Ela Herawati shows a copy with an image of her daughter who went missing with her divorced husband more than 20 days ago. Photo credit: VnExpress/Q.T
Ela Herawati, 35, arrived in Ho Chi Minh City in the early morning hours of July 11th and found her ex-husband in poor health.
“I was shocked to see his condition,” she said.
Once stout and sprightly Karl Werner, 37, moved slowly and favored a cane.
The pair climbed into a taxi with their chubby-cheeked five-year old daughter that dropped them at the Oscar hotel on Nguyen Hue Street.
The strange city was dark and empty and the slender, raven-haired Indonesian remembers being glad to have the stout Mid-Westerner in tow.
Don’t trust these people, she recalled him saying: don’t play with your phone on the street, don’t leave it on the table.
The next morning, they visited Werner’s sparsely furnished apartment in District 1. She recalls Werner saying he’d put most of his things into storage and she felt bad for the man who said he planned to head to Hanoi to begin chemotherapy as soon as they left.
Herwati says she brought her daughter to visit her estranged father every morning and picked her up every night.
Herawati tried to reconcile with Werner, whom she hadn’t since their messy divorce in 2014.
On July 22 of that year, an Indonesian court issued a decision awarding Herawati full-custody of their child and ordered Werner to pay $500 a month in child support.
Herawati claims she received the favorable ruling after producing evidence that Werner had cheated on her.
Werner didn’t respond to text messages and a list of emailed questions.
Herawati and her attorney say he never paid a cent of child support.
“Creative, enthusiastic, dedicated”
Karl Werner began playing the piano at age five and took up the trumpet and violin in middle school, according to a cover letter he posted online in which he described himself as a “creative, enthusiastic and dedicated instrumental music teacher” with over a decade of experience under his belt.
Indeed, Werner had played violin in several regional orchestras before he took his first international teaching job at the North Jakarta International School in 2004.
He and Herawati married in 2008 and had their daughter in Turkey in 2010.
Then things soured.
In July of 2014, Werner called the FBI and claimed that his wife had abducted their daughter two months prior.
“If possible, I would like [Herawati] and my daughter stopped at any border crossing while attempting to use my daughter’s passport,” he wrote in an email. “I will then travel to collect my daughter […] My family and I are very distraught.”
A file photo shows Karl Werner and the daughter. Photo credit: VIetNamNet.
Werner’s parents didn’t respond to several messages left at their home in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.
At the time Werner was petitioning the FBI to help him, he had already moved to Ho Chi Minh City to take a job at the American International School in Nha Be District.
(The school did not respond to a phone call seeking comment, but has since taken Werner’s profile down from its website).
The FBI declined to open an investigation and requested a custody order, according to correspondence provided by Herawati’s lawyer. Herawati says she met with US Embassy officials in Jakarta and they decided Werner’s claims were without merit.
Moving on
After her divorce was settled, Herawati moved to Manila to start a new life with her boyfriend, a French father of two.
In the Philippines, she took a job doing marketing work for an Indonesian restaurant chain. Things quickly brightened. She’d even begun to reconnect with Werner on WhatsApp — a messaging application, she says.
Things went well for a few months.
She began to feel as though they might have a future raising their daughter like friends, “as a team,” she said.
Then things got rather dramatic.
When a Vietnamese woman contacted Herawati offering $9,000 for her daughter’s participation in a photo shoot, Herawati says she contacted Werner who denied knowing anything about it.
Soon after the incident, Werner announced he’d been diagnosed with bone cancer and feared for the worst.
“I want to make it right before I meet God,” he wrote in a screen-captured chat Herawati sent to a friend.
Eventually, Herawati agreed to bring their daughter to visit him in Ho Chi Minh City.
“If he dies and doesn’t get to see her,” she remembers thinking. “I’ll hate myself forever.”
A day at the beach
On their first day together, Herawati and Werner went to the US consulate to apply for their daughter’s US passport. Werner allegedly assured his ex-wife that he only wanted to obtain the document for the girl’s benefit.
At one point, Herawati says, Werner tried to get her to sign some sort of will, but she refused.
Herawati recalled spending most of her time in her hotel, picking up and dropping off her daughter. Occasionally, she’d tidy up Werner’s apartment — thinking him too ill to take care of it himself.
The mother’s future looked bright.
Soon, she and the girl would spend Ramadan with her family back in Indonesia. Herawati had $4,000 and 500 Euros in cash she planned to deposit in a savings account for the girl.
On July 15, Werner hired a car to Vung Tau, where he’d rented them rooms at the Lan Rung Resort. They arrived around 1p.m.
That afternoon, Werner handed Herawati a spa voucher. When she tried to return to her room, she found it locked.
When she finally had the hotel staff open it, she found it empty with the exception of her husband’s cane.
At that point, she began to suspect everything she had been told was a lie.
An abduction
Herawati says it took some time for her to explain to the staff that she had been robbed and her daughter had been taken without her consent.
CCTV cameras showed Werner leaving the resort with Herawati’s luggage in the company of a Vietnamese national.
Phuong’s attorney later discovered that the woman who assisted Werner in committing a parental abduction had checked in on a false passport and left with Herawati’s luggage. Werner accompanied her, paid for Herawati’s room in cash and left a note.
A still image from CCTV cameras shows Karl Werner leaving the Lan Rung Resort in Vung Tau with the daughter. Photo credit: CongAn Online
The driver that had brought them to the hotel would be back to pick up Herawati up at around 5 a.m. to take her to the airport, according to an affidavit prepared by her attorney.
Speaking no Vietnamese and having been robbed of everything but VND200,000 and her passport, Herawati called the police and engaged in a series of translated telephone exchanges with the driver who finally arrived at 3 a.m. with her luggage which she claims had been stripped of her telephone, cash and jewelry.
Werner would later deny that he or his accomplices had taken anything from his ex-wife.
Herawati claims the driver spent the next five hours circling Ho Chi Minh City before dumping her at the airport and telling her to leave the country.
Instead, she grabbed his cell phone and wrote down the last three numbers he’d dialed before being detained and by airport security.
The numbers she’d written down linked back to Werner and the mysterious Vietnamese woman assisting him.
A turtle’s pace
The response in Ho Chi Minh City to this apparent child abduction has proven nothing short of galling.
Herawati claims she used her last bank note—money Werner had given her to tip the spa staff–to take a taxi to the Indonesian Consulate.
A local attorney named Nguyen Thi Diem Phuong at the resort reached out to an Indonesian client who put her in touch with Herawati who she agreed to represent pro bono.
Seeking to settle the matter without involving the police, Phuong called the number her client had copied out of the driver’s phone.
Eventually she got in touch with a woman who identified as Nguyen Phuc Quynh–the wife of Werner’s best friend.
Quynh never answered the phone. Phuong says a review of police mugshots never matched her purported names. Friends who contacted Phuong through Facebook say the woman’s actual name is An.
After some negotiation “Quynh” agreed to call Werner to the coffee shop.
When he arrived, Phuong says she offered to draft a custody-sharing agreement on the condition that he call his ex-wife and let her know their daughter is safe.
Werner allegedly left the meeting saying he’d consider the offer.
Instead he called the attorney the following day and broke down sobbing.
According to a recording of their conversation, Werner blamed Herwati’s lifestyle and that of her boyfriend’s for his inability to return his daughter. He claimed his daughter had drawn “terrible” pictures of Herawati’s boyfriend with “fangs and things.”
“Honestly, I don’t really have anything in my life except [my daughter],” he said in a recorded telephone call with Phuong. “If I lose my job, if I go to jail if I lose my reputation, it’s OK. Because, honestly, I don’t really have anything.”
At the conclusion of the call, he promised to call Herwati and never did, according to Phuong.
21 days later
The Indonesian consulate has thrice petitioned the US Consulate to take action on behalf of Herawati’s daughter, an American citizen.
A source speaking on background at the US consulate confirmed that they’ve instructed the Vietnamese authorities to locate the child and petitioned the Department of External Relations to locate the child and confirm her well-being.
“I believe the Vietnamese authorities are doing so,” she said.
The US consulate has also checked with Vietnam’s Immigration Department to ensure Werner hasn’t left the country— apparently he hasn’t.
In the meantime, Werner’s cancer narrative appears to be unraveling.
Phuong later learned that Werner had only briefly rented his District 1 apartment a few days before Herawati’s arrival.
A supplied photo shows Ela Herawati and her daughter in a trip few months ago.
When she finally tracked Werner to an apartment in District 7, she enlisted her father and the district police to accompany her to knock on the door. No one answered, but Phuong received a texted photograph taken from outside the building and a message in broken English.
“I know you guys are trying to find my place but believe me you are pushing [the child] in dangerous[sic],” the message read. “But you will see hows[sic] things will go.”
The couple stopped paying their rent last month and the landlord has since given up on their return.
Phuong claims that Werner has threatened to release prurient pictures of Herawati, a crime punishable in Vietnam by as much as a year in prison.
Bizarrely, the driver involved has insisted that Herawati and Phuong come to Vung Tau to clear up his role in the abduction — they declined, fearing for their safety.
Meanwhile, the police there told Phuong they’re only now elevating the case to the municipal department.
Several concerned citizens have suggested Herawati and her attorney take a trip to Bac Lieu Province to speak to “Quynh”‘s parents.
But all of this seems like the sort of thing one might have to do to recover a beloved bicycle, not a five year-old American citizen.
Regardless of who is right in this case, it betrays a galling lack of institutional action.
Herawati hasn’t seen her daughter in three weeks and purports not to know whether she is dead or alive.
When asked what everyone should know about this case, she answered simply:
“They should be embarrassed.”
Alleged parental abduction betrays hole in Vietnamese dragnet Related image(s)
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