US woman kidnapper released from jail

AFTER two decades on the run as a child kidnapper and almost two years in jails in the US and Australia, Dorothy Barnett is a free woman.
THE 54-year-old has been released from South Carolina's Charleston County Jail.
Barnett, a former US flight attendant, sparked a global hunt in 1994 when she fled South Carolina with her one-year-old daughter Savanna. Barnett had lost custody of Savanna following a bitter divorce battle with her husband Benjamin Harris Todd III. She bought a fake California birth certificate for Savanna, applied for a Texas driver licence under an alias and used that to get a US passport under the fake identity. Barnett renamed her daughter Samantha and flew to Malaysia and then to South Africa where she married local Juan Geldenhuys and took his surname. They moved to Botswana, New Zealand and eventually Australia because of Geldenhuys' job. Geldenhuys died and Savanna always thought he was her father until the FBI and Australian authorities raided the family home in Mountain Creek, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, in 2013 and arrested her mother. In a South Carolina court in February Barnett entered guilty pleas to international parental kidnapping and falsifying two passport applications and was sentenced to 21 months' jail. Barnett received credit for time-served in custody in Queensland before her extradition and in South Carolina. Todd never gave up on finding Savanna, now 21, and is hoping to rebuild a relationship with her.