The Fugitive Mother (Part 2 of 2)

This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Embroiled in a hellish custody battle over her 9-month-old daughter, Lee Barnett made a surprising and criminal decision, to leave the life she'd known behind and start a new one, as an international fugitive.  

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of
the speaker and do not necessarily represent The Knife or
exactly right. Media.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Nice that are there any of you guys FBI because
there was like twelve of them raiding the house. Because
there's two of them, Wait now, size and bring them
on in. So I knew then that was it.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith, I'm Patia Eaton.
This is part two of a two episode series. If
you have not heard part one, we recommend you go
back and listen to that now. We will be back
at the end of the episode to discuss the series.
Let's get into part two. Last episode, we heard about

(01:00):
Lee Barnett's crumbling marriage and the vicious divorce trial and
custody battle. Lee was devastated to lose custody of her
daughter Savannah. Now, if this were a movie, the screen
would go dark here and then reopen in an entirely
different genre. So far, we've been watching a legal drama

(01:20):
set in Charleston, South Carolina, in nineteen ninety four. A
young mother sits at the defence table while her sanity
is dissected. She is painted as crazy and dangerous and
unfit mother. Her powerful and respected stockbroker ex husband comes
out on top, and her child is carried out of
the courtroom in someone else's arms. But then without warning,

(01:44):
the film changes The camera follows a thirty three year
old flight attendant, determined and plotting, studying airport monitors in
a map of Los Angeles. This is no longer a
courtroom drama. It's now an action thriller.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
It is the.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Story of a woman who never imagined breaking the law
until the law became the thing standing between her and
her child. With nowhere left to turn, she does the
only thing she believes will keep her daughter safe. She
decides to kidnap her and disappear. And Lee was not
an expert by any means. She had not been trained

(02:21):
for this. She had just heard about a park in
Los Angeles where illegal goods could be bought, and so
she got on a plane to California and decided to
figure it out as she went.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
So, I heard about MacArthur Park. I got a really
stady motel, very easy to do around the corner, rented
a car, and opened a phone book in the room,
I put my finger down the phone book picked out
our new names. I decided I was going to make
Samantha boy because she was still bald. Mine was Alexandria Maria,
and Samantha came out as Nick Mara. I wrote down

(02:56):
that did the same thing with birth dates. When I
got down to a car and park, everybody was going around.
They could drive constantly around the park, you know, selling stuff.
And they kept asking me like did I want all
these drugs and stuff. I'm like, no, no, I just
want birth certificates. And finally this guy goes Berth certificates
and I go yeah, and he goes, Okay, go onto

(03:18):
that tunnel meet me on the other side of the park.
And there was no reason, but I think he wanted
to see the shop factor and also to see if
I was being followed or to see how serious I was.
So I started down that tunnel and people were laying
with needlesticking out of their arms.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
There was defecation.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
I know the tunnel le he's talking about. I used
to work near MacArthur Park. It's in a high density
area of Los Angeles called Westlake, and there have been
major efforts to clean up the park Since two thousand
and two and as recently as twenty twenty four, crime
has significantly reduced in the area, but in the nineteen
eighties and nineties it was riddled with crime and gang violence.

(03:58):
In the year nineteen ninety Elonvee, thirty people were reportedly
murdered in the park. And then there's Lee in nineteen
ninety four showing up at this park to obtain counterfeit
birth certificates, one for herself under the name Alexandria and
one for her daughter, Savannah, who now goes by Samantha.
Savannah was less than a year old at the time,

(04:19):
and so Lee's plan was to dress her up like
a little boy and use the name Nick. And that
is how she found herself walking through this tunnel.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
I get out there and he's over there, and I'm like,
I get to the car and I guess I passed
the test. And he goes, get in the back of
the car and get in the back of his car
and he keeps driving. Wow, and he goes, what do
you want to go? I need two birth certificates, And
I said, here are the names and the birthdates. You know,
make them California birth certificates. So he says okay, and
he goes, make me back here three or four and

(04:48):
I said okay, and he told me where all right?
So I have all day, this is early in the morning,
time to do something. Thought that, well, I've never seen
a California birth certificate. Maybe I should go see what
it looks like. So I stood in the passport line.
Because every state's got three types of birsificates, so one
of the little feet, you know, and then there's a
small version along and I invariably always took the wrong

(05:11):
one in and I didn't know what a California one
looked like. So I tapped the lady in front of message,
can you just make sure I brought the right versa
to VIC? And I looked at it and has blue
trim around and yellow speckles all the way through. So
I go back down to Mark Arthur Park. He pulls up,
I get in the back of the car. He told
me it was one hundred dollars each. I opened the
envelope and there was two really crappy black and white copies.

(05:34):
Oh no, and I have to get back for visitation,
and I'm on this time frame like panicking, So I
go don't mess with me.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
And I grab him by the back of the shirt
and I go, I've.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Got to have him blue blue around the outside of
yellow speckles, and like he was just shocked.

Speaker 4 (05:50):
I was shocked.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
And he goes, we'll meet me here tomorrow morning on
that bench at nine. Okay, back the next day, he
wasn't there. I saw him across the street and I
saw him put something in a newspaper he picked up
at the store, and I was like, God, is that
a gun or a knife? I mean, what the hell
did he slide in that newspaper? And then he motioned
to me twenty more minutes and about twenty five minutes

(06:12):
later he was behind me and he goes, don't turn
around too, mini cuffs, and he said, just keep looking straight,
and he sat on the other end of the bench
and he slid the newspaper over to me. And I
opened the newspaper and there are two really good looking
birth certificates. So I put my two hundred dollars in
and I slid it back to him. Before I could
even say thank you, he was gone. It was like crazy.

(06:35):
I was like, oh my god, step one down.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Wow, Yeah, that was okay. So you have these two
birth certificates. You've given yourself the alias of Alexandria Maria Canton. Yeah,
and Savannah is now Nick Mara Nick Mara Canton. Okay,
so currently you've labeled her birth tip Gad as a
boy because you're like, no one's gonna check. Yeah, okay.

(07:01):
And then you get on a plane to return for
your visitation just in time. Okay, So I see, So
now you're headed back to Charleston.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
So I got back on the red eye. I guess
I got there just in time, and I had Samantha.
It was getting really bad.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
Then by the time she.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Would come home, and I've got all my friends this
witnesses she was pulling her hair out, she would just
really not her. So everything just kept propelling me to
move forward. So when she left on Sunday night, I
called my best childhood friend and she lived in Houston,
and I said, Susie, can I come out and see
you in Houston? And she said, you can always come in.

(07:36):
I said, I just got to get away from Charleston.
They've taken Savannah, you know, And so.

Speaker 4 (07:40):
I go out there.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Lee had visitation rights to Savannah every other weekend from
Friday evening to Sunday evening. She had hurried back to
Charleston just in time for her weekend with Savannah. But
after the weekend was over, Lee got back to planning.
With her new fake birth certificates in tow, she flew
to Houston and set in motion phase two of her

(08:02):
plan to start a brand new life as Alexandria Maria Kenton.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
I borrowed her car, so I drove like an hour
away and I got a black wig, brown contacts, and
brown the horn room glasses. Then I went down to
the motor vehicle and I did the whole driver's license thing.
They said, okay, let's get your ID. But back then
they didn't do a picture ID. They gave you a

(08:30):
temporary one for two weeks. And I'm like, oh my god,
I didn't think of that. And I had to make
up a fake address real quick for them to send
the real ID too, because I didn't want to be
hooked to anybody else.

Speaker 4 (08:41):
So I like crap.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
So then I go to the passport office and I
got my temporary driver's license and my birth certificate arth
birth certificates, and they said, oh, I'm so sorry, you
need a picture ID.

Speaker 4 (08:55):
And I went, Oh my god, so I emptied up.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
My purse in the car. I knew I couldn't use
my driver's license, and so then I see my US
Air Slide Attendant ID.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Lee needed two things in order to get a passport
for Alexandria, Maria Canton and her son Nick. She needed
a birth certificate, which she had, and a picture ID,
which she did not have. And even though she'd gone
through the trouble of getting a driver's license in Alexandria's name,
the official license with the photo would be mailed to

(09:27):
a random address in California in two to three weeks,
so that wouldn't work. Instead, that evening, as her friend
in Houston went on a date, Lee headed to Kinko's
to make Alexandria a photo ID.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
They had like all night services and they just started
photo copying at that time, like color copying, not photo
but it just did it, like not too long before
I got a color copying, I remember, with a big deal,
and I used a number two pencil on my eyes.

Speaker 4 (09:57):
I wided out.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
The names, copied it, type the new names in, and
then I laminated it and cut it all up and
everything and whila, I was now Alexandra Maria Canton, the
US air flight attendant. So I go back to the
passport office the next day and it was a lady
who was helping me, and she's looking at the picture

(10:18):
because I couldn't change my hair, you know, and I've
got this black wig on. She looked at the pictures,
she's looking at me, She's look at the picture, looking
at me, and then finally I just leaned forward and
I go, I've been really sick, and she goes, oh,
I understand, like you know, it was a weeks of cancer,
and she put it through. The next day I went
and he said here, and I just waited every minute
to be swarmed in on by cops.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
You know.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
I just knew I was going to get nailed. And
there were cameras back in those days in there. And
I opened up the envelope and there were two brand new, beautiful,
real US passports.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Li says she still feels guilty about claiming to have
cancer to that woman at the passport office, but this
is what happens, what would continue to happen, because once
she started the lies, she felt like she had no
choice but to continue them, to build upon them. She
was able to pay for next day pickup in person
of the passports. Now she had everything that she would

(11:14):
need to flee the country. Now you have a passport
for you.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
And for Nick Marrikan and my son, who.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
Is actually Savannah Barnett. Yes, so now you have birth
certificates and passports.

Speaker 4 (11:31):
So then I've got visitations are coming up again.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
But Thursday I packed, and I was stuffing cash and
a shoe for all this year and a half of
fifteen eighteen months of hell, and so I had about
eight thousand dollars, I think. But I packed everything I
could think of, mainly everything for Samantha to make her
feel comfortable, like baby stuff and all that, and pictures

(11:55):
as I wanted photographs I could show her, you know,
as she got older. And I loaded everything except for
the car seat and the stroller in the car. I
drove down to Jacksonville, Florida Airport. I rented a car
at the airport, I loaded everything in it. I parked
it in LOP twenty three at the airport, and then

(12:17):
I headed down to the beach to my hippie brother's house.
And he was out windsurfing and he sees me and
he comes running up and he's like, Hey, what are
you doing here? I got a favor to ask you,
And I said, we have to leave, Because of course
you have to leave. You've done everything you could possibly do.
And I said, here's three hundred dollars. I said, I
need you to pick me up Saturday. I said, when

(12:38):
you return the car, you need to tear up my
credit card receipt.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
Okay, this part gets a little bit complicated, but it
also goes to show just how meticulous Lee was. A
few days before her next visitation with Savannah, she drove
nearly four hours to Jacksonville, Florida, where her brother lived,
but she had no intention of flying out of Jacksonville.
She handed a set of car keys to her brother

(13:02):
and gave him precise instructions. On Saturday, he was to
retrieve a rental car that she'd parked at the airport,
take that car, drive about four hours to Charleston, and
pick up Lee and Savannah, not from Lee's home, notably,
but from a nearby hotel where they'd be waiting. From Charleston,

(13:23):
he would then drive them another five hours to Atlanta, Georgia,
and drop them at the airport. Then he would return
to Jacksonville alone, and return the rental car. Lee paid
for everything in cash. Every detail seems intentional. She didn't
use her own vehicle in case it was recognized. She
didn't leave the rental car parked at her brother's house

(13:44):
where neighbors might notice it or notice her if anyone
came around asking questions. By keeping the car at the airport,
it blended in and she chose to fly out of
an airport that wouldn't tie her to family. Lee laid
out the plan to her brother.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
I said, will you do it? And because of course,
I'll do it. And I said, number one, whatever you do,
do not drink. I said, promise me you won't drink.
Because he was an alcoholic. I'm thinking, I'm putting our
lives in the hands of an alcoholic. But I also
knew he had so much less to lose than anybody else,
and I didn't want to, you know, tell anybody that
would be destroyed. So I got Savannah visitation. I pretend

(14:24):
that my car was broken, asked a friend for a
ride to downtown Charleston, went up to the third floor
and he showed up a little after eleven, and we
headed to Atlanta. Airport, and on the way to Atlanta,
I plan on stop at this motel and getting him
to cut my hair and dye my hair, but it
was full, so we ended up having to do it
down on a park and we threw my hair into

(14:44):
this little river, and then I had to go to
a public bathroom and I changed dressed Samantha's little boy,
sorry for the Samantha Savannah, so dressed Savannah.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
Then he cut my hair off. You. I dyed my
hair and put my contacts.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
In and we almost missed the plane because when I
came out, he drank two beers. Oh wow, and he
missed the airport exit. But all because of that, they
threw everything on the plane. They rushed us to the tarmac,
and I think that saved us from having anything stamped,
because we had nothing stamped when we got on the planes.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Wow. And how long was your visitation supposed to be?

Speaker 3 (15:22):
I got her Friday night at six and had to
give her up Sunday night at.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Six, So you're on a timeline of like, I need
to get on a plane before Sunday night.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
Oh yeah, And as they said, I think it was
in the forty eight hours. They're like, where were you I,
So I was probably in Paris by the time they
realized I was gone.

Speaker 4 (15:39):
Then I wouldn't have her for two weeks.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
I left on day sixty five, so I went to
MacArthur Park day forty six.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
When Lisa's day forty six, she means forty six days
after the trial ended and she lost custody of her daughter,
Lee and her legal team were waiting for the written
court order divorce decree to be completed, because she couldn't
file an appeal until that was done. Lisa's she was
told by her attorneys that it would only take thirty days.

(16:10):
As soon as that thirty day marker passed, Lee started
making plans. She says she made her trip to Los
Angeles looking for falsified birth certificates on day forty six,
and the day that she stepped onto a plane with
Savannah to flee the country, it was day sixty five.
Lisa's part of why she fled is that she did
not trust the court system to give her a fair

(16:32):
chance to appeal the case and fight for custody of
her daughter. She claims that the entire time she planned
her exit, she still waited for that divorce degree to
come through, hoping that there would be some legal channel forward.
Even on the night before she fled the US, she
says she checked to see if that court order had
come through.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
My lawyer called Friday night and I just said any
court order and he said no, we were out having
a beer the other night and city he's going to
get around to it.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
So before you left, did you make anyone aware of
what you were doing?

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Only my brother? But I told and I still he
begged me to tell me my name where I.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
Was going, and I said, I can't do it. I
cannot do it.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
He begged me all the way to the plane. He's like,
what if something happens, I go, then it happens, I
can't tell you. And I'm so glad because I knew,
you know, it's you don't have a tyrant, you don't
have a narcissist dictator that does anything on their own.
It's the people that support him below. So I knew
this whole group was so powerful. They had me accused

(17:36):
of being mentally ill with no evidence, and they just
took a nursing baby from a good mom back in
the early nineties.

Speaker 4 (17:43):
That's unthinkable.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
So I knew that they really had a lot of
power and they were not going to stop at anything.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Now you recorded a video, though, when did that happen?

Speaker 4 (17:53):
That was a dumb thing to do too.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
So in the meantime, this is before internet, before anything,
before cell phones.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Really, Lee left a letter and a recorded video behind.
In the video, she goes through her story. She talks
about how things went wrong with Harris and how he
never wanted the baby. She says that he repeatedly suggested
that he wasn't the father because she was quote promiscuous,
and he showed no interest in visiting or seeing Savannah

(18:22):
at all until Lee pressed him for child support. Lee
claims it was only then that he went for custody.
She says Harris made significantly more money than she did,
which is true. Their incomes are laid out in the
court documents. Harris made almost three times what Lee made
when Lee was able to work. I should note that

(18:42):
she had taken a lot of time off after she
had Savannah, and she was Savannah's primary caretaker and covering
the costs herself. But the moment that Harris won full custody,
Lee had to pay him child support. Lee paints a
picture of a system that unfairly worked against her, of
a guardian Adlatam who sided with Harris, a psychiatrist who

(19:04):
tricked her into taking an antipsychotic drug, and multiple people
she claimed lied on the stand. She explains that her
daughter was taken from her because she supposedly had a
mental illness hyperthymic temperament, which Lee points out is not
even a psychiatric disorder listed in the DSM three. Lee

(19:25):
says that Harris had told her that if she went
on medication, she could see Savannah more often, but Lee
refused to take medication that she did not need. Lee
claims in the video that Harris is not just an
aloof or absent father, but a dangerous one. Remember how
at Lee's first visitation writes with Savannah, she found her

(19:46):
daughter to have bruising on her body. Harris later claimed
that that happened while his mother was watching Savannah and
that it was an accident. But Lee claims that it's
more sinister than that, that her daughter is not safe,
and she says that it all comes back to revenge
toward her. She says about Harris quote, he will stop

(20:07):
at nothing to destroy me for someone who did not
feel listened to in court. It makes sense that Lee
would lay everything out from her perspective in this video.
She wanted to explain why she was about to do
something extreme, why she was about to commit the crime
of parental kidnapping.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
She says this Bananna and I belong together, and nobody
besides God has the right to destroy them.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
I wanted to leave proof, and I left an eighty
six minute video and I named everything and everyone. And
if I didn't do that, they would have thought I
was dead or something. But now they knew I left
on my own Verisi, and so probably big mistake, but
I felt I was doing the right things. I knew
the hell that we'd been through for eighteen months, and
I knew that other people were living that hell every day.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
And so you are in Paris by the time they
realize you're gone, you and your daughter. Yeah, and you're
living under aliases or you've traveled there under aliases. No.

Speaker 4 (21:16):
We first flew to Germany.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
When we landed in Germany, the announcement came on and
it said, can miss Canton and baby stay on board
and this is Delta flight.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
And I just thought, oh, dear God.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
I literally was shaking so bad that when everybody deep playing,
they're all staring at us, and I'm trying to smile,
looking normal, you know, and trying to make this stuff.
After a whole long flight to Germany, and Sammy's ready
to go, and I'm just I'm ready to just die.
I stand up, the baby bag falls open, my wipe

(21:53):
pies roll out underneath the seats, and you think that's
not a big deal, but I hit the eight thousand
dollars in those wipe pies.

Speaker 4 (22:00):
So I'm crawling on the floor.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Trying to get them, and I'm shaking so bad, and
everybody's off the plane. I'm like, I can't go backwards.
I can't get out of here. I'm in the prison.
So I finally go out, go out. I'm at the cockpit.
I turned left and there's four agents standing there, Delta agents.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
And I looked at him and I'm like, yeah, they go,
you miss panting. I go, yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
They said that we've heard that you are traveling with
a baby and a whole lot of luggage, and we
came to help you.

Speaker 4 (22:27):
And I'm going, oh, bullshit.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Oh bullshit, you just can't arrest me on the plane.
And then they were in the jetway. I'm like, they
can't rest me here. So when we get to the
airport part they're going to arrest me. We get down,
they load all the luggage on. There's two big giant carts,
and they take us up to immigration and there's a
super long line and immigration. And don't forget, I was
a flight attendant. Even at that moment, they didn't know it.

(22:49):
And they go, oh, look at the line. Well, let's
just take them through the crew line. They waltz Savannah
and I through the crew line with all of our luggage.
Nobody checked our past, nobody stamped anything, nobody did anything.
Then they took us all the way to the train
because I've never taken a train, and loaded everything on
for us, and off we went to Paris, so there

(23:12):
was no record of us anywhere. There was a little
Guardian angel on my left shoulder.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
And when your money rolled under the seats in that
wipes package, did someone just hand it back to you?

Speaker 4 (23:29):
I was digging out it. I was like, but I
was shaking so bad.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
I mean, I if anybody could look guilty, that would
have been me. You know, as I thought they're going
to put me in a mental hospital. There's no one
that's going to be able to protect this child. You know,
I didn't even make it one leg of my journey.
I'm like, how useless am I?

Speaker 2 (23:45):
But for all of these, you know, maybe coincidences that
happen and you're whisked through security, you're going to at
least sounds like more confident that you're going to be
able to get away with this.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
No.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
I never I never had, you know, I found like that, okay.

Speaker 4 (24:02):
Never.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
Li says that she was always looking over her shoulder,
always thinking that she was just about to be caught,
but she wasn't. She made it out of the airport
in Germany, and then she was on a train to Paris,
but she wouldn't stop there. She would keep moving.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
I'd made my mind up that I would go to
Malaysia because nobody would think of Malaysia. I've never been there,
and they spoke English. I knew the weather was warm,
and I knew that the water was warm, and I
was like, okay, so nobody knew anything Like I wouldn't
tell my brother I was going. So I went to
get a ticket, one way ticket for back then babies

(24:42):
get sit on your lap for free. Two thousand dollars
one way ticket from Paris. I remember I only had
eight thousand with me to survive.

Speaker 4 (24:49):
I almost died. I was like, went back to the hotels.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
But another night I did get any cheaper, and I thought,
you know, hotels are in Paris cost so I thought, okay,
I got to bite the bullet.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
And then we left Malaysia.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
You get to Malaysia with Samantha who is currently she's
nick a little boy that you're disguising her as you're
there with your fake passports, where do you go from there?

Speaker 4 (25:13):
I bought and I.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Ripped the covers off of but I bought a rough
guide to Malaysia book and I was in Houston and
the covers off in case anybody might have seen it.
So I'm looking to all I'm on the plane to Malaysia,
and I thought, oh, there's a hotel.

Speaker 4 (25:28):
So we went to this hotel. I don't think it
was probably that.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
It probably might have been a little bit of a brothel,
I found out later, but it was very nice people.
They were all just very humble, and it was downtown
kl Kaula Lumpa, and we went through immigration.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
She was in the pram. They were stamping everything.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
From there, I just looked up adverts for places to stay,
and an Indian man came and he goes, I'm a
landlord for the place that's next door to me and
my wife. And I didn't want to live where they
were expat people. I wanted to live with Malays and
Indians and Chinese, so it.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
Was very nice.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
It was three stories, three bedroom place I rented. Not
long after that, I went really soon. I got a
job with a Chinese media company where I represented international
herald of a newsweek. So it was all going really
well until my boss came up and said, we're applying
for your work permit. We need your university degree, and

(26:27):
I went, oh my lord. I was like, oh, I
didn't think about that. So I called Auburn University where
my brother is a VET and he finished at school
and I didn't, and I said I was a secretariat
that doctor Barnett was in Malaysia doing symposium and could
they please FedEx me his undergraduate degree. And she's like, well,
why don't you want his doctor? It's not that well,

(26:47):
I'm not going to go that far. So I was like, no,
undergraduate is what they need for this oposium, and sure
is Bob. A week or two later, I got it
and it just didn't look all that good. So third
world countries love stamps of all sorts. So I actually
went into the US embassy with this paper and asked
them if they would please stamp it to make it.

(27:08):
I told him it was for my work from it.
And meantime I'm in there and there's most wanted Kidnapped
posters pictures all over the whole place, and I was
so scared, and the guy was so nice, and he's
stamping away and he goes, hey, would you like a
gold seal with that? I go, yeah, a gold seal
sounds really good. So he put a gold seal on it.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
But this has your brother's name on it.

Speaker 4 (27:31):
Oh, I forged it all. I became really good at that.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Unfortunately, Lee and Savannah stayed in Malaysia for seven months.
Savannah was a year and a half old when they
picked up again and moved to South Africa.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Well, this is getting problematic. She was still Nick Marcanton,
and I was like, what am I going to do?
So I met my husband, my future husband. We got
married very quickly, and we went through the whole adoption
thing because he was South African. And then I went,
why did we do that? Why don't I just make
a new birth certificate, make her a girl, make him

(28:06):
the father on the birth certificate. So we did that
and it looked really good, and then sent that in
and yeah, she got a I guess South African citizenship
and then later South African passport.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
So now she's a girl.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
I want to ask about this because you know that
would require a conversation. Hey, I want to just put
you on the birth certificate.

Speaker 4 (28:32):
Oh no, where everything was talked about.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, so I want to I want to know more
about that decision and how he received this information.

Speaker 4 (28:39):
Oh he was. We'd been dating not long, but we
got married really quickly.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
But we were dating, and I gave him my diary
because I've been keeping a diary for Savannah.

Speaker 4 (28:50):
He said, let's get married.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
So I said, first of all, he'd known, but he
didn't know the whole detail. So I said, first of all,
take the diary out by the pool and sit there,
and you come back and tell me if you really want.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
To do this. This is a lifetime of looking over
your shoulder.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
And he came back and he's in tears of flowing
down his face because I love you even more.

Speaker 4 (29:10):
I'm so proud of you.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
And he fell in love with everybody fell in love
with Savannah the second they met her. Now she's Samantha,
and he desperately, you know, wanted to do that. So
we literally got married right away and then had Reese,
my son, ten eleven months later.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
It sounds like Savannah was then raised believing that your
second husband was her biological dad.

Speaker 4 (29:32):
That was her daddy. Yeah, and she was Daddy's girl. Yess,
that was her. She thought that was her biological dad.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Lee married Juan Geldon Hughes, and now she was Alexandria
or Alex Gelden Hughes, and her daughter became Samantha Gelden Hughes,
which is still her name. Lee had a fabricated, entirely
new identities for herself and her daughter, and now she
created a brand new family for them. While Lee still
worried that she'd be and that her daughter would be

(30:01):
taken away from her for years, it just didn't happen. Instead,
they lived their lives. Samantha grew up with her mother,
who she thought was named Alex, with Juan, who she
believed was her biological father, and pretty soon she had
a younger brother, Reees. On the outside, they were just
a normal family. Only Lee and her husband knew the truth.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
I tried to minimize every lie as much as I could,
because I knew i'd get caught one day and I
needed my children to believe in me as the person
that they've known. So things like Jean is my second husband.
He'd say, oh, the day you were born. I'd look
at him and go, don't make that up. I told
her because Mendela was getting out of prison, you know

(30:45):
what was going to happen, I said, She and I
went back to La and I haave birth there in
case it was some kind of you know, uproar or
whatever from that. So that's why I claim we were there,
that's where she was born. And I've tried to make
it not as fictitional as it was. And he just
kept jumping angus because he won. I think he honestly

(31:08):
believes Amy was is because he just loved her so much.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
So, I mean, telling someone is a huge risk if
you're a fugitive. At any point, were you concerned that
he might tell someone?

Speaker 3 (31:21):
You know, it was funny I took such a risk,
especially as quickly as we got married. I think I
landed with the perfect person that kind of wanted us
and needed us as much as we needed him. And
I could tell right away that his love for Savannah
would Samantha would be would override anything. And it's weird

(31:42):
because you can kind of tell when you're on the run.
And now I've got a lot of experience of not
trusting people behind me, and I'm a super trusting person.
I'll talk to anybody and everything, so I have learned
kind of just to filter out who I can and
who I can't trust. He was wonderful and pry it
out of him to anybody.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Ever since leaving Charleston, South Carolina, Lee had been on
the move, never settling in one place for too long.
She'd spent time in Germany and France, Malaysia, Singapore, and
South Africa, and as her children grew up, they only
knew her by the name Alex. It was Juwan and
Alex and their kids Samantha Henries. Juwan's job required the

(32:24):
family to relocate occasionally, which was fine by Lee. She
never wanted to stay in the same place for too long.
She was a fugitive after all.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
From South Africa. We moved to Botswana, colonial lifestyle there.
When Jean's contract finished in botswanas we moved to New
Zealand because we couldn't get into Australia age wise. But
you can go from New Zealand to Australia to live
without a problem and work. So we lived in New
Zealand for five years, got our citizenships there and then

(32:55):
immigrated to Australia. Yeah, and John and I got divorced
not long after we meet to Australia. He'd gone over
earlier and met somebody, and you know, but it was
very amicable. It was actually really amicable. Jean moved back
to South Africa. I was working and publishing for a
long time. I worked in publishing in New Zealand and

(33:15):
in Australia. Samantha is up at university.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
You know, you say, Samantha's at university. So at this point,
you know, you're living in Australia. How many years has
it been that you've been, you know, on the run,
nearly twenty nearly twenty At that point did you start
to feel comfortable with this new life? Did you expect
that you would just live the rest of your life
with this alias, and that's what it would be.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
I remember running a few days, well maybe it's a
month or so before, and I was out running with
my dog and I was like, this is the happiest
I've ever been. The only bad thing was my husband
ex husband at the time. He's back in South Africa.
He was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Speaker 4 (33:57):
And I kept thinking this could all be gone.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Beautiful home, a brilliant job, My children were just insanely excelling,
and I, God, this could all be gone. And it's
the first time I thought about it in a long time.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Because I was Alex I wasn't you know. It's not
like I was living in persona I am that person
after that many years.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
I have to wonder if Lee had kept moving countries
or continents, if she'd ever been caught. But she settled
in Queensland, Australia, and raised her children there. Samantha was
now a legal adult and Reese was in high school,
and in interviews, both Samantha and Reeves have spoken positively
about their upbringing and their mother painting the picture of
a happy life. It makes me think back to the

(34:40):
divorce trial in Charleston in nineteen ninety four, in which
the case was built that Lee was mentally unwell and
should be put on anti psychotic medication. There was that
ominous prediction, a warning really included in the divorce decree
that if Lee remained unmedicated, she could become homicidal or suicidal. Instead,

(35:01):
what she'd done was create a good life for herself
and her children, but the FBI never stopped looking for her.
What we now know is that they had conducted multiple
international searches for her. They had looked in Belize, different
parts of South America and South Africa, and Lee's first husband, Harris,
had also been looking for her. Back in nineteen ninety nine,

(35:25):
he went to Costa Rica looking for Lee and his
daughter Savannah. A producer from the show Forty eight Hours
accompanied him and they aired a segment on the search.
In the segment, Harris says that he is unhappy that
he does not know his daughter and that he will
continue to search for her. Lee had provided her daughter
with a good life, but it was still a life

(35:46):
without the ability to know her biological father. And even
through all the good times, in the back of Lee's mind,
she always knew she could be caught.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
You told your now ex husband, you know, the truth
about your identity, and Savannah, who else did you tell?

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Every country we went to, we would have our closest
couple friends, you know, like husband and wife that we trusted,
because we thought, what if we got killed in an
accident or something, you know, and the children were left orphans,
you know, because you just don't know. So we always
had somebody that we trusted, and we had a key

(36:26):
to the safe where we had all the documents. We
always made sure somebody knew, and we had friends that
we all. They were just so supportive, so wonderful. I
found out though if they were not American citizens, they
couldn't get in trouble. If they are American citizens, and
I told them they could face five years in prison.

(36:47):
So I had a couple in New Zealand that were
very good friends of mine, but I never told them.
Explain to them afterwards why I didn't tell them, because
they could have, you know, taken the brunt of it.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Lee had only told very close, very trusted friends about
her true identity, and that worked for many years, but
eventually word leaked to some people who she didn't trust.
She said it was a husband and wife that she'd
met in Botswana and then years later they'd gotten in
contact with her because they planned to move to Australia.

(37:20):
She says she helped them arrange their move, find a house,
get them all set up, but after they arrived she
wished they'd never come.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, so I moved them over and they're the ones
who I was painting my house and they were all
having wine while I'm doing that, and they said, what
name are you using now? And I literally didn't know
what they were talking about, and then they start giggling,
so I was I knew I was up the creek,
and with the internet now, so you know, back then
we didn't have all those.

Speaker 4 (37:50):
Things, so the Internet now, they could have kept looking
and looking.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
So I took the husband out in the boat and
I told him the truth because he was in, you know,
the better of the two, and I said, please don't
tell you, And I told him Samantha's original name was Savannah.
He was the only other person besides my husband that
knew that. So when they used that name later on,
I knew it.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Was Well, you were missing before the arrest, had you
ever googled?

Speaker 4 (38:16):
You never googled me.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
The only time I did was we'd go back to
South Africa. We'd go through Dubai and stuff. I did
google one time there. All the children were running around
someplace and I put my name and it came up
with a death certificate. I said, Thomas Edwin Barnett, which
was my dad and my brother, and then the children

(38:39):
came running back and I closed it down.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
So I did never see me.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
I didn't know I was most wanted and all that stuff,
but I put it in the back of my mind
that it would have been my dad's death certificate, which
would never have been because he died, you know, nineteen sixty.

Speaker 4 (38:52):
I knew my brother was dead, but I didn't look
at it long enough and I saw that. So that's
the only thing I ever saw.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
And Samantha, did she know the truth at this point?

Speaker 4 (39:03):
You never knew anything until I got arrested.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Okay. Every time I was going to tell her, she
went through some you know, went through a wabbly stage
when we got divorced and her dad moved back to
South Africa and that wasn't the right time. And then Joan,
when he was dying, he said, please don't tell her
until I die, so Jean, she'll love you even more.
So I waited, and he died a week before, eight
days before I got arrested, so he was coming down

(39:26):
for Christmas, and I was going to tell her and
actually your boyfriend too.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
And this might seem like a crazy question to ask,
but I'm just curious if there was ever a moment
during those almost twenty years that you questioned your choice
to leave and you wondered if maybe Harris would have
ended up being a good dad, or was there ever
a question of that or no.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
No, there was never a question of it if he
hadn't done what he did to me and in turn
due to her, you know, because all of the trauma
that baby went through, the whole pregnancy, when he was
telling me, I'm sick and I'm insane. When they finally
did the court order, after I was gone for three weeks,
they finally wrote the court order, and it said I

(40:11):
was so mentally ill, it was escalating so fast that
I was going to go into homicidal suicidal rage. And
there I have been, never had a problem, never been
on I don't men take aspirin. I worked corporate forever.
You know, there was like, so they looked they went
too far to the extreme, So I knew how diabolically
was Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
And did you ever have any other issues with you know,
mental health or people accusing you of having mental health
issues after you left?

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (40:39):
No, never.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Lee recalls the day that her life on the run
finally came to an end.

Speaker 4 (40:53):
So Jeana just died.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
Semi had written the eulogy, and she was up at
school fifteen hours away. Reese was doing his final exam
at the high school across the street. And it was
seven thirty in the morning, and let's get ready to
go to work.

Speaker 4 (41:07):
I was my Tasmanian boxer shorts.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
I always say, you envisioned this arrest your whole twenty years.
You don't envision being in Tasmanian boxer shorts and a
scrub shirt.

Speaker 4 (41:16):
So they'd pounding on my office.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Door and I was like yeah, and they said we've
got a warrant to search your house. And I always
knew don't jump up and give them too much because
I talked too much anyway, because I was like okay,
I said all right, I said, you want to come
in the front door of this door. And before I
could even say that there was a man behind me
in my house. He must have hopped the hedge, run
around the pool, around around the back of the house

(41:39):
and he's standing.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
Then he goes, I don't see knives. I don't see guns.
And I'm like, what I said, I don't own any guns.
And I said, I got knives in the kitchen. You're
welcome to go in there if you put a knife.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
So I invited them in and I said, you want coffee,
you want tea?

Speaker 4 (41:52):
And I sat them down and I told.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Him where the passports were, where the birth certificates were,
and then pedro the arresting officer. He said, okay, what's
your name. I said, it's alex Skeldenhuse. He said, what
are the names are you known by? And I said, well,
Alexander and Maria Canton was my maiden name. I said,
but my married name is Alexander Maria guilden Hus. He goes,
what other names? I go, I don't know what you're

(42:15):
talking about, and I go alex And then I looked
at him and he looked at me, and I said,
are there any of you guys FBI? Because there was
like twelve of them raid in the house. Because there's
two of them waiting now side, I said, bring them
on in.

Speaker 4 (42:26):
So I knew then that was it.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
After almost twenty years, the FBI had located Lee, and
now she had to tell her children the truth.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
So I called one of my girlfriends and she comes
in and they're raid in the house. And then my
son walks over from his final exam and he's like, mom,
what's going on? And they let me go into the
bedroom with him and try and fast forward twenty years
and you could see how convoluted the story is. Then
we had to call Samantha, which was terrible.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
And how was that telling Samantha the truth.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
I'm sitting on the couch. Reesa's got his arm around me.
My girlfriend carry has got her arm around Reese. And
we put the phone in the middle and the coffee table,
and I said, well, we've got to call her boyfriend,
her long term boyfriend, make sure he's there for her.

Speaker 4 (43:13):
So we call his number and he's like, Alex, are
you okay?

Speaker 3 (43:16):
And I go no, Brad, I said, you told me
at one time you had big shoulders when you started
dating my daughter. I said, I need those big shoulders
pulled back straight. And you just stay by her side,
and hecause I will. And she gets on the phone
and she's like, Mom, what is it? And I said, honey,
I was married twenty years ago and I had to
take you when you were eleven months old to keep

(43:36):
you safe. And I said, you just got to trust me,
and she said, Mom might trust you.

Speaker 4 (43:41):
Of course I do.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
And I said, I'm going to take me to jail now,
and I need you to hop on a plane, bring
your passport and your brother, and a FBI agent named
Tom will meet you down at the Brisbane airport. She's like, Mom,
to take you to jail. I said, I'll be fine.
Everybody's being really nice. I said, don't worry, just come
on down, take care of your brother. And then we

(44:02):
said how much we loved each other and all that,
and we hung up the phone and literally thirty seconds
goes by and the phone rings and it's Sammy. You
remember she just buried her dad and she just said Mom,
And I said what she said? Does that mean my
daddy wasn't my daddy? And I just said, sweetheart, your
daddy will always be your daddy. And she said, okay, Mom,

(44:25):
I'm coming. And I said all right, and that was it,
poor kid.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, that it is hard to imagine that phone call
and being on either end of it. Really, So you're
arrested and extradited to the United.

Speaker 4 (44:43):
States, Well, I thought extradition.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
They stayed in Australia as long as I could, knowing
that the conditions, even though it was maxim security, would
be a lot better. Also, every one of my friends
saved every piece of evidence for twenty years, so they
made all copies of them, shipped them up to Australia.
Samantha and my friend Bruce and another friend and his

(45:06):
wife all jumped in. They photo copied everything, got it
to me in prison, so I can actually remember what
had happened, you know, get myself ready. We had to
get me an attorney because we didn't have anything. One
of my closest friends here, and we found an attorney,
and then I finally succeeded extradition after I'd studied all
the evidence for ten months.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
And tell us about your trial or plea deal in sentencing.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
So the first heroin we went to was just whether
you plead guilty or not guilty.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
And I'm like.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
Ninety five pounds, these chains all around my ankles, and
my waist and everything, and I'm walking in and I
start singeing all my people I hadn't seen, you know,
family and everybody, and that they're all like crying and waving,
and I'm waving with my shackles, and my lawyers like
stop that, and I'm like, but I haven't seen these
people for so long. Hearing Samantha was there, and the

(46:02):
whole courtrooms filled again with all my friends and everybody.
And then that's the first time I look to my left,
right where I walked in purposely, and there's my ex
husband and I was close to him as like a
foot so he wouldn't come to the other hearings. So
the prosecutor, who was actually a really good guy, he

(46:23):
got up and he laid out his case about me.

Speaker 4 (46:26):
That's what they do, that's the order it goes in.
Then the judge asked me, because it's all going to
go on record, He goes, is there anything that you'd
disagree with?

Speaker 3 (46:35):
And I wasn't supposed to say anything, and I go, yes,
your honor, and Russell stomps on my foot and he said,
what is it? And I said, the prosecutor just said that.
Shortly after the birth of my daughter. Harris left me.
I said, Harris left me at two and a half
months when I wouldn't I don't think, I said, when
I wouldn't have an abortion.

Speaker 4 (46:54):
And he said okay, and he said, is that all?
I said, yes, sir, that's all.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
There's a lot of inaccuracies in there because it's such
a convoluted story, but it wasn't as severe as that.
I would be damned if looked like he stayed there
for the pregnancy and all of that. And then my
daughter stood up and gave the most beautiful diplomatic talk.
And then Harris's attorney got up and started reading some

(47:19):
of When the judge wouldn't let him talk about the
family court case, he said that was twenty years ago.
We're not re litigating this in a federal courtroom. Then
he promptly got some of Harris's poems out and started
reading poetry to the judge. And then he sentenced me
to the maximum of my sentencing guidelines, which gave me
another three and a half months. But he said, I'm

(47:40):
sure you'd be put in a camp someplace that family
can come visit you, which was not the case.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
In February of twenty fifteen, Lee was sentenced to twenty
one months in federal prison for international parental kidnapping and
two counts of falsifying US passport applications. Because of all
the documents that Lee forged over the years, she could
have been facing a much longer sentence.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, but relative to a ten year sentence.

Speaker 4 (48:10):
Twenty three years is what I was looking at.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Okay, a twenty three year sentence pretty good. And at
least one FBI agent has commented publicly that he didn't
agree with your sentencing. And you know, Hannah, and are
speaking to you today hearing your side of this story
and not Harris's side. And this certainly isn't meant to
be a celebration of parental abduction or on custodial abduction.

(48:37):
I want to hear from you. I guess about any
conflicting feelings that you have about your decision to do this.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Well, first of all, I want to say, this is
how the breakdown of the twenty three years is. It's
ten years for each falsification statement on a passport, and
it wasn't the two passports. It's when I got more
pages and I changed my name when I got married,
those two passport cases. That actually is a misdemeanor. There's
actually no court.

Speaker 4 (49:05):
Time for that.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
Well, and I'm sorry to cut you off, but like
we do a lot of cases, and we understand that
there are a lot of charges. When someone's charged, there's
a lot of different things. There's mil fraud, there's every
time you forge a document. I'm sure there was a
potential charge and a potential sentence.

Speaker 4 (49:21):
With that could be could have been easily you ended.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Up getting twenty one months. But I think what's more
interesting is to hear a reflection about you know, because
I in some sense, like I very much get why
you did what you did. Like, I think that it
was very clear that you felt an incredible threat against
not just yourself but your daughter. And you know, it's

(49:45):
my understanding that you did what you did because you
were out of options and because you wanted to protect her.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Yeah, that's exactly the only reason why I was saying
that is that three years is for parental kidnapping, and
that's what I got it for. So that turned into
a that is that's what the twenty one months came
out to, which is that So that's why especially federal
as you know, they hype up the numbers so much
that it looks kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Right, But at the same time, you know, you did
abduct my child. Yeah, this child, And even though one
could argue that her biological father would not have been
a good father, you know, I think he probably still
has an argument that he never had the chance to
have that if that were something he wanted. And you know,
do you have any kind of conflicting feelings about any

(50:31):
of that?

Speaker 4 (50:33):
No, I wish I did.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
I cannot tell you how scary it is to be
deemed mentally ill when you've had nothing wrong with you.
I can't tell you how scary it is to either
be forced on lithium or lose your baby and you
have no control over that. So when he said in
the court that he would do the same thing with
his baby girl because she's the fourth generation and he'd

(50:58):
put her on medication to Jenga's three years old, I
could never take that out of my mind. Now, when
I got caught, I was hoping there might be some
epiphany from him or anybody to say, hey, we were wrong.
Look at how she's lived her life, she's raised basically,
you know, my husband was there for part of it
my second husband, and they would say, oh, you know,

(51:20):
let's just say there was a big mistake done, blah
blah blah. But instead of that, they demanded I get
like thirty years in prison. They demanded this and that
and the other. And as both of my children said,
if he just walked up and knocked on the door,
I'd have been like, hi, come on in. But it
wasn't about finding my daughter. It was to punish me.
The whole thing was to prove that I was this

(51:43):
crazy person. But they couldn't do that because a crazy
person couldn't have done all the things they did, you know,
and maintained such a normal life with normal, well rounded children.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
At least. Sentencing hearing, her daughter, Samantha spoke out advocating
for her mother. She asked the judge to get her
mother a sentence that did not include prison time, because.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Now I'm in a situation going, oh my god, I've
got two children.

Speaker 4 (52:08):
My husband's said, no money, I'm going to prison. How
do I put them through university?

Speaker 3 (52:12):
So I thought maybe he'd step up and you know,
say okay. And it also proves I didn't know any
of this. But this is how vengeful he sued my mother,
my brother, he sued my best friend Susan, And I
didn't know all that when I left, of course, because
I didn't have any connection. So every single thing that
I knew was cooperated after I found out.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
If that makes any sense, Yeah, that totally makes sense.

Speaker 4 (52:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
I mean, if there wasn't been something that was kind
of understanding, loving towards Samantha or you know, anything, but
it wasn't that way. I didn't want to be right,
you know. I didn't want to be right, I really didn't.
I was hoping there'd be some warmth and something there
for me, but for the fallout of everything else. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
And does Samantha, you know, has she reconnected with Harris?
Do they have any kind of relationship?

Speaker 4 (53:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (53:07):
They do talk now they didn't, you know, she went
on you know, publicities, I mean, see everywhere. But she
did meet him when I was looking at twenty three
years and he tried to shake her hand. And she's
the most diplomatic grown up kid in the whole world,
and she said, now, let's give it a hug.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
And they have communication. Yeah somewhat. It's not my business.
She's an adult. Yeah, and that's her story, as she says,
you know.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
I'm her priority, and yeah, just thank god, I've got
such great kids, really amazing.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
How is your relationship with your kids now that you're
out and you know, living your life.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
It's brilliant. I mean, Sammy and I just spent almost
six weeks together. We went to Belize and we just
did all the jungle stuff. So if I did when
as a child that she'd heard about, I mean, we've
been before, but this time we really just stayed in
cool places. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Does she still go by Sammy? So to recaps, she
was born Savannah, Yeah, then became Nick and now she's Samantha.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
That was a very short purred till Nick.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
Okay, but she goes by Samantha. Got it?

Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (54:17):
Yeah, Well, I appreciate you fielding all of our questions.
You know, it's our responsibility, I think, to our audience
when we do stories that you know, have elements of
being problematic, that we you know, ask those questions, and
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
You can't imagine how many hundreds and hundreds of people,
men and women that have reached out to me and said,
please help me. We've got to do the same thing.
I can't live through this. If anything, I have the
worst survivor's guilt because Samantha and I had an ad
Reese we had and my husband, we had a normal,
leave it to beaver life. It didn't seem like it
inside I was being eaten alive, but on the outside

(54:56):
we did. There's not a single person that I would
ever say yet, go on the run, because you'll get
caught and you'll never be able to protect your child.
So even if you only have visitations as little as
I had, if I had any outlet like legally, which
I covered every base, I would have never gone. There's
a lot that was very illegally.

Speaker 4 (55:17):
Done to me and to her.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of conversations
around abuse of the family court system and when there's
a wealth disparity between the parents who are fighting it
out for custody especially, and it's imperfect to say the least.
I mean, that's one of the reasons it's actually hard
to report on is it's hard to prove when the
stories are so different.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
It is, and it's got to remember even more so,
back then, women weren't allowed to cry, we weren't allowed
to be emotional. We could watch our food and being taken,
but that moment were mentally ill. Women were so easily
told that they were mentally ill because it was easier
just to accept it. I didn't or I probably would
have caved if it wasn't for protecting her. You know,

(56:02):
if it hadn't been, I probably would have never done
anything for me. It was that I knew what was
going to happen to.

Speaker 4 (56:07):
Her down the road.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Okay, Patia, you connected with Lee, which I mean, what
a wild story. How did you make that connection happen?

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Yeah, So I reached out to who I thought was
Lee from what I could find online with you know,
contact information. Didn't hear back, and I just started thinking, Okay,
this is still such an incredible story and highlights so
many things that I think resonate with a lot of
people about the family court system and how volatile things
can be and the imbalances there. And anyway, I really

(56:42):
wanted to do the story, so I thought, well, this
would be a great off record. I'll just research the
story and then I'll tell you the story. And then
it was a weekend and I got a call from Lee.
I just had a call back, a callback Yeah, she
called my cell phone or maybe she texted I don't remember,
but I immediately got on the phone with her. We
talked for like twenty five minutes, and I was like,

(57:04):
we have to do the interview with Lee, but you know,
we're on a production schedule. Yeah, and so yeah, I
loved you probably like a really long voice note about
how you needed to cancel whatever plans you had on
this lovely holiday weekend and do this interview. And of
course you weren't game, and it was worth it. It
was so worth it, and Lee was happy to do it,

(57:27):
and yeah, what a story.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
Yeah, obviously her story has been told before. We mentioned
the forty eight hours episode in our series. She's also
written a book, but you know, I hadn't heard like
a longer format podcast about her side of the story,
and so we felt like, yeah, there's enough interesting stuff

(57:50):
here for us to really take the time and let
her walk us through what was going through her head
when she made this wild, like truly wild decision.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Totally, and I think that she's a perfect example of
what we were envisioning when we started this show, which
was stories from all perspectives. And yeah, Lee was on
the wrong side of the law. But her reasons I
think are really relatable. You know, a lot of times

(58:21):
life is not black and white, and she was doing
what she felt was best for her daughter. And that's
not to say that there aren't problematic areas in her story.
And I would never tell someone else how to feel
about it, but I thought it was just such a
unique perspective and that she was so open and vulnerable
in sharing it with us.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
Yeah, because we talk with victims on the show, right,
and technically Lee was convicted of a crime in this story,
and so who is the victim in this story is debatable. Really,
it was important to us not to downplay the fact
that Savannah Samantha's father really didn't have a choice on

(59:05):
whether or not he was present in his daughter's life.
No matter what kind of person he is, like, that's
still something that was taken away from him illegally. But
at the same time, once we started to dig into
the court documents, this whole other story came to light
about how she was portrayed, and I found the mental

(59:25):
health aspect of this court case to be really intriguing,
you know. And obviously it was in nineteen ninety four,
and we talk about this in the series, that the
understanding of different diagnoses and mental health disorders changes and
updates throughout time, right, but the evidence that they used
against her in this court case is now current like

(59:46):
modern day understanding, completely ridiculous, right, Like absolutely unfounded, not
true at all, And she was portrayed as this mentally
unfit woman, this unfit mother, which she clearly is not.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
One thing that happens when we produce these episodes is
we often have follow up questions after an interview. And
because I was, you know, the first point of contact
with Lee, you know, and we've both been in touch
with her outside of the interview, you know, you end
up talking to them about things that are going on
in their life right now. And you know, Lee's mentioning
a trip that she's going to be with both of

(01:00:23):
her kids. And she had a marriage that was a
long and happy marriage. It ended eventually, but like it
was a long and happy relationship that she spoke really
highly of a great relationship with her kids today. All
of those things, for me are what really informed my
sort of perspective on on Lee. Yeah, I also think

(01:00:45):
that she didn't shy away from really difficult questions. Yes,
she was very honest. She was really honest, and yeah,
you know, we pressed on the hard stuff and she
accepted that. And yeah, I really was enthralled by this. Yeah,
we didn't speak with her daughter, but her daughter has
done interviews and has been very positive about her mother

(01:01:08):
and says that she had a great childhood, a great upbringing,
and you know, has said things like I understand why
she did it. So I also think that says a lot. Yeah,
her son has said the same in his interviews, and
so to me, that speaks volumes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Yeah, Okay. One thing that I feel like we just
have to revisit, even though we talked about it so
much in the series, is the idea that just like
a quote unquote regular person who doesn't have any kind
of like FBI, CIA, like even like you know, army training, anything,
can figure out how to go on the run, how

(01:01:43):
to forge documents. Like when she was telling us that,
it was like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Honah, was an amazing part of the interview. Let it
be a lesson to us all. Do not let imposter
syndrome dictate your decision making.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Yeah, do it, you can do it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
And it reminded me of that movie American Animals a
little bit, that scene with her and MacArthur Park and
like remembering the guy telling her to walk through the
tunnel and then that being kind of a test.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
In American Animals. That was a movie I've watched.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
It remind me of it. Okay, Sneaky Recommendation here came
out in twenty eighteen, directed by Bart Layton, and it's
based on a true story and it's sort of this
like hybrid scripted film with talking heads from the real people,
so almost like a domembermentary mixed with film.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
It's like there's part of it that's it's a movie
where you're seeing actors. Yeah, this out, but then it
cuts to the real people. Yeah, I remember that. It's
really like unique, it's so unique. It is an amazing movie.
Like I have watched this movie so many times. I
have like the movie poster art right outside my daughter's and.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
It's big fat.

Speaker 4 (01:03:00):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
But anyway, so what reminds you, Yeah, of that?

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
So it reminded me of that movie because I believe
that Lee was telling us the truth. But I know
from just being a human and also speaking to so
many people about stories that have happened many years before
in their life. Memories change, you know, they're kind of elastic,

(01:03:24):
and they're different for different people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
And we're kind of constantly editing our own story in our.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Pass And so that's not to say I don't think
it happened like that. I totally believe her that it did.
But it was just such a vivid memory that it
really took me to like, maybe I just think it
should be a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Probably should be. Yeah, but I remember in that film,
it's like similar that it's these sort of regular guys,
college students that decide to plan, yes, a heist or something.
So you have that like real person trying to do
this thing that feels like someone in an action movie
would do. Exactly you just brought this all together. Why

(01:04:04):
made me think of that movie?

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Yeah, but yeah, it's this person who you would never
think would be in that situation then getting to that
point and actually following through. Yeah, and I think maybe
like the kids in American Animals that pulled off this
heist until they didn't. Of course, the whole time, you're
wondering is it really going to happen? Am I really

(01:04:27):
gonna do this? For how far?

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Am I gonna go?

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
How far am I going to go? Like Lee thought
it was gonna end after the first flight, Yeah, the
agents helping her off of the flight and through customs,
like at every turn, she was sort of wondering, is
this really happening? Am I really doing this?

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
And you have to imagine, like how far ahead was
she really planning? She obviously had huge incentive to do this,
like this is not something that you would do just
you know, change your identity and flee the country and
create a whole different life, never speak to your family again.
That is huge for anyone that you know, and unless
you have like a real reason to do that, right,

(01:05:07):
But was part of her just like Okay, I have
to flee and run, but yeah, I'll probably get caught soon.
And then she does it, and then it's like the
years tick by and she just creates this totally different life.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, and I imagine like seeing her daughter thriving, and
you know, she spoke to us so much about how
proud she is of her children and how well they're doing,
and that would be I think, very reaffirming. Yeah, Okay,
this was the right decision. I should keep doing this, right,
And she had good friends in Charleston and in her

(01:05:39):
life in the US that you know she never had
problems with and she left them behind too. It was
not not an easy situation.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
Yeah. Wow, I'm so glad she called you back and
that we were able to do this series.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
Yeah, me too. Thanks so much to Lee for taking
the time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Well, that is our episode for today.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
We'll be back next week.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactlyrightmedia
dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram at
the Knife Podcast or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me paysha Eden.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.