Twists of Kidnap Trial Turn on Child Abuse Accusations

Were the story to unfold in a pulp novel, it could make for a steamy page-turner.

Among the characters are a wealthy surgeon, a beautiful Israeli actress, a sultry mistress, a Spanish-speaking nanny, an ex-wife and two young children. The complicated plot drips with love, hate, revenge and deception. There’s a messy divorce, a paternity suit, a kidnaping, arson, a bomb threat and charges of rape and incest.

But central to the case of the State of California vs. Orly Lapin, currently under way in Superior Court Judge David H. Brickner’s 11th-floor Santa Ana courtroom, are accusations of child abuse.

Actress Orly Lapin--charged with kidnaping her son and daughter--and her former husband, surgeon Ron Lapin, have accused each other of abusing their children. And while child advocates, attorneys and law enforcement officials say such charges made in the wake of a bitter divorce are common and always difficult to sort out, the accusations in the case of Orly and Ron Lapin may be more difficult than most.

Orly Lapin, 31, who admitted in court that she went into hiding with both her children, has suggested that authorities did not thoroughly investigate allegations that her former husband molested their 4-year-old daughter. She said the little girl and her 2-year-old brother, who live with their father, may be in danger.

Orly Lapin’s state of mind at the time she disappeared with her children is critical, since her motivation and intent could help jurors decide whether her actions amounted to a crime.

Ron Lapin, 48, who was granted sole custody of the children after they and his wife disappeared, has denied that he molested the girl and accused his former wife of abducting the children in a malicious attempt to hurt him.

Moreover, a new twist in the case emerged this week when the children’s former nanny, a Mexican woman, testified in court that she witnessed Ron Lapin fondling his daughter’s genitals as he bathed the girl. The nanny said that Ron Lapin also raped her and that a child resulted from his rape. She has filed a paternity suit against him.

According to court documents, the chain of events that apparently led to the abduction began in May, 1987, when Orly Lapin told child abuse authorities that she suspected Ron Lapin of molesting their daughter, who was 3 years old at the time. A sex crimes investigator from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department interviewed the little girl, although the date of the initial interview could not be immediately determined.

The prosecutor in the kidnap case, Kenneth O. Chinn, said in court this week that the first investigating officer spoke with the child in June, 1987. In documents filed in court, however, Ron Lapin said he was interviewed by a sheriff’s investigator and an official from the county’s Children’s Services department in May, 1987. The couple’s divorce was made final on May 27, 1987.

After reviewing testimony from all the interviews, the district attorney’s office declined to charge Ron Lapin.

Bill Evans, supervising deputy of the district attorney’s sexual assault-child abuse unit, explained it this way: “The sheriff’s investigator noted that (the child) would only speak in whispers, that she would only shake her head up and down.”

Evans said the investigator could not get the little girl to tell him, in her own words, what had happened to her, if anything. The investigator said that when he asked if she understood the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie, he wasn’t convinced that she did.

“And they never did pin down the time when (the alleged abuse) took place,” Evans said, “just that it was sometime when she was in dad’s custody.”

Nanny Says She Was Threatened

Evans noted that the nanny initially did not back up Orly Lapin’s sex abuse claim, which came in the midst of a custody battle. The nanny testified in court last week that Ron Lapin had threatened her with violence and deportation.

“When you are dealing with child custody disputes, one parent will often try to portray the other family person as unfit,” he said. “We do look (at those cases) much more closely and we are somewhat skeptical.”

Evans said that although abuse may have occurred, what weighs on the district attorney’s mind when deciding whether to press charges is the quality and quantity of evidence admissible in court.

“It’s a fact of life,” he said. “We have to judge them that way. Sometimes it doesn’t mean that (the allegation of abuse) isn’t true. But it is not going to give us the quantity of evidence to give us a conviction.”

Evans said the district attorney’s office has no plans to reopen an investigation of child abuse against Ron Lapin.

But Dr. Justin D. Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC Irvine, who saw the girl on June 26 and June 29, 1987, said that he “certainly agreed with Mrs. Lapin that there was reason to be concerned.”

Call, who testified in court on Orly Lapin’s behalf, said the child was “very eloquent in her behavior,” leading him to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘Definitely Something Amiss’

“There definitely was something amiss,” Call said in an interview. “This little girl had a primary attachment to her mother. There was a specific fear of the father.”

Paraphrasing his court testimony, the psychiatrist explained what happened during his sessions with the girl.

“On both occasions, I had established a very good play dialogue with her and her mother,” Call said. “She was happy and enjoying life and enjoying the contact with her mother. Then when I asked her, ‘Can you tell me what happens at Daddy’s house?’ her immediate response was to freeze, stop and say nothing, with a wide-eyed, frightened stare. And she tried to climb under the couch.

“Then after a few minutes, she came out and clung to her mother’s body and wouldn’t look in my direction. It took her another five to 10 minutes. I didn’t follow through. I knew she had been traumatized. My approach tells me that when you see a child reacting that way, you know there is serious trouble. You don’t just go plowing into it. You wait for the child to tell the story in their own way, in their own time. I didn’t have time to do that.”

Call did not have time for further sessions because Orly Lapin fled with her children. But first she asked her attorney at the time, Tonya E. Prescott, to request an emergency court hearing in an effort to remove her children from Ron Lapin’s house.

Prescott said she unsuccessfully argued with Orly Lapin against the hearing, which she believed would fail in the absence of compelling, irrefutable new evidence.

“The usual rule of thumb in Orange County,” Prescott said, “is that judges don’t like to start moving custody of children around on an ex parte basis (where no oral testimony is allowed), because unless there is blood on the carpet, where it is something so flagrant, it is not something that you can really say without a doubt.”

The judge, aware of the complications of the case, was unwilling to alter the custody decision without further review and scheduled another hearing about two weeks later to further examine the issue.

By that time, however, Orly Lapin had disappeared.

Prescott said Orly Lapin requested the emergency hearing because “she felt things were more dire, and rightly or wrongly, when the ex parte hearing went as I predicted it would, she made a unilateral decision to leave.”

The attorney further noted that the evidence she submitted at the hearing, including Call’s report and another from a pediatrician who examined the girl at the emergency clinic of Childrens Hospital of Orange County, was legally nothing more than hearsay because it had not been taken under oath.

The pediatrician, Michael Aufdemberg, said he testified that he found no physical evidence of penetration when he examined the girl. He added, however, that the lack of such evidence did not mean that abuse had not occurred. Aufdemberg said he suggested to Orly Lapin at the time that she should visit Call if she remained concerned.

Need for Witnesses

According to attorneys, law enforcement officials and child advocates, one of the crucial elements in determining whether charges of child abuse can be proven is the existence of third-party adult witnesses. Although in the Lapin case, the nanny would qualify as such, Deputy Dist. Atty. Evans said the fact that she has filed a paternity suit against Ron Lapin discredited her testimony.

“You have a woman who has filed a paternity suit and then, as an aside, she says, ‘He’s also messing around with his daughter,’ ” Evans said. “Nobody is going to start an investigation by telling us that.”

Gene Howard, director of the county’s Children’s Services department, said that because of confidentiality statutes, he could not comment on whether his agency had reopened an abuse investigation or whether the children would be removed from Lapin’s house.

“I can say that our responsibility does differ somewhat from the D.A.’s,” Howard said. “We do not necessarily have to have the makings of a criminal case.”

But Howard and others stressed that the Lapins’ acrimonious divorce weighs heavily on investigators’ minds when looking for signs of child abuse.

Beverly Jones, senior consultant with the Child Welfare League of America in Washington, said: “I do think that there is a perception generally that when you have allegations of abuse made in the context of divorce or custody issues, that people tend to look at them as less than credible, which I think is unfortunate. I think too often we tend to dismiss them without making an objective, thorough investigation.”

Rocky Marriage

The paper trail documenting the troubled union of Orly and Ron Lapin began even before the couple wed on Aug. 20, 1984. Both signed a prenuptial agreement, with attorneys present, stating that their business incomes were to remain separate and that Lapin was to give his wife $1,200 monthly, to be distributed by his office manager.

But by the time Orange County Superior Court Judge Jack Mandel granted the couple’s divorce on May 27, 1987, that arrangement had long since proved unworkable. Ron Lapin claimed in the divorce record that his wife had begun demanding unreasonable amounts of money and that she frequently hit and pushed him. Orly Lapin claimed that her husband was addicted to narcotics.

In the lengthy divorce settlement, Mandel ruled that the couple would have joint custody of their children, although they were to live with their father in his home in Lemon Heights, an exclusive neighborhood in North Tustin.

Orly Lapin, awarded the couple’s Palm Springs house, was told she could take the children home with her every weekend and that she could spend several holidays with them throughout the year. Without her husband’s or the court’s permission, however, she was forbidden to take the children outside the seven Southern California counties.

But that arrangement, it turned out, didn’t last long either.

It was during one of Orly Lapin’s scheduled vacations with the children, in July, 1987, that she took them and fled, the actress has admitted. They were not found until November, after a tap on Ron Lapin’s phone traced a call from Orly Lapin to a home in Paso Robles. Orly Lapin had been living there under the name Dominique Franklin, and the children, too, were using aliases, according to court testimony.

Wife Called Unstable

His wife’s actions, Ron Lapin has said, are proof of her instability and lack of concern for their children. By the time Orly and the children were found, Ron Lapin had already gone back to court to amend the custody agreement that he claimed his ex-wife had violated by abducting the children.

On Aug. 20, 1987, while Orly Lapin and the children were still missing, Judge Thomas Stabile awarded Ron Lapin sole physical custody of the couple’s children.

But Orly Lapin, currently facing a jail sentence of up to 3 years on the kidnaping charge, has maintained that desperation and fear that her daughter would be abused by Ron Lapin forced drastic action. She has suggested that her ex-husband, a prominent surgeon whom she calls “a very rich and powerful man,” has used his influence to discredit her.

“I went everywhere,” she said in an interview earlier this week. “The police, the D.A., the court, nobody would help me. Nobody did anything.”

Orly Lapin said in court testimony Wednesday that she suspected her ex-husband of abuse after her daughter began talking about the size of her father’s genitals and after she spoke to the nanny about Ron Lapin’s conduct with the child.

The nanny, testifying Tuesday, said that she saw Ron Lapin touch his daughter’s genitals while he bathed her and that the child frequently slept nude in the same bed with him. She made the same allegations in a paternity suit she filed with the Orange County district attorney’s office in January. In the suit, the nanny said that Ron Lapin raped her and that the baby she gave birth to in June was the result of the rape.

Threats Against Children

In court papers filed in the divorce trial, which he initiated in March, 1987, Ron Lapin said that his wife frequently threatened to kill the children and that she showed little affection for them.

Also in the file was a statement from a nurse at Coast Medical Center who said she recalled taking a call from Orly Lapin in which she threatened to kill the children if her husband did not return from work immediately.

Ron Lapin has denied ever molesting his daughter--although he admits telling Orly Lapin that to goad her--and said she kidnaped the children to spite him. Deputy Dist. Atty. Chinn, who is prosecuting Orly Lapin for kidnaping, said he believes Ron Lapin.

Adding to the drama has been testimony this week from Lapin’s first wife, actress Maureen Lapin, and from Leslie Murray, who said she was Lapin’s mistress throughout his marriage to Orly Lapin. Both women said under oath that Ron Lapin was a liar, and Murray added that he regularly used illicit drugs.

For his part, Ron Lapin has charged in court documents that Orly Lapin phoned in a bomb threat to the Anaheim Commerce National Bank, in which he has an interest. Orly Lapin was found not guilty of the bomb threat charge in a jury trial in May. Ron Lapin also contends that his former wife is a suspect in an arson fire that destroyed her Palm Springs house. Police handling the arson case have refused to comment on any suspects because the investigation is still open.

Both the defense attorney and the prosecutor in the kidnaping case have declined to elaborate on court testimony while the trial is under way.

Testimony in the case, which has attracted nationwide media attention, continues this week.