Alese Reichart : Teen gets her life back

TUCSON - For nine years, Alese Reichart tried to live her life as another girl, letting her secret slip only to a few close friends.

She enrolled in school as Nicole Peters and pretended to be a year younger than her age to prevent any clues to her location from reaching her father, Michael Reichart.

Alese was just 5 when her mother, Joli Ann Taylor, took her from their Illinois home amid a bitter legal battle that left the parents with joint custody. Taylor, on the run with her daughter, settled in Tucson and remarried, and Alese built her own teenage life as Nicole.

Then, late last year, their fragile life in hiding fell apart.

A classmate recognized pictures of Alese and her mother on a missing children advertisement. The principal called authorities. FBI agents showed up at the middle school in December and took Alese back to Chicago.

This week, after eight months in foster care in Chicago, Alese learned her parents' lawyers had reached an agreement to return her to her stepfather in Tucson. And on Wednesday, for the first time in nearly a decade, Alese Reichart, 15, was able to use her real name and age openly in the community she considers home.
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While the agreement, approved by a judge, allowed her to return to Tucson, her life will be different.
Her mother has to remain in Illinois to face child-abduction charges filed against her in 1991, though she is free on bond. And after 10 years apart, Alese will be spending vacations with her father, who has had sole legal custody of her since 1994.
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At home in Tucson, Alese was known as a creative girl with an infectious laugh who could suddenly swing into dark moods. She was in and out of therapy, at least partly dealing with her mother's claims that her father sexually abused her, according to court documents filed in May by the Cook County, Ill., public guardian.

According to those documents, three complaints Taylor made alleging her daughter was sexually abused were dismissed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services as unfounded. In 1991, Michael Reichart was arrested by Chicago police, but he was released without being charged. The same year, Taylor took her daughter to two hospitals and complained the girl had been abused, but neither hospital found enough evidence to establish that there had been sexual abuse, an official at Cook County Children's Hospital said.

Years later, a therapist in Arizona said Alese Reichart couldn't recall being molested.

Part of the agreement granting her stepfather, Dan Peters, temporary custody requires Alese to continue with therapy to help her adjust.

Initially, reconciling father and daughter after a decade apart wasn't easy, but their relationship has become "very comfortable, loving," said Alese's lawyer, David Pasulka.
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