the Stork Club.
This sort of thing counts for a lot in Palm Beach. How often we've wished that Raymond was alive
when Wendy and Rachael were taken. Or
later, now, when their censors say that we didn't look hard enough to find
them. We know about cons.
Here’s something
else no one has told these girls: Their great-great grandfather, John F.
Schindler, a Universalist minister and partner, with his sons, of the Schindler
Bureau of Investigation, made a speech about crime to the League of Women
Voters in Palm Beach in February 1934.
It was in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Gloria Vanderbilt
custody case.
"Any citizen
who selects which laws he intends to obey or disobey is not a good American
irrespective of his place in the community or social position," Schindler
told Palm Beach, years before the open country clubs, the Trumps, the wealthy
stepmothers and stolen affections: "Kidnapping is child stealing…. It
involves two distinct crimes, assault and false imprisonment. The offenses are aggravated by taking the
victim forcibly to some other place.
Both these offenses are felonies carrying severe penalties.”
Remember that,
children. You won’t be hearing it at
home.
MORE ON THE FAGAN CASE:
SALON | MOTHERS WHO THINK:
KIDNAPPED
Over the last two weeks, my family has been
sucked willy-nilly into the jaws of the American media scandal machine, into
the world of Oprah and Montel, of Dateline and "20/20," of CBS, ABC,
Fox, CNN, People, "Inside Edition," the Globe, the Examiner, the
Enquirer, the Star and -- most unnerving of all -- into the sights of Hollywood
movie producers dangling dollars in front of our eyes. The speed with which all
this has happened has taken our collective breath away. We are not celebrities.
Monica Lewinsky doesn't live at this address, though we're deeply sympathetic
all of a sudden to her plight.
This is the
scene that keeps playing in my imagination. The moment when Stephen Fagan
turned to 2-year-old Wendy and 5-year-old Rachael and told them: Your mother is
dead. He must have said it more than
once. Much more than once. After all, young children ask questions. How many
times over the 18-½ years from the day he abducted his daughters to the day he
was discovered did he have to answer questions?
DAD PLEADS GUILTY IN
KIDNAPPINGS
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A man who abducted his
two daughters 20 years ago, told them their mother was dead and made a new life
for them under assumed names pleaded guilty yesterday to kidnapping and was let
off with probation and a $100,000 fine.
In order to
strip Stephen Fagan bare of the image contrived by his hired flacks, we need to
look at his case coldly and see it for what it is: His crime was heinous,
unspeakably cruel; and morally, if not legally, he renewed it and repeated it
on every one of the approximately 7,300 days he kept his girls and their mother
in the dark.
STEPHEN FAGAN’S UNSETTLED SECOND ACT
Defends kidnapping daughters, worries
about others' opinions