Father’s Own Search Finds His 2 Children

A Camarillo father, desperate to find his missing children, was reunited with them Thursday after he conducted his own search and located them living with their mother along a lonely Missouri highway.

Ventura County district attorney officials spent much of the day Thursday on the telephone with Ozark County, Mo., sheriff’s deputies and a judge to clear the last legal roadblocks separating James Moats from his son James, 5, and daughter Jessica, 9.

“This is the best Christmas I’m ever going to have,” a tearful Moats, 35, said in a telephone call from Missouri moments before a court order gave him his children again. “I’m just going to make sure they have a good Christmas as well.”

The children disappeared in August after a weekend visit with their mother, and failed to turn up despite exhaustive record searches by local and federal agencies. So Moats and his mother decided to drive to places as far-flung as Texas and Missouri, areas where his former wife might be hiding.

Moats said he was relieved to learn that his son, who has had open-heart surgery four times and was under observation for an artery blockage, was in relatively good health despite missing a scheduled October doctor visit.

“I guess the worst thing is they just basically need a good bath,” Moats said.

Taken into custody in Missouri on child abduction charges was Sherry Kay Moats, 35. She will be extradited to Ventura County to face prosecution here, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pam Grossman said.

James Moats was granted permanent custody of his children in January after a court battle revealed that Sherry Moats is an alcoholic and the children wanted to stay with their father, Grossman said.

Sherry Moats was allowed weekend visits with her children, but she did not return them as scheduled on Aug. 21, officials said.

The district attorney’s office, as well as the FBI and missing children’s centers throughout the United States, had conducted an extensive search for the children for four months without success.

“We literally thought she had gone to the underground--we had exhausted everything,” Grossman said.

Although authorities knew the children initially had been taken to Missouri, the trail grew cold when Sherry Moats’ mother told police her daughter had returned to California, district attorney’s Investigator Dennis Peet said.

When schools, utility company and motor vehicle records throughout the country were searched without success, James Moats devised his own plan.

“Finally, he said he and his mom were going to go everywhere he thought (Sherry Moats) could run to,” Grossman said.

First, James Moats went to Texas, visiting towns where his ex-wife had relatives and leaving flyers with pictures of the children on them. When that did not prove successful, Moats and his mother went to Missouri early this week.

“We traveled along 130 miles of highway, going to small towns and dropping off flyers,” Moats said. “That’s when we got people who said they recognized the kids, Sherry or the car.”

Finally, an informant called the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department and told them where Sherry Moats and the children were living.

“They were off a rural highway in the middle of Missouri,” Peet said. “She had been living with another man, she had only gone out a couple of times, and the children were not in school. . . . Without these flyers, no one would have ever found her.”

Moats said he and his mother will drive the children back to Camarillo and expect to arrive Christmas Day. Although he expects the children will need counseling to deal with what has happened, he said nothing in the future will be as bad as the past four months--for the children or for him.

“It was like somebody just reached in and tore my heart out,” he said.