Is a federal law the answer?
Eighteen months ago, a California designer named Susan Downer received a chatty telephone call from her three children (ages eleven, six and four), who were visiting her divorced husband in Manhattan. It was the last time she ever heard from them. When Mrs. Downer drove to the Los Angeles airport to pick them up, they were not aboard their designated flight. Ex-Husband Seth Gerchberg, it later developed, had remarried, liquidated his assets, obtained a passport and disappeared with the children. Since then Mrs. Downer and her second husband have spent $40,000 on a futile investigative legal...