The Meanest Divorce
He kidnapped their kids. She bankrupted his family. He hid out for seven years. She had him put in jail. A story of love turned to hate.
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On the plane, Chick and Carolyn never spoke. In London, for some undetermined reason, Chick and the constable slipped through customs easily, whereas Carolyn was detained for six hours by British authorities and then ordered to file court papers that would allow her to take the boys back to the U.S. Securing the papers took a few days; by the time she and her investigator drove up the narrow mountain roads to the lodge, the Smiths were gone. When Carolyn asked the lodge owner if she could just look at the rooms where her two sons had been living, he refused. He had been told that she was an abusive mother who was trying to kidnap the boys, and he asked her to leave.
A desperate Carolyn had already decided that if she couldn’t see her sons, she could at least make the Smiths suffer as she had suffered. With the help of Randy Donato, a lawyer three years out of law school, she filed a civil lawsuit against the entire Smith family, claiming they had participated in a conspiracy to aid and finance Chuck’s kidnapping of the boys. But cavalierly, the family refused to tell Carolyn anything. When asked under oath about Chuck’s whereabouts, they would either claim to have no knowledge of his location or take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer.
At the trial, jurors were appalled by the Smiths’ attitude. Although Carolyn had asked for only $2 million in damages, they awarded her an unbelievable $53 million, reportedly the largest sum for damages ever given in such a case. Afterward, an unrepentant Chick walked up to Donato and told him he’d never see a dime. And he made good on his word: After losing his appeal in the civil case, Chick went into hiding, with Pat and Kim, en route to a new life in Georgia, mum as to his whereabouts. On the lam, Chick gave up his beloved Texas dealership; later, when Donato picked up his trail, he filed for personal bankruptcy.
But Carolyn wasn’t done fighting. She turned to a young Harris County district attorney, Edward Porter, who was so inspired by her story that he tacked a picture of Charles and Christopher next to his desk. Porter was able to persuade a grand jury to indict Pat on a charge of assisting Chuck’s child custody interference, yet even he knew it was a weak case. His best evidence was a rental car agreement that Pat had signed in England; Porter claimed the car was used to transport Chuck and the boys. A jury easily acquitted Pat—and there seemed to be nothing more anyone could do.
AS THE YEARS PASSED, CAROLYN began to doubt whether she would ever see her sons again. Those who knew her during that time often talk about the changes that came over her. There was something so remote about her. Refusing to trust anyone, she lost all her friends. She stopped going to her parents’ church. On the rare occasions when she would step outside her parents’ home, she would barely speak to the neighbors. She says whenever she would hear about a plane crash somewhere in the world, she would wonder if her sons had been on it. At grocery stores she would see a little blond-haired boy in the distance, and she would find herself starting after him, calling out the name of one of her sons. At night she would dream that she was in a house full of empty rooms. Suddenly, she would see Charles and Christopher—and then, just as suddenly, she’d turn around and they would be gone.
Then, in May 1990, Larry Boucher, an investigator for the Family Offenses section of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, decided it was time to clean out an old file cabinet. As one of two investigators in his section, Boucher has plenty to do; Family Offenses gets four thousand phone calls a month from citizens complaining of domestic disturbances from bigamy to wife beating. But he was intrigued by a thin yellow folder he found hidden far in the back of a file drawer. He sat down to read a brief summation of the case against Chuck Smith.
“What’s being done on this?” Boucher asked. Immediately he went to work, at first hitting nothing but dead ends. Chick and his family were so well hidden that Boucher could find little relevant information about them on national law enforcement computers. Working with two irrepressible amateur private eyes—Skip Nichols, who owned an insurance office, and Millard Land, who owned an automobile repossession company—he traced the names of every “Charles Smith” and “Christopher Smith” registered in schools in various states and Canadian provinces. He clandestinely tailed Chick for a week. In a last-gasp effort, Boucher made a phone call to NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries and begged a producer to listen to his story. On January 20, 1991, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on the missing boys and asked viewers who might have information to call the FBI. More than four hundred calls flooded in. When the show was rerun the following July, the FBI got more calls, including one from a Cuernavaca schoolteacher who gave the exact address where Chuck and the boys were residing.
The Smiths were living in an upper-class neighborhood, in a large five-bedroom home surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall—practically impossible to scale without a ladder. Around the swimming pool in the back yard were gloriously colored tropical flowers. The boys were attending Cuernavaca’s most prestigious private school, and Chuck was engaged to a pretty Mexican woman, Ana Traconi, whom the boys were already calling Mom. There was no question that Chuck had become a better father since he left Houston. Raising his children had become his passion: It was his way of showing the world that he was right. Ana says she fell in love with Chuck when she saw his gentle nature around children. Chuck would quit work in the middle of the afternoon—he owned a small gardening company and jointly operated a chemical-supply company with Ana—to pick up his boys from school, and on weekends he was always taking them on trips to places like Acapulco.
It seems impossible to believe that two boys, ages four and six, would not at least be interested in their own mother, even if she had been neglectful as a parent. But Chuck says that not once in their seven years on the road did the boys say they missed their mother. He says that when he asked them if they wanted to return to Houston to see her, the boys would firmly shake their heads no. “No, Daddy,” Chuck recalls Charles telling him. “I don’t want to go back. You told me we’d never go back. You promised.”
Although the Mexican government was unwilling to do anything about Chuck’s case—parental kidnapping is considered a domestic dispute, not an extraditable offense in Mexico—a persistent Larry Boucher sent letters pleading for assistance to a high State Department official and to George W. Bush, the president’s son, whose secretary notified the White House. It is not known what effect the letters might have had, but on January 13, 1992, Mexican officials devised a way to deport Chuck and the boys for immigration violations. When they arrived at Houston International Airport, at least a dozen armed officers were waiting for Chuck. “Dad,” Charles said, “would you look at this show?”
THE TRIAL, HELD IN MAY, had all the bathos of a B-movie—lawyers delivering horse-opera speeches, witnesses weeping on the stand, spectators rustling in their seats. “My God,” said Marilyn Skinner, the official court reporter, during one recess, “I feel like I’m transcribing a Danielle Steel novel.”
On opening day, Chick Smith, back from his self-imposed exile, came striding down the hallway of the Harris County courthouse in one of his trademark black suits, his lips slightly curled into a thin smile. A few onlookers gasped. Television lights fired up. Reporters rose to their feet. It was as if Howard Hughes had just arrived.
The courtroom gallery also strained for a look at Chuck. Sitting at the defense table with his head bowed, Chuck certainly looked like the grieving parent. Throughout his four-and-a-half-month stay in jail, he had written more than fifty letters to his sons—all of them dutifully photocopied by the defense in case they were needed as evidence—in which he adamantly declared his love. “Our love is stronger than all the lawyers in the world!!!” he wrote. “We are a family and we allways [sic] will be.” But like a Greek chorus, the reporters covering the trial endlessly speculated about his motives. Was he really the good father? Or did he take the kids out of spite?
There were just as many questions about Carolyn’s new relationship with Charles and Christopher. In pretrial interviews with the Houston media, Carolyn put a good spin on things, saying she and the boys were cordial, gradually getting to know one another. Christopher, she said, had almost hugged her. But others who had been over to the house said the boys were barely speaking to her. Privately, Carolyn had admitted that she was locking her bedroom door at night because Charles scared her and that he had once hit her with a belt, apparently angry that she was trying to put his father in prison.
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