Father gets deal over kidnap of daughters

TWENTY YEARS after Stephen Fagan fled a messy custody battle with his former wife and took their two young daughters to a new life under another name in Florida, he is expected to plead guilty to kidnapping.

The plea, negotiated over several weeks between lawyers for Mr Fagan and public prosecutors in a Massachusetts court, will lower the curtain on a legal saga that first grabbed headlines in April last year.

Then, acting on a tip, the FBI knocked on the door of the Palm Beach mansion of a certain Dr William Martin. But the agents quickly discovered that the wealthy socialite with a Bentley in his front drive was in reality Mr Fagan.

The hearing yesterday, before a judge in the same Cambridge courthouse that was the scene in 1997 of the Louise Woodward au pair trial, marked the start of a process of emotional healing between a mother and the daughters she barely knows. The two girls, Rachel Martin, 23, and Lisa Martin, 21, were seeing their mother, Barbara Kurth, for the first time since 1979.

Mr Fagan, now 57, had told the girls their mother was killed in a car crash. Their new life began with an invented CV for himself. He claimed he had worked variously as a Harvard professor and security consultant to the CIA, and he married twice. The second marriage gave him the wherewithal to set up in his beachfront home.

Last night, the judge in the case, Peter Lauriat, was expected to accept the guilty plea and punish Mr Fagan with probation and a considerable fine. His trial had been set for 14 June, and a conviction could have sent him to prison for 10 years.

Mr Fagan has argued he was acting in the interest of his daughters. He had taken them for a weekend trip from Boston to Cape Cod in October 1979, then spirited them away to Florida. He insists Ms Kurth was an unfit mother who drank and neglected the girls.

This is the same story he has told since his cover was blown last spring. Ms Kurth, a research assistant at Virginia University, has claimed that she was suffering from a rare form of narcolepsy that caused her to black out. At the time, the couple had been divorced for a year and the courts awarded primary custody of the children to her.

Ms Kurth indicated before yesterday's hearing that she would not oppose the plea deal. But news of it did not please everyone.

"The plea bargain is almost as bizarre as the case itself," complained The Boston Globe in an editorial yesterday. "While many of the parties may be satisfied with the tepid compromise, justice is not."

The daughters have sided firmly with their father since he was found out and resolutely refuse to support their mother's case or to establish contact with her.