2 Separate Trails Led to Fugitive

For 14 years, Gisele Marie Johnson lived with a secret she kept hidden from her son: She was an international fugitive, wanted in Canada for kidnapping the boy during a custody fight with his father.

For both mother and son, the truth began to emerge a year ago, from completely different sources. Orey Goudreault, 17, typed his first name on an Internet search engine and eventually found his own picture -- as a 2-year-old -- on a website for missing children.

About the same time, Johnson filled out an application for permanent residency in the United States, creating a paper trail that would eventually lead authorities to her front door in Chatsworth.

Contacted by a Canadian missing-children’s agency after her application was discovered, Johnson began months of negotiations with the group, agonizing over whether she should turn herself in and risk separation from her son.

“She had a really big decision to make,” said Rhonda Morgan, executive director of the Missing Children Society of Canada, who was an intermediary between the mother, the father and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “She wanted our help in trying to get the charges dropped, and we told her we can’t do that.”

On Wednesday, a shackled and tearful Johnson, 45, appeared in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for an extradition hearing, a week after authorities arrested her on her way to work as a Los Angeles Unified School District clerk.

Orey’s fate also remains in question, because authorities have to decide whether the teenager whose life has been turned upside down will be returned to his father or will stay in a foster home under the supervision of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

“He’s very upset at this point in time, and we’ve heard he’s stopped talking to everybody right now, including his mom,” Morgan said.

The boy’s fateful Internet discovery was rooted in a bitter custody battle in an Alberta family court 15 years ago.

According to Canadian court documents filed in Los Angeles, father Rodney Steinmann, 43, said he and Johnson were never married; they dated for some time before breaking up in 1986. Steinmann told police that several months after that split, Johnson told him she was pregnant but planned to have an abortion.

“Two years after she left, she contacted him and told him that he had an 18-month-old son,” court documents said. “She threatened him that if he wished to see his son, he would have to pay child support under the table.”

Steinmann told police that he agreed and at one point paid her a lump sum of $5,000. He said that for a while, Johnson dated other men and that Orey lived full time with him.

Eventually, according to Steinmann, he and Johnson returned to dating each other, and the boy went to live with his mother again.

About September 1988, the mother reportedly told Steinmann she was pregnant with his second child. Steinmann demanded a court-verified paternity test.

Johnson threatened him, saying “she would tell the courts that he was a child molester, a male prostitute and a homosexual,” according to court documents.

Steinmann told police that he pursued the paternity test anyway and that Johnson filed a 54-page affidavit accusing him of child molestation, which he denied.

The documents don’t say what the paternity test found.

Ultimately, a court awarded Steinmann sole custody of Orey, effective June 1, 1989.

But Steinmann said that a week earlier he had dropped his son off at Johnson’s house for a visit and never saw them again.

A friend of Johnson’s in Canada disputes Steinmann’s account of the custody battle. Laurie Wallace, 46, of Canmore said her friend was faced with a painful dilemma that she thought could be solved only by fleeing the country.

Johnson “had a very brief relationship with the father when she became pregnant, and she did the dutiful thing and she informed him,” Wallace said Wednesday. “He wrote her a letter that stated, ‘Abort it. I don’t want anything to do with you or the child.’ ”

Johnson never thought that a court would take away custody, because she had been raising Orey on her own for 2 1/2 years, Wallace said.

During the court proceedings, the father’s attorney made much of the fact that she took prescription antidepressants, Wallace added.

“That was the one thing that was being used to really degrade her and her stability,” Wallace said. “She certainly wasn’t the least bit off balance.”

Wallace believes that the judge gave sole custody to the father because he thought that Orey would be better off in a wealthier household and with his paternal grandparents nearby for added stability.

“She was the most fabulous mother, the most fabulous friend,” Wallace said of Johnson.

According to U.S. marshals, Johnson appears to have fled from Canada to Mexico for four years with her son, and eventually ended up living in a Chatsworth apartment complex. Authorities said she had been living in California for five years, with Orey using the last name “Torres.”

Friends of Orey’s said his mother told him that his father had abandoned them. It was only after surfing the Web at his North Hills preparatory school that another version of his childhood emerged.

“He got a hit on our site, so he clicked on the site there and his picture came up with information that basically says missing since, missing from and a bio,” said Morgan, who founded the missing children organization. “[It] said he was abducted from Red Deer, Alberta, by his noncustodial mother on May 29, 1989.

“He called his teacher over, who in turn called another [missing children’s] agency in California to ask about it.” That agency called Morgan.

Morgan immediately contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Red Deer, which told her that officials had just found out about Johnson’s citizenship application.

“At the same time that Orey discovered himself on the Internet, the INS discovered her through application for permanent residency,” Morgan said.

She had hoped that Johnson would voluntarily help reunite Orey with his father.

But after months of discussions, the mother was still torn about what to do, she said.

“It just didn’t come together the way we hoped it would.”