Abduction nightmare:
She believed she’d found the perfect man. Yet, on a family holiday to Turkey, Lisa’s life collapsed into chaos when her Turkish-born husband seized their son. What followed led to a chase across the country, a 60 Minutes crew and a dramatic escape,
forced to kidnap my own son
They were the words Lisa Kennedy* never expected to hear. Speaking down the phone line, her husband, Stefan, the man she had shared her life with for the past decade and who had left with their seven-month-old son, Daniel, just a few hours before, delivered news that left her stunned and gasping for breath. “We are not coming back,” Stefan said. “I’ve filed for divorce [in Turkey]. You will get the papers next week. Daniel is staying with me. You should make plans to go back to Australia.”
Lisa, a young Australian woman, who meets The Weekly in a capital city hotel room, recalls at that moment she felt all the life energy drain out of her like air escaping from a balloon. “What are you talking about?” she demanded, her hand shaking uncontrollably.
“I’ll talk to you once you’ve calmed down,” Stefan said, coldly. “Don’t come here. This is serious, Lisa. Don’t call me. I’ll call you when you have calmed down.”
Lisa put down the phone, her heart pounding. “I felt like I was dying,” she says. “My husband was a man I no longer knew. He’d taken my son and filed for divorce. We’d had our differences, like any couple, but there was nothing to indicate something like that was coming. I loved him and thought he loved me. It was the most devastating betrayal.”
Crying, she instinctively moved to the shelf where the couple stored their passports. “We kept our passports in a red wallet,” she says now. “I picked it up, but I already knew what was inside – my passport was there, but Daniel’s and Stefan’s were not. This was a mother’s worst nightmare, my worst nightmare. I wanted my son. I kept thinking, I need my baby back.”
Lisa Kennedy believed she had found her life partner – a romantic, caring, sensitive man with an exotic accent and shared ambitions for the future. Yet, as she discovered, life doesn’t always deliver certainties or even happy endings.
To understand the predicament that Lisa found herself in and how her story came to involve 60 Minutes reporter Liz Hayes, a child recovery agent and a desperate dash across the sea, you need to understand how her relationship with Stefan began.
The couple met when she asked him the time late one evening in a city nightclub. He was charming and attentive, with an intriguing foreign accent. Lisa was immediately smitten. As they became closer, she learned more about him. “Stefan’s family was well-off in Turkey – well-off in any country, really,” says Lisa. “They had several properties. His sister, Didem, was a lawyer. They were aspirational. His father, Sabri, was a businessman. His mother, Goknur, was a housewife. Though they lived in a mostly Muslim country, they weren’t religious.”
Eight months into their relationship, Stefan asked Lisa to move to Turkey to live in the city of Istanbul. “I was in love, but I knew the realities, too,” says Lisa. “My friends thought I was insane to go to Turkey. We had an agreement that we would live there for two years, no longer. I didn’t have any plans to live permanently in Turkey.”
They made the move. Lisa was just 22. “Stefan’s family welcomed me with open arms,” she says. “They absolutely fell in love with me. They fell in love with how I treated him and how he treated me. But we lived in the expatriate world, not in his world.”
Their romance flourished and Stefan asked Lisa to marry him. They wed in 2002, in Istanbul. “It felt like our fates were linked,” says Lisa.
At the end of their time in Istanbul, Stefan and
Lisa moved to Sydney, where they settled. “Our agreement was to live in Turkey for two years,” says Lisa.
“We always said that. But when it came time to go, Stefan’s family acted as though they were shocked. They assumed we’d live there. That was never the intention. But we agreed to go back to visit.”
The couple set up a business and made a life for themselves in Sydney. Then, in 2009, Lisa felt the pull of motherhood. Within a few months, she was pregnant and her days were filled with baby books, prams and cots as she prepared for a new phase of her life. Their son, Daniel, arrived a few months later. “My whole life
My husband was a man I no longer knew.
changed the moment he arrived,” says Lisa. “We were a threesome, a family.”
At the same time, Stefan and Lisa planned to move interstate. As she recovered from Daniel’s birth, Stefan suggested that instead of enduring the rigours of winter in a new city, they return to Istanbul and enjoy the European summer for a few months before settling into their new home.
Lisa readily agreed. Stefan had business interests in Turkey and it would mean his parents could get to know their grandchild.
With their belongings packed, Lisa, Stefan and Daniel jetted into Istanbul for what should have been a three-month holiday. They stayed in an apartment owned by Stefan’s family, not far from the family’s gated residence. “That first night, we had dinner and cocktails at a nightclub in the same building where we married and we had beautiful views across the Bosphorus Sea,” recalls Lisa. “It was lovely.”
Yet, despite the enchanting beginning, things seemed strangely out of kilter to Lisa. Goknur, Stefan’s mother, knocked on her door almost every single day. “It was like she was monitoring me,” says Lisa. At the same time, Stefan began working out of his sister’s law offices.
She became acutely aware of the cultural differences between Australia and Turkey. “I wasn’t scared of Turkey, but I knew I didn’t want it to be a permanent part of our future,” says Lisa. “And Stefan had willingly agreed to that.”
Yet tensions continued to rise. There were differences about her attitude to child-rearing. Lisa was frowned upon for taking Daniel out in public. Even women in the street gave her disapproving looks. Nothing Lisa did seemed to meet with approval from her husband’s family. Stefan stayed coolly on the sidelines as his mother hovered.
These simmering tensions never alerted Lisa to any kind of major threat, though. It was, for her, simply a case of minor disagreements before she and her family left Turkey and returned to Australia. Yet for Stefan and his family, the matter was entirely different.
“After Stefan took Daniel, I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I desperately wanted my son back. I didn’t speak the language. I was in a strange country. My family were thousands of miles away. I didn’t know where to turn.”
Lisa believes that Stefan’s betrayal was a hastily conceived plan to get her to stay. “It wasn’t well thought out, a kind of last-minute attempt to get me to stay in Turkey,” she recalls. “I had such conflicted emotions at that point because even though he had done this, I was still in love with him and I didn’t understand what was motivating him. He’d changed, become a different person, and I didn’t know why.”
She also realised just how alone she was. At first, she reached out to the Australian Embassy, but embassy staff could only advise her to get a lawyer. This was an internal Turkish matter and the Australian government could not intervene – and the Turkish legal system could be agonisingly slow, they warned.
Lisa telephoned and left messages for Stefan, but received no reply.
Not even an email.
What followed was a long and legally complicated series of events stretching over many months and eventually years. Within the first month, Turkish courts granted
Lisa custody of Daniel.
Yet because he held both Australian and Turkish nationalities, they ordered that the little boy could not leave the country.
This left Lisa in a kind of suspended animation, neither able to return home nor leave her son because that would mean relinquishing custody to Stefan and his family. It was an excruciating bind.
Lisa pinned her hopes on the Hague Convention, an international treaty that expedites the return of retained children to their place of habitual residence. For Lisa, the key phrase here was “habitual residence” because Daniel’s intended home was always in Australia. Though her funds were running out, Lisa engaged an international lawyer, who was based in Istanbul, to take up her case.
At every point, Stefan’s family threw up legal barricades – appeals, continuances – delays intended to stretch out the proceedings.
Eventually, after four years of legal struggle, Lisa knew time was running out. Under the terms of the Convention, “habitual residence” has a use-by date. “The problem was that, after four years, Stefan could demonstrate that Daniel had spent much more time in Turkey than he had in Australia and that his place of residence was now Turkey,” says Lisa. “That would carry significant legal
I desperately wanted my son back.
weight in a final court order or any future appeals.”
Desperate, Lisa came up with a new plan. She had heard of child recovery agencies and one of the best known was run by an Australian named Adam Whittington, a man who later became famous for his role in a child abduction connected to 60 Minutes that went horribly wrong.
“He was wonderful,” says Lisa.
“He ran me through all the pitfalls and really seemed to care about what he was doing. I had a great deal of confidence in him, even though I knew what we were doing was extreme.”
Yet Adam was detained in Singapore over another case. He wouldn’t be able to help Lisa. Instead, through a friend in Australia, she put her hopes into garnering public support, believing this might put pressure on the Turkish authorities.
Lisa’s friend reached out on her behalf to 60 Minutes. The contact was veteran producer Stephen Rice. Through another contact, Lisa was able to find a child recovery agent – a man in his 70s named Keith – who was willing to be filmed.
The current affairs program agreed to provide Lisa with some money and when she had the plan set up, 60 Minutes agreed to send a reporter and crew to Istanbul to film their escape.
The plan was that Lisa would take Daniel on a short holiday to Bodrum, a seaside port in southern Turkey. From there, it should be a simple process to procure a ferry passage to a Greek island a few kilometres off shore.
“It sounded so simple,” says Lisa. “And I was assured that the recovery specialist, a man named Keith, had done this many times before and that it would be relatively straightforward.”
The operation was set. Keith arrived in Istanbul and made contact. Stephen Rice and his crew, including reporter Liz Hayes, arrived a few days later.
Liz and the crew met with Lisa.
“Liz was lovely, though I was pretty nervous at first,” says Lisa. “In fact, the whole crew were marvellous.
They really seemed to appreciate how difficult it all was for me. We did a tentative first interview and then they went off to their hotel to wait for the next move.”
Keith had arranged a car and driver. Lisa packed bags, just as she would for a few days’ holiday, and made sure she was seen carrying them down to the car, in case someone was watching.
They took a plane south to Bodrum and booked into a local hotel. Liz and the 60 Minutes crew stayed at the same hotel. Keith spoke with his contacts at the local ferry service. Everything was ready for their escape.
“But at the last minute, with the
60 Minutes crew already on the boat, the ferry captain refused to take
Daniel because there was a travel ban on his passport,” says Lisa. “I’d been led to believe that would be looked after, that it wouldn’t be a problem, but now it was a problem.”
They were forced to abort at the last minute. Liz and the crew didn’t have time to get off the boat and had to sail to Greece, leaving Lisa, Daniel and Keith behind in Bodrum.
During the next few days, Keith desperately switched tack and tried to find a local boat crew to take them across. Although they got as far as actually boarding a boat, again the captain refused at the last minute.
“Here we were, still in Turkey, and if we couldn’t get across, then the only alternative would be to go back to Istanbul and perhaps try to drive across the border, but the unlikely success of that was why we decided to use a boat in the first place,” says Lisa.
“Also, the longer we waited, the more likely it was that something else would go wrong and we’d be caught by Turkish officials or by Stefan.”
For the next week, Lisa and Daniel languished in Bodrum, unsure of how they were going to get out. She kept
Liz and the crew up to date, but Lisa realised that time was running out.
“We knew they couldn’t wait indefinitely and we also knew that perhaps this would be the last role of the dice,” she says.
Keith went off to try to convince yet another boat captain to take them across the water. At the same time, Lisa decided to take matters into her own hands. She emailed a group of expatriate acquaintances who lived in Turkey. Some of them owned boats. Perhaps they could lend a hand?
Keith returned next morning, but with bad news. No one wanted to be involved. It was too fraught and Turkish law too stringent in such cases. The recovery team had badly miscalculated.
Not long after, Lisa got a phone call. She recognised the number. It was Didem, Stefan’s sister. It was a short, awkward call and it put Lisa on guard. A few hours later, she got another call. This time, it was from Stefan. She answered. He wanted to know if she was able to hand Daniel back in a few days, as arranged. She could tell from the number that he was calling from somewhere in the area of Bodrum. He was on their trail.
Then, as they finally prepared to run the gauntlet at the border by car, Lisa got an email from one of her acquaintances. Yes, he would carry them across. She yelled for joy.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “After everything we had been through, I suddenly saw the light at the end of tunnel. I contacted Stephen and Liz, then I looked out the hotel window and I could see Greece, just a few kilometres away. So close ... ”
Next day, Stephen and the 60 Minutes crew arrived on the boat that would take Lisa and Daniel out of Turkey. Stephen had arranged to meet the boat’s crew and come across to film the escape. He had checked out Lisa’s acquaintance to make sure everything was legitimate.
At lunchtime, they boarded the boat at the local dock, intent on playing the part of day-trippers. No bags, just hats and sunscreen – that was all they had to carry off the greatest pretence Lisa had ever been involved in.
“Stephen came with us,” she says. “He sat in the back with Daniel and helped keep him busy. As far as he was concerned, we were just out for a boat trip. I was on the bow with one of the sailors, looking and waving and laughing. We couldn’t afford to be out of place or pulled up by the Turkish authorities because they would check our passports.”
Lisa could see the Greek coastline approaching as they finally reached the harbour and all her fears fell away. There, on the dock, was Liz Hayes waving and yelling as they pulled in.
“I almost fell off the boat, it was such a relief,” says Lisa. “Then Liz stepped in and gave me a big hug. ‘Welcome to Greece,’ she said. The weight of the world had come off my shoulders and I could see the future again.”
Liz Hayes and the crew completed their interviews and then they were
Dheading to another story. Lisa,
Daniel and Lisa’s mother, who had flown to Athens to join them, booked themselves onto a flight back to Australia. It was the end of a long road.
“I have since realised that it was a runaway train,” says Lisa of her experience. “They expected to scare me and that I would give in and stay there, or later, simply give up and go away. But their original intention, I think, was to scare me into living in Turkey. But I wasn’t prepared to do that. Equally, they weren’t prepared to change trains once they were on board. They launched a war and wouldn’t back down. In that way, what happened was inevitable.”
Today, Lisa is back in Australia with her son. Stefan also returned to this country and they have a co-parenting relationship, and he plays a part in Daniel’s life.
Lisa is passionate about helping others in similar situations. “Information is critical to this kind of fight,” she says.
“I have set up an association to help others who fall into this trap.”
And she would do it all again. “The sad thing is that
I did love Stefan,” says Lisa.
“The man that told me that he was leaving with Daniel and never coming back, I didn’t know him. I’d never met him before. I still no longer know that man.” AWW
* Names have been changed for legal reasons.
I suddenly saw the light at the end of tunnel.