Newport Mayor’s Former Life on the Run

Newport Beach Mayor John E. Noyes took over the city’s top office last fall with a promise 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, one who married his high school sweetheart and raised two happy daughters, who still live nearby.

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he spent nine years on the run, 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.

It was the beginning of a nearly decade-long cat-and-mouse game with the girls’ mother, Ann Heltsley, whose search for her daughters didn’t cease until she tracked them down in an affluent island community off the coast of Washington state in 1985. The kidnapping charges were dismissed a year later.

According to interviews and court records, Noyes changed his entire life, using the last name North for at least three years, obtaining a second Social Security card, driver’s license and bank account issued 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 and then back again.

All the while, Heltsley was at least one step behind, in a frantic search that consumed her. She sent out hundreds of fliers bearing school pictures of the girls. She persuaded local law enforcement officials in Idaho, from 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 then-U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Idaho and pleaded unsuccessfully with the FBI to issue a fugitive warrant for her ex-husband.

In the end, 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. Finally, Heltsley received $665,000 in settlements with Noyes, his present wife, Sheila, as well as his father and his stepmother, who had also been named in the lawsuit.

Today, Heltsley’s and Noyes’ children are grown--now 31 and 30--and still live close to him and their stepmother in Newport Beach.

In depositions, he said he believed he had no choice but to take the girls. He said trying to get custody through the legal system 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.”

The girls haven’t spoken to their mother in more than a decade.

Mayor Defends His Actions

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 he accused of stealing a campaign sign.

“Somebody who runs for public office should have a little higher standards,” 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 in the nine years he had them, 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 said the issue was resolved when the civil case ended 12 years ago.

“I’ve paid that price. There was a lawsuit; it’s been settled,” he said. “Just because someone had a messy divorce, they shouldn’t be able to serve the community?”

Voluminous court documents and meticulous records kept by his ex-wife detail a case far beyond a routine divorce. Noyes’ abduction of his own girls--which he admitted in the civil litigation--is still vividly recalled by law enforcement officials in the tiny community of Salmon, Idaho.

“It was a traumatic thing for a father to take the children from their mother,” said Fred Snook, the prosecutor in the case 24 years ago. “She was very persistent and followed every lead she could.”

From the start, the relationship between Noyes and Heltsley, who were in their early 20s when they married, was rocky. By 1972, their 3-year-old marriage was essentially over. Their divorce was final by late summer 1974. Noyes drew up the papers himself, giving Heltsley custody of the girls, agreeing to pay $250 a month in child support and getting reasonable visitation rights.

The agreement, approved by a judge, didn’t stand for long. During the Christmas holiday that year, the two parents would have a falling out that proved a turning point--a serious conflict over 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 remarried shortly after the divorce in 1974 and lived in Southern California.

The fight ended with Heltsley showing up with a policeman and a copy of her divorce decree at the Laguna Beach motel where Noyes was staying. According to Noyes, when his ex-wife left with the girls, she told him, “You’ll never see those kids again, you son of a bitch.” Heltsley denied saying such a thing.

Eighteen months would pass before Noyes would find his daughters.

Changing His Name Before Abduction

It was July 23, 1976, at a mobile home in North Fork, Idaho, not far from where Heltsley was working as a rafting guide on the Salmon River, when Noyes found his daughters. In the early afternoon, he and his second wife, Sheila, pulled into the driveway prepared to take the girls, by now 6 and 7, from the care of the baby-sitter.

How Noyes located them is in dispute. But by the time he walked up to the baby-sitter’s front door, he had for some time been thinking about--and preparing for--what he would do when he found the girls.

A year before, 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 Sheila acquired Social Security numbers, drivers’ 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.

In those statements, he said he had even filed his taxes as John North in 1975 and 1976 and didn’t file taxes again until 1984. In court depositions, he said that for the years 1977 to 1980, he made too little money to require him filing taxes. Under further questioning in the deposition, Noyes said that he filed taxes owed from 1980 to 1983 in 1984.

Within minutes of arriving at the baby-sitter’s home that summer afternoon, Noyes and his wife had both girls inside the car. He and Sheila said in court depositions later that they were shocked by what they termed the girls’ poor health and believed they had been neglected. Heltsley said that claim was outrageous, that the girls were good students and well-cared-for. Friends and neighbors of Heltsley’s told the court she was an excellent mother.

The day after the abduction, the baby-sitter told a judge that a man who identified himself as the girls’ father had come to the house and taken them away. The baby-sitter said he waved a piece of paper at her, saying he had permanent custody of his daughters. She said she asked him to wait until their mother returned. But, she testified, he put the children in the car anyway.

“The little girl is crying. She does not want to go with her father and she is very upset, the other little girl is already out in the car, she has been taken there by the lady with him,” the baby-sitter testified. “They get into the car and I am still trying to talk to the man but he is not going to, I realize, listen to me.”

Just before Noyes pulled away, he handed her a slip of paper and told her Heltsley could contact him in Montana. Authorities said it was a phony address.

It would be nearly a decade before Heltsley would see her daughters again.

The Next Day, a Criminal Complaint

The night of the abduction, Heltsley came back from her job on the river and learned her ex-husband had taken their daughters. Fred Snook, then the Lemhi County, Idaho, prosecuting attorney, received a phone call from her at 4 a.m.

A criminal complaint, felony kidnapping in the second degree, was sworn out against Noyes later in the day. One month later, an identical complaint was filed against Sheila Noyes for allegedly aiding in the kidnapping.

“It wasn’t a family dispute. It was a criminal act at the time,” said Snook, who agreed to pay extradition costs to Idaho if Noyes could be foundunusual for a jurisdiction with limited resources.

Shirley Goins, executive director of the California branch of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said parental abductions are not uncommon, although the length of time Noyes kept the children from their mother was rare. Only in recent years, she said, have courts and law enforcement officials begun to take such cases more seriously.

In Heltsley’s frantic search, which began more than two decades ago, she appealed to authorities around the world, from school officials in Montreal to passport service offices nationwide to foreign consulates, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then-Sen. Church.

But the laws at the time made her cause difficult. The FBI was prohibited from going after parental abductors, unless it could be proved the minors were 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 still not a federal crime, more uniform custody laws have since evolved, requiring states to honor existing 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 snatch a child and leave the country.

But those changes to the law would come too late for Heltsley, whose intense search for the children brought her close to finding them several times.

The first promising lead came in late 1977 after a schoolteacher in Portland, Ore., read an article in the local newspaper about Heltsley’s plight. The woman had had the little girls in her Montessori school the year before and remembered them. The youngest had been in tears nearly every day, crying for her mother.

In a deposition taken in 1987, the teacher recalled her interaction with the little girl more than a decade earlier:

“She said, ‘I want my mommy, I want my mommy.’ And I said, ‘Where is your mommy?’ ‘She is dead, my daddy said.’ ”

But by the time the teacher called Heltsley in Idaho, Noyes, still using the last name North, was already gone.

Other leads fizzled. A solid tip that the family was in Australia fell through just two days before she was scheduled to fly there. Australian officials, who had helped her track the family to Brisbane, called to say they had left the country.

From Australia, Noyes had taken the family on a six-month trip around the world with stops in India, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Germany, and England, before they came back to the U.S. for a three-day trip to Disney World in Florida.

They then lived briefly in Southern California before moving back to Oregon and finally settling in Washington.

When asked earlier this month about his travels, Noyes denied they had anything to do with evading his ex-wife.

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

In her search for the girls, Heltsley wrote to passport offices across the country, saying that as the custodial parent, she did not grant permission for passports to be issued for her minor children.

Her persistence had bittersweet consequences. In 1980, the passport service rejected Noyes’ application for his daughters and forwarded a copy of it to Heltsley--complete with the photographs. The little girls smiling on her search fliers were now nearly preteens. She could barely recognize them.

Two years later, another letter from the passport agency came in the mail. This time, her ex-husband had applied at a U.S. consulate in Costa Rica and the request mistakenly was approved. An official forwarded a copy of the application and apologized for the slip-up.

The photocopy was so bad, their pictures looked like sketches. But Heltsley didn’t care.

“They were photographs I treasured, even though they had staples in them,” she said. “That was all I had--the passport photos.”

A 2nd Teacher’s Tip Leads to Daughters

In July 1985, the search came to an end through another tip, this time from Bainbridge, Wash. While cleaning out her desk, a schoolteacher had found one of Heltsley’s fliers, the ones first printed up weeks after the girls vanished in 1976 and sent to every school district on the West Coast and throughout Canada. The woman was sure they were the same students she had had in class the year before and phoned Heltsley.

By this time, Noyes and his family had lived in the exclusive island community for four years. Heltsley immediately made the 620-mile trip by car and took a 36-minute ferry. 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 one girl stood and stared. The youngest burst into tears, saying that it couldn’t be true because her mother was dead.

And then there was their father.

“After nine years of searching for my daughters, I walked in and John said, ‘Long time, no see, where ya been?’ ” Heltsley recalled. “I could’ve reached across the counter and strangled him.”

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 since he was, by that time, living under his real name.

A Criminal Matter Is Dropped to Civil

When Heltsley found her daughters and ex-husband in 1985, there was a new prosecutor in Idaho who declined to pursue the outstanding kidnapping charges. And Heltsley said local law enforcement authorities in Bainbridge told her they considered it a civil matter--the girls were happy and healthy and doing well in school. They wanted to live with their father.

In the coming months, Heltsley’s efforts to reestablish a connection with her daughters were rebuffed by the girls themselves. The girls’ visit to her Idaho home went badly. Afterward, they wouldn’t return calls and sent back an album of family pictures she had assembled.

In March 1986, the Idaho charges were formally dismissed by Snook, the onetime Idaho prosecutor who had once promised to extradite Noyes. Now a state magistrate judge, Snook said the age of the girls and the unwillingness of the prosecutor to extradite led to the dismissal.

By February 1987, Heltsley said, she had given up hope of having a relationship with her daughters, who seemingly wanted nothing to do with her.

Determined that he should pay some price, Heltsley sued her ex-husband, filing the case in the U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington.

She says she believed that the lawsuit--filed against Noyes, Sheila and his father and stepmother, whom the court found had misled Heltsley about Noyes’ whereabouts--was the only way to show her daughters how much she had missed them.

A court-ordered psychiatrist who examined both girls said they were fiercely protective of their father and had a close bond with him and their stepmother. The psychiatrist, Diane Stein, said the girls, by then 17 and 18, “idealized” their father and the comfortable lifestyle he had provided. Their few memories of living with their mother included her yelling and their impoverished living conditions, the girls said in depositions.

In interviews and her own depositions, Heltsley said the children were the center of her life and she provided for them as best she could as a single mother on welfare who was not getting regular court-ordered child support payments.

In their depositions and their interviews with Stein, her daughters recalled it differently.

The older daughter, then 18, told Stein: “It’s unfair that people like her can be around.” They will “lie, cheat, do anything for money or their own gratification.”

The daughter said she saw nothing wrong with her father’s taking them or his never seeking legal custody. She told Stein: “I’m nothing but grateful to my father for taking us. He is very special. I would do the same thing.”

Noyes Starts Again, in Newport Beach

The judgment in Heltsley’s favor came down in August 1987. Details of $665,000 in payments were worked out in 1988. As part of the order, Heltsley asked that $25,000 from her ex-husband be earmarked for a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization she had worked with over the years in an effort to change the laws on parental abductions. Noyes, his wife and his father paid about $620,000 of the sum. His stepmother settled separately for $45,000.

In the meantime, Noyes moved his family to Newport Beach in a move that took his Washington friends and business acquaintances by surprise.

But as he had done on Bainbridge Island, Noyes soon established himself in Newport Beach as a successful businessman, starting John Noyes Jewelry and Island Home Furnishings.

After being active in the business community, Noyes ran for city office in 1996 on an anti-crime platform. As mayor, he receives a monthly stipend of $1,245, a boost from the $878 he got while a council member. As mayor, he has the power to appoint committees and he presides over council meetings. He also has sought to play a role in major countywide issues, lobbying for the proposed airport at the former El Toro Marine base and against expansion of nearby John Wayne Airport.

He was selected to the largely ceremonial position of mayor by a vote of the Newport Beach City Council last fall, but on Tuesday night, he surprised even his closest colleagues by announcing that he would not seek reelection in November. He gave no reason for his decision, saying “it’s too complicated” to explain.

In his recent interview, Noyes said he believed his history has nothing to do with the position he holds today as mayor of Newport Beach. He said he didn’t want to bad-mouth his ex-wife, saying he wasn’t going to engage in “tit-for-tat.”

Heltsley, who has been a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer for 16 years, said she still sometimes dreams her daughters will change their minds and want her in their lives again. She knows where they are but has stopped trying to contact them.

“Everyone who knows the situation says that, ‘Someday, when they have children, they’ll find you, they’ll look you up,’ ” she said. “We always want to keep that line of hope open.”

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Noaki Schwartz is a staff writer for the Daily Pilot. Megan Garvey is a Times staff writer. Jenifer Ragland of the Daily Pilot contributed to this report.