She was controversial and compassionate, determined and sometimes deflated, empathetic and indefatigable, a fixture on television talk shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Activist Faye Yager created Children of the Underground, a clandestine network based in Atlanta with safe houses around the nation and world to shelter and save children from sexual abuse.
Surrounded by her family, Yager, 75, died Aug. 3 at her Sandy Springs home of complications from metastatic colon cancer, said her son Joshua Yager. One of a dozen children, she was born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and reared in Mabscott, West Virginia, where her father supervised a coal mine.
“Faye Yager was motivated to protect children because the justice system failed to protect her own child from sexual abuse,” said former DeKalb District Attorney J. Tom Morgan. “I understood Faye’s motivation.”
She had been dismissed when she had accused her first husband of molesting their toddler daughter— he was given custody of the child. Years later, Yager was vindicated when he was sentenced for molesting several children in Florida. She established Children of the Underground to prevent other mothers from suffering the same anguish she had endured, said Joshua Yager.
After divorcing her first husband, she married physician Howard Yager and settled into her life as an interior decorator and mother. In the late 1980s, she established the Children of the Underground and began vetting and then counseling frantic family members wanting to know how to keep their children safe. She told them the truth, that violating court orders would made them criminals and necessitate moving to new places — sometimes to other countries — and creating new identities.
“Faye handled several thousand cases, and most of them were righteous,” said journalist C.B. Hackworth. “She was a very beautiful, feisty, confrontational person. Everyone agreed her heart was in the right place, not to say she didn’t make some mistakes.”
He wrote about Yager for various television news outlets, and he covered a 1992 Cobb County trial in which she was acquitted of charges related to kidnapping and cruelty to children. She was sued by several different men whose children and spouses had disappeared into the network, including a New York millionaire.
“She started off doing some good — [still] violating the law, but she had good intentions,” Cobb District Attorney Thomas Charron said at the time. “But in recent days, Faye Yager has become so obsessed, I believe she is endangering the children she is supposed to be helping.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a “satanic Panic” was sweeping the country, with the Prince of Darkness supposedly showing up in rock 'n' roll lyrics, games like Dungeons and Dragons and shadowy cults. Yager once told the Atlanta Constitution that 70% of her cases involved people talking about the satanic abuse of children.
By 1998, the Yagers had bought a historic inn in Brevard, North Carolina, and Faye was no longer involved with Children of the Underground. Built in 1885, the Inn at Brevard is on the National Register of Historic Places and is decorated with antiques and art. Faye enjoyed cooking for and talking with the inn’s many guests, her son Joshua said.
“For me, her story is a story of trials and tribulations and sorrow,” he said. “What’s most amazing is that she could deal with all she did in her life and come out successful and happy. She was fierce.”
In addition to her husband Howard and son Joshua, Faye Yager is survived by her siblings Judith Ray, Bonnie McPeake, Mary Simpson, Florence Lively, Gaston Wisen, Fred Wisen and Don Wisen; her children Zachary, Heather, Janelle and Michelle, 12 grandchildren and one great grandchild. The funeral is at H.M. Patterson and Sons-Arlington, in Sandy Springs at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 8, with burial at Arlington Cemetery in Sandy Springs. The public is invited. A reception will follow at the funeral home.
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