Girl Still Missing After Being Taken By Mom Father Has No Leads On Where To Find Daughter Missing For Month

Mark Machacek has returned to work but his thoughts often stray to his 7-year-old daughter.

Michaela Machacek has been missing for a month, taken from a Coeur d’Alene park by her mother, the noncustodial parent, during a supervised visit.

After spending nearly a week trying to find her, mounting bills forced Machacek, 43, reluctantly back to his job building cages over fish hatcheries near Tacoma.

“One day it’s like therapy, the next day it’s like torture because I think I should be doing something,” Mark Machacek said by phone from his Western Washington home. “It’s like I’m torn between the two - doing a good job here and looking for my little girl.”

Kootenai County Prosecutor Bill Douglas said custodial interference cases are becoming increasingly common. He reviewed two other reports last week, looking for violations of the state’s custodial interference law.

“Police and prosecutors are not in the business of mediating those things,” Douglas said. “We’re in the business of enforcing them.”

Last year, 10 of the 16 children reported kidnapped in Kootenai County were taken by their noncustodial parent, according to the state Bureau of Criminal Identification.

Parents in nearly all of those cases were unhappy with the court-ordered custody arrangement, Douglas said.

Kootenai County prosecutors have filed felony custodial interference charges against Bethany M. Elsenbeck, the girl’s 38-year-old mother, who lived in Coeur d’Alene before going on the run. A warrant was issued for her arrest earlier this month.

Elsenbeck also is wanted on a $2,000 bench warrant for violating terms of her probation following a fraud conviction, according to court records.

So far, there has been no hint of where the two have gone.

“I feel for my daughter,” Mark Machacek said. “I know she’s confused. She loves her mother, but I think she knows she’s been kidnapped.”

Guardian ad litem Virginia Balser said the Machacek situation is the first case of parental kidnapping she has seen, but added parents regularly interfere with court-ordered visitation.

“Most of the time it’s self-centered and selfish,” said Balser, a former Kootenai County magistrate. “It’s ‘I want the kid, period.”’

Taking a child during a custody dispute in Idaho, if the child does not leave the state and is voluntarily returned unharmed, is a misdemeanor that carries a six-month jail sentence. Crossing the state line bumps the crime to a felony, punishable by five years in prison.

Parents who return the child within 24 hours after the expiration of an authorized visitation are not charged, according to the law.

“The statute is aimed at returning the child,” Douglas said.

That was not the case 10 years ago when custodial interference cases were treated as second-degree kidnappings, Douglas said.

While the punishment for second-degree kidnapping is more severe - up to 25 years in prison - the cases were difficult to prove, Douglas said. The law required prosecutors to show the children were taken against their will, he said.

That distinction matters little to Machacek. Taken against her will or not, Michaela was kidnapped, he said, although he doubts Elsenbeck, the woman he lived with for 10 years but never married, would ever intentionally hurt their daughter.

“She loves her daughter, there’s no doubt about it,” Machacek said. “She doesn’t know how to love right or to play by the rules.”

Michaela disappeared from City Park in Coeur d’Alene during a supervised visit with Elsenbeck on Sept. 20, two days after her birthday.

“We are basically without leads,” Machacek said. “She made a clean getaway. We don’t know how she left or where she went.”

Hannah Machacek, Michaela’s stepmother, has spent the past four weeks trying to stumble onto their trail. She plans her days before going to bed, scratching a to-do list for the following day, and keeps her husband appraised at work of the day’s progress.

More than half of Hannah Machacek’s time is spent on the phone talking with police, prosecutors and Elsenbeck’s relatives, trying to get Elsenbeck’s telephone and Internet records and making fliers to send to anyone she can think of who might have seen the girl and her mother.

She hustles between the library where she uses the Internet to search for ideas on finding missing children and the Hoodsport, Wash., hardware store, home to the town’s only fax machine.

Days often end in frustration and exhaustion, but a remembered conversation with the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl several months ago quickly renews her fight.

“She said, ‘Hannah if my mom kidnaps me, you have to promise me you will come look for me. And don’t give up. I don’t want to grow up without my dad,”’ Hannah Machacek said.

Another list is started.

“It’s kind of like being a fighter,” Hannah Machacek said. “You go into the ring and fight as hard as you can until you get tired. You take some pretty good licks some days, and it’s hard to pull up your boot strings and keep going.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: DESCRIPTION Michaela Rose Machacek, 7, has blond hair and blue eyes. She was last seen wearing a blue denim dress with black leggings. Bethany Marie Elsenbeck, 38, has blond hair and brown eyes, is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds.