Law: Moving to Stop Child Snatching

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Is a federal law the answer?

Eighteen months ago, a California designer named Susan Downer received a chatty telephone call from her three children (ages eleven, six and four), who were visiting her divorced husband in Manhattan. It was the last time she ever heard from them. When Mrs. Downer drove to the Los Angeles airport to pick them up, they were not aboard their designated flight. Ex-Husband Seth Gerchberg, it later developed, had remarried, liquidated his assets, obtained a passport and disappeared with the children. Since then Mrs. Downer and her second husband have spent $40,000 on a futile investigative legal odyssey that finally cost them their Pacific Palisades home and landed them on welfare. Increasingly disconsolate over having allowed the court-ordered Manhattan visit, Mrs. Downer now wonders: "Why was I so stupid as to obey the law?"

It is an understandable question. An estimated 25,000 to 100,000 child-snatching cases occur every year, and so the parent who observes court orders risks ending up the loser. In most states, kidnaping of children by one of their parents is not treated as a crime. Parents, even those denied custody in divorce arrangements, are exempted from the federal kidnap law. Lacking jurisdiction, the FBI almost never helps locate or return abducted offspring, even when state lines are crossed. Maybe, says Mrs. Downer, "I should tell them I've had three cars stolen, and their names are Joslyn, Heather and Terry." Says another victimized parent: "If my former husband stole a neighbor's cow, the authorities would follow him to the end of the world. But they can't do a thing to help me find my girls."

The situation leads to disrespect for court orders and some spectacular snatches. After Pittsburgh Millionaire Seward Prosser Mellon and Wife Karen were divorced in 1974, a Pennsylvania court awarded custody of their two girls to Mellon. During a visit, however, their mother took the children to New York and later gained legal custody in a court there. Two years ago, three men employed by Mellon seized the two girls as they were on their way to a Brooklyn school, and the millionaire still has them.

Twenty states* have moved to stop nose thumbing at court orders by passing the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act, which generally promises respect for custody terms worked out in other states. That still leaves 30 states as potential havens for child snatchers, however, and the act does not provide a mechanism to track abductions across state lines. An obvious answer is federal standards, but lawmakers are reluctant to thrust Washington into family spats. Says U.S. Representative John Conyers of Michigan, whose House Judiciary subcommittee has buried several federal bills: "Whenever there is onerous conduct, everybody says there ought to be a law." Last week the influential American Bar Association House of Delegates solidly repudiated, 135 to 82, a resolution that would subject parental child snatchers to federal kidnap laws. Cried Washington, D.C., Attorney Lee Loevinger: "Do we really want to make loving parents into federal criminals?"