Fugitive mum jailed after Aust arrest

From Dorothy Barnett's perspective, she was a mother desperate to keep her one-year-old daughter Savanna.

US District Court Judge Richard Gergel on Tuesday had a different view, saying the 54-year-old former flight attendant committed a calculated, methodical crime.

The judge in Charleston, South Carolina, sentenced Barnett to the near maximum term of 21 months in jail.

Barnett's crime began in her home town in South Carolina in 1994 and ended in Mountain Creek, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, in 2013 when Australian authorities and the FBI knocked on the front door of the home she was living in under an alias.

Barnett, who lost a custody battle with her former husband Benjamin Harris Todd III, took Savanna during a supervised visit in 1994 and, with the help of disguises, fake birth certificates, a fraudulent driver's licence and passports, vanished from the US.

It was not until the raid on her Queensland home that Savanna discovered the truth about her life.

Savanna, 21, thought her name was Samantha Geldenhuys.

She believed her dad was another man.

"I was loved beyond belief," Savanna said in an emotional address to the judge, describing her life growing up with a fugitive mum, the Post and Courier newspaper reported.

Barnett has been locked up since her Queensland arrest and entered guilty pleas to international parental kidnapping and falsifying two passport applications.

Todd, a stockbroker, never gave up hope of finding his daughter, often going on US TV talk shows including Montel Williams and Sally Jessy Raphael in the hope somebody would help locate her.

Over the years, he updated Savanna's bedroom in his South Carolina home to match her age so when the day finally came they would be reunited.

Savanna initially sided with the mother she thought she knew, but Todd, who wasn't in court, has not given up on a relationship.

"She is an exceptional young person," Todd's longtime lawyer, Graham Sturgis, told AAP.

"Harris looks forward to growing their relationship, and they have been in contact."

Court documents describe how Barnett began planning the kidnapping while her divorce battle raged, with a fake California birth certificate for Savanna created before the judge ruled.

Barnett assumed the alias Alexandra Marie Canton, applied for a Texas driver's licence and used it, a flight attendant ID card and a fake tax form to get a US passport.

For the passport photo, she wore a wig and large glasses.

On April 24, 1994, during a supervised visit with Savanna, Barnett and the child disappeared.

Barnett told authorities she moved to Malaysia, then South Africa, where she married local Juan Geldenhuys and took his surname.

They moved to Botswana, New Zealand and eventually Australia because of Geldenhuys' job.

Savanna thought her real father was Geldenhuys. He died before Barnett's arrest.

Savanna and her father recently spent time together, and "it was an experience I can't describe in one word", she said.