Dad’s custody quest shows cracks in the system

Josef Cannon found his daughter. He’s still seeking justice.

Cannon, an actor from the L.A. area, has spent the last two years traveling between California and England in a battle to bring home his 11-year-old daughter, Shelby. In the midst of a custody dispute eight years ago, Cannon’s ex-wife took the girl and fled overseas.

Four years after Shelby’s disappearance, Cannon tracked her down, but he remains
locked in a custody fight and is out to reform an international law that’s been criticized by parents’ and children’s rights advocates alike.

“I’m just trying to bring her home,” he said. “I’ve made this my full-time job.”

Attorneys for Cannon's ex-wife, Catherine, did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

According to court documents, Catherine first disappeared with Shelby while on a trip to visit her parents in Navan, Ireland, in late 1998. Cannon says his split with his wife several years earlier was amicable. They shared custody of Shelby and under that agreement Cannon consented to her trip, he said. Shortly before Catherine and her daughter were to return, Cannon said, Catherine stopped calling.

“All the phone numbers changed and I couldn’t get through,” he said.

Cannon says rather than return home, Catherine filed for sole custody of Shelby in Ireland. Cannon sought help from British authorities, who, according to court papers, ordered Catherine and Shelby back to the U.S. in July 1999 under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. The treaty calls for custody disputes regarding children snatched by a parent abroad to be settled in their country of residence.

Gone without a trace
With a new custody hearing looming in California, Catherine again disappeared with Shelby, Cannon said. Court documents indicate that in an effort to elude authorities, Catherine assumed a fake name and gave Shelby the identity of a deceased Irish child.

During his search for Shelby, Cannon enlisted the help of the British press and fellow actors, including Navan-native and “James Bond” star Pierce Brosnan. After pictures of Cannon and Brosnan and old portraits of Shelby appeared in Irish tabloids in 2003, a British reader identified Shelby as a classmate of her son in Liverpool, according to local Irish reporter Nicola Tallant.

“The press in Ireland picked up the story on a Sunday,” Cannon said. “By Monday morning Shelby had been found.”

Cannon filed another Hague petition seeking his daughter’s return. During the proceedings, a British judge wrote that Catherine said she took Shelby because she could not afford a custody fight in the U.S.

Given the circumstances of Shelby’s abduction and U.S. custody orders in his favor, Cannon assumed British courts would approve his latest petition. But court proceedings dragged on for more than a year.

According to court documents, Shelby was glad to see her father, but told social workers she didn’t want to leave England. The court questioned Catherine’s influence on Shelby but eventually ruled that the girl had developed a tight social network and should remain in the country.

“I was floored,” said Cannon. “You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

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