Mother of lost twins endures heartbreak
She is lobbying for an Amber alert-style program to be created in Switzerland
OTTAWA— The mother of Swiss twins who were kidnapped by their Canadian-born father says the loss of her children left her with a choice: to live or to die.
Irina Lucidi, 47, said in a telephone interview that she chose to live after her six-year-old girls Alessia and Livia were kidnapped by her estranged husband, Matthias Schepp, on Jan. 30, 2011.
Schepp killed himself on Feb. 4, 2011, by jumping in front of a train in Italy, but the girls were never found.
“I think in an extreme situation the choice becomes very simple. You have two choices: to die or to live,” Lucidi said in her first interview with Canadian media. “I could never have the courage to kill myself.”
Even though she chose to live, Lucidi says, it kills her every time a new lead surfaces.
Last month, news that Italian journalist Ercole Rocchetti’s show, Chi L’Ha Visto, which investigates missing people, received a letter alleging that Alessia and Livia were alive and living in Ottawa and Lachute, was met by their mother with mixed emotion.
“It’s hope. Hope and despair, actually, because the situation is quite desperate,” Lucidi said. “It’s actually quite violent for me. It’s very personal.”
The letter writer pointed to a man in Italy who allegedly produced fake documents for the girls to get them out of the country, Rocchetti said.
The television station turned the letter over to the police. So far, Canadian police have not been called to assist.
“You get used to the worstcase scenario because there’s nothing else,” Lucidi said. “That’s the difficulty of an un-closed story.”
Rocchetti has received tips from two different women who say they saw Livia in Ottawa last summer.
A third tip from Lachute claimed that twins who resembled the missing girls attended a birthday party, Rocchetti said. A lead last September that the girls were spotted on the Italian island of Sardinia proved fruitless.
It’s a roller-coaster ride every time there is renewed hope only to be let down once more.
Lucidi said it feels like her body shuts down. Exhaustion sets in.
“It’s like a big shock. It’s like somebody with a baseball bat hitting you very hard.”
Lucidi said she has to remind herself it might not be true that her girls are still alive, although it is possible.
“That’s the tragedy for me. It’s a story without an end,” Lucidi said. “And it’s not just a story that belongs to me. It
“That’s the tragedy for me. It’s a story without an end.”
IRINA LUCIDI
belongs to everyone.”
Lucidi’s nightmare began to make international headlines on Jan. 30, 2011, after she went to the police.
Two days earlier, Lucidi had dropped her twins off at their ballet class in St-Sulpice, a suburb of Lausanne, Switzerland. As planned, Schepp picked them up after class to take them to his house for a weekend visit.
The couple shared custody of the children since their separation in August of 2010. Schepp had the girls every second weekend and two days during the week.
When Schepp didn’t show up that Sunday at 5 p.m. to return the girls, Lucidi went to his house.
Schepp and the girls weren’t there, but she found a handwritten will.
Lucidi frantically contacted Schepp’s friends and family, but no one knew where he was. Around 9 that night, Lucidi and Schepp’s cousin went to the police.
“That’s where it started,” she said.
But the Swiss police were slow to act — they don’t have an Amber Alert system in Switzerland — and told Lucidi she was being hysterical. Nothing would happen to the girls if they were with their father, they told her.
She wanted to believe them, but while police dragged their feet, Schepp was already on the run.
He left Switzerland and was spotted in Marseille, where he withdrew about $10,000 from cash machines and bought three tickets for a ferry to Corsica.
Witness accounts about whether Schepp got on and off the ferry with the children were conflicting.
Despite all the pain she has suffered, Lucidi set out to transform her tragedy into something positive less than a year after her girls disappeared.
On Oct. 7, 2011 — on what would have been the girls’ seventh birthday — Lucidi launched an organization called Missing Children Switzerland. The intellectualproperty lawyer now spends her free time lobbying for an Amber Alert program and education for police about parental abductions.
Starting the organization might help Lucidi cope, but it doesn’t address why her husband took their children.
When they married in 2004, Schepp was an extroverted jokester and a nice man.
But he gradually changed over time, which became apparent to Lucidi by late 2006 or early 2007.
“He was always the victim,” Lucidi said. “He’s being unjustly treated.”
For years, she urged him to go to marriage counselling. Finally he agreed, but it made matters worse: It seemed to reaffirm for Schepp that he was somehow a victim.
When Lucidi moved out of their home on Aug. 27, 2010, her friends asked why she was leaving such a great man. He’s so good with the kids, they said.
“He was very good at hiding,” Lucidi said. “It’s difficult to detect it because from the outside he was perfect.”