An Arizona woman kidnapped from Michigan on Mother’s Day weekend 30 years ago during a divorce dispute continues to grapple with the fact that not only is her mother alive but the identity she thought she had isn’t real.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., has arranged for a psychologist to assist Genevieve Rachel Nielsen, who found out last week that her mother, Laura Gooder, is living in Michigan.
Genevieve, now 32 and living in the Phoenix area, was 2 when her father picked her up from his estranged wife’s Oakland County, Mich., home and never returned. He told the toddler that her mother had died in a car accident.
“She’s struggling,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said Sunday. “Everything she’s been told since she was a little girl was a lie. She’s, in essence, had a whole house of cards come down around her.”
Oakland County detectives, meanwhile, plan to meet with officials from the prosecutor’s office this week about their case against Genevieve’s father, Eric Douglas Nielsen.
Eric Nielsen, who police say lived in Florida, California and Arizona under a different name, has been in an Arizona prison for about seven years on a separate felonious-assault charge and is scheduled to be released in about two weeks.
Bouchard said an outstanding state kidnapping warrant issued in 1976 likely will be used to bring Nielsen back to Michigan. He also could face additional federal charges, said Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe.
Genevieve’s mother, Laura Gooder, who lives in Frederic, Mich., declined to comment Sunday or say whether she had spoken to her daughter yet.
