When a bitter ex vanished with her kids, she vowed to find them. 40 years later, this Petaluma woman's story still inspires [The Press Democrat]

Sep. 15—Editor's note: This is the first of two parts. Read the second part here.

Stephen Ford worked thousands of criminal cases in a Mississippi law enforcement career that spanned nearly half a century.

What were the chances he'd remember a case from 40 years ago, when three young children from Santa Rosa were kidnapped by their father, then subjected to a six-month odyssey through the Deep South?

Quite good, it turns out.

"A lot of my memories are faint," said Ford, now 72, during a recent phone interview. "But this one is hanging in there."

As he spoke, he held a laminated clipping from the Biloxi Sun Herald headlined: "Gulfport detective, Harrison deputy find California fugitive."

It recounts the arrest of Dennis D. McCoy, on Oct. 12, 1982, in north central Florida, where he'd fled as police in Mississippi closed in.

Working with information provided by Ford, then a detective with the Gulfport Police Department, Florida authorities arrested McCoy at a trailer park in Gainesville. With him were the three children he'd abducted the previous April, in violation of the court-ordered custody arrangement with his estranged wife, Nannietta Avants.

She was 16 when they married. He was 28, and already had two ex-wives. A gun collector and guard at San Quentin State Prison, he told her shortly after their wedding, "the only way you'll ever leave me is in a pine box."

Seven years into the marriage, she left him anyway. They'd moved five times. McCoy would disappear for days at a time without explanation. He had trouble holding down a job. When she told him she wanted out, he took it poorly.

The Avants children were 5, 4 and 2 years old when officers of the Alachua County Sheriff's Office found them in Florida.

Nan Avants, left, with her youngest daughter Bre Schafer, holds a folder containing some of the research she used while tracking down her ex-husband, who kidnapped their three children in 1982. They were found after a six-month search. Photo taken in Petaluma Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

The oldest, now living in Sonoma County, would not be interviewed for this story, and asked that her name and likeness not be used. Those six months on the run continue to haunt her in adulthood, she explained in an email. "Time does not heal all wounds."

The middle child, Brennan Avants, served 20 years in the Army, retiring in 2017 as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot. He now lives just north of San Antonio, Texas, and is a program coordinator for Operation Homefront, a nonprofit supporting military families. He recalls his older sister soothing him the day they were reunited with their mother.

"See?" she said, "I told you Mom wasn't dead."

BreAnna, the baby, goes by Bre. She lives in Petaluma, where she and her husband, Nicholas, run Schafer's ATA Martial Arts school. Nan recalls then 2-year-old Bre proudly informing her, on the flight from Florida, 40 years ago, "I have a new name!"

Anguish over the disappearance

In addition to assuming a new identity as Mike Bradford, McCoy had assigned each of the children new names. He'd forged Nan's signature on a document giving him permission to take the kids out of the country. Their mother, he told them, had died in a car accident.

Nan believes he intended to take their children to Belize — a friend of theirs had lived there — and start new lives with them.

While it chronicled "Mrs. Avant's anguish over the disappearance of her children," the Sun Herald gave her nowhere near enough credit for getting them back.

She was at a steep disadvantage in that quest. McCoy, in addition to his background as a prison guard, was a firearms instructor, former Air Force interrogator, survivalist and avid reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine. He was also, as Mark Twain described one of his characters, "an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar."

A San Jose Mercury News article includes a photo of Nan Avants, and her younger brother Tim Hussey, reuniting with her son, Brennan, in 1982. Photo taken in Petaluma Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

She was 23 with a high school education, little money and no idea where her husband had taken her children. But Nan Avants was resourceful, resilient, determined. She was a quick study, not above bending a law or two, if she thought it would help her find her children. Most of all, she was relentless.

In the end, she beat McCoy at his own game.

A walking red flag

They'd met late in her sophomore year at Santa Rosa High School. She had a friend who was dating a man 12 years older. He was buddies with McCoy, then 27. Dennis and Nan started dating.

"He seemed smitten with me," she recalls, "and the pursuit was on."

Nannietta Hussey was one of nine children of an alcoholic father and overwhelmed mother. All 11 of them lived in a duplex near the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. "We were very poor," recalls Nan, now 64, happily married and living in Petaluma. When one of her grandfathers moved in with the family — his Social Security check came in handy — he slept in a room with Nan and one of her sisters.

"I was young, I was in love, I thought the world was rosy."

Nan Avants

In the midst of that hardship, "this man shows up" — McCoy — "and he's buying me clothes and records, and bringing my Mom prime rib," she recalled. He soon proposed, and she accepted. "I was young, I was in love, I thought the world was rosy."

In the weeks before the wedding, Nan's mother came to see McCoy for what he was: a walking red flag. But her daughter would not be deterred. Nan looked forward to starting the next phase of her life — to no longer sharing a room with her sister and grandfather.

To wed so young, she needed permission from a judge and at least one parent. It was granted.

Printed announcement for Dennis Devana McCoy, 28 (his middle name is mispelled in the copy) and Nannietta Jo Ann Hussey, 16, on their Nov. 9, 1974 marriage. Nannietta had to get permission from a judge and at least one parent to marry at her age.

Early in the marriage, Nan was cleaning their small house on Dutton Avenue when she found a divorce decree. She knew McCoy had been married once before, and had a son from that union. But this document bore the name of a different woman, in Washington state.

When confronted, McCoy admitted that, while stationed there during his time in the Air Force in 1969, he'd briefly been married. Asked why he'd never mentioned it, he pointed out the marriage hadn't lasted very long.

"I didn't think it was that important," he said.

McCoy worked the graveyard shift at San Quentin, but at one point plunged into "a big funk, a great depression," Nan recalls. His condition was serious enough to force him to retire as a prison guard. McCoy earned his scuba license and became an instructor.

He opened a dive shop on Dutton Avenue, and ran that business for a year or so until he informed Nan, out of the blue, that they were moving to Bremerton, Wash. He'd found work at a dive shop up there.

One night, after McCoy closed up the shop in Bremerton, it was burgled. Suddenly, the couple had funds to rent a larger apartment, and buy custom furniture. Nan began to suspect her husband had stolen the money. "I'm sure he did," she says.

"I can't live like this"

Three moves later, they were back in Santa Rosa, but not for long. McCoy was working in the gun department at the Big R in Petaluma when an opportunity arose that he couldn't pass up, he told Nan. A guy was opening a gun shop in San Jose and needed help.

They moved again, this time to the South Bay. McCoy was gone for several days at a time — buying arms for the new store, he explained — while she was home with no car and three small children.

One day she told him how lonely and unhappy she was, how unavailable he'd been. Even when he was physically present, he wasn't present. "Something's going on with you," she said. "You're not here. I can't live like this. I don't think I want to do this anymore."

The wedding announcement that appeared in The Press Democrat for the Nov. 9, 1974 marriage of Dennis D. McCoy and Nannietta Jo Ann Hussey. She was 16. He was 28. (Courtesy of Nan Avants)

"Fine," she recalls him saying. "I'll take you to your mother's. But you're not taking my son."

"I have to get out of here. Because I don't know what he's going to do to me."

Nan Avants

Nan could take the girls back to Santa Rosa, McCoy told her, but he was keeping Brennan.

"In my head, I just said, 'I'll get Brennan later,'" Nan remembers. "I have to get out of here. Because I don't know what he's going to do to me."

Power and control

McCoy did not physically abuse her. He did, however, engage in behaviors experts include under the umbrella of intimate partner abuse. Among them: coercion and threats — including once pointing a gun at her; using isolation to control a partner, using male privilege to make all major decisions, treating a woman like a servant, and this one, from the Power and Control Wheel designed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project:

"Threatening to take the children away."

While it was Nan's idea to separate, McCoy initiated divorce proceedings, not two weeks later. It was a power and control move, she soon realized. "It meant I had to do everything down there (in the South Bay)," which involved repeated, multi-hour round-trips to the courthouse in San Jose.

They arranged a visitation schedule, "but it got nasty," she recalls.

During the exchange of children, "he degrades me, calls me names — slut, whore, whatever — but I grin and bear it so I can see my son."

Soon, McCoy introduced a new wrinkle to the kid swaps. "He starts bringing police with him."

"Why are the police here?" she asked, the first time it happened.

"To make sure you don't act up," he replied.

She'd never "acted up," Nan said. "No matter how nasty it got, I kept being the nice person. But this was his power trip, again."

After spending part of Easter weekend with them in April 1982, McCoy was required, by their visitation arrangement, to hand them over to their mother that Sunday.

He no-showed, but called Nan late that night. "We're in the state of Washington," he told her. "The car broke down."

"What are you doing in Washington," she asked, incredulous.

But he'd already hung up.

Abducted

She met with Richard Salsman, then District Attorney of Santa Clara County, and came away unimpressed and discouraged. "I would describe him as very male-oriented," she remembers. Salsman warned of the strong possibility that she might never find her children.

He did offer this morsel of consolation: If their father had taken them, "he must really love them."

"I remember looking at him and thinking, I'm in trouble here," she says.

In the trove of documents and records Nan has from that ordeal is a lined journal. Her frequent entries took the form of letters to her children.

"I thought about you a lot today and had quite a few down times," she wrote on May 22, 1982. "Some days I'm positive that I'll find you and then some days I'm not so sure.

"There have been days when I was ready to give up but Del always gave me strength to go on."

Del Avants was forklift mechanic who lived across the street from Nan and Dennis in Santa Rosa. He was a single father raising two daughters on his own. "I felt bad for Nan," he says.

McCoy, he remembers, was "always gone," leaving her with three children and no car. If she ever needed a vehicle, he told her to just let him know.

They became friends. A year or so after Nan split with McCoy, she and Del moved in together, infuriating her ex, who took to calling her "slut" and "whore" when they met to exchange the children. Stealing the kids, Del figures, was an extreme way for McCoy to assert control over her, even though he'd been replaced.

A starting point

Nan and Del had no money for a private investigator. But the first consultation with a PI was free, Nan learned. "I'd get my free consult, tell 'em what was going on, and sometimes they'd give me ideas."

She had McCoy's mail forwarded to her, opening his credit card statements and phone bills.

"That's right," says Nan without apology, "I committed federal fraud. I did not care."

A friend of hers worked at Farmers Insurance. McCoy had insured cars with Farmers in the past. If he bought a vehicle now, she figured he might use the company again.

"The computers were pretty basic back then," says Nan, "but you could tell if someone was in the system. I told Jenny to keep track, to see if he ever got insurance."

One day Jenny called her back: Dennis Devana McCoy had just purchased a car, and insurance, in Houston, Texas.

She learned, during a call to that Farmers office in Texas, that it was next door to a used car lot. On the chance that McCoy had bought the car there, she called the dealership and talked to a man named Beauford. Tight-lipped at first, he came around after she faxed him a newspaper account of her children's abduction.

Documents granting Dennis McCoy permission to take his three children with estranged wife, Nannietta Avants, out of the country. McCoy had forged the mother's signature. (Courtesy of Nan Avants)

Beauford remembered McCoy, who'd introduced himself as a photographer from Boise, Idaho. He was on assignment, he explained, and would be working along the Gulf Coast for a couple months. He'd purchased a yellow-beige 1980 Ford Fairmont station wagon, paying for it with a cashier's check.

Beauford recalled McCoy as very "strange acting."

Nan, meanwhile, decided to pay one private detective — a man who told her he could get people's phone records. She targeted one woman in particular — a mutual acquaintance of hers and McCoy's. Nan was all but certain that woman was now helping McCoy.

For $350, the investigator pulled that woman's phone records. As Nan pored over the list, a phone call from Biloxi, Miss., jumped out at her.

While in the Air Force, McCoy had served at Keesler Air Force Base — in Biloxi. "He called it the armpit of the world, and said he'd never live there. He went somewhere he thought I wouldn't look."

"Now I had a starting point."

The Biloxi phone number belonged to a furniture store in nearby Gulfport. On Sept. 21, McCoy called the dealership and spoke to Beauford, asking him to mail the title of the station wagon to 27 Pass Road in Gulfport — the address of Mill District Furniture. Beauford passed the information along.

"So we knew that was his mail-drop," says Nan. "But we didn't know he'd worked there for a short time."

Beauford phoned with more information a week later: McCoy was trying to sell the car in Gulfport.

Heartbreak, then hope

All this time, Nan had been phoning leads and information back to Salsman, the DA in Santa Clara County, who'd issued a warrant for McCoy's arrest. Now Salsman called the Gulfport Police Department.

Business card for Stephen Ford of the Gulfport, Mississippi, police dept. Ford was a detective on the kidnapping case of three young children from Santa Rosa taken by their father who fled with them to the deep South. Ford help arrest the fugitive father, Dennis McCoy.

Detective Steve Ford paid a call to Mill District Furniture, but McCoy wasn't there.

"The thing that really aggravated me," Ford recalls, four decades later, "was that as soon as I left someone from the store called and tipped him off. That's why he left town, I'm sure."

Upon learning that Gulfport police were moving on McCoy, Nan and Del got on the next flight to New Orleans. They rented a car and drove the 80 minutes to Gulfport. Ford's jaw dropped at the sight of Nan's "binder" — the portable cache of documents and research she'd compiled, relating to the case.

Taking care to stay out of law enforcement's way, Nan and Del slowly drove the streets of Gulfport, scanning for McCoy, his car, for three towheaded children. Nan checked with every preschool, elementary school and day care in the area, asking if her children were registered. She even showed pictures of her kids to random children.

"I'd say, 'Have you seen these kids?' and they'd say, 'No ma'am, we haven't,'" Nan remembers. "That's how I found out how polite people are in the south."

Ford, meanwhile, found an address. McCoy's name showed up on a utility bill. He and the kids had been living on Loveless Drive, just north of city limits. The apartment was empty when police arrived. McCoy had left in haste, it appeared.

Among the items left behind was a picture of the children, taken in a studio by a professional. Bre's gloomy expression in the photo caught her mom's eye.

"You were my happy, bubbly, giggly baby," Nan later wrote to her youngest daughter, "and your face was the saddest face I had ever seen. I knew you were not okay."

Nan also found a pair of letters McCoy had written but not sent. They gave glowing accounts of how the children were faring — even as they ignored the fact that he'd abducted them and was a fugitive from the law.

"Dear Gary, Teresa and family," begins one. "Hello from The McCoys! Sorry I haven't written sooner, but we have been really busy just making ends meet."

In these accounts — which reflect both McCoy's uncertain grasp of capitalization and his mystification when faced with a choice among "there," "their" and "they're" — the children are thriving, eating well ( "like horses"), saying grace before meals and bedtimes, bathing and brushing their teeth.

Those Rockwellian depictions were at odds, however, with both the sizable stash of pornographic magazines McCoy left behind, and with the husband and father Nan had come to know. "He didn't brush his own teeth, but now he's brushing theirs?"

"The kids are growing like weeds," McCoy informed a couple named Gary and Teresa. "It's hard to realize they were so small so short a time ago. I love them so much & they're so good."

After asking for their "thoughts and prayers," he added:

"P. S. Please burn or flush this letter after reading."

(Pete McDonnell/For The Press Democrat)

McCoy assured old friends Norm and Helga in another un-posted letter that the kids "are fine, growing and are very happy!"

"I explained to The Kids the best I could — That I love them, that I want only what is best for them & that they could either live with me or mommy — the choice was there's.

"I wish I could share with you The moment when they all told me they did not want to live with mommy or ever see her again & the tears of joy from all of them when I told them they did not have to go back anymore!"

Asked if they wish to see their mother, according to McCoy, "they say no." Indeed, the baby "shudders & says Mommy yuck!"

None of that was true, says Nan, who believes McCoy deliberately left that letter behind, to hurt her. Which it did, she allows. But mostly, says Nan, "it pissed me off."

For two nights, Nan and Del staked out the apartment, on the chance McCoy might return in the small hours, under cover of darkness. Finally, after nearly a week in Gulfport, they got on a plane for home, brokenhearted.

But the night is always darkest before the dawn. After speaking with a neighbor, Ford, the detective, learned that a local teenager named Janice had been babysitting the children. The neighbor had seen Janice removing items from the property.

Police located Janice, who showed them the items, which included an expensive Nikon underwater camera, and other video equipment that McCoy had earlier reported stolen. In addition to abducting his children, he had committed insurance fraud.

Not long after Nan and Del flew back to California, McCoy placed a call to Janice the babysitter. "He called back and gave her an address to ship that equipment to," Ford recalls.

Police now had an address in Florida. "And that worked out great," he said.

Coming Friday: An arrest and tearful reunion

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.

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