Fagan - from star-struck to stunned
DorianA123
HOW KURTH WAS CHARMED -- AND LEFT CHILDLESS
Author: By Ellen O'Brien and Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff
Date: SUNDAY, April 26, 1998
Page: A1
Section: Metro
Stephanie Ebbert, John Ellement, Ric Kahn, Stephen Kurkjian, and Brian
MacQuarrie of the Globe staff and correspondent Colum Lynch contributed to this
report.
She was a wide-eyed young woman from a small town in Vermont, new to Boston in
the late 1960s. Her long chestnut hair flowed straight to her waist, and she
dreamed of changing the world through social work.
He was flashy, a local guy nearly 10 years her senior who had just graduated
from law school. He liked to brag about his black belt in karate, chatting with
girls as he leaned against his red Corvette.
From the start, Barbara Kurth and Stephen Fagan seemed headed for a wild ride.
They married in a rush, eloping in Haiti because Fagan needed a quick divorce.
Their marriage lasted just five years, a tumultuous pairing that yielded two
daughters and an extraordinary journey filled with new identities, enormous
lies, and astonishing truths.
Last week, their family secrets were revealed in detail after Fagan was
arrested in Florida and charged with kidnapping his two young children nearly
20 years ago. Barbara Kurth was resurrected for her grown daughters, who
investigators say were raised believing their mother had died in a car crash.
The script for this family saga melds fact and fiction. And the ending hasn't
been written.
It began at the Kenmore Club, a racy Boston nightspot where red lights flashed
while Rolling Stones tunes blared.
Kurth, 19, had come from Burlington, Vt., to Boston in 1968, enrolling at the
Boston School for Human Resources, an experimental program that no longer
exists.
Back in her hometown, Kurth was a reliable teenage baby sitter, a level-headed
girl who acted in school plays and joined her family at the local Unitarian
church each week.
Her sister, Gillian Randall, described her younger sister as the ``nurturing
one'' in a rowdy bunch of siblings, five in all.
Their father, Fred Kurth, was an administrator with General Electric whose work
brought the family overseas; until 1960, the Kurths lived abroad. But it was in
Greater Boston, sharing an apartment with her sister in Newton, that Barbara
Kurth wanted to find her place in the world.
She left school within a year and worked at local clubs, checking coats and
waitressing. Fagan, 27, was a bouncer at the Kenmore Club, but he spoke of
loftier ambitions, having graduated from Suffolk University Law School in 1965.
He had been raised in Boston and Newton; his parents doted on him and brought
him to temple each week. By the time Kurth met him, Fagan was already married.
But she fell hard for him.
``He just seemed, to her, to be a pretty exotic creature,'' her sister said.
Fagan told Kurth his wife was ``in an insane asylum,'' Kurth's sister
remembered. There were other troubling signs: When he arrived for dates, Fagan
waited for Kurth in silence. Relatives saw him as strangely controlling.
``She was required to say `I love you' the minute he called and she answered
the phone,'' said her brother, Peter Kurth. ``She was scared of her own
shadow.''
Kurth's family was appalled by news of their marriage in 1973, her brother
said. Her family saw little of her as time passed, and they grew suspicious
about how a young lawyer with only four clients could afford various suburban
homes -- especially the large Framingham house on Edmands Road the couple
bought in 1976.
Neighbors -- who saw little of Fagan but remember Kurth as a down-to-earth
housewife who liked to go barefoot -- had similar concerns because she seemed
to be alone with the kids a lot. Patsy Maselek said Kurth seemed overwhelmed by
her enormous house.
``She seemed battered emotionally by him,'' she said. ``But with those kids,
she was good. And they were the picture of health.''
As her house began to fill with valuables, Kurth came to believe that her
husband's income came from handling stolen artwork and antiques, her lawyers
said.
Kurth asked her husband for a divorce on Christmas Day 1977. His first
response, she told her attorneys, was to ask how to divide the linens. Then he
grew angry, she said, and allegedly threw her against a bathroom wall while one
of her daughters was ``screaming hysterically on the bed.''
The divorce proceedings, documents show, became increasingly venomous. At one
point, Fagan asked the court to seal the entire divorce file, saying it would
damage his reputation as a lawyer.
By his own account, that career was already suffering. Two years before he
married Kurth, in 1971, Fagan took the Massachusetts bar exam six times before
he passed, records show. His law practice, when it existed, had about three or
four clients, according to his testimony in a 1978 deposition taken by Kurth's
attorneys. At least one client was convicted of receiving stolen goods.
According to his tax returns, most of Fagan's income in 1978, the year he was
divorced, came from Harvard University, where he earned $12,500 a year to
supervise students in its Legal Aid Bureau.
Kurth's attorneys said they tried to find out how Fagan could afford Oriental
rugs, paintings from Newbury Street galleries, and artifacts from India. But he
refused to answer questions about it.
When the lawyers were done in August 1978, Kurth was granted custody of the
girls. Her ex-husband kept the house.
As her marriage collapsed, Kurth became depressed and overwhelmed, but some
neighbors recall her continuing devotion to her children.
``In the middle of the whole'' divorce, ``she was so concerned about Rachael
being able to have a Halloween,'' said Maselek. ``Rachael went
trick-or-treating that year as a nurse, with a little cape and hat.''
What happened in the year following the divorce is now the crux of Fagan's
defense: that he was justified in stealing his children away.
Kurth moved to North Adams, her sister said, to be closer to her mother in
Vermont.
In September 1979, according to court records, Fagan said he received an
anonymous phone call from a neighbor in North Adams, saying his girls were not
fed or clothed properly. Three days later, he filed a complaint for custody in
Middlesex Probate Court and was granted a temporary order, allowing him three
days with the girls immediately, court records show.
While the custody battle raged, three neighbors provided accounts of the girls
chewing on raw meat while their mother was unconscious; they assumed she was
drunk.
Later that month, the state Department of Public Welfare became involved.
Social worker Monica Howson evaluated the girls. She reported to the court that
Rachael, then a 5-year-old in kindergarten, was a ``very intelligent child,
though with a somewhat sad countenance.''
Howson described Wendy, then 2, as a ``precocious child, very intelligent,
outgoing, and social.'' A North Adams physician also examined the girls and
reported they were in good health.
On Oct. 18, 1979, the Protective Services Unit recommended that the girls
remain with their mother. The decision left Fagan fuming.
``He was so frustrated by the whole process,'' said attorney E. Eugene Fleming,
a friend of Fagan's at the time. ``He felt that the system was failing him, and
his daughters were the victims of that failure.''
A week later, Stephen Fagan arrived at Kurth's home in North Adams for a
routine weekend visit with the girls. He told Kurth he was taking them to Cape
Cod. They were due back Sunday by 6 p.m.
That evening, the phone rang in Kurth's small apartment at 6:20 p.m. A man who
said he was Fagan's Cape Cod mechanic called to say that Fagan's car needed
repairs, and that the girls would not be back that night.
Barbara Kurth never saw her girls again.
She filed a complaint in probate court, charging her former husband with
parental kidnapping, but that report did not prompt a police investigation.
Prosecutors now say Kurth was a victim of a crime that, at the time, was
considered a ``family matter.''
Kurth remained for a while in North Adams, her sister said, in shock and
denial, ``sure that they were going to be found.''
Kurth's attorney, Jacob Atwood, said Kurth began seeing several doctors, and
she told him that she had been diagnosed with narcolepsy, a rare sleep disorder
that caused her to pass out suddenly. Those episodes were confused with
drunkenness, she told him.
She went back home for more than a year to recover, her family says, but began
to spiral into a deep depression. Kurth had been hospitalized once before,
according to her attorneys and her siblings. In 1977, she fought an addiction
to amphetamines, which her attorneys said were prescribed for narcolepsy. A
psychiatrist admitted her to Leonard Morse Hospital in Natick.
After a year in Vermont, Kurth began to cope. She enrolled at Trinity College
and graduated in 1983. She studied biology, and she attended support groups for
parents of missing children.
With a $10,000 loan from her father, Kurth told her divorce attorney to depose
anyone who might lead her to Fagan -- including Boston attorney Barbara Moore,
whom Fagan was dating when the children disappeared. In 1980, Kurth placed a
missing-persons ad in local papers, with pictures of the girls and her former
husband.
In November 1979, one month after the girls were taken from their mother, Fagan
arrived in Florida and began to form a new identity, according to Florida
registry records.
Whatever money he used to start his new life appears to have come from the sale
of his Framingham house to his parents for $115,000 in December 1978. There was
no mortgage on the house, partly because Fagan's parents helped him pay for it
just after he married Kurth.
Fagan's parents sold the house a year later to Richard Egbert -- Fagan's
current defense attorney. Egbert, who no longer owns the house, said the
transaction was unrelated to his current representation of Fagan, and nothing
more than a ``historical accident.''
In early 1980, Kurth learned Fagan was receiving mail at the Florida home of
his sister, Cheryl Klein. That fall, she sent her father to knock on Klein's
door, but Klein stonewalled him.
Egbert said Fagan and his daughters could have been found easily; the girls'
grandparents lived about 10 minutes away, under their own names. Kurth's family
said she actively searched for her daughters, but had to stop when she ran out
of money.
Kurth has not responded publicly to any of her husband's allegations.
Fagan adopted at least two false Social Security numbers. The first one he used
between 1979 and 1981, under the name of William H. Martin, and told the
Florida Division of Motor Vehicles he had lived in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the girls were being raised as Rachael and Lisa Martin, after their
father apparently changed the name of his younger daughter from Wendy to Lisa.
Fagan married twice in Florida. Each time, it was to a wealthy woman who
believed he was Dr. Bill Martin.
As Martin, Fagan rattled off a list of fake credentials to his neighbor, June
Slote. He said he had a law degree from Harvard and a psychology degree from
Columbia. He also said he had a tragic past: his young wife, Barbara, was
killed in a car crash in Boston.
Slote introduced the ``widower'' to her wealthy sister, Linda Vine, whose
husband had died in a car crash earlier that year. Fagan, as Dr. William
Martin, and Vine were married in 1986; each had two children from previous
marriages.
They were divorced in 1995, but Fagan was not alone for long. In July 1996, he
married his current wife, Harriet Golding, a businesswoman whose family owns
real estate on Long Island, N.Y., in affluent Great Neck.
Rachael and Lisa Martin blossomed into popular, athletic adolescents. The
younger one grew taller than her sister, and both showed promise on local swim
teams.
In 1987, when Rachael was 13 and Lisa was 10, they competed in the Ocean Mile
Classic in Delray Beach. Lisa placed first in her age group; Rachael, second.
They attended Palm Beach County Day School, a private school with tuition of
about $7,000 per year.
``They were two of our favorites,'' said headmaster John L. Thompson. Lisa
attended a local high school and won a swimming scholarship to the University
of Southern California -- one of the nation's top collegiate programs. Rachael
headed north for Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and later took a job
at a charitable foundation run by her stepmother's family.
As young adults, Lisa is the bolder of the two, according to those who know
them, and both are close to their father.
USC head swimming coach Mark Shubert recalled how, after a power outage at a
campus hotel one morning, Martin left the lobby and returned with coffee and
muffins for everyone there.
``He is a very nice guy, a very generous guy,'' Shubert said. ``He's very
sociable, and supportive of Lisa.''
While Fagan remade himself with phony diplomas and outlandish claims of work as
a CIA operative and an adviser to presidents, Kurth rebuilt her life, finding
solace in quiet laboratories.
After graduating from Trinity College in 1983, her sister said, Kurth enrolled
at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she discovered her talent
for science. There, she met her current husband, Peter Gudaitis.
They were married in 1989, in a quiet civil ceremony in the living room of a
relative's Long Island home. The couple moved to a small estate in
Charlottesville, Va., about a year later, and have cultivated a quiet life of
gardening and books.
One day last September, on Kurth's 48th birthday, a Massachusetts State Police
trooper phoned her to say police believed they had found her ex-husband in
Florida.
Sources say Fagan's sister confided her brother's lie to a friend in Florida;
the friend told a lawyer, who called police. Kurth phoned attorney Jacob Atwood
in Boston.
Several months passed while Atwood prepared evidence to bring to the Middlesex
district attorney's office. By January, authorities had launched an
investigation.
Kurth said she was told by investigators not to contact her daughters pending
the investigation.
Ten days ago, Fagan was arrested at his Palm Beach mansion. Minutes earlier, a
prosecutor had arrived at Rachael Martin's apartment in New York and delivered
the stunning news that her mother was alive.
Tomorrow, Rachael and Lisa Martin will have their say when they face the news
media at a Boston hotel. Their father is free on bail and faces up to 10 years
in prison. His daughters have said they support him.
Meanwhile, Barbara Kurth waits. She has a room devoted to her missing
daughters, filled with baby pictures of her girls among her treasured
collection of dolls.
Last week, Kurth caught her first glimpse of her two grown daughters on
television. She phoned an old friend in Framingham; Kurth, the friend said, was
thrilled to see the young women look so much like her.
SIDEBAR:
Key figures in the case
Stephen Fagan, charged with four counts of kidnapping for the abduction of his
two daughters in 1979, is free on $250,000 cash bail. A look at the key players
involved in the case: