The boy known as “Richard” was not even 3 months old when the lawyers started fighting over who would raise the baby. When he was just a toddler learning to walk, the stack of legal papers was nearly as tall as he was.
On Monday, with enough lawyers’ paperwork to fill a storeroom, the legal fight came to an end. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the long-shot effort by his adoptive parents to regain custody of the boy, who is now 4.
Left unfinished is the business of restoring some semblance of normalcy to the lives of the child and two sets of parents who have bitterly fought for custody of the boy, whose real name is Danny.
The case prompted passage of a new state law calling for special custody hearings in cases where adoptions have been contested, and ensuring that similar cases get resolved more quickly. It drew attention to children’s rights, and advocates had hoped this case would compel the justices of the nation’s highest court to give children broader rights.
And the case sent a chill through many adoptees, adoptive parents and biological parents who watched closely, wondering if it would affect their family.
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The ruling ends any legal possibility that the child could be reunited with Jay and Kimberly Warburton, the Schaumburg couple who raised the boy until he was 4 years old.
The ruling also leaves the Warburtons without any legal authority to visit the child, whom they have not spoken to since April 30-the day they tearfully handed him over to his parents, Otakar and Daniela Kirchner.
Now, the adoptive parents must plead, through their lawyer, to at least be permitted to visit the child they had raised since he was 4 days old.
“Regardless of the court’s decision, our commitment to Danny is carved in stone, as well as in mind and spirit,” said a statement from the Warburtons, known in court as Jane and John Doe.
“We will do all within our power to ensure that Danny is well cared for, receives qualified mental health care and ensure that he can see his brother, who misses him every day, and the parents who raised and love him.”
The abrupt transfer of the child six weeks ago provided the most vivid and wrenching picture of the 4-year-old drama: A little blond boy with a face bright red from sobbing, his arms locked around the neck of Kimberly Warburton. Then, those arms being pried away as the child was taken by Kirchner, while the boy’s brother, 8-year-old Johnny, stood crying at the curb.
Now Danny has adjusted marvelously, never asking for the Warburtons, Otakar Kirchner has said in frequent interviews.
“The kid’s doing fine,” said Loren Heinemann, Kirchner’s lawyer. “We are quite pleased with his adjustment so far.”
Buoyed by repeated victories at the Illinois Supreme Court and now in the U.S. Supreme Court, Kirchner said he has no plans to allow Danny to visit his former family, contending they essentially kidnapped his son. Kirchner’s lawyer said a visit is conceivable but none is planned.
“I don’t care about the Does,” Kirchner told WBBM radio early Monday, before his attorney told him to stop talking to reporters. “The Does are the reason for these troubles, especially that Danny and I had to go through. Why should I be sorry for someone who stole my child?” asked Kirchner, who lives in southwest suburban Mokena.
Monday’s one-line decision from the U.S. Supreme Court not to order a new hearing was the predictable legal end to a case of love, jealousy, anger, betrayal-and heartache on all sides.
The case began when Otakar Kirchner says he learned that the child he thought had died was in fact alive and had been adopted by the Warburtons. What followed was a legal battle over which set of loving parents was entitled to “Richard.”
In all, the case went three times to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to get involved. In their most recent appeal, the Warburtons asked the justices to reverse the Illinois Supreme Court and recognize Danny’s right to a custody hearing to determine where it would be best for him to live.
At the core of this drama, which has creaked through the courts, however, is a man’s love of a woman-or, actually two women.
In January 1991, Kirchner left Chicago, and his job as a North Side restaurant manager, to visit with his ailing grandmother in Bratislava in the former Czechoslovakia.
Left behind was his fiance, Daniela Janikova, also a Slovakian emigre, who was then a beauty school student who was seven months’ pregnant with his child.
But there was also second woman in the picture, Maria Zuzicova, also a Slovakian who had come to live here. When Janikova heard that Maria had gone with Kirchner back to Bratislava, she was furious, angry, hurt, devastated.
“I hated him,” she said.
Despite long-distance telephone pleadings that it was only Janikova that he loved, Kirchner returned to the North Side apartment they shared to find she had left-leaving behind their never-used marriage license, torn to pieces on the dining room table.
Janikova hid out at the Greenhouse, a shelter for battered women a few miles away from their old apartment and a place where she felt certain Kirchner would not find her.
This became important in the legal battles that followed because the Warburtons contended that a critical reason they would not return infant Danny to the Kirchners early on was that Daniela had told them that Otakar abused her and they feared he would do the same to the boy.
“We had a moral obligation to protect him,” Kimberly Warburton said, although they had not raised the abuse issue in their later court battle to keep the child. The Warburtons subsequently said that Daniela also persuaded them that the father of her child was unworthy, that he was unfaithful and a heavy gambler.
Daniela gave up the baby willingly to the Warburtons when he was only 4 days old, steadfastly refusing to divulge the name of the father.
Daniela had her friends tell Kirchner that the child was born dead. He contended that he sifted through her garbage looking for used diapers in an effort to determine if she was lying and that it was only when Danny was 57 days old that he discovered the truth when Daniela finally disclosed it:
He had a son.
Soon, he hired attorney Heinemann and the battle was joined when Otakar filed suit in Circuit Court on June 6, 1991.
The following September, Daniela and Otakar married. They moved to a bigger apartment and set aside a bedroom filled with stuffed animals for their son. But the boy never slept a single night there.
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The Warburtons prevailed in court, finalizing the adoption by relying on an obscure-and never before legally tested-section of Illinois adoption law requiring a parent to express interest in the child within 30 days of birth.
After a two-day trial, Judge Eugene Wachowski said Daniela’s lying was “unconscionable behavior” and he approved the adoption, saying Otakar’s ignorance of the law was no excuse. By now, Danny was 14 months old.
Two years into the legal fight, and after an Illinois appeals court said the child should stay with the adoptive family, Daniela declared, “I would like to kill myself. It’s all my fault.”
Daniela’s self-loathing came after the Illinois Appellate Court said that moving the child from the home of the Warburtons, the only family he had ever known, would be “contrary to the best interest of the child.”
On the legal front, that would be the last good news for the Warburtons-who continued to raise Danny-as the case continued in the courts, with rulings for the Kirchners, for almost two more years.
As the case dragged on, Illinois GOP Gov. Jim Edgar and Democratic Sens. Paul Simon and Carol Moseley-Braun came out squarely behind the adoptive parents.
The case prompted the Illinois legislature to adopt an amendment to state adoption law, providing for a hearing on the “best interests” of the child in cases where adoptions are contested.
Although the state high court said the new law did not apply in this case, legal experts said it would help prevent-though not eliminate-similar lenghty adoption battles. Meanwhile, both the Kirchners and their lawyer and the Warburtons and their lawyers tried the case in the media, using interviews and television appearances to influence the outcome.
There are those who think that both sides along the way lost sight of the most important issue of all: What was really best for one little boy named Danny.