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.

His taking of his two daughters in 1979 was more than an abduction. It was an act of terrorism in that it left the girls' mother, Barbara Kurth, forever wondering when, if and under what circumstances she would see her girls alive again. For sheer cruelty, the best analogy I can think of is the 1991 case of a Hull man who threw two women off his boat six miles offshore when they refused his advances -- leaving them to wonder if their lives would end in hypothermic drowning, paralytic cramping or in the sensation of the muzzle of a shark bumping against them as it prepared to penetrate their bodies with its teeth.

In the case of Barbara Kurth, 20 years of wondering has produced the very teeth of a shark in the ingratitude of her daughters, who at a glance look to have the same icy bilge water in their veins as their father. Is this "Stockholm syndrome" (identification with an aggressor) we are seeing? Is it but economics -- too much pampering in Palm Beach? Are these young women truly free of their abductor at this moment?

It's hard to read them except to say that something doesn't add up. Adopted children who discover a birth parent well know that the unknown past may be explained by drug or alcohol problems, and they know that their birth parent may reject them. Yet in most cases, such children crave a meeting. But the so-called Martin girls disdain a mother they know never wished to give them up and who -- as it seems obvious to everyone but them, their father and his flacks -- is given new, more excruciating pain by their rejection of her.

Of Barbara Kurth -- so publicly dignified in 1999 -- we should assume the private worst in 1979: that she was a negligent single parent with a drinking problem. If we assume the worst about Kurth (even if we do not believe it) we can then clearly see the worst about Fagan. We see that he still had many options. As a citizen, he had ways of documenting and dealing with his ex-wife's deportment as he asserts it to have been; and as an attorney he was in a privileged position to know those options and to exercise them. His cover story doesn't add up -- it's a crock. Instead of exercising his lawful options, he kidnapped his daughters and put Barbara Kurth through a living hell that may never end.

The pertinent story come 1999 is that Fagan has essentially gotten away with what he did, and did, and did for 20 years -- and the public precedent that thereby sets. Succinctly, this precedent tells potential spousal outlaws: if you want to abduct your children, your best bet is to find a legal means to get them into Massachusetts, where the arm of the law is short. If in the end you get caught, your prosecutor will find you a compassionate judge and arrange for your case to be publicly disposed of at the start of a summer holiday weekend, when newspaper readership bottoms out and television news is consumed with sunscreen and traffic tie-ups.

Dousing a hot story by letting it out during a cold news hour is as old a political trick as Richard Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973. In attempting to manipulate the news in this way, newly elected Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley -- who managed the Fagan case -- only showed that as a political hack she is a quick study. Nor does she deny that she selected Judge Peter Lauriat because she believed he would not sentence Stephen Fagan to prison. This is "judge shopping" -- it's the dirty little secret and filthy practice of both prosecutors and defense attorneys that corrupts justice and its appearance in Massachusetts.

In the end, Stephen Fagan's plea bargain proved too hot to be doused by manipulation. Margery Eagan of The Boston Herald and Eileen McNamara of The Boston Globe kept it alive through the weekend and past Memorial Day. Then the Fagans/Martins themselves put on a sickening spectacle of public appearances coordinated by Boston's flack de tutti flacks, publicist George Regan. The worst post-plea- bargain performer, I thought, was Fagan's lawyer, Richard Egbert, who -- having forsaken the chance to defend his client in court -- further abused his client's victim by giving the press documents he said showed Barbara Kurth to have been an unfit mother in 1979. Disgraceful.

And so this case. The worst of it -- even worse perhaps than the ongoing pain of Barbara Kurth -- is the precedent it sets by winking at the abduction of a child by a non-custodial ex-spouse. Society can't tolerate that. But in deal-making, news-manipulating, judge- shopping Massachusetts we do tolerate it, and will have more of it.

Footnote: The two women left to drown six miles offshore chanced to be rescued by a passing yacht; the perpetrator was sent to jail in 1992. I wonder if he's still in jail. I'll bet a judgeship he isn't! The answer next week, if I can find it. --

David A. Mittell Jr.'s column appears regularly in Weekend editions of The Patriot Ledger.