International custody battle

COEUR d'ALENE - A 9-year-old girl living and going to school in Sagle since 2007 could be returned to Mexico City, should a federal judge rule so.

The girl, born in southern California, is a United States citizen.

Regardless, she is the centerpiece of an international custody battle between her Mexican mother, Lilian Beltran, 45, and British father, Patrick Stirzaker, 66, that could send the girl back to Mexico - a pending decision that remarkably found its way to North Idaho.

"This affects the lives of all the respective parties," said Federal Judge Edward J. Lodge at the conclusion of Wednesday's hearing on whether to return the child to Mexico. "We need to be as accurate as we can be."

The hearing was to determine whether Beltran had unlawfully removed the girl from Mexico under the International Child Abduction Act - or the Hague Convention - by taking the girl to Sagle, five miles south of Sandpoint, in the spring of 2007 unbeknownst to the girl's father - who lives in Mexico.

But a condition in the international convention gives judges the authority to overrule a return trip should the child face "grave risk" if forced to go.

Attorneys representing both parents argued each way on those alleged dangers.

Meanwhile, the parents' testimony Wednesday described a sensational custodial battle full of sexual battery accusations, extra-marital affairs, forged Mexican birth certificates, big spending for international travel and reported corruption in the Mexican courts.

Lodge weighed both arguments from the daylong testimony, and decided to review the typed court transcripts with both attorneys' notes in the next 20 days.

After that, he'll make a decision on the young girl's fate.

"I think it's obvious to you these people need to get divorced," attorney Gary Amendola, representing Stirzaker, told the judge. "I certainly don't want to get into a custody (dispute)."

Instead Amendola asked Lodge to focus on the international convention, to which both the United States and Mexico adhere.

That rule makes cooperating nations return abducted children to their residential countries.

Since the girl was living and attending a private English school in Mexico City and Stirzaker, still married to Beltran in the Mexican capitol, had full custodial rights, the girl must be returned as the convention states, Amendola said.

Custodial rights, any pending divorce agreements or additional charges should be then left for that country's courts - not the U.S. - to determine.

But Beltran described an abusive husband who was arrested in Mexico for sexually abusing his daughter by touching her breasts and coming up behind her and pulling down her pants - although Stirzaker was cleared of those charges shortly before Beltran brought her daughter to North Idaho last April.

She described Stirzaker as a wealthy insurance and investment businessman who was more interested in traveling to Europe and America to play golf than to care for his child.

But it was on a golf trip to Palm Springs, Calif., when the child was born in the U.S.

"My child, my pregnancy, my problem," Beltran testified that Stirzaker told her when the father wouldn't pay for the medical bills following her birth.

When Beltran was told the baby needed a Mexican passport to register the child in Mexico, Stirzaker pulled the strings to falsify those documents, Beltran attorney Todd Reed said.

Stirzaker, in court after traveling from Mexico, denied the allegations.

"(My daughter's) been turned against me, quite simply," he said, adding that his marriage to Beltran began to deteriorate after he discovered the former airline flight attendant began an affair with a Swiss pilot while she took a ski trip to Switzerland.

Stirzaker said he later discovered his wife and child were in Sagle by searching Web sites his wife had previously visited.

One matchmaking Web site, sugardaddyforme.com, eventually led Stirzaker to Sagle resident Don Helms' profile. Beltran moved in with Helms, and his profile reportedly stated: "I found my Lilian."

It also reportedly revealed illicit photos of Beltran and sexually explicit dialogues between her and some men.

Those documents would persuade a Mexican court to grant custody to Stirzaker should Lodge return the girl to Mexico where the rest of the saga could play out, said Stirzaker's Mexico-based attorney, Alejandro Perez Inclan.

"I don't want to show some of the photographs with me," Inclan told the court. "I respect this place."

Stirzaker's Web site searches also yielded the phone number for Helms, who owns an RV dealership around Sandpoint, which Stirzaker called and recognized Beltran's voice.

That led to Wednesday's hearing, where Beltran said she was aware Stirzaker was innocent of the abuse charges, but said she feared a country with a corrupt reputation wouldn't offer her a fair custody trial back in Mexico.

"The corruption is so bad, it's worldwide known," she said, adding that her daughter lives in fear of her father and has refused to see or speak to him even after he located them.

Now, Lodge will review the hours of testimony, which the judge said veered too far off topic at times into arguments about who is the better parent, before determining how "grave" the danger, if at all, would be for the girl if she returned to Mexico.

"You never know what the judge is going to decide," Helms said following the hearing. "All I know is one side of the story. I know Lilly's side of the story and I know it very, very well. I see the things in (the daughter) that Lilly was describing as true."

The daughter was not in the courtroom and did not testify due to her age, according to attorney Julie Doty, working with Amendola.

"That's one reason I really don't want her to go back to Mexico," Helms added. "(Stirzaker's) a very wealthy man. Everything down there is, Who has the gold, rules."