On Jan. 25, 1991, Carolyn Montalbano felt a twinge of apprehension as sons Vito and Nicholas, then 9 and 7, left their Arlington Heights home for a court-ordered visit with their father, her ex-husband, Curt Montalbano.
Three days earlier, Carolyn had been awarded custody of the boys after a bitter, two-year court battle. Curt Montalbano had been granted unsupervised visitation, and that Friday marked his first weekend visit with the kids.
Despite her custody victory, she was troubled. On more than one occasion, she said, Curt had threatened to take the children to punish her for, as he saw it, breaking up the family.
“I was hesitant to send them out, but I didn’t want Curt to think I was abusing control,” Carolyn said.
Little did she know that her hesitation portended a four-year nightmare.
The next morning, Saturday, she received a phone call from Curt’s wife, Elizabeth, who told Carolyn that he and the kids had not returned to their Barrington home Friday night.
“I knew right then what had happened,” she recalled. “Curt had taken the kids, and he wouldn’t be back.”
She immediately called the Arlington Heights police and filed missing persons reports. But they told her they wouldn’t begin searching for the boys until Sunday evening, when Curt’s visitation would be technically over and the kids could be declared missing. By that time, she knew Curt and the kids would be long gone, Carolyn said.
So she phoned Tom Hampson, a private investigator recommended by a friend. Before Hampson began his own investigations business in 1983, he served as chief investigator for the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission. There, he said, he learned enough about parental abductions to know what Montalbano was up against.
Such cases “encounter one stumbling block after another,” he said. “Unless your name is Rockefeller, it’s a big yawn to law enforcement because they think if kids are with a parent, they’re safe. They don’t realize what a trauma it is, and that many kids in these situations are in danger.”
A 1990 U.S. Justice Department study supports Hampson’s contention. Of the more than 350,000 children abducted each year by a family member (8 of 10 abductors are parents or parental figures), based on reported incidents, around 75,000 suffer serious emotional, physical or sexual abuse.
The study found that even children who don’t suffer measurable abuse show significant symptoms of trauma, including separation anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, grief, inexplicable fears and so forth for as long as five years after being returned to the custodial parent.
And if that’s not reason enough for concern, parental abductions have been growing at an “alarming rate,” according to Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a non-profit organization based in Arlington, Va., that acts as a national clearinghouse for information on missing children.
Montalbano’s initial encounters with law enforcement agencies were characterized mostly by futility.
“They never actively searched for my children,” she said. “I quickly realized I was going to lead the search.”
With Hampson’s aid, Montalbano alerted officials to question anyone requesting the boys’ birth certificates, put a stop on passport issuances and provided the missing children’s center with information and pictures of the boys to be passed along to law enforcement agencies around the country. They pursued leads as far away as Montana, haunted train stations with pictures and relentlessly “bombed” areas across the United States, Canada and overseas with mass mailings of fliers bearing the boys’ likeness.
“I was always working on another mailing,” she said. “I quickly realized that the key to finding my children was getting their pictures in front of someone who might recognize them.”
Mass-mailing fliers like the ones put out by Hartford-based ADVO, Inc. — elongated post cards with advertising on one side and missing children on the other — are considered nuisance mail to most people. But for Montalbano they were a lifeline: they held out the possibility, however remote, that someone, somewhere, might recognize her children.
But a year passed, and hundreds of leads were pursued and exhausted. The trail grew colder.
“I had no permanancy, no relationships,” she recalled. “But I had to stay sane because if I didn’t keep it together emotionally and financially, I wouldn’t be there for my kids when they came home.”
She also realized that her anger at Curt took too much energy from her crusade to find her children.
Yet each time she entered the boys’ rooms, left untouched in anticipation of their return, she would be reminded of the magnitude of the crime committed against them: “Half-read books, unfinished homework assignments, a pair of favorite sweats on the bed, $10 in a wallet . . . theirs were lives in progress,” she said.
“But when things get really complicated, you need to resort to priorities. If your children are your number one priority, you’ll make the right decision,” she said. Forgiving the father of her children became a priority.
In the summer of 1992 Montalbano placed an advertisement in the Illinois Family Law Bulletin for a Chicago-area support group. The national center for missing children picked up the request and inserted it in the center’s newsletter. Five Chicago-area parents responded, and Parents of Missing Children was born.
“Even though I wasn’t finding my children, I thought maybe I could help others,” Montalbano said.
Results were immediate and stunning, she said. Armed with a search plan drawn up by Montalbano, three parents developed promising leads that quickly led to the recovery of their children. After 17 years of searching, one woman, a Polish emigre, located her son not far from home.
Group member Steven Kriegsman, whose son was abducted by his ex-spouse in 1988, says he was impressed by Montalbano’s ability to get results.
“She’s a very centered, goal-driven person,” he said. “She was able to remove herself from what is a highly emotional situation in order to be most effective in the search for her children.”
Like someone with a terminal disease who has run out of standard treatment options, Montalbano began to explore experimental alternatives. She discovered a little-known, non-profit group in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., called Child Find of America. The group sponsors a program called A Way Out, which encourages battling spouses to resolve abduction cases through mediation.
The group helped Montalbano draft conciliatory letters to Curt Montalbano’s family in the hope that he was in communication with them.
“I basically said that I would do anything in my power to get my kids back, including trying to get the charges against Curt dropped,” she said.
Shortly after, early in January, 1994, the phone rang. “It was Michael, Curt’s brother. He said, `Hi, Carolyn,’ and his voice was shaking,” she recalled.
He made small talk for a while and then asked her to meet him at a nearby restaurant for coffee.
“We sat down and he questioned me closely about any feelings of revenge I might have toward Curt. I said that I hadn’t been hanging onto those feelings because they weren’t productive.
“Then he said, `Your children’s destiny is in your hands. I spoke to Curt last night.’ It hit me right away that I was going to see my kids again. I was all over that restaurant, crying hysterically.”
According to Michael, Curt phoned for help after civil unrest in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where Curt and the boys had been living for some time, forced them to flee their home. Michael, perhaps swayed by Carolyn’s forgive-and-forget letter, suggested Curt send the boys home. There were several calls back and forth, but finally Curt reluctantly agreed.
Curt’s only conditions were that Carolyn agree to travel without law enforcement or media to a remote island off Honduras where Curt and the boys had relocated.
“By that point I would have agreed to anything,” she said.
On Jan. 19, 1995, almost four years to the day after her sons’ disappearance, Carolyn Montalbano, accompanied by Hampson, flew to Latin America. Although Hampson had many reservations about the setup, he kept them to himself. “Carolyn was not to be stopped,” he said.
The reunion was “pretty incredible,” said Hampson. “The kids were crying and hanging on her. Curt was crying, too. Nicky was glued to her leg almost from the time he saw her until they got back to Chicago.”
“Seeing my kids again,” Montalbano recalled, “I realized how much of myself I’d lost. In finding them, I got Carolyn back.”
This past year, Montalbano has been getting reacquainted with her sons. It hasn’t been easy. Vito, 14, and Nicky, 12, are still caught between two worlds and afraid that someday they might be asked to chose between them, said Montalbano.
“They are afraid that they’ll establish a routine, become grounded, only to have it broken up,” she said. “Every day brings a new fear.”
Curt regularly phones the boys, and although Carolyn has reservations, she doesn’t interfere. “I want what’s best for my sons,” she reiterated. Which is why she has no particular desire to see Curt prosecuted either. “But that’s really out of my hands,” she admitted. (If he should return to the U.S., Curt would face state felony charges for child abduction and federal charges for fleeing prosecution).
Montalbano knows that it will take time for things to return to normal, if they ever do. But she’s not complaining. Life without her children was no life at all.
Yet even in their absence, she said, her children sustained her. “I always knew if I didn’t find them, they would find me. There are things in this world that you can’t define, that aren’t physical, like bonds of love that distance and time can’t sever.”
