HOUSE SPRINGS, Missouri - Three years after an American man allegedly abducted his young daughter from Missouri and ultimately fled to New Zealand to avoid detection, the mother and child are reunited and rebuilding their relationship, the Associated Press (AP) is reporting.
Authorities say that Arlen Dean Hill II, who
was separated from his wife, took their 17-month-old child for a two-week visit on June 8, 2002, and never returned, the report says.
Hill, 33, was arrested last month in New Zealand and remains jailed here, as Taylor and her mother, Julie Coleman, 30, adjust to being together again in Missouri.
Authorities believe Hill fled first to Mexico and spent time in Singapore, Spain, Australia, the Philippines - and possibly other places - before arriving in New Zealand.
Coleman flew to Auckland, New Zealand, after she learned her now 4-year-old daughter had been found. Taylor had been placed temporarily with a foster family.
Social workers showed Taylor pictures of her mother. Her father had told the child her mother was dead, the AP report states.
"I told her that I was her mom and asked her if she had seen any pictures, and she said, 'Yes'," Coleman told the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
"Maybe 40 minutes later, I told her, 'I want you to come live with me,' and she said OK and that she wanted to go. It was just real quick."
Within hours, AP reports, the two were playing hide-and-seek in their hotel room. Coleman hugged her daughter for the first time in three years that night.
"She started calling me 'Mommy' right away and has ever since."
Taylor has since met her younger sister, Lauren, and learned she is actually 4 years old, not 3 as she had been told.
On July 12, Hill pleaded guilty to charges related to production and possession of false passports. Authorities said he used the alias Paul David Reynolds.
In the US, Hill faces a federal charge of international parental kidnapping and a state charge of felony child abduction.
