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Other abduction cases have got bigger headlines. Just two weeks ago, Stephen Fagan of Palm Beach, Fla., was arrested after 18 1/2 years for kidnapping his two daughters and spiriting them away from their mother's home in Framingham, Mass. Fagan nearly pulled it off; a lone tip to police gave him away. But the case of Bipin and Ellen Shah is more typical, and it illustrates both the intense emotions and the murky underground networks that often play a role in parental abductions.
And so the battle lines are drawn, and Shah sits impatient and alone in the parlor of his wealth, where the light is yellow with the afterglow of his own meaningless success. The house, the money, the two Jaguars in the garage. What good is all that paper without the girls giggling and running around? His dining room has been turned into a war room stocked with WANTED posters, surveillance reports and the makings of a question he can't afford to answer objectively.
Can all his millions buy him what he wants most?
"I've always gotten what I've wanted," he says through narrowing eyes. It is a chilling warning to Ellen and to Faye, but he doesn't say it for them. "There are no failures in life. There are only delays."
Born in India and raised in Burma, Shah knew as a young boy that he was supposed to be somewhere else in the world. He would pass beggars in the shadowy streets of Rangoon on his way to the movies, where a glamorous, faraway place filled the screen every day. William Holden was up there, along with Gregory Peck and Kim Novak, golden with the light of the West.
"Our ancestors have made a terrible mistake," Shah told his parents. "We were born in the wrong place."
In 1958, at age 19, the son of diamond merchants packed up and headed west, with $93 and a scholarship in his pocket, following the star his family had missed. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College near Cleveland, Ohio, filled with the impatience of his own promise. He was working on a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania when one day he realized that he didn't have the money to get a pair of broken eyeglasses repaired. It was a revelation; there would never be money in philosophy, he reasoned, so he promptly quit school to take a job in electronics. Eight years later, he switched to banking and became a rising star, first at Philadelphia National Bank, then at its successor, CoreStates Financial. Colleagues describe him as hot tempered and strong willed, but they say his work was phenomenal. And so it was that although Shah is no Cary Grant, the boy who loved American movies would come to live the very life of society depicted in The Philadelphia Story.
He met Ellen Dever at Philadelphia National Bank when he was a $600,000-a-year executive vice president and she a $24,000-a-year computer programmer. He was 42, and she was 26. He was married, with a daughter, and Ellen was single, born in the Midwest and raised middle class near Valley Forge, Pa. They had an affair, and he soon moved out on his wife of 19 years.
"I didn't want to get married, and Ellen kept pestering me. Finally she said, 'Marry me or else,' and we broke up for a month. I missed her and went back," says Shah.