As a baby Montana was stolen by a couple desperate for a new child. Now she wants to meet her kidnappers
ANITA Ciancio has a “special bond” with daughter Montana Barbaro that stems from the terrible moment a decade ago when Montana, then a three-week-old baby, was abducted.
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ANITA Ciancio has a “special bond” with daughter Montana Barbaro.
That bond, she says, stems from the terrible moment a decade ago when a desperate couple assaulted her in a shopping centre carpark and abducted Montana, then a three-week-old baby.
Mark and Cheryl McEachran held baby Montana for two days, cutting her hair and claiming her as their own.
Then they dumped the helpless infant in a derelict house in North Melbourne.
Police plucked Montana from among the filth and food scraps after a jogger heard a baby crying.
“I feel Montana’s heart when she’s not with me,” Ms Cianco told the Herald Sun yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of the abduction.
“When she’s not with me I feel everything she feels.”
Montana was taken during their first outing together as mother and daughter.
Ms Ciancio, who now has an elder daughter aged 11 and two young sons aged seven months and nearly two, said Montana, now 10, was mature and very wary for her age.
“Montana knows a lot,” Ms Ciancio said.
“She keeps saying, ‘Mum, I want to meet those people (who abducted me) ... I have questions. I want to ask them, How could you take me away from my mummy?’
“Montana is beyond her years. She’s very aware and very in tune with people and people’s feelings.
“I’m very proud of her.”
Montana loves music, history and antiques, and writing and drawing.
Yesterday, she and her mum spent the day together at home — despite it being a school day.
“I keep her home that day every year,” Ms Ciancio said.
“I keep that day for just her and I.”
Ms Ciancio admitted to still living a reclusive lifestyle.
“I’m still nurturing and protecting my children,” she told the Herald Sun.
“My enjoyment is my kids. Everything I’ve got is here at home. All I ever wanted was to be a mother.”
Despite her partner, Joe Barbaro, having returned to the family after serving a jail term for drug offences, Ms Ciancio said she still experiences a mix of emotions — guilt, fear, anger and even pity for the McEachran couple and their children.
“I thought all the negative feelings would all go away when Joe came home but I’ve realised they’re never going to go,” Ms Ciancio said.
“I’m still living with a siege mentality.
“I just want to keep my kids close to me.
“The time not knowing what was happening to Montana (after she was abducted) was what traumatised me.
“For two days I didn’t know if she was dead or alive.”
Normal daily events trigger memories for Ms Ciancio.
“Every day I brush Montana’s hair and think about them cutting it off,” she said.
“Life will never be normal ... I tell Montana, ‘They didn’t take you to hurt you. They took you because they wanted a child.’
“That’s the only way I can justify the abduction.”
The year after the kidnapping, Mark and Cheryl McEachran, aged 44 and 49 respectively, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to jail terms.
A depressed mother of six, Cheryl McEachran had desperately wanted another baby.
Her children had grown up and either left home or were soon to leave the nest, and she wanted to add to her brood.
Her husband of nine years desperately wanted to help make his wife’s wish come true.
The couple, from the suburb of Timor in central Victoria, had tried unsuccessfully over the previous two years to either conceive or adopt.
Four months before they stole Montana, Cheryl McEachran had placed a baby rocker and pink baby suit on lay-by, telling people she was hoping to get a foster child.
On August 7, 2004, the McEachrans looked at kit homes at a display village in Deer Park before heading to the Brimbank Central Shopping Centre for groceries.
Ms Ciancio was at the shopping centre with her three-week-old baby, Montana.
It was about 5.30pm and the shopping centre was closing.
“I remember thinking it was a bit creepy as all the shops were closed and there weren’t many people about,” Ms Ciancio said in her police statement.
As Ms Ciancio walked her baby to their car in the underground carpark, she noticed a couple with a trolley full of grocery bags.
“There was just something about them that gave me a strange feeling,” Ms Ciancio later told police.
Mark and Cheryl McEachran had not noticed Ms Ciancio as much as they had the gorgeous little baby in the pink and white top.
Mark McEachran said to his wife: “You want a baby — well here’s your opportunity.”
Cheryl McEachran later told police: “The opportunity was there and the baby was there.”
Mark McEachran would tell detectives it was just a “spur of the moment” decision.
“(It was) pretty stupid but ...,” Mark would add.
Ms Ciancio had put Montana in the baby capsule in the back seat and was loading shopping into the car when Mark McEachran hit her and dragged her to the ground while spraying an aerosol can into her face.
Cheryl McEachran, meanwhile, grabbed the baby and she and her husband drove away with the infant in their car.
Ms Ciancio yelled: “Don’t take my baby!”
Injured and with blurry vision, Ms Ciancio noted what she could of the abductors’ numberplate and dialled 000.
To this day, Ms Ciancio wishes she had done more.
“It took me a long time to realise it (the abduction) wasn’t my fault,” Ms Ciancio told the Herald Sun this week, “but there will always be this guilt that I let Montana down.”
Police quickly arrived at the scene.
Joe Barbaro issued the first public plea regarding his missing daughter.
“Just please bring her back safely unharmed,” he said.
“Just leave her in a hospital ... a police station, anywhere where she can be safe. We just want her back.”
Ms Ciancio was shown CCTV footage from inside the shopping centre.
From that footage she identified the abductors.
That night, Mark and Cheryl McEachran bedded down with Montana in a Warragul caravan park.
They’d changed the baby’s clothes and unsuccessfully tried to feed her.
The next day Ms Ciancio, being comforted by her father Nick, made a tearful plea for her baby’s return.
“Please, please just take her somewhere safe and call the police. Just bring my baby back ... Please don’t hurt her.”
In a crude and rushed attempt to change the baby’s appearance at a truck stop between Pakenham and Melbourne, the McEachrans cut Montana’s hair.
“I thought she looked beautiful,” Cheryl McEachran later told police.
About an hour after cutting the baby’s hair, the McEachrans arrived at Mark’s sister’s house and announced Montana as their newborn baby daughter.
Needless to say, the relatives were shocked.
Cheryl McEachran and the baby stayed there that night.
The abduction led all the TV news bulletins.
“It started to cross my mind that the baby (with Cheryl) was the one on the TV,” Mark’s sister, Sue McEachran, said in a police statement.
CCTV images of the couple at the shopping centre were also shown on television.
Cheryl rang the Warragul police station and said she and her hubby had been publicly wronged by being linked to the abduction.
The local copper who took the call immediately informed the detectives investigating the abduction.
Cheryl McEachran rang her husband and ordered him to come and collect her and the baby.
They had to dump the child.
They drove back to Melbourne, dismissing a plan to leave the baby at a hospital for fear of being filmed by security cameras.
In North Melbourne, they randomly chose a derelict house in Erskine Street.
Mark McEachran dumped Montana — wearing nothing but a nappy and a jumpsuit — in the derelict and darkened dwelling.
It was a squatters’ residence that had recently been burned out.
Mark McEachran told his wife he left the baby wrapped in a blanket on an old mattress.
As Montana lay vulnerable amid rubbish and foodscraps in near-freezing temperatures, Ms Ciancio’s nightmare of not knowing the fate of her baby girl lingered on.
An early-morning jogger ran past the property and heard a baby crying.
Police entered the ramshackle building and found the infant in what they described as a “cesspool”.
A hypothermic Montana was taken to the Royal Children’s Hospital.
The McEachrans, meanwhile, had decided to return to the dilapidated house and found police swarming the place.
They drove back to Timor and contacted a solicitor, knowing full well they were going to have to come clean.
Police phoned Ms Cianco and Mr Barbaro to tell them a baby, most likely Montana, had been found and they were needed at the hospital to identify the infant.
Ms Ciancio sent Mr Barbaro in to identify the child with the hacked hair.
She says she could not have bared being told the baby was not Montana.
Mr Barbaro confirmed it was her.
“I just grabbed her and pulled her in close to me,” Ms Ciancio said in her police statement.
“I was overcome with emotion, mentally and physically. I was shaking with relief and happiness.”
On their way out of the hospital, Ms Ciancio thanked the awaiting media.
“It feels like your heart has been just put back in your body and ... you’re a mum once again,” she beamed.
Tactical response squad detectives arrested the McEachrans.
During an early court hearing, Cheryl McEachran had their barrister read a letter of apology.
“I am deeply sorry for the pain,” she had written.
“I have torn my own family apart and I don’t know why I did it.”
The couple later pleaded guilty to kidnapping, causing serious injury and reckless conduct.
Montana was baptised on the first anniversary of her abduction, as a way for Anita to dispel the horrible memories.
“I thought I could change the memory of that day and turn it into something different,” Anita told the Sunday Herald Sun.
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