Who's Your Daddy? Mom's a Cross-Country Cross-Dressing Kidnapper

By Linda Orlando

Authorities in Roanoke Rapids, NC, were shocked Friday when they went to follow up on a tip in a missing children's case. The children had disappeared while in the custody of their father, Ernest Karnes, in the summer of 2003. After Dusty, now 6, and Erica, now 8, were taken from their father's home in Globe AZ, their mother, Shellie White, took them across the country and began to live as a man. She dressed and acted like a man, telling the children she was their father and allowing them to call her Daddy.

A bill collector tipped off investigators and led them Friday to the home where White, 30, was living with another woman, Holly Sirois. U.S. Marshals found the two children and arrested the two adults in the house, thinking they were a couple who had abducted the Karnes children. "They arrested a man and a woman, but as it turns out the man was impersonating a man who was actually the mother of the children," said Charles Reavis, a U.S. Marshal. "The children thought the lady who was representing herself as a man was actually their father and the children thought the lady in the house was actually the mother."

White certainly looks the part of a father, at 5'9" and 280 pounds, with short cropped hair, a slight mustache, and stubble. She says the facial hair is the result of a hormone disorder. White told authorities that she had considered a sex-change operation and decided against it because of the cost, but she denied that the idea was part of any scheme to avoid police.

White said she did not intentionally persuade her children into thinking she was their father. However, she admitted instructing her son to tell children at his school she was his father, but she told investigators that was only because the other kids teased him about her appearance. Her daughter told investigators that she and her brother referred to White as a man "because he told us to call him Daddy and dads are mostly 'he's.'"

Ernest Karnes and his new wife, Melissa, were happy to learn that the children had been located. Anxious to see his children for the first time in nearly three years, Karnes told reporters, "I just want to see them and hug them and love them, you know’have them again, you know." Karnes and his wife didn’t have the money to travel to North Carolina, but a local businessman in the area heard their story on the news and paid for their plane tickets to travel east and collect the children. The couple plans to travel back to Arizona this week after appearing in a Halifax County courtroom to establish custody. "It’s been a long haul, a real long haul," said Ernest. "I just want to take my babies back home. They need to be with their family."

But according to the children’s mother, they have been with family for the past two years, even though she's done a good job of confusing them as to what family members they lived with. "I didn’t steal my children and I didn’t take my children," White told reporters in an interview from jail on Monday. "When I left Arizona, I had custody." White said that she has been in the Roanoke Rapids area for about nine months, and that Karnes has known all along where the children were. "At any time, he could have come and said 'I want to see them.' I wasn’t hiding them like they said," White said. "I haven’t lived the life of someone on the run. I never knew I was on the run." White believes authorities had a hard time finding her because the warrants were drawn with her married name, Karnes, and she had reverted to going by her maiden name, White. She seems puzzled by all the fuss. "If he had honestly believed I had kidnapped the kids, then why did he wait so long to file a charge of kidnapping?"

White has been charged with custodial interference in the children’s disappearance, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, and she will be sent back to Arizona to face the charges. She could face both state and federal charges, and the woman she was living with may face charges as well. And the children will have to face the truth that Daddy is really Mom.