Six-Year-Old Girl Will Be
Returned to Father in Washington

November 22, 2000

The six-year-old girl who was kidnapped sixteen months ago from the state of Washington by her mother after the father was given legal custody of the child will be going back home to her father in Washington.

That’s what Judge Geoffrey Wilson ordered on Monday in Greenfield at the Franklin County Probate and Family Court.

But the child will not be returning on the same airplane as her father, Kyle Strieby, because DSS has decided that they will return her to Washington authorities rather than to her natural father who has legal custody and who is still in Greenfield. This raised many eyebrows because no one could conceive of keeping a child from its mother if the tables had been reversed.

A group of about twenty from a local battered women’s shelter, NELCWITT, attended the court session with their children in order to provide support for the mother.

There is a felony warrant for the mother’s arrest from the state of Washington and a warrant for “Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution” from the federal government. The FBI and local police located the woman and child in Greenfield on Thursday after a neighbor grew suspicious and called the police. The girl’s hair had been dyed and her name had been changed. She was not enrolled in school.

Fathers groups were upset that Judge Philip Beattie from Springfield released the mother on $200 bail last Friday, saying that she is “not a flight risk” even though she has done so before.

The mother is said to have abandoned the child, father and home about four years ago to live in Hawaii and Arizona with a cult-like group that is polygamous. Before she left and after she returned from that venture, she constantly accused the father of sexually abusing the girl. But many checks by authorities have failed to uncover any evidence of abuse.

The father was awarded temporary care, custody and control of the child in August 1999. The mother was restrained from going near the child or the father. But the mother kidnapped the child after that decision.