DON’T PROSECUTE EX FOR TAKING KIDS AWAY 30 YEARS AGO
Dad: Isn’t going to help anybody
WARWICK, R.I. — A Rhode Island man whose two young daughters were snatched from his life three decades ago insists he doesn’t want his ex-wife thrown in jail for running off with his precious girls and hiding them for all this time.
“I’m not looking to have my ex-wife prosecuted or anything like that. That isn’t going to help anybody at this point — all it would do is push my children further away from me,” a shocked Russell Yates, 69, told the Herald yesterday, hours after police confirmed they tracked the girls and his ex-wife to Texas after a high-profile, 31-year-long hunt for the trio.
“I’ve been searching for 30 years,” Yates said. “It’s a big relief to know that they are out there.”
But even as police told Yates his daughters live 1,500 miles away in Houston, with families of their own, Yates is again waiting.
“Being that they are adults now, it’s up to them to get in touch with me if they want to,” Yates said. “The police won’t give me their information, and I just hope they will call.”
Yates, waiting for that call yesterday, said he wanted his girls to know they have a 21-year-old half-sister who’s studying creative writing and working right now in Los Angeles.
“She’s graduating this year,” Yates said. “She would love to know her sisters.”
Yates last saw his missing daughters, then-3 1⁄2- year-old Kimberly and then-10-monthold Kelly, on Aug. 26, 1985, when his wife Elaine Yates left their Warwick home after a heated argument reportedly broke out.
Three months later, Russell Yates got sole custody of the girls, and police issued a warrant for his wife’s arrest in October 1988 for child-snatching.
In 1990, Yates’ mother-in-law, Mary Pigeon, was jailed for eight days for contempt of court when she refused to reveal where the girls were hiding and insisted she did not know where they were.
The exhaustive search for his girls was strewn with tips and dead ends that lifted his spirits only to dash his hopes when they led nowhere, Yates said.
Then, a tip to Rhode Island state police days before Christmas turned their attention to Houston, where Elaine Yates was living under the name Leina L. Waldberg, police said.
Texas investigators and Rhode Island state police, sifting through driver’s license photographs and social media accounts, tracked Elaine Yates to Houston and arrested her on Monday. Yates confirmed her true identity to police. Houston police charged her with being a fugitive and sent her back to Rhode Island, where she will be arraigned today in Kent County Superior Court on two counts of child-snatching.
“I would just like my ex to tell me where the kids are and if they are well,” Yates said. “And she can go about her business. I hear they have families of their own, I don’t know.” Yates said one of his biggest fears was that Kimberly, now 35, and Kelly, now 32, were never told they had a father searching for them.
“I don’t even know if they knew I was alive,” Yates said. “This might be a bigger shock to them than it is to me. My ex, before she left, she had threatened that she would leave with the kids and I would never know them or they would never know me.”