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.
“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.
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.
‘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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
✔@USMarshalsHQ
U.S. Marshals issue alert after woman, children never return from vacation
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@fox43
Virginia mom, 4 children sought after she abducted them amid claims of sex abuse
