“I was scared the whole time”: Fugitive mum breaks her silence about being on the run for kidnapping her own daughter
For twenty years, Lee Barnett was on the run from the FBI, criss-crossing the world, always looking over her shoulder. But finally the authorities caught up with her. Extradited back to America, she went to jail. Her crime, kidnapping her own daughter.
Now, for the first time since being released from prison, Lee is able to tell the full story of her life as a fugitive … a secret hidden from even her own children.
Lee was involved in a fierce custody battle with her estranged husband, Harris Todd, back in the late 1990s. In a stunning decision, the courts finally granted Todd, not Lee Barnet, custody of their daughter, Samantha.
But Lee couldn’t accept the judge’s ruling. She kidnapped baby Samantha and fled the US.
“My heart was pounding, I was scared to death,” she says of the night she fled her hometown of Charlestown, South Carolina.
Lee used forged documents to get a passport under a different name and changed her daughter’s name from Savanna to Samantha.
From the US, Lee and Samantha fled to Asia, Africa, and New Zealand, before putting down roots on the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland.
“I never ever stopped being scared the whole the whole time,” she said.
Lee put her past behind her. She met and married Juan Geldenhuys. Together they raised Samantha and had a son of their own, Reece.
Despite living in constant fear, Lee tried to give her children the most normal of childhoods.
“Sam got what I always wanted, she had a dad who loved her and a mother who loved her and a pretty normal life,” Lee said.
“And a little brother that was a surprise.”
Lee held her secret tight but told close friends, a couple.
However, after a falling out, they turned on her and sent Harris Todd an email tipping him off about his former wife’s whereabouts.
“He sent me a photo of my ex-wife and my daughter,” Harris Todd said.
“She had a big smile in this one picture and I recognised my smile in her smile.”
On November 5, 2013, Harris contacted the authorities and, shortly after, the F.B.I and Australian Federal Police turned up on Lee’s doorstep.
“I had been waiting for them for so many years that I think the worst thing that I could have ever done was give a bad example to my kids,” she said.
Lee had just minutes to speak to Samantha and reveal a lifetime of secrets.
“I think there was no one else that could really help that much, so I just stepped up my game and I did whatever I could to support her,” Sam said.
After twenty years on the run, Lee’s secret, double life had been exposed.
“I don’t believe I committed a crime by any means, my constitutional rights were taken from me,” she said.
“A judge is meant to be fair and there’s no way the judge was fair.”
Lee is now on parole but desperately wants to return to Australia to be with her children. However, the Federal Government is unlikely to allow her to come back into the country because of her criminal conviction.
“I’d love to go back to Australia,” she said.
