BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

This Mother's Day, four of Ruth Smith's five children will send her some kind of greeting. A card, a plant, a call.

But Ruth will not hear from the fifth child, Debbie. And Ruth is glad.

No news is good news, Ruth has come to believe over the last 18 months. It means Debbie and her 10-year-old daughter are safe, have not been found. It means Debbie will not go to jail, and Jenny will not go to her father.

Their names have been changed at Ruth's request. She wants her story told.

In the fall of 1995, after several years of trying to convince police and judges that her former husband had sexually molested her daughter, Debbie packed a single suitcase, buckled Jenny into her car and left her parents' home in suburban Cincinnati, not to be heard from since.

"She had told me before, 'Mom, when I go away for a weekend, if I don't come back, don't call the police,' " Ruth says.

Debbie and Jenny had gone away other weekends, always returning to the Smiths' home, where they lived after legal fees had left Debbie nearly bankrupt.

This time, Ruth and her husband, Ed, had a feeling it was a long-term goodbye.

"I told Jenny that I loved her and I always would," Ruth says, her soft blue eyes filling with tears. "I told her to do what her mother tells her to do, and she'll be all right. And I told her God would always take care of her."

She told Debbie simply, "Just do what you think is right." It was the very thing that made Debbie leave, and that makes her mother proud.

Facing an awful dilemma

The courts never fully believed Jenny's and Debbie's testimony against Jenny's father. Family members and friends never doubted it. Ruth and Ed Smith, retired professionals and the ultimate in quiet, law-abiding citizens, believe their daughter had no choice but to flee.

A few years back, they would never believe their family would be caught in this, or any, legal battle. They lived by the law. They believed in it. Several of their children entered it as a profession. Today they believe their daughter and granddaughter were victimized twice. Once by Jenny's father, and again by a legal system that would not protect her from him.

Across the country, ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of such awful dilemmas. Some side with the mother, believing she was forced to desperate measures to protect her child. Others sympathize with the father, believing him deprived of his child by a vicious and calculated lie. Should she ever return, the world would surely look at Debbie in such a divided fashion.

But Ruth Smith, a gentle woman, has never doubted her daughter's or granddaughter's story. She waited in the hallway with Debbie during dozens of court appearances. She joined a support group to understand this strange legal issue.

And she tried to help her granddaughter through the anger and rage of being at the epicenter of a brutal court battle.

Now she must care for them in second-hand ways.

Hoping for a reunion

She looks around the pink and white bedroom that has stood empty since her granddaughter left. Animal figurines fill it like an ark. A live goldfish darts impatiently in a bowl. "I'm trying very hard to keep it alive for Jenny," she says. "She had two, but one already died."

Her daughter's small bedroom is sparse, except for files of legal work overflowing a chest. A black dog, so still it appears inanimate, is curled up in a corner. It is Debbie's dog, rescued from life as a research animal. "I think she still misses Debbie and Jenny," Ruth Smith says. The dog raises only its eyes toward her.

Ruth Smith understands that it is waiting. She is, too. And lighting candles in church on their birthdays, and praying. "First, that they're safe and not found," she says. "Then that something happens so they can come home whenever they want to."

She believes she will see them again. Not, perhaps, for eight years, until Jenny turns 18. Not, perhaps, until after the goldfish has died, and the candy pink bedroom has been repainted a subtler color.

But it is the only Mother's Day gift she wants this year, and one she must give herself. It is the simple, difficult, sustaining gift of hope. Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE