I just got word that Zachary and Chelsea Smith have been found safe. They were 9 and 6 when they were abducted by their mother, Elizabeth Stratton, from California in 1997. Stratton had leveled a lot of abuse charges against the children’s father, all of which were found to be baseless, and then she took the children and joined the criminal organization Children of the Underground, which helps hide abducting mothers who claim their children were abused. Zachary is now 22 years old and Chelsea is 19.
They told the FBI they wanted nothing to do with their father. I’m not surprised. They must have been alienated against him a great deal over the years. Young children are so impressionable. Robert and Katherine Baskin, also family abduction victims (by their grandfather) were made to believe that their grandfather was their father. And Katherine was eight and a half at the time of the abduction. So yes, even at the relatively advanced age of nine, Zachary could have been made to remember and believe things that never happened and are not true.
You can see this heartbreaking YouTube video where the father reaches out to his children, pleading them to contact him. Perhaps they will eventually. Hayden, Chandler and Rebekah Clark, whom I wrote about earlier, at first didn’t want to contact their father but later they did reconcile.
The Charley Project Blog 