The Retriever: The True Story Of A Child Retrieval Expert And The Families He Has Reunited

CHAPTER 1

Child’s Play

I love kids. Always have. Children are the greatest gift, and to see them grow into fine adults is an absolute blessing. There was never a prouder father of the bride than me at the wedding of my daughter, Timiko, in 2009. She is now a successful lawyer in London, and to see my daughter’s life bloom so beautifully, like the flowers in the garden of my Brisbane home, makes me a very proud dad indeed. As I write this, my son, Kamball, is planning his own wedding in the tropical paradise of Port Douglas. Watching the contented lives of both my children fills me with immense love and joy.

The mere thought of anything untoward happening to my kids is my greatest nightmare. And to have them taken away from me by someone I once trusted is incomprehensible, yet I have seen the pain that such a situation can cause time and time again. To people who, when they walk through my door, are complete strangers. People who have lost the most important things in their lives, their children. People who need my help.

I have been a private detective for forty years and during that time I became the man people turned to when there was nowhere else to go. I earned a reputation around the world as a specialist in retrieving stolen children; a man who would fly into hostile situations and dangerous territories to bring home children who had been kidnapped by one of their parents against court orders.

The US Justice Department estimates that worldwide, 650,000 children are abducted each year by a parent after a marriage breakdown, and many are taken to countries with no extradition treaties. Each year in Australia between 80 and 120 children are taken illegally by one of their parents to one of the 81 countries signed to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. The agreement came into force in Australia in 1987 and is an international undertaking that oversees the return of children wrongfully removed from their country of residence. Retrieving them from those countries should be straightforward but that’s not always the case — and for the dozens of children taken to countries not signatory to the Convention the retrieval becomes much tougher. In fact, only about 60 per cent of the kids taken overseas are ever returned. My life’s work has largely been spent bringing some of the lucky ones home.

In a marriage break-up, there are usually three sides to every story: the husband’s, the wife’s and, somewhere in the middle, what really went down. But if truth is the first casualty of war between marriage partners, I’ve found that children are the most tragic casualties when love between a husband and wife turns to hate and revenge. From a lifetime of dealing with the wounded survivors of marriages gone wrong, I know that the kids can suffer terribly, especially those who are taken hostage by one of the parents.

For the parent left behind, their whole world has imploded and I’ve seen some of these anxious, depressed mums and dads driven almost to madness by the frustration and grief. But they’re grown-ups. Imagine the sense of bewilderment and loss that their kids must go through. These small, helpless disorientated children are dragged away from home, from friends, from loved ones, from pets, from their familiar day-today environment and taken to a strange, alien world on the other side of the globe where, often, they can’t even speak the language. Frequently they are fed lies about the other parent — that they hated their child and didn’t want them; that they saw the child as a nuisance. Often they are fed lies about where they are going. These kids can suffer from all kinds of emotional and behavioural problems from the upheaval to their young lives, whether they come home or not.

There are all sorts of ethical dilemmas inherent in child retrieval and the more I became involved the more I came to realise just what a delicate balancing act it is. It was certainly never my intention to play judge and jury on these cases. I admit that, on my first child retrieval case more than thirty-five years ago, I accepted it simply for the money. I didn’t really know the circumstances, just that a desperate dad wanted his kids back. I was a young, gung-ho guy trying to build a successful detective business and I returned his children to him. But once I got into that case, and met those lovely little kids, I realised just how crucial it was to their lives that I carefully considered what was right for them, rather than what was right for the paying client. So, for the children I would retrieve in the following years — who would number more than a hundred — I began to perform very thorough background checks to make sure I was doing the right thing and, subsequently, I only took on two-thirds of the child retrieval cases I was offered. Before taking on a case, I’d ask around to find out about the parents — talk to neighbours or relatives, visit churches, Sunday schools, kindergartens and old employers — to get an idea of who was the best parent to take care of the children. In almost 40 per cent of the cases offered to me I decided the children were better off with the parent who had taken them and that it was best to leave them where they were.

Sadly and far too frequently in custody disputes, children become weapons to be used by bitter ex-lovers. Sometimes I’d find that parents would kidnap their own children, claiming they were saving them from abuse, but almost always the real motivation was to hurt the other parent. Sometimes I found that a mother or father was willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-kidnap their children — not because it was good for the kids, but because it was the best way to twist the knife a little deeper into the heart of their former partner. Those were also the cases I declined. Often I’d find that a parent had stood up in court and told lie after lie to get the kids and then dumped them with a relative while they went off to do their own thing. The kids were just footballs to be kicked around in a game of spite.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a very clear sense of justice and was a person who wanted to do the right thing. As a poor farm boy growing up in a big, loving family in Queensland, I wanted to see kids happy. I used to lie awake at night staring up in awe at the myriad stars stretched across the southern skies and imagine myself as a lawman, a crime investigator, a man of justice and good deeds. I told every adult who’d listen that one day I would be a ‘Please-man’ — my kiddie-speak for policeman. Since training with the Royal Australian Air Force and my short stint on secondment with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), my life as an investigator and retriever has been an amazing adventure that has taken me from the broiling desert of the Middle East to the vast, frozen wilderness of Antarctica.

I built up a large detective agency in Brisbane and the business gave me the means to go to any lengths to reunite stolen children with the parent who could best take care of them. Finding kidnapped kids brought me into the parallel world of CIA agents, KGB men, bodgy passports and dodgy border guards. It’s a dangerous job and, believe me, no one gets rich from child retrieval work. No one.

In the detective business there are many more lucrative, and much safer, ways to make a good living. Even on my most hazardous cases, where I could have been imprisoned or even killed, my motivation was never the money, but the opportunity to help people who had no one else to help them. Occasionally I ended up out of pocket. The adrenaline rush, combined with the satisfaction of assisting people in crisis, is a heady mix. Few things in my life have been as satisfying as bringing home abducted children from a foreign land. I’ve always said that if I was killed doing my job I would have died doing something that I really loved.

While I had a tremendous run of success in bringing children home, not all the retrievals I attempted were successful, and that only compounded the grief of the parents who hired me. Sadly, the nature of this business is that sometimes it’s just too hard to bring children out of countries where they have been hidden.

Many of the parents who abducted their children, and whom I pursued around the globe, would no doubt bad-mouth me as a gun for hire, a mercenary who made their lives hell. But in almost all of my cases, I was only carrying out the decrees of courts that were powerless to act in the areas I ventured into.

During my career I have been shot at, stabbed and robbed at gunpoint. I have seen a man hanged in the street and once spent a week caged in a Yemen prison cell, praying that an executioner with a sword wouldn’t cut off my head. I once flew around the jungles of the Philippines in their president’s private chopper looking for a stolen child, and I also helped force the US Congress to change its laws on child protection.

Danger was always part of the job, but in tough situations I always thought back to my adventures growing up on Dad’s farm and the lessons of self-reliance and toughness he taught me. ‘Fear nothing,’ he would say, as he taught me to stay calm even in the most perilous times. Among private eyes around the world I became known as ‘Mr Valium’ because nothing could shake me. At least, that’s the impression I gave to both my clients and my adversaries as I followed lost children across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, America, Mexico, the Middle East and Europe. If I didn’t have confidence in myself, how could I inspire confidence in the people who had entrusted me with the lives of their precious kids?

Over the years, many people have asked me why I took on so many hazardous child retrieval cases when it would have been much easier to say I was too busy or not interested. The simple answer is that when I learned first-hand of the tragic cases from the left-behind parents, I just had to help. Most of the mums and dads who hired me seemed so terribly alone. Often the only person they had to love in the world was the child who had been taken from them illegally and whose whereabouts had become a mystery, and they were utterly gutted by their loss. Many of them also had little money and faced official roadblocks that seemed insurmountable.

They were sad, lonely and desperate.

Take Marian Wojtek and her Aunt Danute, for instance. They were two shattered ladies who needed a shoulder to cry on.

CHAPTER 2

What Becomes of the Broken-hearted

It was the spring of 1992 and I was busy building a thriving investigation business in south-east Queensland when two very nervous, highly agitated Polish women came to my office in George Street in the Brisbane CBD. One was in her early thirties, thin, blonde and anxious; the other in her late sixties, greying, and just as uneasy. They seated themselves on the other side of my desk looking shell-shocked. Eleven months earlier Marian Wojtek’s husband had defied a court order, abducted her two children, and taken them to live in squalor in a heavily polluted city in Poland.

When Marian and her aunt, Danute Keical, came to my office they were emotional wrecks. They wrung their hands in grief as they outlined a story that tore at my heartstrings. With her children gone, Danute was the only relative Marian had left in Australia.

Marian had migrated to Australia from Communist Poland in 1974 when she was nineteen. She had grown up in a country that was still mired in desperate poverty and, given the chance to start again on the other side of the world, she was determined to make something of herself. After a life of long food queues and empty pockets, Marian believed Australia was the land of opportunity.

Arriving in Brisbane, this petite, industrious woman worked hard cleaning other people’s toilets and within five years had saved enough to buy a house in the inner-city suburb of Buranda, just a cover drive away from the famous Gabba cricket ground. In 1983 she was overjoyed to marry Stan Wojtek, a big bear of a man with a thick neck and a walrus moustache, who already had a son living in Poland. Stan shared Marian’s background, her culture and, she thought, her dreams.

At the start married life seemed like heaven, but it soon became something else. Marian bore two children, Jenny and Anton, but the stars in Marian’s eyes lost their lustre as her big cuddly husband became overbearing, with a temper like Vesuvius. His homemade vodka kept him liquored up and quarrelsome and before long all Stan wanted were drinking parties and holidays. After five years together Marian and Stan got on like petrol and fire, and Jenny and Anton became ringside spectators to their parents’ daily battles.

There were separations and reunions. Marian left with the kids, went back to give it another chance, and then left again. In 1988, just before Christmas, the marriage effectively ended. Marian left with the kids again, claiming she felt threatened by Stan. But when the Christmas presents arrived, things got a little better between them. There were promises and apologies, and Stan convinced Marian that some of their troubles were her fault, too. She gave him another chance but a week after they reconciled she realised it was hopeless. Marian asked Stan to get counselling but he said no, he wanted her to get counselling. By now Stan was swearing at Marian all the time in front of the children and she knew it was no life for her, or her kids. Then, in 1990, Stan’s solicitor drew up papers that would allow him to stay in Marian’s house, even if they were no longer married. She refused to sign them and started to make plans for a future without him.

In August 1991, Marian left home, taking the children with her. A bitter custody battle and restraining orders against Stan followed but he still had reasonable access to his children because Marian wanted Jenny, then eight, and Anton, then six, to maintain a relationship with their dad. But Stan had a nasty shock in store for Marian and it hit like 100,000 volts.

On 21 September 1991, the day before the Family Court was due to grant Marian final custody of the children, Stan obtained passports for the kids by forging Marian’s signature on the immigration forms. He gave the phone number of a female relative as the contact for the absent parent. When the Immigration Department phoned the number provided to check all was in order, the female relative said she was the kids’ mother and had given them permission to travel overseas. Stan then booked himself and the children on a flight to Warsaw on Tuesday, 15 October 1991.

That day, he told Marian the children would be home late from school but not to worry because he was taking them to the circus. At 11 a.m. he turned up to the St James Catholic primary school in the nearby suburb of Coorparoo and told teachers he needed to take the kids for dental appointments.

At 5 p.m., Marian was at home cooking dinner, expecting the children to come screeching, goggle-eyed, into the little house anytime soon with astounding tales of clowns and tigers and elephants.

By 6 p.m. she was a little anxious.

By 7 p.m. the sweat started to drip down the back of her neck as she prayed there hadn’t been an accident.

By 8 p.m. she was frantic. At 9 p.m. she panicked.

Marian raced over to the unit where Stan was living, only to find it completely cleaned out. The furniture was gone, and so was he.

There was no sign of her babies.

By the time Marian rang the state and federal police that night, Stan, Jenny and Anton Wojtek were already at an altitude of 11,000 metres on a LOT flight that had just left Singapore, bound for Warsaw. Stan had crashed out, snoring and belching, across the three seats allocated for him and the kids, forcing Jenny and Anton to move. Anton found another seat and Jenny slept on the floor.

Back in Brisbane, there was nothing Marian could do but break down and weep. She couldn’t understand why Stan had done it. She thought he’d had as much access to the children as he’d wanted and she’d had no inkling that he was planning to take them to the other side of the world. A few days after he took off, Stan called Marian and said there was only one way he would ever bring the children home: if she gave him full custody. But Marian knew if she agreed to that they would be lost to her forever.

For a week after the abduction Marian was physically sick. Jenny and Anton were her whole life and she feared she would never see their smiling faces again. She called everyone she could think of — policemen, priests and politicians. All were sympathetic, all were useless, and all had the same official response: ‘It takes time to determine these matters. We anticipate we will have more information in the near future …’ Marian explained to me that she had tried everything she could think of to make the authorities help her but nothing had worked. She was worn out from worry and frustration.

In 1992, international legal channels were clouded by static and Poland was still a few months off becoming a signatory of the Hague Convention. Aggrieved parents had to make their own rules if they wanted their children returned. Australian law was irrelevant.

Ten days after Stan had taken the kids, federal member Garrie Gibson, the MP for Moreton, Marion’s electorate, wrote to the Attorney General’s Department saying that Stan was blackmailing his wife — that he had contacted her demanding full custody of the children or she would never see them again. ‘He has said he will return to Australia to get the above [full custody] in writing and not until then will he let her see the children again,’ Gibson wrote. ‘She has become extremely upset because she feels there has been a lack of action by the federal police. Mrs Wojtek is obviously frightened by her husband. I fear she is keen to give into his demands of blackmail only to see her children again.’

Like slow, relentless torture, months dragged by with no official action. The only communication Marian had with her children was letters from her daughter. But they were letters of hate. In her childish scrawl, Jenny wrote that she couldn’t stand her mother and never wanted to see her again. Marian would burst into tears every time. She knew Stan was making his little girl write them.

As her children grew up away from her, Marian grew more despondent. Many nights she would cry herself to sleep, frustrated time and time again by a lack of help from the Australian government. She went to work every day hoping the regular grind would somehow alleviate her anguish. But then she would return to her empty house, hoping for a letter or a phone call that might change her life and make it right again.

In her desperation, she appealed to the most famous man from her old country, Pope John Paul II. The kids’ headmistress at St James Catholic Primary wrote to the Pope’s representative in Canberra asking for assistance. The reply was polite but firm. The Holy Father could not involve himself in the legal affairs of individual nations.

But as Marian finally realised, God helps those who help themselves. She decided she was going to Poland. She would tackle Stan head on and take the kids home herself. But she knew she needed professional help.

Marian saw my advertisement for ‘International Detection Services’ in the Yellow Pages and was taken by the word ‘International’. When she and her aunt came to see me, Marian said she was falling apart from the stress and loneliness.

‘Keith, I will do anything to get my babies back,’ Marian told me between pitiful sobs, the tears clouding her pleading eyes. ‘I have nowhere else to turn. I will pay whatever it costs. I am going to use the money from selling my little house at Buranda to bring my kids back home.’

As Aunt Danute explained to me: ‘Stan didn’t take the children for their sake. He did it because it was the only way to hurt his wife.’

I really wanted to help Marian and Danute, but these poor, distressed women couldn’t have caught me at a worse time. In September 1992 I had political aspirations and was doing my best to get elected to the Queensland parliament. Two years earlier I’d lost out in the race for the federal seat of Brisbane and I was working overtime on my new campaign for Chermside.

‘I’d love to help you, Mrs Wojtek,’ I told Marian, ‘but at the moment the election is taking up all my time. If I win the election I’m afraid I won’t be able to go overseas for you, and in any case it will be a few weeks, at least, before my company can really do anything at all on this case.’

My frankness with Marian might not have sounded very encouraging, but after she’d run into so many official roadblocks since the abduction, she was relieved to find someone who cared and who could empathise with her situation. By the time Marian and her aunt came to my office I had already been involved in dozens of missions to retrieve stolen children — both in Australia and overseas — and I told Marian that if her story checked out, and if I wasn’t suddenly a state politician, I would help her recover her children.

‘If we do go to Poland and take the kids back from your husband we risk a long prison term in that country,’ I told her. ‘The Australian embassy there might not be prepared to bail us out. But if the children are better off in Australia with you than in Poland with Stan, I can go there and bring them out.’

The first thing I had to do, though, was to check out Marian’s story. She seemed very genuine but I had to be certain she was telling the truth.

After just a short time questioning Marian and Danute I was pretty sure her children would be much better off with her in Brisbane. I had Polish friends in Australia who had told me how conditions were still harsh in their homeland and that rationing of things like food and petrol was still common.

Of course, I hadn’t met Stan, but from what Marian had told me he was a heavy drinker with a ferocious temper, a combination that didn’t sit well with small children on the scene. I also knew that it took a certain type of man to steal his own children and take them 15,000 kilometres away from a mother who obviously loved them more than anything in the world. I knew the great lengths Marian had gone to in trying to gain official support. She had tried to do everything by the book.

Marian was prepared to do everything in her power to give her children the best life she could. She had no wish to hurt Stan and in fact wanted him to be part of the children’s lives. She just wanted Anton and Jenny back in Australia where she could love them and look after them.

To make doubly certain I was doing the right thing, I wanted eyewitness testimony of Anton’s and Jenny’s circumstances in Poland. When kids have been living in a foreign country for some time it can be very cruel to wrench them away from a culture and language they have become used to, and by the time Marian and Danute came to see me the children had been living in Poland for almost a year.

What was their life like with Stan? I needed a spy there to find out.

A Polish-Australian friend said he knew of a family acquaintance in Warsaw who was a former KGB agent. After the fall of Communism, Krzysztof Rutkowski had opened a small detective agency there