Newport Beach Mayor Has Complex Past

Mayor John Noyes took over this city’s top office last fall promising to usher in a new era of openness. He had run for City Council three years before on a law-and-order platform. His campaign literature cast him as a successful businessman with jewelry and furniture stores on exclusive Balboa Island who married his high school sweetheart and raised two happy daughters who still lived nearby.

But Noyes had spent nine years on the run in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, wanted on kidnapping charges in Idaho, where he had snatched his daughters, 6 and 7, from the legal custody of their mother, his first wife. Those charges were dismissed in 1986.

Noyes’ decision to take the girls was the beginning of a nearly a decade of a cat-and-mouse game with the girls’ mother.

According to interviews and court records, Noyes changed his entire life, using the last name North for at least three years and obtaining a second Social Security card, a driver’s license and a bank account under that name. Over a 2 1/2-year period, he took his family around the world, from the Pacific Northwest to Australia to Bombay to a ski resort in Switzerland.

All the while, the girls’ mother, Ann Heltsley, was at least one step behind. She sent out hundreds of fliers with pictures of the girls. She persuaded law enforcement officials in Idaho, where the girls were taken, to file criminal charges. She hired private investigators to help track down leads she dug up. She enlisted the aid of U.S. Sen. Frank Church.

Finally, she found the girls in 1985, just days short of the nine-year anniversary of their abduction. But she did not get them back.

In 1987, two years after prosecutors had declined to press criminal kidnapping charges against Noyes, a civil court judge in Washington found him liable for severing Heltsley’s relationship with her children. In two settlements, Heltsley received $665,000 from Noyes, his present wife, Sheila, his father and his stepmother, who were named in Heltsley’s lawsuit.

As a public official, Noyes has held fellow politicians accountable for their actions. He has criticized council colleagues for what he has viewed as unethical behavior, calling for a fellow council member’s resignation when he believed she abused her influence and once filing a police report against a former candidate for allegedly stealing a campaign sign.

“Somebody who runs for public office should have a little higher standard,” he told a local newspaper in 1996.

But he sees no contradiction between his public service and his past. Noyes, who never sought legal custody of his children, was asked about his history in two recent interviews. He declined to comment at length.

“I don’t see the relevance to what I’m doing today,” he said. “I’ve been through this once, I don’t want to go through it again.”

Noyes was elected to the largely ceremonial position of mayor by a vote of the Newport Beach City Council last fall, but Tuesday night he surprised even his closest colleagues by announcing that he would not seek reelection in November. He gave no reason, saying “it’s too complicated” to explain, but his decision came after The Times questioned him about his past.

Noyes and Heltsley were married in 1969 and divorced in 1974. Noyes drew up the divorce papers himself, giving Heltsley custody of the girls and agreeing that he would pay $250 a month in child support and get reasonable visitation rights.

But during the Christmas holiday in 1974, the two parents had a serious disagreement about how and when he would return the girls from a prearranged visit. By then, Heltsley was living in Colorado and had sent the girls, then 4 and 6, to see Noyes, who had remarried shortly after the divorce and lived in Southern California.

The dispute ended with Heltsley showing up with a policeman and a copy of her divorce decree at the Laguna Beach motel where Noyes was staying and, according to Noyes, threatening to keep the girls from him.

Noyes did not find his daughters for 18 months. During that time, he had started using the last name North and substituting Emery for his given middle name of Emerson. Asked why in a deposition, Noyes said: “Well, because I had intentions of finding and taking my children and basically keeping them from their mother.”

He and his new wife acquired Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses and bank accounts issued under the name North, and set up a home in Portland, Ore., according to their legal depositions taken when Heltsley sued them in 1987.

After Noyes took the girls, then 6 and 7, from their baby-sitter’s home in North Fork, Idaho, in 1976, a criminal complaint--felony kidnapping in the second degree--was sworn out against him. One month later, an identical complaint was filed against Sheila Noyes for aiding in the alleged kidnapping.

Heltsley appealed to authorities around the world, including school officials in Montreal, passport service offices nationwide, foreign consulates, the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and Idaho’s Sen. Church.

The FBI is prohibited from going after alleged parental abductors unless it can be proved that minors are in imminent danger. When Church tried to intervene, he was told that the federal government considered such cases domestic disputes.

Although parental abductions within the United States are not a federal crime, more uniform custody laws have since evolved, requiring states to honor preexisting custody agreements from other states. And in 1993 Congress passed the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act, making it a federal felony for a noncustodial parent to take a child and leave the country.

Noyes, who lived in Australia for more than two years, took the family on a six-month trip around the world with stops in India, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Germany and England, before coming back to the United States for a three-day trip to Disney World in Florida.

When asked earlier this month about his travels, Noyes said they had nothing to do with evading his ex-wife.

“It’s against the law to travel?” he asked.

Acting on a tip, Heltsley finally tracked down her children in July 1985, on Bainbridge Island in Washington, an exclusive community where Noyes and his family had been living for four years.

She walked into a candy store owned by her ex-husband to find her daughters, now 15 and 16, working behind the counter. But it wasn’t the reunion she had envisioned.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “But I’m your mother.”

Heltsley said the older girl stood and stared. The younger one burst into tears, saying that it couldn’t be true because her mother was dead.

Noyes and his daughters said in court depositions that he had never told them their mother was dead. He said in court, and in a brief interview with The Times, that he believed she couldn’t have been looking for him very hard, because he was, by that time, living under his real name.

By 1985, there was a new prosecutor in Idaho and he declined to pursue the outstanding kidnapping charges. Local law enforcement authorities in Bainbridge told Heltsley they considered it a civil matter--the girls were happy and healthy and doing well in school. They wanted to live with their father.

Determined that he should pay some price, Heltsley sued her ex-husband, filing the case in federal court in Washington.

She believed that the lawsuit was the only way to show her daughters how much she had missed them. The $665,000 judgment in Heltsley’s favor came down in August 1987. Not long afterward, Noyes relocated his family to Newport Beach.

Today, the two children are grown--now 31 and 30. They haven’t spoken to their mother in more than a decade.

In depositions, Noyes said he had no choice but to take the girls. He said trying to get custody through the legal system--which he never attempted--would have been futile and might have traumatized the girls.

Earlier this month, he issued this written statement:

“Twenty-five years ago I was involved in a difficult divorce that eventually led to a hopeless custody situation. At that time, I pursued an aggressive course of action in order to protect my children.

“Fifteen years ago in a civil lawsuit settlement, all those issues were resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

“If you have not been in a similar situation there is no way to explain. If you have, then no explanation is necessary. Today I am fortunate to enjoy the continuing love and respect of my wife and children.”