My story starts way before the night I was kidnapped.

My parents married as teenager when my father joined the Marines at 17, and my mother dropped out of school to follow him. The relationship was not great, by all accounts, and all I can say is that getting married as children and then having a child to ‘save’ the relationship are terrible life choices.

When I was a year old my parents relationship finally dissolved, and my mother left. She claims that my father did not allow her to take me with her, but I don’t fully understand or believe her explanations of why, as she had legal and family support, and I have been told by more than one source that my father was emotionally (and most likely psychologically) unstable when she left, as well as dangerous. So, it is very unlikely that police would leave a toddler with someone who was setting my mother’s belongings on fire on his front lawn (supposedly).

Either way, my father’s parents stepped in and had us move in with them while my father was going through his crises and he needed help with me. These are my earliest memories.

My grandparents were very opinionated and controlling and my father always hated that about his parents. They got a lawyer and arranged his divorce without involving my mother, and attempt to do a few more things to ‘help’ him.

But at some point after the age of two, they began to suspect that I was being sexually abused, and they could only come up with one suspect. They accused my father, had him ejected from the home, and filed for custody.

By the time I was three and a half, I had visitations with my dad, and I was living with his parents as my main caretakers. I went to school, had regular appointments with a therapist, and had someone called a ‘guardian ad litem’ which is someone like a social worker, who represented you in legal proceedings.

My mother was not involved in my life until right before my fourth birthday. I don’t know what kept her from trying to come and see me for all this time, but something prompted her at this point to file for custody. I have been told several different reasons, but all from people that have prejudice against my mother so I don’t know how much I can trust these comments.

The only things I can really trust are what is documented in the court paperwork, which I have several copies of. While my father is only mentioned a few times, my mother is mentioned a lot more and in very questionable ways.

An evaluation from a psychologist from the court states that she demonstrates no real emotional attachment to me, and has no reasonable explanation as to why she has not seen me in two and a half years, even though we live in the same city and I have transport from both my grandparents and my father.

Also troubling to me is the way the court handled my case. More than one person, in multiple documents, stated that there was physical signs of me being sexually abused over time, both before and after my mother came back into my life, and the social workers did very little to investigate it or follow up with the doctors who had examined me.

A report done by an independent guardian ad litem states that he had spoken to my assigned case worker and they had told him that everything was fine, but when he had reached out to the hospital and doctor that had examined me after alleged abuse had happened the doctor had contacted child protective services to make a report, and that no one had ever called them back or tried to collect the results of my tests. I was three years old at the date of this appointment.

The same report states that my case worker had made comments to me that my memory of abuse was ‘a dream’ that I had had, and that during supervised visitations my mother would take out photos of someone who was suspected of being responsible for my abuse and showing them to me and did not think there was anything wrong with it, and in fact defended the practice when confronted with it.

A psychological evaluation I had done by a court appointed therapist is also quite disturbing, and claims that it is possible that I caused damage to my own hymen in the bath, or with ‘exploration.’ As a four year old child.

Admittedly, I don’t know the proper procedures for writing a psychological evaluation of four year old little girls who are suspected of being sexually abused, but I’m not very comfortable with the idea that a grown ass man wrote that I caused damage to my own hymen with ‘self exploration’ as a toddler. In fact, that makes me feel rather nauseous.

So by now I can understand why my main caretakers would be frustrated that no one was really taking the subject of my abuse seriously, considering there was only two real main suspects and the court didn’t seem to care either way.

Let me just add that I currently, at thirty-seven, have no idea who the perpetrator of this assault was. Trauma and time have taken that memory from me. And I would never accuse someone of hurting me without truly knowing it was them first. This may be something I will never know.

But at the time my grandparents could not accept the ineffectuality and gross incompetence of the court. And with their paranoia and hyper religious natures, they became easily caught up in the hysteria of the satanic panic and became completely convinced that everyone that wasn’t them was involved in a conspiracy of abuse and satanic worship.

My grandmother ordered pamphlets from magazines that warned against ritual sacrifice to demons, and the dangers of cults. They really and truly believed that I was at the center of this conspiracy and they needed to save me from it in any way they could.

They ran out of money for the custody battle, and ended up having to concede. My legal custody was given to my mother, and her husband (my step father), which I find a bit weird.

While I understand that my father was still being investigated for abuse at this time, my step father was also accused and I had only seen him a handful of times and had no real relationship with him. I don’t understand the decision of the court to give my custody to a man who was basically a stranger to me. This would mean that when they divorced when I was 16 he would have still had parental rights to me, even though he is not my biological father.

I find it unsettling and I don’t really like it.

Realizing the situation that they were in, and fully entrenched in paranoia, my grandparents reached out to a woman called Faye Yager, who was pretty famous in the late eighties and early nineties for helping people kidnap children.

She helped them devise a plan to liquidate their assets and leave the state, staying as unnoticed as possible. She had a network of people that would help hide us, and that’s how we stayed out of sight for the first few years after we left.

When my grandparents picked me up on that fateful night in 1987, Faye had already come to see my grandparents and deemed them worthy of her help, giving them instructions on how to disappear.

My family still tries to peddle the fiction that my grandparents were some sort of criminal masterminds that conceived of this plot all on their own, and persuaded hospitals to lie for them.

In all honesty, the conspiracy used them as much as they used it.

While fully believing in the satanic panic, they used Faye’s underground to their benefit to get what they wanted, and punish people they believed had hurt me. I believe that was very important to them. But I also believe that they were so fully under the spell of the panic, that if they had not had someone like Faye guiding them, foolishness and hubris would have made them do something that would have gotten them caught early on.

My grandmother listened to what Faye told her to do, and internalized those messages. After a time the paranoia caused them to break away from Faye and her underground network, and my grandmother used those same lessons to disappear once again.

And that’s how I grew up. Amazingly able to go to school like a normal child (sort of), pretending my grandparents were my parents. And they had real identification and jobs, paid taxes, owned businesses. And for a while everything was ok.

And then I started to grow up, and everything started to become less ok.

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