A Bittersweet Reunion for Father and Son : Families: After 14 years, the search for the abducted Tustin boy ends in San Bernardino County. The youth, now 17, appeals for mercy for his mother, who faces felony charges.

On Nov. 12, 1980, Bill Kennedy’s ex-wife picked up their son from the baby-sitter’s house in Santa Ana and vanished. She had done it before--disappearing with 3-year-old David for weeks at a time.

But this time she didn’t bring him back. There were no telephone calls. No letters. No clues to her whereabouts. Kennedy, an engineer living in Tustin, hunted fruitlessly for months, exhausting his savings on private investigators before they threw up their empty hands, speculating that Ann Kennedy may have even fled the country.

David--an only child--was gone for 14 years.

All the false trails and years of sleepless wondering ended last month when a renewed search--and a lucky break halfway across the country--led Orange County district attorney’s investigators to find Ann Kennedy in San Bernardino County, where authorities said she lived for years under an assumed name. With her was David, now 17 years old.

“I don’t know of any cases I’ve worked where we found the kid after this many years,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kelly MacEachern. “Any child abduction is horrendous, but especially a case like this, where 14 years went by and a child grows up without a father and the father was so deprived too.”

The reunion of father and son, bridging years of anguish and a youth’s entire childhood, has been bittersweet.

Ann Kennedy, who for years lived under the alias Emily Trevino, now sits in Orange County Jail facing felony child abduction charges. She says she regrets the years of lying. David, reeling from the recent events, has appealed to authorities not to prosecute his mother.

“She had her reasons and that’s all I need to know. She has raised me with all of her love and taken good care of me all of my life and that’s all that matters to me,” David wrote in a two-page letter to the court. “She has been a wonderful, caring mother to me and I love her very much. I don’t see how putting her in prison is going to change anything she has done.”

And Bill Kennedy, hoping to create a fatherly relationship with a stranger who is a teen-ager, now loses sleep worrying that David will not accept him because the search that found the boy also landed the boy’s mother in jail.

“I think we both were robbed,” Bill Kennedy, 48, said in his home in suburban San Diego, where he moved in 1984. “I don’t care if she goes to jail. I don’t care if she goes away scot-free. The only thing I care about is my relationship with (David).”

Kennedy’s second wife, who reopened the search for David after watching her husband suffer the blues through yet another holiday season, takes a harder line on the case.

“This woman needs to pay back society for what she’s done,” said Jessica Kennedy. “She robbed a childhood from this man.”

Ann Kennedy said she planned to tell David the truth about his father on his 18th birthday, in June. She said she had been writing up notes, hoping to explain to David that she fled to protect him from a poisonous environment bred by the couple’s continual skirmishing over custody. Ann Kennedy described the boy’s father as “controlling,” and said she feared in the end she would lose all access to the boy.

But deputies arrived before she could tell David her story.

“I’ve given myself a lifetime sentence,” Ann Kennedy said, sobbing during a jailhouse interview. “I took away what I can’t replace to my son. I took away a childhood growing up with his father. . . . But I did it because I loved him so much.”

Close friends describe Ann Kennedy, whom they know as Emily Trevino, as an excellent mother and generous neighbor who held a bookkeeper’s job for more than a decade without letting on to a secret past.

David, a B student and a basketball enthusiast, now lives alone at his mother’s home in Highland while finishing his senior year of high school, with onetime neighbor Doris Reyes looking in on him. Since his mother’s March 27 arrest, David has spent time visiting with his father and Jessica Kennedy, looking at his own baby pictures and learning the names of relatives who now include six stepbrothers and stepsisters.

“The poor kid’s in shock,” said Jessica Kennedy.

Bill Kennedy said David remembers slivers of the past before he was taken away: a Kermit the Frog doll, a Rams cap, feeding McDonald’s french fries to the birds with his father. “But he didn’t remember me, “ Bill Kennedy said.

David would have been too young to remember his parents’ custody struggles or the three times that Bill Kennedy said the boy’s mother spirited the child away--once for nearly a year--before and after their 1979 divorce. Custody seesawed back and forth for two years. But in October, 1980, court records show, a judge issued a temporary order putting the child back in Bill Kennedy’s hands after Ann Kennedy took the boy to Reno.

Four weeks later, back in his father’s custody, the boy disappeared with his mother for good.

Kennedy called Santa Ana police. But he said authorities lost valuable time in the first days by making him track down a certified copy of the custody order, and later did not aggressively investigate the matter. Sgt. Chuck Johnson, head of the department’s child-abduction unit, said police no longer have records of the 1980 case and could not say whether it was properly handled.

Bill Kennedy turned to private investigators, as he had during the prior disappearances, spending thousands of dollars in the first two years before the trail grew cold. He made trips to Nevada, where his ex-wife once lived. His sister, who worked in a store credit department, used the computer at work to hunt Ann Kennedy. His notebook swelled with names and telephone numbers.

Leads popped up, inflating hopes, but invariably sank. The roller-coaster search took a heavy emotional toll. Bill Kennedy said the despair drove him to the brink of suicide. Each Christmas season and David’s birthday on June 18, often falling close to Father’s Day, pained Kennedy so much that he would disappear for days to avoid friends and relatives.

He found comfort in friends and Catholic Church groups and he threw himself into his engineering work, turning in 90-hour workweeks.

“He went into severe depression and, as a way to deal with that, became a workaholic,” said Leo Boyd, a longtime friend and former business partner.

Kennedy transferred his job and moved to San Diego. At that point, he said, he gave up on the search “emotionally.” But friends say signs of David--favored toys, photographs of the boy--remained prominent around the house. Kennedy, who remarried four years ago, steeled himself against false hopes but never really gave up, friends said.

During the same period, a woman calling herself Emily Trevino moved with her son into a home in Highland, recalls then-neighbor Reyes. The two women became close friends. Both had ex-husbands, but Trevino revealed little about her past.

“She’s never been one to have a lot of friends,” Reyes said. “Emily’s always been a private person.”

Ann Kennedy said she told her son he had a father who once lived in Tustin and gave him the few photographs of Bill Kennedy that she had kept. But David asked few questions about his father--and she did not tell him much.

The two lived quietly for 11 years in the same small house on the edge of San Bernardino, raising a yard full of dogs, cats, rabbits and goats. Ann Kennedy held down a job as a bookkeeper for an electrical contracting firm and said she only rarely reminded herself that she was on the run.

Bill Kennedy had no idea they were living just 100 miles away. But early this year, his second wife, Jessica, made up her mind to solve the riddle that had so long haunted her husband.

“She said she was just tired of every Christmas being ruined because she knew there was this void,” said Valerie Sandoval, a friend of the couple in San Diego. “She once and for all wanted to find David.”

Jessica Kennedy hired a Seattle investigator who helps adopted grown-ups find their natural parents, and she persuaded Santa Ana police and the Orange County district attorney to reopen the case. A new warrant for Ann Kennedy’s arrest on child-abduction charges was issued Feb. 14.

The big break came in late March, when Ann Kennedy’s nephew was arrested in Chicago, said Bill Kennedy. The nephew, who already had caught the eye of investigators searching for Ann Kennedy, gave police a choice tidbit: he had an aunt with a 17-year-old son living in California. Her name was Emily Trevino.

Investigators went into high gear that day, checking computer lists of names and driver’s license photographs. One photograph was faxed to Bill Kennedy at work. He stared at it, stunned, and called home. “It’s her,” he said.

Even on the ride to meet sheriff’s deputies in Highland, Bill Kennedy refused to believe the search was nearing the end.

They joined deputies who pulled up in front of the house and watched as Ann Kennedy and a young man got into a patrol car for the ride to the station. There, a deputy told David that his father was waiting in a nearby room to meet him. David at first declined, but finally relented, Bill Kennedy said.

“He looked at me and got real emotional and said, ‘Father.’ I just broke down,” said Bill Kennedy. “It was an incredible moment. . . . He’s calling me father and hugging me.”

“I hope my son will understand what I’ve done,” said Ann Kennedy. “If there’s another mother out there considering doing what I’ve done, she should consider the life sentence that goes along with it.”