I was seven years old when my father told me we were going on a vacation to Jordan. I had no reason not to trust him… but what he was really plotting was unspeakable

It was Halloween weekend 1987 and the air in Richardson, Texas, was crisp and cool. Seven-year-old Lauren Burns bounded out of bed, buoyed with anticipation for a night of trick-or-treating in her new blue and yellow cheerleader costume.

She carefully packed a small pink suitcase with her costume and her favorite stuffed animal. She was headed to her father’s house for the weekend and couldn’t wait to show him, her stepmother and her half-siblings the outfit she had carefully assembled.

Lauren Burns was just six weeks old when her mother Cathy Mahone filed for divorce from her father, Ali Bayan, so these weekend visits to her father had long been a staple of her young life.

This weekend, however, was anything but routine.

Instead of collecting sweet treats in the suburbs of Dallas, Lauren was abducted by her own father, who absconded with her on a plane to the Middle East, to his home country of Jordan. Neither his wife, who refused to decamp to Jordan with their three children, nor his brother, who also lived in Texas, knew about the plan. 

Lauren’s father, Ali, had told her they were going on a surprise vacation. In reality, for months, he had been secretly planning to take her to live permanently in his hometown of Jerash, Jordan, where he intended to raise her with his extended family. 

In Stolen: A True Story – Kidnapped, Rescued, Redeemed, Lauren, now 46, revisits her harrowing abduction, her journey back to her mother and the complicated aftermath of her experiences as she wrestles with the loss of her child-like innocence as she realizes the depth of her father’s deceit.

Speaking exclusively with the Daily Mail, Lauren explained: ‘There was no reason for me not to trust my father, I had a great relationship with him. He was loving and kind and had never lied to me that I knew of. I was seven, so when he told me that he had a surprise and we were going to Jordan instead of trick-or-treating, I was confused.’

Weeks turned into months and before long, Lauren realized the trip to Jordan was not merely an impromptu vacation. Visiting her father’s homeland for the first time should have brought her joy, but Lauren couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.

Whenever she asked her father when she could go home or see her mother, he would respond with anger, telling her, ‘it’s not time yet,’ before retreating into prayer. On the rare times she was allowed to call her mother, her father would closely monitor the calls, instructing her not to say anything that would make her mother upset or worried. Ali did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.

Life in the family’s Jordanian compound was a far cry from her life in Texas. In Jerash, Lauren lived in a large building with her cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and she rarely saw her father, owing to the tradition of women and children staying together in one part of the home while the men, who rarely helped with housekeeping, occupied a different area. Men also rarely helped with caretaking.

Lauren learned how to speak Arabic so she could communicate with family members who spoke little to no English, and she joined them in daily prayers at the local mosque.

‘Everything, every day, was different,’ Lauren said. ‘There were good memories as well, but the overshadowing fear of never going home, never going back to my school, to my friends, to my mother, was overwhelming. I would cry myself to sleep.’

And while her daughter struggled with confusion and fear in Jordan, back home in Texas, Cathy, who had always had full custody of Lauren, was sick with worry and outrage.

Cathy found support and invaluable help from her close friends and neighbors, Rick and Beverley Lambert, private investigators whose daughter, Miranda, had often played with Lauren. She vowed that she would stop at nothing to find her daughter and bring her back home.

Cathy exhausted every option available to find her daughter. She sought a warrant for Ali’s arrest in the US and consulted attorneys about legal recourse. She reached out to the US Department of State. She wrote to Queen Noor of Jordan. But she was unable to find anyone to help until someone on the State Department board connected her to Corporate Training Unlimited (CTU) – a North Carolina-based private security firm founded by former Delta Force commando Don Feeney – who was up for the task.

The mission was dangerous – it would involve locating Lauren without being tracked by the Jordanian police or Ali and his family and associates. And if Lauren was found, getting out of the country with her without raising suspicions would be another challenge. If anything went wrong, Lauren’s mother and the CTU crew knew they would have no support from the American government, which had no authority to intervene in the region.

But Cathy was undeterred by the risk the endeavor posed. She emptied her life savings of $80,000 to make the perilous mission a reality and embarked with the CTU special operations team to Jordan. There was no question she’d do whatever it took to get her daughter back.

‘I can’t fathom what she went through… all the things she did, fighting for me day and night to get me back, even risking her life,’ Lauren said. ‘One thing that I found was her will [from that time] – that stopped me in my tracks. I saw the date; she went to an attorney in the middle of all these things happening and had her will drawn up within weeks of her getting on a plane to go to Jordan to get me back.’

This wasn’t the first time that Cathy had been in Jordan, which was a crucial element of the mission. She had previously visited Jerash following her engagement to Ali nearly a decade earlier. She had been welcomed warmly, despite the unconventional pairing of a Jordanian marrying someone outside of their culture and religion.

Now, Cathy’s memories from that long ago visit were used to help locate Ali and Lauren. On the streets of Jerash, she attempted to retrace her steps from the market to Ali’s family compound, until she spotted Ali’s white Mazda with its Texas plates, confirming both his place of residence – and the level of planning he’d put into the abduction.

The team decided the best way to get to Lauren was to meet her on her daily route to school. On January 28, 1988, the ops crew and Cathy, disguised in traditional Jordanian robes and headscarves, stopped Lauren’s school bus. Cathy grabbed her daughter and with the help of the security team, the reunited mother and child rushed into a getaway car, where Lauren hid under blankets in the backseat. The team split up later that day to avoid drawing suspicion, while Lauren and Cathy took a bus into Israel. They crossed the border and flew back to the States the next day.

After three torturous months, Cathy and Lauren were finally together back on American soil. Little did the mother and daughter know, however, that the nightmare wasn’t over.

The dangerous rescue mission that brought Lauren home made headlines around the world, thrusting them into the spotlight. The media scrutiny was relentless, with reporters even climbing on the roof of their home to get photos of them. It was so bad they moved 14 times before Lauren was in high school and changed their last names for security reasons.

Lauren struggled to find her footing after returning to America, her sense of normalcy shattered by her father’s actions. She insisted on sleeping in her mother’s bed until she was 12 years old. As a teenager, she began to act out – sneaking out at night and meeting up for late night trysts with a boy.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, Lauren’s relationship with her father was complicated. He returned to the US a few years after Lauren’s return to safety and was taken into custody at John F Kennedy International Airport, Lauren recalls. Since Cathy was the sole custodian according to the divorce settlement, Ali was charged with The Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution, which led to jail time followed by many years of probation. Eventually, he moved his family to Vermont.

Lauren wrestled with whether she wanted to pursue a relationship with a man whose reckless actions upended not only her life, but her mother’s, yet a part of her still longed to have her father in her life. When she decided to reach out to Ali, Cathy offered her full support, promising to back up any decision that her daughter made.

She said: ‘I wanted that love of my father. I also wanted to know why, right? Why did you do what you did? Why did you take me from my mom? Why did you take me to Jordan? Why did you keep me from her? Not just take me, but not allow me to come home?

‘I had all these questions, and I wanted answers, because what he did ruined our relationship. Once he took me, how was I going to have a relationship with him when he betrayed me in such a big way?’

When she was 13, Lauren reached out to her father after years of estrangement, an experience that was really ’emotional.’

‘It was very hard and scary,’ she said. ‘Hearing my father’s voice was scary. My heart would race, and my palms would get sweaty, and all those emotions would flood me… But I wanted to know him, and I wanted the answers, so it was worth it to me to push through all of those hard emotions.’ 

For Lauren, the answers eventually came – but not from her father. During her troubled time as a teen, a chance visit with the Lamberts changed the direction of her life. After observing Lauren’s sullen demeanor and hearing Cathy’s concerns about her daughter’s rebelliousness, the Lamberts invited her to live at their house in rural Lindale, Texas, for the summer. During her time with the Lamberts, Lauren found community and solace at church, finally landing on the peace that had eluded her in the years since her rescue.

It has taken her decades, but now, through her faith, Lauren has forgiven her father for his deception, saying: ‘Forgiveness is a long journey. It was a long process where I was thinking that all that anger would hurt my dad, but it was just killing me instead. Forgiveness doesn’t mean what he did was okay and forgiveness is not forgetting what he did. Forgiveness isn’t even necessarily having a relationship with the person that did a horrible thing, because maybe it’s not safe for you to have a relationship, or maybe that other person’s not in a place where they can have a relationship. But it’s truly saying, “I’m letting this go.”‘

The last time Lauren spoke to her father was in 2018, although she did reach out to tell him that she was writing about her experience. He did not respond.

For Lauren, one of the throughlines that emerged as she wrote her memoir was realizing that though she may not have had a father who showed up for her in the way that she needed, she and Cathy had a chosen family that showed up tenfold.

‘To have people stop their lives to support my mom like that, we all need that,’ she said. ‘We need people. I hope everyone has that kind of community and adoptive family.’

Stolen: A True Story – Kidnapped, Rescued, Redeemed by Lauren Burns is published by Post Hill Press.