they searched the internet and discovered lee s secret. they re real detectives. i think so. reporter: they figured it out. they tracked you down and then, essentially knowing the wrath that the would face if my ex-wife eve found out that they did it they went ahead anyway. they told me, we feel like you have a right to know your daughter. reporter: harris gave the couple s information to fb agent ed klimas. and now tha they knew lee s alias, the fbi was finally able to figure out how she had left the u. s. without being detected. she ha set her abduction plan i motion by getting a fake birth certificate about two months before taking savanna. dorothy lee barnett goes to become a fictitious person named alexandria maria canton. she went to texas to obtain texas driver s license, then used the information from that to obtain a united state passport. what we learned wa
After losing a hotly contested custody battle, a woman disappears with her 11-month-old daughter; the child s father searches four continents for almost two.
figured he could wait a bi more. i think some people, though, may say that a rea father would have gotten o that plane the moment he found out about where his daughter was. if i d showed up in australia without any backup and run into my ex-wife or m daughter, i would have had n legal backing at that point. they could have caused, you know, an altercation. he could have been in trouble with th local authorities. alexandri and samantha geldenhuys coul have fled. and then we d b back to square one reporter: a year passed then almost two. that was to much, even for a patient man like harris. he bought his plane tickets and told the fbi he was going no matter what. you weren t going to wait an more? you were done? i wasn t going to wait. and it just so happened that suddenly, the paperwork went from the bottom of the stack t the top. reporter: harris determination may hav forced law enforcement s hand. on november 4th, 2013, two day before he landed in australia,
reporter: when australian police and the fbi showed up a lee s doorstep, she didn t see surprised. but her 20-year-old daughter was about to receiv the shock of her life. i couldn t fathom what wa going on. it happened so fast. but, you know, it keep replaying in my mind reporter: savanna, or samantha, as she knew herself, was away at college when her boyfriend brad handed her th phone and said her mom was o the line. she talked about tha moment of truth with australia s 7 network. and brad said, she s crying. and it s not like mom to cry. she s a very stron woman. so, she said, look, i being arrested. and of course i went, oh my goodness, yo know? i d never expect out o anyone in the world my mom would have done anything. it was a brief conversation about how she was married previously in america and she conceived m with him. and then something became unsafe and she just too
she had left the united states went to malaysia, and then fro malaysia went to south afric where she met geldenhuys. from there, in 1999, she moved to botswana. in 2003, she moved out to new zealand. and then after a couple of years, she moved to australia reporter: an 18-year-ol mystery solved. in the movies, on tv, they find the person an they rush out to make th arrest. story s over. did that happen in this case? no. we had to get the state department involved. departmen of justice involved. and we ha to get a provisional arres warrant that the australians would accept because we have t abide by their laws. reporter: harris wanted t fly to australia right away, but the fbi asked him to let bureaucracy take its course. harris had waited 18 years. he