Lost in the Shadows

Sometimes she awakens in the middle of the night and sees her son’s face on the dark ceiling of their mobile home. She sees it the way it was in 1979, a smiling, alert face with bright eyes.

She lies there remembering the boy’s voice and the sound of his laughter, like wind chimes on the summer air. Joni Goldstein remembers and sighs. There are no tears. They stopped a lifetime ago.

Skye, now 16, is one of an estimated 500,000 children kidnaped each year in America by parents involved in custody battles.

A warrant is out for the arrest of his natural father, John Ross, on a charge of child abduction. But both his mother and stepfather believe that little, if anything, is being done to find him.

Ten years have passed, but the pain lingers. Skye looms tantalizingly in the shadows, frozen at age 6 in his mother’s memory.

Joni and her husband, Richard Goldstein, and Joni’s parents have spent thousands trying to find their son. Private investigators, lawyers and bounty hunters have failed.

Hundreds of letters have been written, both begging and demanding help from police and government officials across the country. Most of the letters have gone unanswered.

Frustration blends with anguish to form a volatile compound. Richard, 46, who admits to having once dealt drugs on the streets of Hollywood, feels strongly that federal agents were involved in Skye’s abduction.

He charges angrily that they wanted to trade the boy for information on the life Goldstein gave up for a wife and family. The FBI dismisses the notion.

“We’re not a part of any grand conspiracy,” a spokesman says. “We’re not the enemy.”

Joni Smith, unhappy at home, hit the streets when she was 14. She met Ross, an itinerant carpenter, and became pregnant with Skye. She says he beat both her and the baby, and in 1976 she left him. Two weeks later she met Richard Goldstein.

Eventually, they were married and granted legal custody of the boy. Richard began an adoption procedure. “I consider Skye my son,” he says, “and he considers me his father. He called me daddy, and I accepted that in my heart. And then this happened. . . .”

John Ross heard about the adoption procedure, Joni says, and made an effort to grab Skye, beating her badly in the process. Other incidents followed. Ross always seemed to be nearby, a haunting presence in the new life the Goldsteins were trying to establish.

In one incident, Ross grabbed Skye and carried him to his car. Joni screamed, “He’s kidnaping my son,” and 40 people in the vicinity of a market responded. They surrounded the car and returned the boy to his mother.

Ross was arrested but released when police learned that he was the natural father.

The actual abduction occurred on a Van Nuys street corner. Both Joni and Richard say that Ross and others sprayed them with a chemical substance, possibly Mace, beat them both and took Skye.

Joni says she saw a small “g” on the black and white license plate of the kidnap car, leading Richard to believe those “others” were federal agents.

The abduction was brief, but violent. Richard’s nose was broken and Joni suffered brain damage that causes periodic seizures. She’s afraid she’ll die before ever seeing her son again.

The shadows that conceal Skye deepen at every turn.

Joni’s father, James Smith, says Ross telephoned their house once. He said Skye was “OK” and hinted at a deal with Joni. If she’d drop the abduction charge, he’d let her see her son. But he hasn’t tried to contact them since.

Meanwhile, Richard Goldstein, a carpenter and talented artist, remains bitter at the apparent lack of effort that has gone into finding Skye.

“It was a violent felony,” he says angrily in their Box Canyon home, “but no one at the LAPD has even talked to me about it, except to threaten my arrest if I didn’t stay quiet.

“Stay quiet? Do you know what it’s like to have your screaming child torn from your arms? I do!”

Spokesmen from both the district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles Police Department deny that they have shoved the case aside. Several agencies are looking for both Ross and Skye, they say, but can’t find either of them.

All deny Goldstein’s conspiracy theory. The FBI says it has never even been involved in the case.

Joni Goldstein, meanwhile, contends with the shadows as best she can.

“We are two bodies with one soul,” she says of her son. “There’s an emptiness in me that won’t be filled until we find Skye. I’ve cried all the tears I can cry. What else can I do?”