December 1, 2013 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Here’s a final note on the organization Children of the Underground that helps mothers kidnap their children. The organization’s founder, Faye Yager of Atlanta, Georgia, claims she only helps mothers with clear cases of sexual abuse of children by their fathers. But, as I demonstrated in the case of Harris Todd, that’s just not true. Yager is lying when she claims to rigorously vet claims of abuse.
But there’s just one more thing I’d like to add before moving on from Children of the Underground. It appears here (Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma). How do mothers find out about Children of the Underground and its many illegal services to help them deny fathers to children? One way is to go to a domestic violence shelter.
Rita Mazzie entered the underground through the doors of a women’s shelter.
But does that mean America’s growing network of domestic violence shelters has become an arm of the underground?
“Actually, yes,” says one lawyer who has extensive underground contacts and asked not to be identified. “There is a federally funded underground in this country — women’s shelters. A woman and children will go in, she’ll say she’s been abused, and if they think she’s being stalked, they’ll call up another shelter and send her there. And that’s often the start of a life on the run.”
Sometimes, shelter officials go a step further, hooking women up with networks that have “safe houses” and can provide false identity papers, like the one run by Atlanta’s Faye Yager, who acknowledges she gets many of her referrals from shelters.
And of course those shelters don’t vet women who come to them any better than Yager does. If there’s any domestic violence shelter that requires women to prove their claims of abuse, I’ve never heard of it and what evidence there is tends to contradict the notion. Indeed, at least one former director of a shelter on the east coast candidly admitted that only about 10% of the women there had been physically abused.
Yager’s admission clearly corroborates the statement quoted by Dart that women’s shelters feed the system of maternal child kidnapping in the United States. And the attorney makes a salient point: women’s shelters are federally funded through the Violence Against Women Act. We therefore are confronted with the strange phenomenon of federal money facilitating the kidnapping and interstate/international transportation of children, which federal money then goes to investigate by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. There’s an evil genius at work there somewhere.
Let’s not forget that we’ve seen at least one such case (prior to the current Dorothy Lee Barnett case). Two years ago, Wendi Lee Bartell-Dimm of Minnesota became unhappy with the attempts by her son Timber’s father to assert his visitation rights. So she absconded with the five-year-old, but she was apprehended three days later.
Her obvious neglect of the boy didn’t bother the judge and neither did her violation of his order of visitation. He also looked benignly on her abduction of her son. All he did was order her to turn the child over to his father, Canadian logger Danny Dimm, for a period of time long enough to make up for all the visitation he’d missed. Did it occur to the judge that, having once abducted the boy, Mom might do so again? Did it occur to the judge that his failure to punish her civil and criminal violations of law might encourage her to kidnap him again?
We don’t know, but that’s just what happened; Wendi Lee Bartell-Dimm took Timber again, but this time she “vanished,” much like Faye Yager’s mothers do. No one saw her. Her car remained parked at her trailer home. There were no credit card purchases to trace. How can someone simply vanish into thin air?
Minnesota Private Investigator Ed Wunsch knew just how, as I wrote about the case two years ago here and here.
Police at the time believed she must be getting help from someone, and private investigator Ed Wunsch of Hopkins, Minnesota thought he knew who.
Wunsch runs an organization called Parental Abduction Child Recovery Team which specializes in finding children who’ve been abducted by their parents and returning them to the left-behind parent. He thought Bartell-Dimm might have disappeared with Timber into a women’s domestic violence shelter somewhere. Now police have found Bartell-Dimm and Timber and where do you suppose they were? In a women’s domestic violence shelter outside Sturgis, South Dakota.
I contacted Wunsch and surprisingly, he had nothing to do with Bartell-Dimm’s apprehension or Timber’s rescue. He’d been contacted by Danny and was preparing to meet with him when the good news arrived. Wunsch told me that his understanding is that a woman at the shelter had become suspicious of Bartell-Dimm and, when she left the shelter went online to the site of the Center for Missing and Abducted Children and found Bartell-Dimm’s name along with Timber’s. She then called the FBI in Sioux Falls who apparently made the bust.
The linked-to article tells us that Bartell-Dimm and the boy were living there under assumed names which led me to wonder whether the shelter knew they were using aliases. Wunsch told me that often women who come to those shelters tell the administration that they had to leave the house quickly and were unable to take belongings including identification. That way they can give a false name to the shelter.
It’s no coincidence that a domestic violence movement that for decades has had, as some of its core beliefs, the fantasy that all or most abusers are men, that they do so to maintain control over women, that women rarely or never lie about abuse and that the family is the most dangerous place for women and children, would make common cause with Children of the Underground and Faye Yager. Birds of a feather, you understand. So it’s a natural course of events for domestic violence shelters to not inquire into the realities of a woman’s claim of abuse and turn her over to Faye Yager if she wants to disappear for good.
As the Dart article makes clear and shelter operatives admit, shelters in fact scrupulously avoid knowing just what goes on after they refer a woman and her children to Faye Yager. They know enough about the Yager’s criminal activities to not want to know more. They’re like Sergeant Schultz in the old TV show “Hogan’s Heroes.” Schultz always knew perfectly well the shenanigans that Hogan, et al were up to, but because he was involved himself, pretended ignorance. “I see nothing; I know nothing,” was his mantra.
And so it seems to be with women’s shelters that are happy to feed women and children into Yager’s underground pipeline, but pretend to “see nothing, know nothing” of what happens afterward.
Marty Friday, director of the Pittsburgh Women’s Center and Shelter, says she’s heard of Faye Yager — but doesn’t refer women to her.
“This might be splitting hairs, but for the most part shelters will tell people what their options are, and let people choose for themselves,” Friday says.
In other words, they tell the mothers they can remain in the shelter and deal with the courts or the shelter can put them in touch with someone who can help them avoid the unpleasantness of due process of law.
And many shelters, concerned primarily with protecting a woman and her children, will continue to look the other way when it comes to issues of custody.
“The less we know, the more we can protect ourselves,” says one shelter official who asked not to be identified. “Our job is, first and foremost, to protect our clients from harm. And to do that, we also need to protect ourselves from liability.”
Sergeant Schultz would understand completely.
Meanwhile, fathers and fathers’ rights organizations are not so charitable.
Some shelters have been the target of lawsuits by fathers, and some shelter employees have been charged in abduction cases with obstruction of justice.
Most women’s shelters work closely with police, but when they get involved in helping a mother flee, it can put a strain on their relationships with law enforcement officials.
A San Francisco shelter was raided several years ago by police, who charged that the shelter’s director was harboring fugitives at the request of organized underground leaders. The entire shelter’s staff was replaced with new employees — strict instructions to check custody orders carefully.
Note that shelters “work closely with police.” Of course they do. As long as police are arresting fathers for claims of abuse — whether false or true — shelter personnel are happy to work with them. But when the true believers in the DV movement start entering into criminal conspiracies to abduct children, the relationship starts to fray.
And that of course highlights a built-in problem for the domestic violence movement. They’ve convinced law enforcement officials that their political ideology about DV accurately describes the phenomenon, so police act pretty much like a cat’s paw for the movement. But the same mindset leads shelters to involve themselves in criminal wrongdoing of the Faye Yager variety. In a nutshell, they need the police but end up alienating them by their own criminality.
And, speaking of that mindset, check out this quotation from the Dart piece:
Domestic violence organizations counter by saying that ineffective law enforcement — and judges who don’t believe claims of abuse — are driving women underground.
“Until the courts start to look at the evidence that is presented about the safety of children, mothers are going to be forced to take actions that are not legal,” says Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
According to these people, courts don’t “look at the evidence that is presented about the safety of children.” Really?
Never mind the countless fathers who’ve been ordered to stay away from their children based on completely spurious claims of abuse by mothers. Never mind that it’s a requirement of the statutes of every state in the nation that the issue of domestic violence be investigated by family courts if it’s raised in the course of a child custody proceeding. And never mind the fact that the police are trained to arrest “dominant aggressors,” i.e. men, whenever DV is claimed. And never mind the many district and county attorneys with no-drop policies regarding claims of abuse. There, even if the mother recants, the charges against the dad go to trial anyway.
No, to the zealots like Faye Yager and the many who sup from the gravy train of the domestic violence movement, all that adds up to courts that have not even begun to “look at the evidence that is presented about the safety of children.” What complete arrant nonsense. The fact is that those courts do look at the evidence and all too often discover the thing that family attorneys have been talking about for decades — that Mom has made up facts to gain an advantage over Dad.
True believers like Yager won’t be happy until mothers have an absolute veto over the parental rights of fathers and the interest of children in a relationship with them. Until then, they’ll continue to kidnap children and parrot their nonsensical claims about courts ignoring claims of abuse.
And the former will continue to be intellectually dishonest and the latter criminally so.
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