Man Who Took Daughters From Ex-Wife Still Measures Up to Palm Beach Standards

High-society hopefuls here are never judged by the size of their bank accounts. Everyone here has money.

Rather, “you observe,” explains prominent attorney Robert Montgomery. “Does he have the social graces? Is he a conversationalist? Is he charitable? Belong to other organizations? From there, you slowly and surely take their measure.”

By those criteria, William S. Martin measured up perfectly. He and his wife, Harriet Golding Martin, had recently bought a $2-million oceanfront villa with a bad paint job and restored it beautifully. His candy-apple red Ferrari Testarossa was often parked out front, next to the Bentley, behind the stone lions at the gate.

Martin joined Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Country Club, was named to the board of the Palm Beach Opera and discreetly dropped clues to an illustrious background that included a law degree from Harvard, a Supreme Court clerkship, hush-hush work for the CIA, founding a Washington think tank and a career in psychiatry. Or maybe it was psychology.

No matter.

It was all a lie.

Not only was Martin none of the above, but he wasn’t even William S. Martin.

By now, much of the nation knows that the man Palm Beach knew as Martin was arraigned in a Boston suburb April 21 on kidnapping charges. There he admitted to being Stephen Fagan, 56, who more than 18 years ago went to the home of his former wife, picked up his two daughters, then ages 5 and 2, for a weekend outing, and never brought them back.

His daughters, like his friends in Palm Beach, were shocked. But the story of Stephen Fagan, a.k.a. William Martin, is hardly ending with cries of betrayal.

Today, the girls are poised young women who profess only love for the father who raised them, even though one of the many lies he told was that their mother had died in a car crash. As yet they have expressed little interest in a reunion with their mother, Barbara Kurth, a research scientist in Virginia.

“I firmly believe what happened with my sister and I some 19 years ago happened for a good reason. My dad wanted us to be safe and to grow up happy, healthy and strong,” said Lisa Martin, now 21, who is to graduate this month from USC, which she entered four years ago on a swimming scholarship.

Her older sister, Rachael, 23, works in New York for a philanthropic group connected to the family of Fagan’s wealthy wife.

And as Fagan waits at his two-story beachfront home for a May 22 court date in Framingham, those who knew him here remember him as both a tuxedoed charmer and a devoted father. Society matron Lois Pope, the widow of National Enquirer founder Generoso Pope, said she was surprised and saddended by the news. “His life was a lie, perhaps,” she said. “But he’s a wonderful guy. He is.”

Fagan was arrested here last month after Massachusetts police received a tip from a local lawyer that the man known as Bill Martin was wanted for kidnapping.

Fagan told reporters that he took his daughters because they were endangered in the custody of Kurth, a woman he described as a neglectful alcoholic.

Kurth, 48, who has a doctorate in biology and works at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said that although she suffered from narcolepsy and grew dependent on amphetamines to stay awake, she was not a bad mother. “I have been living with the loss of my daughters for nearly 20 years,” Kurth said at a news conference. “And not a day has gone by in which I have not thought of whether or not they’re safe or happy.”

Now, although she knows where her daughters are, Kurth said “the incredible charade [Fagan] has been living has created a media spectacle that I fear has endangered any hopes of being reunited with my daughters.”

That media spectacle has not exactly convulsed Palm Beach, a stately seaside city of 10,000 that is so old-money that some still think of the Kennedys as arrivistes.

Scandal, after all, is not unheard of here. William Kennedy Smith was tried and acquitted of rape charges in 1991 after a sexual encounter on the lawn of the family estate with a woman he met while bar hopping with his uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Financier Ivan Boesky had a place here before he was busted in an insider-trading scam. And just last week, Atlanta police issued an arrest warrant for millionaire Palm Beach socialite James Sullivan, suspected of ordering a hit man to gun down his wife, Lita, on the doorstep of their villa in 1987. Sullivan, well remembered here for cruising around town in a bright red Rolls-Royce, is a fugitive.

To many here, it is what William Martin became, not what Stephen Fagan did, that fixes an impression.

While not a Harvard man, Stephen Fagan is a lawyer, a graduate of Suffolk University who needed six tries to pass the Massachusetts bar exam. In 1978, he worked as a part-time legal aide at Harvard, earning $6,500. According to Massachusetts authorities, that may be the last job he ever held.

The divorce that ended his five-year marriage to Kurth was bitter. In court papers he charged her with allowing the children to run around naked and hungry. She accused him of being involved in insurance fraud and art theft.

Fagan’s parents and a sister lived in Palm Beach County, and that’s where he headed when he decided to take the girls and flee.

Kurth said she searched for her ex-husband and the children until her money ran out. Then she remarried and went on with her life, becoming a specialist in cell biology.

Fagan, meanwhile, was busy fabricating a whole new life. He changed his name to William Martin, taking the identity of a Massachusetts boy who died at the age of 6, police said. He altered his passport, used three different Social Security numbers, and for almost 20 years reported no income, according to prosecutors.

At first he and the girls lived modestly outside West Palm Beach, where Rachael recalled her father picking her up at school in a 10-year-old Datsun and wearing “the same sole-less Birkenstocks.”

“The media has portrayed my father as everything from a gold-digging playboy to a thief,” she said. “That is simply not true.”

The family’s fortunes began to change, however, in 1986, when Fagan married Linda Vine, who had received a sizable wrongful-death settlement after her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, was killed in a 1983 car crash.

After the couple were wed--by notary public Sheryl Klein, Fagan’s sister--he and the girls moved into his new wife’s Palm Beach home, and he enrolled the girls in the prestigious Palm Beach Day School, which her two children attended. They moved twice during the nine years of their marriage, each time to a larger, more expensive home.

Soon after Fagan and Vine divorced in 1996, he found an even richer wife. Harriet Golding, who posted her husband’s bond with $250,000 in cash, heads a real estate company based in Melbourne, Fla. They married in 1996, and that same year paid $1.6 million for a 7,000-square-foot house, with 100 feet of private beach, that was financed through her family’s trust fund in Great Neck, N.Y.

Built in 1984, the Mediterranean-style mansion the couple bought on South Ocean Boulevard, not far from the Kennedy compound, was poorly constructed, had never been lived in and for years was referred to as the Pepto Bismol house for its hot-pink color. But Fagan and his new wife poured lots of money into the place, adding French doors of mahogany and stone lions imported from London, and changing the color to mustard.

Through months of renovation, contractor Tim Dart said he found the man he knew as Dr. Bill Martin to be “a model citizen, very honorable, extremely well-read, a man of integrity who loved his children and had a good relationship with his wife.”

Indeed, by all accounts, Fagan was a devoted family man who, like many residents of Palm Beach, was not burdened by a regular job that prevented him from waiting on his daughters after school or sitting through swimming practices. He had time, in other words, to work on his imaginary resume, and his upward climb into Palm Beach society.

As Martin, Fagan told some he met that he held degrees in philosophy from Columbia University or in psychology from Cornell. He said he had been a national security advisor to Presidents Nixon and Carter. Sometimes he described himself as a chemist, a former Harvard law professor, a stock market investor or a CIA operative, now retired.

He joined Trump’s Mar-A-Lago and worked out there daily on the treadmill. Influential people Fagan met often received notes penned on stationery of the nonexistent Institute for Policy Analysis, with an address that reads “London-Bonn-District of Columbia-Toyko.”

After a recent charity golf tournament at the Sherbrooke Golf and Country Club, club owner Mac Schwebel got such a note, signed by Martin. “He wrote a beautiful letter, saying what a wonderful time he had, and praising me,” said Schwebel. “I asked him later, ‘What company is this?’

“ ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I sold that.’ He looked like a hell of a nice guy.”

“He was very well-read,” said Montgomery, one of several attorneys hoping to share $2 billion in legal fees for work on Florida’s $11.3-billion settlement with Big Tobacco. “There was hardly any subject you could bring up on which he was not informed.”

Montgomery, chairman of the Palm Beach Opera board, said he and his wife stopped by the Martins’ home recently for a glass of wine before some social function when he noticed “there on the wall with his Harvard diploma were photos of his travels all over the world.

“I asked him, ‘Bill, how’d you get to New Guinea? Where’d you stay in Hawaii?’ And he knew all the answers. He dropped a lot of names. There was never anything suspicious.”

Fagan so charmed Montgomery, in fact, that he named the newcomer to the opera board and then assigned him a task on the land acquisition committee. “He came back with some answers,” said Montgomery. “He did a hell of a good job.”

No one was more impressed with Martin than Lois Pope.

The Martins went with her to Colorado last winter for a disabled skiing event sponsored by her foundation, she said, and, citing security concerns, Fagan insisted on accompanying her on a daily five-mile run up a little-traveled mountain road, even though he was no runner and she is an experienced marathoner.

“For three days he did that,” said Pope. “Four of his toenails fell off, and he was super-gluing another one on, and he never complained.

“Bill Martin is my friend; I didn’t know Stephen Fagan. We all embellish a bit, and he must have done it for damn good reasons. I think he’s a wonderful guy.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.