Children of the Underground

A reader provided more info on the case below. The NY Daily News reports:

According to The Australian, Barnett initially fled to South Africa, where she married a man, Juan Geldenhuys in 1995.

She later gave birth to a son, now 17, before moving to New Zealand. From there, she moved to Australia after splitting with Geldenhuys, who recently died of bone cancer. It was a friend of Geldenhuys who helped tracked down Savanna's father after becoming suspicious of the mother and tracking him down via the Internet.

She was apparently helped in the US by an organization called Children of the Underground, which helps women stuck in apparently abusive relationships.

Another source says:

Since then, he has spent nearly all his assets in an effort to recover Savanna. Leveraged to the hilt, he lives simply and works seven-day weeks at two jobs: as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch and as a father engaged in a full-time search for his child.

There are hundreds of people like Todd, mostly fathers, who say they are victims of an underground network that willingly helps mothers and their children go into hiding - in violation of court orders.

Most of these fathers say they have been falsely accused of molesting their children. While the courts believe them, the underground's organizers don't; instead, they take the law into their own hands, leaving fathers cut off from their sons and daughters for years at a time, sometimes forever.

The most public of those underground leaders, Faye Yager, says she will only hide mothers who have extensive documentation of sexual abuse - medical reports, psychological evaluations, police statements.

But no such papers existed in Todd's case. Barnett never made any sexual abuse allegations during the long, nasty court battle for custody of Savanna. She called Harris Todd lots of names, but "child molester" wasn't one of them.

Just as I suspect, there is an underground network of child kidnappers that help moms violate child custody court orders. They tell themselves that they are preventing child molesters, or some such nonsense. Fathers no not molest their one-year-old babies. This is just a phony charges that is dreamed up by moms because they are vindictive, delusional, paranoid, possessive, borderline, or whatever.