Mother Gets Jail Term for Abducting Son

A woman who snatched her son and lived underground for 14 years to keep the boy from his father pleaded guilty Monday on the eve of her child-abduction trial, nearly a year after her capture.

Ann Kennedy, 46, who now lives in San Bernardino County, was sentenced to nine months in Orange County Jail and placed on informal probation for three years in exchange for admitting that she abducted son David, then 3, from a baby sitter’s house in Santa Ana in 1980. David is now 18.

Kennedy, who was living under an alias when authorities found her and David last March, had faced a maximum term of three years in state prison. Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard W. Luesebrink also ordered her to pay the boy’s father restitution of $100 a month for the three years she is on probation.

The father, William J. Kennedy, said Monday that the sentence did little to convey that society takes child abduction seriously.

“I’m disappointed,” said William Kennedy, a 49-year-old San Diego engineer. “Most people would think 9 1/2 months for a 14-year crime is a slap on the wrist. I don’t think it’s a slap on the wrist, but I don’t think it’s going to deter anyone.”

Ann Kennedy said little as she left the courtroom with a friend. “David’s real devastated,” she said.

Defense attorney Jeffrey D. Kent said Ann Kennedy decided to plead guilty--and avoid a high-profile trial--as a way to keep the media spotlight off herself and her son.

“We still feel it’s not the kind of case where she should spend any time in custody,” Kent said.

Using the alias Emily Trevino, Kennedy lived the quiet life of mother and bookkeeper for more than a decade in the rural community of Highland--just 100 miles from the suburban San Diego home of the boy’s father. The couple divorced in 1979, and the father later was awarded custody. Even close friends had no clue about Ann Kennedy’s past until she was arrested and charged with felony child abduction.

*

William Kennedy said he searched in vain for several years, at times desperate to the point of considering suicide, before he gave up the hunt more than a decade ago. The discovery last year filled William Kennedy with hope of establishing a relationship with his long-missing son. Instead, he said, tensions over the pending criminal proceedings kept that from happening. After a series of monthly get-togethers, father and son have not visited since Christmas.

“All I really wanted was a relationship with my son. And that’s all he wanted,” William Kennedy said. “I don’t know if we’re going to have a relationship. I hope we do.”

The prosecutor and experts on child abduction cases said it is almost unheard of for a such a case to be solved after so many years. News of Ann Kennedy’s arrest set off a flurry of media coverage, and William Kennedy and his wife, Jessica, have been approached with proposals for television movies and books about the case. The Court TV network had applied to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial, which was set to begin Monday until Kennedy’s surprise plea.

“It does rank up there with the very unusual,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kelly MacEachern said. “Usually when [missing children] are gone that long, we don’t ever find them.”

Some experts said judges rarely hand out stiff sentences in cases where children have been abducted by a parent. Most often, offenders do not go to jail at all, said Don Wood, president of Child Watch, a group based in Orlando, Fla., that helps locate missing children.

“A lot of people think of parent abduction as not that serious. . . . To me it’s a form of child abuse. The child is really a hostage,” Wood said. “I’m surprised she even got jail time.”

County probation officials said Ann Kennedy was a sound mother and had not been in any other trouble. A Probation Department report prepared for sentencing said David did not want to see his mother behind bars. The report noted the emotional toll on the father and said no sentence could ever repair the damage.

“There is no way we can get them back,” William Kennedy said of his son’s childhood years.

*

Ann Kennedy has said she planned to tell David about his father on his 18th birthday, contending that she took the boy to get him away from the couple’s custody fights.

“I took away a childhood growing up with his father. . . . But I did it because I loved [David] so much,” Ann Kennedy said in a jail interview with The Times after her arrest.

David Kennedy was 3 years old and in the care of his father when his mother picked him up on Nov. 12, 1980. The couple had battled over care of the child, with custody rights seesawing back and forth until sole responsibility was given to William Kennedy about a month before the abduction.

William Kennedy, who lived in Tustin at the time, looked to police, then spent thousands of dollars on private investigators to chase leads that ultimately fizzled. He agonized during holidays and on David’s birthday, June 18, often falling near Father’s Day. William Kennedy said he gave up, “emotionally,” when he moved to San Diego in 1984.

His wife, Jessica, pushed to reopen the long-dormant case early last year.

A breakthrough came weeks later when Ann Kennedy’s nephew, arrested in Chicago, told authorities she was living with David in California under the name Trevino. A computer check of names and driver’s license photographs confirmed her true identity as Ann Kennedy.

The ordeal has left everyone bruised. Ann Kennedy will begin a jail term next month and her son, who has fought against incarceration, must watch her go. William Kennedy, full of hope a year ago, has yet to make a fatherly link with his found son.

“You find them, and everything’s euphoric,” William Kennedy said. “Then there’s the battle after.”