As a domestic relations practitioner of 25 year's experience, I have this to say about the Darby/Cressi story.
First, the police do not generally get involved in custody disputes, calling them "civil matters" and referring the parties to civil lawyers. A full-blown custody case will cost from $25,000 to $150,000 depending on the malice of the parties. Had Cressi called the police, they would have done nothing unless she had a Court order awarding her sole custody and then they probably would have referred her the Court to file a contempt petition. If Cressi had no money at the time (as is common in these cases) then she would have been effectively stopped at that point.
If she had shown up on grandma's porch demanding info about Darby, then grandma could, and probably would, have had her arrested for trespass.
In the cases in which I was the attorney representing the parent whose child had been snatched, the grandparent were in collusion with the snatching parent. At no time did those grandparent tell their "snatching" child to give visitation or even telephone contact to the parent who had lost the child. Nor did the grandparents facilitate contact on their own. Darby's grandma did not tell Cressi she had Darby, nor did she bring the child to the phone, nor did she offer to meet Cressi with Darby. She said she couldn't do anything unless her son said she could.
On two occasions when I used habeas corpus to get children returned to the parent from whom they had been taken, the Court eventually ordered visitation for the parent who had originally taken the child. In each of those cases, the parent who had originally stolen the child did it again, and in both instances, the grandparents were helping in the theft. In both instances the snatching parent went to other states. Those states did not recognize the Illinois custody orders and required relitigation of the custody issue. The parents who had lost their children in these cases didn't have the money to initiate custody cases in foreign jurisdictions.
Legal Aid normally won't get involved in child custody cases. Legal Aids don't have the resources to adequately handle these complex and time consuming cases.
Kidnapping laws are only helpful if they are drafted to cover the situation where a parent takes a child from the other parent. Generally, kidnapping laws, if they apply to parent at all, only cover situations where the parent who has lost the child had a prior valid Court order for sole custody. If there is no sole custody order, then the whole matter is referred to civil court. Generally, the parent who has lost the child to a snatch doesn't have the thousands of dollars it takes to initiate civil custody litigation.
The grandma in this case should have been pasted to the wall for her part in this tragedy. Apparently she had Darby for at least 2 years and could have let Cressi know at any time, could have put the child on the phone, could have initiated contact -- could have done all in her power to restore normal mother/daughter contact, and she chose not to.
If Dad was a better deal as a custodian, why was his mother raising the child?
I think the grandma was 110% behind Dad in this awful situation.
Our parents are among the most pivotal people in our life. They literally shape our minds and our personalities, teach us morals, values, and right from wrong. So when a parent disappears from a child’s world, the loss can result in a life-long quest. Dr. Phil meets two women whose child/parent bond was broken under two separate sets of devastating circumstances. Erica is in search of the man who murdered her mother when Erica was just a toddler. Erica says he tortured her mother, then shot her on the front lawn where she finally died. The man who committed this horrifying crime is Erica's own father! Then, Cressi has a daughter whom she hasn’t seen in nearly 20 years. She says her ex-husband snatched the girl from her home when she was just 8 months old. Did Cressi do everything she could to find her missing child, or does her daughter, Darby, have a right to feel abandoned? You will be amazed at what Dr. Phil finds as he goes in search of these missing loved ones. Talk about the show here.
