Happy Ending for Redondo Beach Kids After Kidnap Odyssey

In a dramatic cloak-and-dagger rescue, detectives from Redondo Beach tracked down two kidnaped children to a remote Central American island and negotiated with State Department officials and Belize’s elite police force to have them returned.

Vivian and Andrew Raffaele, ages 7 and 8, were back at Jefferson Elementary School in Redondo Beach last week after being taken by their father, Guy Francis Raffaele, on a two-month odyssey through Texas and Mexico, and eventually to the island of Ambergris Cay in Belize, police said.

The trek began when their father, who does not have legal custody of the children, disappeared with the youngsters after picking them up in Redondo Beach on Christmas Day for a daylong visitation.

After Redondo Beach police received a tip Feb. 10 linking the children to the tropical island, their mother, Mary Jo Mueller, traveled to Belize and worked with authorities to track down her ex-husband and recover the youngsters.

Mueller said she wore a baseball cap and sunglasses as a disguise while on Ambergris Cay--a sparsely populated place with dirt roads and houses built on stilts--and at one point saw her husband walk right past her on the main road of San Pedro, the island’s only village.

“It was right out of a movie,� said Mueller, who owns a Manhattan Beach jewelry shop. “It was a scary place, that island. I had never even been to another country.�

Raffaele, 52, who separated from his wife in 1987 and divorced in 1990, is being held in Miami by federal authorities pending extradition to California on federal kidnaping charges, said Redondo Beach Detective Paul Wrightsman. After the bitter divorce, Raffaele was granted limited visitation rights that were later reduced when a judge found he had violated their conditions, police said.

Investigators said Raffaele told other islanders that he had abducted the children from California. He believed he was safe because Belize does not have an extradition treaty with the United States, investigators said.

To get around formal extradition, the Belize government revoked his passport and ordered him deported from the country after Belize officials were contacted by the U.S. State Department. He was picked up without a struggle by the national police force, taken to the Belize mainland and turned over to FBI agents, who had a federal warrant for his arrest.

Even before police received the critical tip placing Raffaele on Ambergris Cay, investigators said they believed Raffaele and the children had left the United States. Before picking up his children on Christmas Day, he had sold his home, purchased a new van and remarked to friends that he might go to Canada or South America, police said.

“Every day was hard,� Mueller said. “It was day-by-day to get through. My kids have become my life. I don’t know if they had been gone any longer if I would have lasted.�

When the children returned to their Redondo Beach home Feb. 16, their unopened gifts were still waiting under the Christmas tree. Mueller said they did what any children would do: They ran to the tree and tore open their presents.

“It was like Christmas morning all over again,� she said.