In November of 1998, I told my wife that I loved her even more then than I had upon the day, twenty years earlier, when I had fallen in love with her “at first sight” during a Thanksgiving dinner in Paris. Ever since the previous summer (1998)—we had rented a camper and traveled down the Loire Valley—I had been moved to affirm to her repeatedly, how wonderful it would be to grow old together and watch our children mature. “Life was close to perfect,” I often said. However, she had other plans—secret plans—something she had been preparing for almost a year, possibly longer. Within three weeks she was gone.
While my family was living in the Netherlands, my wife, Monique Marie Fasel, a Swiss national, became mentally disturbed after an August 1996 abortion to which I was 100% opposed. Exacerbating the situation was her subsequent sterilization followed by having to “pull the plug” to terminate her still-cognizant mother’s life support in February of 1997. She refused to seek professional help. She began to abuse everyone in our family. She also joined several cults. By the end of 1998, the situation had gotten out of hand, and I told her I would have to take the children to the child protection agency on January 3, 1999.
In response, on January 4, 1999, she abducted our children—both native-born Americans who had spend more than half their lives in America—from our home in Zandvoort, the Netherlands. Hoping for reconciliation, I did not exercise my right to charge her with Article 279 of the Dutch law forbidding the removal of children from the family home without joint consent. Within ten days, my younger daughter escaped and came back to me.
Within two weeks, the child protection agency (Raad) provided a person to talk to me. That person spoke no English. I complained. The organization staged what later turned out to be a fake “complaint hearing” about this matter, and they promised to provide a different case worker if I withdrew my complaint. I did, and again they sent one who spoke hardly no English. The woman asked me whether I still loved my wife. I said, “Of course. It’s been less than 3 weeks since she left.” The woman said that if I still loved my wife, she would have to recommend the children never be allowed to see me again because the official policy of the Raad was that it was not good for children to be around parents who still loved their spouses when there is a divorce.
Before any custody hearing had taken place (none had even had been scheduled), my children and I vacationed in America (Summer, 1999). My wife and I had joint legal custody at the time. There was a non-binding agreement that the children return to Holland by the beginning of September. The agreement was of the type that are unenforceable in the Netherlands and three separate Dutch lawyers told me there was no legal reason preventing my children and I from moving back to our own country (J.P.C. Ten Wolde of Haarlem, Prinsen Advocaten in the Hague, and the firm of Moscovitz and Moscovitz in Amsterdam).
When it came time to go back to Holland, my children did not want to leave America; Holland is a foreign country; like me, they are native-born American citizens who had spent more than half their lives in our country. Back in our own country they finally felt “at home,” and stated that being in America was “a dream come true” to everyone they encountered. They loved being home again and were truly happy for the first time in years. So it is no wonder that on the four occasions I took them to the airport to return to the Netherlands, they refused to get on the plane.
I sent my ex an email saying we would have the custody hearing here, and she would be invited. At that point, there had still been no custody hearings. We planned the custody hearing in Idaho and started driving there from Maine, stopping at my parents on the way.
My wife bluffed her way into a Hague Convention return order by convincing the central authority in the Netherlands that our children were Dutch. In fact, none of us have any Dutch relatives, nor Dutch citizenship, although my wife (who is Swiss) learned the language enough to pass as a native. The closest connection we have to the Netherlands is that 385 years ago, six of our paternal grandparents (Pilgrims from England) escaped from Leiden after their children were threatened by the Dutch.
S.A.M. Oostvogels, acting on behalf of the central authority for the Hague Treaty in the Netherlands misrepresented to the United States that the children were Dutch. The fax that Ms. Oostvogels sent to the Office of Children’s Issues at the US Department of State in which she claims the children to be Dutch is part of my FOIA file.
My wife typed an English translation of one of our non-binding access agreements on her own computer, altering it and inserting language to make it appear that she had custody. The original document did not mention custody and did not even include any of the Dutch words for custody—my wife added all the mentions of custody when she made the translation, a translation that was, needless to say, unauthorized.
I believe her Dutch lawyer E.C.H. (“Kika”) de Leon of Smithuijsen in Haarlem coached her with this. Kika is known as someone who “gets too involved in her divorce cases,” and who “has a private agenda” according to her colleagues in the Dutch legal community. Evidence points to the fact that Monique’s American lawyer Susan Carol Elgin (of Faufman, Ries, and Elgin P.A.) also knowingly participated in the fraud. If so, the standards of IPKA rulings mandate that Elgin is equally liable for my children’s abduction. It would not be the first time that Elgin made a seemingly inexplicable error on behalf of a pedophile (see John Doe vs. Christ Church Children’s Center, Inc. Circuit Court for Montgomery County, Maryland. Civil No. 192060).
Without notifying us, though we were less than three miles away and under her detective’s surveillance, Susan Elgin (wife of a Baltimore judge) called a secret hearing in Towson, Maryland, to present the fake custody order to judge John O. Hennegan. Although it lacked the required “Apostille” to certify its authenticity, Judge Hennegan ruled that the bogus document was a “Domesticated Foreign Custody Order.”
Fasel and Elgin then conspired with Deputy State’s Attorney Howard Merker to build a complex “house of cards” upon the now-domesticated fake custody order. The three collaborated with a freelance writer (Joan Jacobson) to produce a dozen misleading inflammatory articles for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, each designed to escalate the situation and further the political aspirations of Merker. A count of the sentences written by Joan Jacobson reveals 70% to be false.
Fasel next took the fake custody order to the NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). There, she was aided by Nancy Hammer and at least one member of the same new-age cults she had joined in the Netherlands: Sara Bresnick. The two helped her involve the FBI and the NCIC, and concocted a misleading video for the “Good Morning Show” from outdated material that Fasel had coerced from my 84-year-old mother. Her caseworker, Nancy Hammer of the NCMEC, arranged with the FBI to add “armed and dangerous” to all their wanted posters (i.e. shoot to kill, ask questions later, even though I have never held a firearm), and to put me on their 10-most-wanted list. Fasel wanted me dead, and apparently, so did the NCMEC.
My wife managed to do all this without providing any proof whatsoever that the children were related to her or that I was even her husband (she has a different last name): no birth certificates or health records, no wedding licenses or marriage certificates, absolutely nothing that tied her, a foreign national, to me or to my children, American citizens. All she had was the faked custody order that she had typed herself, backed by the duped Hague authority’s untenable claim that the children were Dutch with nothing to substantiate either.
Later (April 28, 2000), John Rabun, chief officer of the NCMEC said to me, “I haven’t heard of another case as bad as yours but this case is certainly [due to] a huge loophole.” Even later, Gerry Nance, a veteran caseworker of the NCMEC, informed me that he had never seen such abuse of power by the NCMEC in their entire history. He described the whole event using words like “fishy,” “suspicious,” “strange,” and “irregular.”
Meanwhile, my children and I were leisurely driving to Idaho, on the way to the custody hearing, unaware that anything was happening.
It ended when a SWAT team surrounded our lodgings in Texas, and jailed me for more than a week without charges. Fasel promised to take the children back to Maryland for a hearing. The children were led away shouting, “We are American Citizens and we want to stay in America!” This surprised the FBI who had been told (by Nancy Hammer and others at the NCMEC) that these were Dutch children, 4 and 6 years old, and not 10- and 13-year-old American citizens. They had seen the faked video tape on the “Good Morning Show.” Naturally, Fasel immediately fled the country with the children.
About a week before Fasel’s abduction of the children to the Netherlands, she instructed her Dutch lawyer to obtain a court ruling that I was no longer my children’s father and therefore had no parental rights whatsoever. Such children’s rights atrocities are possible in the Netherlands which has a poor track record concerning children’s rights according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (for example, 95% of all children of divorce in the Netherlands never, ever see their fathers again). My own Dutch lawyer was not informed of that hearing. Clearly, she took the children from America with the intent to interfere with my access to the children: she obtained that ruling between the time she conspired with Hammer, Bresnick, Merker, and Elgin and the time she came to abduct the children from Texas. That is the sole requirement of the International Parental Kidnapping Act: Fasel is guilty of international parental kidnapping.
Her subsequent interference with my access to my children was absolute. Once back in Holland, she had Merker arrange for the confiscation of my passport and my children’s passports at gunpoint (witnessed by my Texas lawyer who immediately filed an affidavit about the larceny of the our passports). Merker gave our passports to Elgin. Without a passport, I had no access to my children. Fasel changed their phone number so I could not contact them by phone for 420 days. At the cult school she forces my children to attend, the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates informed me that Fasel called an assembly of all parents within one week of her return. At this meeting, she threatened other parents with having their own children removed from school if they passed messages between me and my children.
After ten months, I complained to the attorney general of Maryland about Elgin’s and Merker’s theft of my passport. Shortly thereafter, my passport was given back to me and I returned to Holland in August, 2000.
For the first nine months back in Holland, I secretly met with my children every day by the sides of canals on their way to and from school or music lessons, in allies and doorways, often in the pouring rain. Fasel had spent the previous ten months brainwashing the children with lies about me, so it was necessary to rebuild our relationship. Rebuild it we did, and soon, my children persuaded Fasel to seek counseling. The counseling led to a 7-month period during which my children stayed in the family home with me for 10 days per month on average.
My children wanted more time with me, and my younger daughter wanted to move back with me. When we went to court in December, 2001, for the final ruling, both children asked the judges for more time with me. My older daughter testified that 50-50 would be best, but the current 10-days per month would be acceptable; my younger daughter said she wanted to move back in with me and she had arranged her own legal representation to amplify her request. The judge then asked my ex what she wanted. She demanded that the children’s time with me be reduced to four days per month.
The judges ignored the children’s wishes and granted Fasel’s request. That they did this right after my daughters had told them their wishes to the contrary was devastating to my older daughter. Her own country had betrayed her when she said, “I’m an American citizen and I want to stay in America” - now she felt that the Dutch were betraying her. They were. Making matters worse, the mitigating factor in the marital split-up had been my ex-wife’s molestation of our children. No one in their right mind could claim that this was in “the best interests of the children.”
My younger daughter and I continued to meet regularly after school and she dutifully spent only 4 nights a month with me for 6 months. During that time, she contacted more lawyers who informed her she could move back in with me if she wanted to - that any child 12 or older in the Netherlands was allowed to decide with which parent they wanted to live. She spoke about it with my ex, and on Father’s Day 2002, she moved back in with me.
Within 4 hours, a Dutch SWAT team surrounded our house, threatening to break the doors down if I didn’t turn over my daughter. You see, what her lawyer hadn’t foreseen was that the ruling removing my parental rights, allowed the incident to be treated as if a total stranger were harboring an unrelated teenager.
There have been 14 court hearings in the US and the Netherlands. Within days after abducting my children the first time, she had cleaned out our joint bank account, and also presented a faked power-of-attorney to clean out my business account, next burying the bulk of our savings in numbered Swiss accounts. To pay for the court hearings, I exhausted the one account that remained. I was thrown out of my house in the Netherlands, pressured by her hired thugs to sell it, and forced to give the vast majority of the equity to my ex-wife in abject contradiction to a nuptial agreement. Since May of 2003, I’ve been living at my mother’s house.
My ex has reneged on every court order concerning the children spending vacations with me. One-hundred percent. Nonetheless, I’m hoping that one or both of my daughters will find their own way here soon. At 15 and 18, no Dutch law can keep either of them in that terrible country. The problem is their passports, which Fasel has stolen and hidden (yet another crime).
Meanwhile, the mistreatment of my children, arranged by Fasel, Merker, Elgin, de Leon, Hammer, Bresnick, and the Dutch Raad voor de Kinderbescherming, continues. For all practical purposes my children live alone in a foreign country. Fasel traipses around Europe, Switzerland, or wherever, ships the children off to camps where everyone but they are drunk and engaging in sex competitions, and subjects us to other nightmares… anything she can do to use them as a weapon to punish me for the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own father.
Christopher Yavelow
August 1, 2004