$250,000 Bail Set for Father in Daughters’ Kidnapping

A mysterious Palm Beach man accused of kidnapping his two daughters almost 20 years ago and telling them their mother was dead was ordered held on $250,000 cash bail Tuesday as the daughters watched from the court gallery.

Stephen Fagan, 56, looking haggard behind a 3-day-old growth of beard, mouthed “hello” from the prisoner’s dock to Rachael, 23, and Lisa, 21, at the court in suburban Framingham where he was arraigned on kidnapping charges. Fagan entered no plea.

His ex-wife, Barbara Kurth, mother of the two women, told reporters after the arraignment: “I have been living with the loss of my daughters for nearly 20 years. Not a day has gone by that I have not thought about whether they were safe and happy. . . .

“My only desire has been to know how my daughters were doing, and whether or not, when the time was right, a private reunion might take place between us.”

The daughters sat in the courtroom next to Fagan’s current wife, his fourth, to hear the prosecutor describe their father as a fugitive from justice who should be held on $500,000 cash bail.

Family members scrambled to gather the bail money and expected to have Fagan freed by today.

During a bitter divorce while the couple lived in Massachusetts, Fagan accused Kurth of being an alcoholic who neglected the girls, then 5 and 2.

But Kurth, now a cellular biologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said she suffered from narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder.

The Massachusetts Probate and Family Court judge awarded custody to Kurth, but allowed Fagan a three-day custody visit in October 1979.

Fagan took the girls and never returned. He told them that their mother had died in a car accident.

Last week the daughters learned that Fagan, who created a new identity for himself as William Martin, had been arrested and their mother was alive.

Kurth, who has remarried, said she wants to have a relationship with the daughters she still calls Rachael and Wendy. Fagan changed Wendy’s name to Lisa.

Kurth indicated she was concerned that circumstances might prevent her from having a reunion with her daughters.

“Unfortunately, the crime committed by Stephen Fagan, coupled with the incredible charade he’s been living, has created a media spectacle that I fear has endangered the chances of being reunited with my daughters,” she said.

Prosecutors allege that Fagan, who had worked at Harvard’s Legal Services Bureau, took the pair to Florida, where he changed his name and created a lifestyle of luxury based apparently on charm and wealthy wives.

Prosecutor Lynn Rooney told the court that Fagan had three different Social Security numbers, at least one belonging to a dead child, but never showed income under any of them.

While serving on the Palm Beach Opera’s board of governors and volunteering with charitable organizations, Fagan apparently told acquaintances that he was a Harvard professor, CIA agent, chemist, lawyer and foreign affairs advisor under the Nixon and Carter administrations. There is no record Fagan held any of those positions.

After her children disappeared in 1979, Kurth told her attorney that her ex-husband was a scam artist who forged checks and stole identification to obtain valuable artworks and Oriental rugs.

One of his former sisters-in-law, June Slote, told the Boston Globe: “This is a man who married rich women.”