Mandy's 18 and free to be herself.
Byline: SUSAN PALMER The Register-GuardDEXTER - Mandy Monet's calm was seamless. The blond, blue-eyed girl-woman pulled fresh loaves of french bread from the oven in her mother's kitchen, loaves that would be served at her 18th birthday party, the biggest celebration of her young life.
Last week, she chatted easily about the party, the midnight blue dress she'd wear, the food she'd serve, the friends who'd come, the music.
Oh, they'd definitely use the CDs her good friend Nick has burned for her. Nick's the greatest.
"You've got to hear this," Mandy said and moved across the living room to queue up the disc.
"Mandy," said a deep voice recorded over a hip-hop beat, "One jump ahead." It's his epigram for the life she's led.
Nick knows. That's the sweetest thing about her friendship with the affable guy she met in dance class more than a year ago.
Nicholson Davis knows all about Mandy.
She told him a year ago on a day when the calm had cracked. Dropped her mask in the Lane Community College cafeteria.
She wasn't who he thought she was.
Not Diana Jones, the name she had been using since coming to the area in 1999, but Amanda Otter, one-time fugitive in a shadowy underground, a network of people hiding children believed to have suffered abuse at the hands of a parent.
Amanda, the kid who with her mother, April Curtis, gave interviews for dozens of news accounts and appeared on TV shows such as "Geraldo," "Sally Jessy Raphael" and "Dateline NBC."
Amanda Otter: poster child for those who say the mangled court system doesn't do enough to protect kids.
It's a harsh story, a "he said, she said" nightmare with Mandy in the middle.
When she was 3 years old and living in San Bernardino, Calif., her divorced parents began battling over custody after her mother accused her father of sexually molesting Mandy.
Curtis said she made the accusations after Mandy described the abuse to her. She has fiercely maintained throughout the years that her ex-husband, Brian Otter, is responsible for unexplained injuries and a sexually transmitted disease that her daughter contracted when she was 4 years old.
Brian Otter has just as steadfastly denied the allegations. He was never arrested, indicted or charged, and said he underwent lie detector tests and DNA sampling to prove his innocence.
When the San Bernardino courts refused to curtail Otter's visits with his daughter, Curtis and a boyfriend took 4-year-old Mandy and disappeared, assisted by a network of people willing to take in strangers they believe have been wronged by the courts.
The three shuttled from home to home before settling in upstate New York, where they lived quietly under assumed names for four years.
But the family's fugitive status became an open secret, and in 1992 the FBI arrested Curtis, who was pregnant, and took the family back to California.
At 8 years old, Mandy went into foster care while her parents went back to court to fight over her.
A jury exonerated Curtis of kidnapping and custodial interference charges, and she retained custody of her daughter, but Otter also kept his visitation rights.
A year later, Curtis asked the court for permission to move her family to Oregon, where she had grown up. That triggered another custody battle and this time, Otter won.
In 1996, a judge gave him full custody, saying that Curtis had destroyed the relationship between father and daughter, and that they should be given a chance to rebuild the connection. The ruling excluded contact between Mandy and her mother for three months, then restricted them to visits every other weekend.
But the effort to bond with her father failed, and on Jan. 28, 1997, at 13, Mandy disappeared back into the shady world of the children's underground, accompanied this time by a photographer, who helped get her story published in the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch. Curtis denied that she orchestrated Mandy's departure.
For two years, the teen was on her own, staying with families in California, France, Georgia and Florida.
She went by various names: Elizabeth, Renee, Diana. She spent six months at a private school with one of the families, but for the most part she lived quietly, staying at home reading and studying on her own.
It was a lonely and difficult life. She was acutely aware that she relied on the good will of others.
The stress began to show when she was 16 and her weight fell to less than 100 pounds.
When her mother got a call from the family protecting Mandy with concerns for her health, Curtis brought her daughter home to Dexter.
The move risked Curtis' safety. She could have been charged with kidnapping and custodial interference, as she was the first time she and Mandy ran away.
"I don't care" about the risk, Curtis said. "I've given myself the job of her protector."
For the past two years, Mandy has been hiding in plain sight, living with her grandparents, mother and three siblings in a rambling work-in-progress of a house on several acres.
In her mother's care, she has gained weight and looks every bit the healthy teen. She has thrived in classes at LCC, she said, and looks forward to attending the University of Oregon next year and studying French.
She loves movie musicals and wishes she had a boyfriend. A yearlong stint with the Spotlight Theater in Pleasant Hill has given her a love of acting and dance, and if she thought she had a chance, she'd make a career of drama.
At a recent rehearsal, she ran dance steps and kidded around with the other youngsters, appearing relaxed and happy, as carefree as we all dream youth should be.
When talk turns to her past, the calm settles on her. Some memories of abuse linger, she said, even though it happened when she was 2 1/2 or 3 years old.
The uncertainty of her years as a fugitive weighed on her tremendously, she said. As a little girl, she had an inordinate fear of dying and couldn't sleep without a pink quilt with a blue cross tucked around her.
When they lived in New York, if her mother was late getting home, it would trigger anxious tears. She understood from early on the risk her mother took, the risk that others took to flout the law and help her.
"That's always been on me, all the time," she said.
Neither her father nor the California law has come looking for Curtis or Mandy since she came to Dexter, Curtis said.
They aren't hard to find. Mandy's grandparents have occasionally sheltered other families in the children's underground. They're listed on at least one Web site, Children of the Underground Watch, that keeps tabs on such groups for parents trying to track their missing children.
The last time Mandy talked to her father was three years ago at Christmas, she said.
She was 15 years old and living in Florida.
"I called him to see if he would possibly give up custody. I told him that if he wanted to make that choice that we might have a relationship that wasn't bad," Mandy said.
Otter, a hazardous materials specialist with the San Bernardino Fire Department, said he told Mandy at the time that they would have to work through the courts rather than privately to come to any agreement. He wasn't willing to relinquish custody.
He said he suspected that she might return to her mother as her 18th birthday approached but has chosen not to reach out to her because her mother continues to turn their daughter against him.
"She has been raised with this lie ever since she was 3 or 4," Otter said.
He would be happy to see her again, he said, "if she showed sincerely that she knew what the truth was and showed some repentance for what had been done."
In the meantime, he wishes her well.
"I hope her life goes a lot easier than it has," he said. "I hope she's able to form warm, lasting relationships."
Judging from the 200 or so family and friends gathered at her birthday bash at the Hilton on Thursday night, that's a hope fulfilled.
One friend came from Georgia. Two women who took in Mandy and her mother when she was 4 years old made the trip down from Tacoma, to see the little girl they'd sheltered all grown up.
Kay Conway and Mikael Caillier watched Mandy dancing with friends to the beat of "We Are Family," and smiled.
"I was astounded when I got the invitation," Conway said.
"I said, `There's no way I'm not coming.' '
Caillier said she made the pink quilt with the blue cross that Mandy had clung to for so many years.
"As soon as it started to get dark outside, she got hysterical. She was one frightened child. I made the quilt to protect her," Caillier said.
To see the girl so poised and grown up was enormously satisfying, they said.
For Mandy's friend Nick Davis, it's hard to understand how she came through it all with such sweetness and so much insight.
"She's very wise for someone who's 18 years old," he said.
Although at 21, he's three years older, he finds himself turning to her for advice.
She's got more sense than he does when it comes to relationships, he said. "She's definitely on the list of my smart friends."
He knows just how big a deal this birthday is for her.
"For me, when I turned 18, I just wanted to be able to vote. For her, it's, `I want to have a life.' '
Things Mandy can do now that she can reveal her identity:
Change her last name from Otter to Monet, for the French Impressionist painter.
Get her driver's license.
Get a job.
Be seen with her mother without putting her mother in danger.
The California court has no more authority over Mandy, but could still come after Curtis, the family's attorney, Alan Rosenfeld, said.
"I certainly hope they won't. An irresponsible prosecutor could bring Mandy in front of a grand jury against her will and force her to testify and tell who helped her. But that would be crazy because Mandy is the victim of all this," Rosenfeld said.
"The right thing to do is to do what's right for Mandy. That has been the problem all along, that no one wanted to do what's right for Mandy," he said.
CAPTION(S):
Her days as a fugitive finally over, an emotional Mandy Monet addresses the crowd of family and friends gathered at the Eugene Hilton on Thursday night to celebrate her 18th birthday. One friend came from as far away as Georgia.
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| Title Annotation: | Birthday means Dexter teen is no longer a fugitive; Courts |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) |
| Date: | Dec 21, 2001 |
| Words: | 1795 |
| Previous Article: | Wind chill thawing. |
| Next Article: | More join county's jobless ranks. |
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