A Virginia mother is wanted on abduction charges after authorities say she took her four children on vacation six months ago and never brought them home. The woman alleges she is saving the children from sex trafficking by their father and grandfather.
Along with four misdemeanor abduction charges, Melody Bannister, 34, of Stafford, is charged with felony violation of a court order and filing a false police report, a news release from the Stafford County Sheriff's Office said. A warrant was issued for her arrest Aug. 23, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Her children are identified as Genevieve Bannister, 13; Janelle Bannister, 12; Vivienne Bannister, 11; and Peter Bannister, 7.
Genevieve is described as 5 feet, 3 inches tall and 110 pounds with brown hair and hazel eyes, according to the NCMEC. Janelle is described as 5 feet, 1 inch tall and 115 pounds. Like her older sister, she has brown hair and hazel eyes.
Vivienne is listed as 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighing 95 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. Peter is described as 4 feet, 1 inch tall and 90 pounds. He also brown hair and blue eyes.
Bannister is described as 5 feet, 2 inches tall and 110 pounds. Like her two youngest children, she has brown hair and blue eyes.
The children and their mother were last known to be traveling in a blue-green 2002 Honda Odyssey with Virginia license plate number VBH7123, Stafford County Sheriff's Office Detective James Wright said during a segment about the case on "Live PD" on A&E.
Finding Bannister and the children has become more urgent after "recent developments in the investigation have led investigators to believe the children may now be in danger," the Sheriff's Office's statement said.
Wright, who is lead investigator on the case, said on “Live PD” that authorities believe the missing family might be in danger due to the “clandestine nature” of the religious organization they belong to.
"We're concerned about the welfare because they are unable to take care of themselves. They don't have any means to take care of them. Melody doesn't have means to take care of them," Wright told host Tom Morris Jr.
Sheriff's Office spokesman Amanda Vicinanzo said investigators believe Bannister has had help along the way from members of a religious group of which she is purportedly a member, according to the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg. The newspaper reported that the family's pets, a white Great Pyrenees dog and white ragdoll cat, were left at one of the stops Bannister has made since leaving Virginia.
"After months on the road, we had to say goodbye to our beloved pets: Our giant, bounding bundle of puppy-faced joy and our fluffy cat, whose soothing whirr often assuaged our soreness of heart," Bannister wrote on her blog. "It is a comfort to know they are in good, loving hands, since they can no longer be in ours."
"Live PD" pointed out that Bannister has written about her religion previously, describing it as a "cult." According to a blog she began in 2016 called Lady Adelaide's Realm, Bannister grew up in a Quiverfull household.
Followers of the Quiverfull movement believe that the men with the most children will earn the most favor from God. They shun all forms of contraception, believing that it is only God who "opens and closes the womb," follower Kelly Swanson told NPR in 2009.
The movement advocates stringent gender roles, and women are not allowed to question their husbands’ authority. They cannot work outside the home, wear pants or cut their hair.
According to some of Bannister's friends -- and a second blog the missing woman appears to have written since going on the run with her children -- the danger toward the children lies not with their mother, but in their father's home.
Bannister’s blog devoted to the allegations is subtitled “American Outlaws: The Plight of Child Sex Trafficking Victims Living Underground.”
Her most recent blog post on Lady Adelaide’s Realm, dated June 28, names six men, including her father-in-law, as her children’s alleged abusers. The men are not being named because they have not been charged with a crime.
‘Will justice triumph over lawlessness this Christmas?’
A Change.org petition begging for help from Virginia and Alabama officials claims that the children's father "conspired with (Bannister's) father-in-law to perpetuate some of the most horrifying sexual and physical abuse imaginable upon her children."
"When local law enforcement failed to protect these children, ordering them back to live with their abuser, Melody chose to live on the wrong side of the law. What else could a truly desperate mother do?" the petition reads.
Bannister has accused her husband of “deliver(ing) the children up for torture to the barn of his father.” She has accused her father-in-law of not only sexually abusing the children, but of offering them up for abuse by his friends.
"The children have spoken of being given strange substances in the barn that made the world swim before their eyes and caused the taunting faces of their abusers to converge together in a dizzying blur," Bannister wrote.
She wrote on the blog that her only crimes were "believing (her) children when they disclosed a lifetime of ongoing abuse" and "reporting (it) to the Stafford, Virginia, police."
Stafford County officials said that an investigation into the allegations brought to them by Bannister in June found no evidence of abuse against the children.
"A joint investigation with Stafford County law enforcement and Child Protective Services determined the allegations were unfounded," according to the statement from the Sheriff's Office. "Shortly after the conclusion of the investigation, Bannister left Virginia with the children on a planned vacation and never returned."
Bannister wrote on her blog that she and the children left town for a vacation June 14, the day after she reported the abuse, in part out of fear of reprisal from the accused. She said she called the Sheriff’s Office detective, Wright, a few days later to check up on the investigation.
"We spoke briefly once, when he told me that he had interviewed my husband and would soon interview my father-in-law," Bannister wrote. "After that, he stopped answering my phone calls."
She wrote that Wright and a CPS caseworker chalked the sex abuse claims up to children’s “vivid imaginations.” She described fleeing Virginia with the “rancid hot breath of child predators” on her back.
"We left home with barely a week's worth of summer clothes and are practically penniless, living off the kindness of friends who, one by one, have taken us under their wings," Bannister wrote.
She said her husband drained their joint bank account and cancelled her credit cards when she did not bring the children back to Virginia.
Read Bannister's entire, five-part blog here. Warning: It includes graphic details of alleged child sex abuse.
Stafford County's Juvenile, Domestic and Relations Court granted sole custody of the children to their father the following month, Stafford County authorities said. Their father, identified in court records as William Joseph Bannister, filed for divorce last month.
"(Melody) Bannister refused to return the children and subsequently petitioned the courts in Alabama requesting custody be issued to her there," a Sheriff's Office spokesperson said. "The courts in Alabama heard the case and also ordered Bannister to return her children to their father back in Virginia.
“Bannister absconded from the state of Alabama with her four children and has not been seen since.”
Bannister and the children were last seen Aug. 20 in Moulton, a small city in northwest Alabama.
"We set up residence in Alabama and made it our new home, where we obtained a protective order against the man formerly known as Daddy," Bannister wrote on her blog. "This was swiftly snatched away when the judge deferred to the Virginia ruling, which ordered me to return the children to him."
Bannister wrote that a family court hearing was held in Virginia without her presence Aug. 19, with a judge ruling in her husband's favor. She claimed she was never served with a summons for the hearing.
She and the children vanished from Alabama the next day.
US marshals issue alert
Aside from Alabama, potential sightings of the family have been reported in Wisconsin, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas. The U.S. Marshals Service and the NCMEC have been involved in the case over the past few months, the Sheriff's Office said.
The Marshals Service issued an alert this week seeking help from the public in finding Bannister and the missing children.
A friend of Bannister, Julie Lampkins, shared a story on Facebook about the missing family, saying it was "with a heavy heart" that she shared the link about the mother's alleged abduction of her children.
"We all have questions, but no answers," Lampkins wrote. "Help the authorities find her and her (four) kids."
Meanwhile, Bannister is appealing for help on the state and federal levels, according to the Change.org petition. It quoted additional portions of Bannister's blog.
"The mental health and credibility of my children and me have been assessed and verified by two of the most prestigious forensic psychiatrists in the country: Dr. Michael Stone and Dr. Carole Lieberman," Bannister wrote on her blog. "Naturally, the abusers did not take kindly to such a development and are seeking to have the reports stricken from the record. 'Eliminate all threats' seems to be their motto. Hence our position of living underground."
Followers on her blog wrote this week that they believed her and her children.
“Many people believe you and are praying and sharing the news and asking God to vindicate and protect. Praying that true justice will be served,” Carrie Brownell wrote.
A friend, identified as Lana, told Bannister she was praying for her, as well as sharing her story and contacting a list of law enforcement officers listed on the blog on Bannister’s behalf. Another friend named Rachael offered similar well wishes.
"Oh Melody…my heart is so broken for you and your sweet kids," the woman wrote. "I will be keeping you in my prayers and doing what I can. Locally."
A third friend named Petra Carden wrote that Bannister and her children have a place in her home “any time, day or night, no questions asked” if Bannister has to return to Virginia. Others who read her story offered her help in other locations throughout the country, including Alabama, where she and the children were last seen.
Many people who believe Bannister’s allegations of abuse urged caution in reporting the family’s whereabouts.
“If the news articles released regarding Melody Bannister’s children being in danger is all people know, they will report them when they see them and put them back in danger,” one woman wrote on Twitter.
A cult?
Bannister's Facebook profile lists her as manager of a website called Recovering Daughters. The description of the site on its corresponding Facebook page states it is about "healing from Vision Forum, authoritarianism and the Quiverfull Movement."
The Recovering Daughters website is no longer available because the domain has recently expired.
Vision Forum was a Texas-based ministry that promoted a patriarchal lifestyle, in which the husband rules the family, and home-schooling its children. The ministry was shut down by its board in 2013 after leader Doug Phillips admitted to an extramarital affair, the Huffington Post reported.
Phillips has been a friend of and influence on Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, whose TLC show "19 Kids and Counting" focused on their beliefs against birth control and that large families are a gift from God, the news site said.
The Duggars, who lost their show after their eldest son, Josh Duggar, was publicly accused of sexually molesting multiple young girls, including some of his sisters, have also been associated with the Quiverfull movement, though the Huffington Post reported in 2015 that the couple does not formally consider themselves members of the movement.
The Quiverfull movement gets its name from a Bible passage: "Children are a heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate."
Hännah Ettinger, a young woman raised in the movement who had left that world behind, told Cosmopolitan in 2015 that her first big break from the religion came when her father told her she "didn't have the spiritual discernment" to choose her own boyfriend, a man she met at her Christian college.
"Later, I got utterly fed up with the churches I'd grown up in because I kept finding out that they'd protected child abusers, rapists, and men who'd beaten their wives, all in the name of redemption stories, 'biblical' male headship and complementarian theology," Ettinger told the magazine.
Vyckie Garrison, another former Quiverfull member, told Vice in 2016 that, with no central leader, the movement isn't a cult, per se.
It's more of a mindset "in which each family becomes a cult unto itself with Daddy enshrined as the supreme patriarch," Vice reported.
Garrison founded a website called No Longer Quivering, which is designed to help other women in her situation escape the movement. In April 2015, the American Atheists Convention named her its 2014 Atheist of the Year.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Bannister and her children is asked to call the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office at 540-658-4400, the U.S. Marshals Service at 877-WANTED2 or the NCMEC at 800-THE-LOST.
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