How the family is coping three years on…
By Megan Norris
Pictures: Matt Deller
Just three weeks old, baby Montana was snatched from her mother and later left for dead in a derelict building. She was returned to her family with a shaved head, which the kidnappers had done to hide her identity — but for her mother Anita Ciancio the nightmare was far from over. Anita talks exclusively to Woman’s Day about the aftermath.
Young mum Anita Ciancio wakes in a cold sweat, trapped in the recurring nightmare that has invaded her dreams for the past three-and-a-half years.
“It’s always the same awful dream and it’s so real, it leaves me shaking and gasping for air,” says the 30-year-old Melbourne mother of two. “I hear bathwater and see my new baby screaming for me. Then I see giant, filthy, men’s hands — a stranger’s hands — washing my baby. And the screaming gets louder and louder until I wake up sobbing.”
Anita’s terrifying dreams started back in August 2004, when her three-week-old baby daughter, Montana, was snatched from her capsule in a Melbourne shopping centre car park.
Initially thought to be a mob-related payback — Montana’s dad is drug trafficker Guiseppe (Joe) Barbaro — the kidnapping sparked a massive police hunt and made headlines around the country. Although Anita was reunited with her little girl, who was found abandoned in a derelict house 40 hours later, the agony of those missing days still haunts her.
In February this year, jailed kidnappers Cheryl McEachran and her husband Mark were each ordered to pay the mother of Montana, now 3, and Sienna, 5, $10,000 in compensation. But that has done nothing to lessen Anita’s anger towards them.
“It was a callous crime that robbed my two little girls of their mother and turned me into a reclusive, suicidal mess,” Anita tells Woman’s Day in her first interview since the hearing.
“What’s worse is that while Mark McEachran will pay a lump sum of $10,000 from assets seized by authorities [when his nine-year jail term is up], his wife will be forced to compensate me in instalments beginning six months after her [eight-year] jail sentence ends.
“So while they invaded my life once, this ruling means they’ll be in it for years to come. I’ll never be able to move on.”
For the full story, see this week’s Woman’s Day (on sale March 31).
Your say: Have your say below…
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
