Kidnapping, Tears and Reconciliation: Inside Yoko Ono’s Decades-Long Saga to Find Her Missing Daughter

Mar. 15, 2025

From left: Yoko Ono, Kyoko Chan Cox and John Lennon in 1969.Photo:George Stroud/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty

George Stroud/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty

In August 1971,John Lennonleft England on a TWA flight bound for New York City — little suspecting that he would never see his homeland again. He and his wifeYoko Onowere eager to start a new chapter in the Big Apple, where they rented a humble loft-style apartment in the hippie epicenter of Greenwich Village.

Their shockingly accessible home attracted all manner of avant-garde artists, leftist activists, and self-proclaimed freaks, who descended in droves to convince the world’s most famous couple to attach themselves to their pet projects and causes. More often than not, the pair obliged. So began a frenetic period of activity for Lennon and Ono, who went from merely imagining peace to marching on the front lines to make it a reality.

The new documentaryOne to One: John & Yoko, which premiered Jan. 25 at theSundance Film Festivaland will hit select theaters in April, provides an immersive look at their fascinating first 18 months as New Yorkers, a turbulent time when they made friends with political radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman,ran afoul of President Richard Nixon’s conservative government, and performed the only full-length concerts that Lennon would ever give — a pair of gigs at Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972, to benefit the Willowbrook State School for children with learning disabilities.

The move was made in a desperate bid to help find Ono’s missing 8-year-old daughter, Kyoko. She was the only child from Ono’s previous marriage to musician and filmmaker Anthony Cox, who ran off with the girl after violating a court order. Lennon and Ono had already spent a small fortune waging legal battles and trailing them across multiple continents for the better part of a year. Upon hearing a tip that they were hiding in Cox’s native United States, Lennon and Ono relocated there to continue their search.

The traumatic family saga would continue for decades as Kyoko lived with her father under an assumed name ina religious sect. Ultimately, it would be more than 20 years before mother and daughter would be reunited. “Losing my daughter was a very serious pain,“Ono told PEOPLE in 2003. “There was always some empty space in my heart.”

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Yoko’s daughter Kyoko at London’s Heathrow airport in 1969.Central Press/Getty

Central Press/Getty

Ono and Cox were married in the summer of 1963, with Kyoko’s birth following two months later. Ono would admit that motherhood took a back seat as her reputation in the downtown New York City art scene began to grow. “I was a sort of offbeat mother,” she says in telephone audio included inOne to One.“I took [Kyoko] onstage when she was not even a year old. I think that my ex-husband was taking care of her more.”

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with daughter Kyoko and Anthony Cox in Denmark.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

In keeping with the spirit of the time, no formal custody agreement was filed in regard to Kyoko. InOne to One, she can be seen in intimate home videos playing around in the backseat of Lennon and Ono’s Rolls-Royce limousine, napping on a jumbo jet, ducking paparazzi at the airport, and even cuddling under the sheets during Lennon and Ono’s famous “bed-in” for peace.

Despite the glamour, Kyoko’s relationship with her stepfather was complicated. Reflecting on her childhood, Kyoko told PEOPLE in 2003 that Lennon was always “nice to me,” but described him as “this consuming force” that left her competing for her mother’s time and attention. “He wanted all of my mom, and there wasn’t a lot of her for me,” she said.

The first cracks in this blended family appeared in July 1969, when Lennon — a notoriously bad driver — crashed his Austin Maxi into a ditch when taking Ono, Kyoko and his own son Julian on a summer trip to Scotland. The wreck resulted in a five-day hospital stay for Lennon, Ono and Kyoko, all of whom received facial stitches. According to Philip Norman’s 2008 bookJohn Lennon: The Life, the accident understandably caused Cox to “freak out,” and from then on, he insisted on being present whenever Lennon and Ono visited with Kyoko.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with their children Julian and Kyoko during their visit to Scotland in the summer of 1969.Daily Record/Daily Record/Mirrorpix via Getty

Daily Record/Daily Record/Mirrorpix via Getty

This sense of paternal protection soon curdled into what Lennon would characterize as“paranoid”thinking, and visitation rights became bitterly contested. By the spring of 1971, Cox had taken Kyoko and left home, without informing anyone of his whereabouts or intentions. Eventually, a friend revealed that they’d relocated to the Spanish island of Majorca to study Transcendental Meditation — ironically with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with whom the Beatles had studied years earlier.

Lennon and Ono flew there immediately. An ugly scene ensued when Cox accused the couple of “kidnapping” the child from the school where she was enrolled. (Ono insisted that she simply was happy to see her mother and ran into her arms.) The police were called, and Lennon and Ono were briefly arrested before the matter was hushed up.

Kyoko returned to her father, but Cox became increasingly distraught that the rich and powerful pair would use their vast resources and influence to take his daughter away. Even a conciliatory note from Lennon failed to mend relations.

“We want peace, no FBI, no detectives,”he wrote. “We understand the problem. Please get in touch with us through any group or media you trust. We are making no moves. We will wait for your call or letter. War is over if you want it. Give us a chance. Love and Peace, John Lennon.”

Cox retreated to the United States that summer, with Lennon and Ono in hot pursuit. Courts in both the U.S. Virgin Islands (where the divorce had been filed) and Houston (where Cox filed a secondary lawsuit) granted Ono custody rights on the condition that she raise her daughter in the United States, where she was born — a stipulation that pleased Ono and Lennon.

“We don’t mind, we agree, we’d like to be here and bring her up,”Lennon later said during a 1971 appearance onThe Dick Cavett Show. “We’re not allowed to see our daughter, and Yoko’s going mad — as any mother would, because her daughter’s being withheld from her.”

In December 1971, when Cox again refused to turn over their daughter, he was jailed for contempt of court. After his release following his lawyer’s appeal for wrongful imprisonment, Cox, his wife Melinda and Kyoko fled once again  — this time for good. They vanished into the United States without a trace.

Kyoko, who was 7 at the time, wouldn’t see or communicate with her mother again for 23 years. Cox lived in constant fear that he would be prosecuted for kidnapping, and cycled through an ever-expanding list of addresses and false names. “Mom says [now] that she wouldn’t have put him in jail,” Kyoko recalled to PEOPLE in 2003, “but as a child, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was protective. My dad had a lot of problems, but I was his only kid.… It was very painful losing my mom, but I love my dad too.”

Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1971.R. Brigden/Daily Express/Getty

R. Brigden/Daily Express/Getty

Over the next three years, Lennon and Ono reportedly spent the equivalent of $1.5 million in today’s money on their private investigation to find Kyoko. Sometimes they scoped out leads themselves, and once traveled across the country to San Francisco after receiving a tip. Cruising through the neighborhood where Cox was rumored to be living, Ono stormed an apartment building she thought she saw him enter, frantically knocking on doors and sticking her head into the homes of shocked residents. In the end, she found nothing.

With private messages going unanswered, Lennon and Ono started communicating with Kyoko through the media. The B-side “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)” was one early attempt at contact through music. The first sound heard on their 1971 holiday anthem “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is Ono whispering, “Happy Christmas Kyoko.” She channeled her pain more directly into“Looking Over from My Hotel Window,”an early version of which is heard inOne to One. Over stark piano chords, she intones this heart-wrenching verse.

If I ever die, please go to my daughter

Tell her that she used to haunt me in my dreams

That’s saying a lot for a neurotic like me

“After seeing that film, we just couldn’t say anything. It was too much,” Ono recalls in the documentary. “As a mother, I share their pain. I really understand how the mothers feel.” Onstage at Madison Square Garden, she performed an especially impassioned version of “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” chanting the title with barely contained anguish — as if providing comfort to herself as well as her absent daughter.

Lennon never saw Kyoko again before his death on Dec. 8, 1980. Three months before, he spoke about the breakdown of relations in aninterview withPlayboy. “It was a classic case of big boys playing macho,” he admitted. “It turned into me… trying to dominate Tony Cox. Tony’s attitude was, ‘You got my wife, but you won’t get my kid.'”

In the wake of Lennon’s murder, Ono received a sympathetic telegram from Cox and Kyoko from an undisclosed location. It contained no contact information.

Cox eventually resurfaced in 1986 with a self-produceddocumentary calledVain Glory, in which he detailed his decade underground. Elaborating ina lengthy interview with PEOPLEthat same year, Cox claimed that he, Kyoko and wife Melinda had become evangelical Christians living in hiding as members of an obscure pseudo-religious organization called The Church of the Living Word (also known as The Walk), which shielded the family from Ono’s team of investigators and the legion of Lennon fans. In return for room and board (plus education for Kyoko), Cox says they swore obedience to the group’s leader, John Robert Stevens, who proclaimed himself “the returned Jesus.” The group also eschewed contact with outside friends and family.

For the next five years, they lived with members of the sect in locations throughout rural Iowa and California, practicing a unique blend of Pentecostalism, occultism and Eastern mysticism. Despite Cox’s elevated status as a “prophet and set-aside elder,” he claimed he noticed nefarious aspects of the leader’s personality. In addition to Stevens’ fervent proclamations of divinity, Cox cited his supposed practice of “forehead bonding,” a form of mind control and hypnotism he used on his followers. Cox also alleged that the group prayed for the death of political leaders likeJimmy Carterand David Rockefeller, and took karmic responsibility for Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968.

Increasingly disillusioned with the organization, Cox began to plot his escape. But his departure was apparently stymied when representatives of The Walk began to escort Kyoko (living under the name Ruth Holman) to and from her Hollywood high school. Cox took this as a not-so-subtle threat from the church leadership that they were aware of his plans to flee. Fearing they’d take Kyoko to prevent him from leaving, Cox showed up early at school one day before the guards arrived.

In his 1986 PEOPLE interview, Cox revealed that his feelings towards Ono had softened over the prior 15 years. “I don’t have any bitterness toward Yoko,” he said. “We both made terrible mistakes. Although [the Lennons] nearly destroyed me, at the same time she really had tremendous remorse, and when I found that out later, that changed my whole attitude. I really felt sorry for her. Regardless of how much I suffered, she was suffering also, and I’m genuinely aware of that.”

Cox’s surprising re-emergence into public life unfortunately didn’t lead to a reconciliation between mother and daughter. Ono took the opportunity to make another public appeal, publishing an emotional open letter directed to her long-lost child.

Dear Kyoko,

All these years there has not been one day I have not missed you. You are always in my heart. However, I will not make any attempt to find you now as I wish to respect your privacy. I wish you all the best in the world. If you ever wish to get in touch with me, know that I love you deeply and would be very happy to hear from you. But you should not feel guilty if you choose not to reach me. You have my respect, love and support forever.

Love, Mommy

It would be another eight years before Kyoko accepted the offer. In 1994 — then in her 30s, married and working as an artist in Colorado — she contacted Ono after deciding to have children of her own. The phone call marked the first time they’d spoken in 23 years.

Yoko Ono with her daughter, Kyoko Cox, and her granddaughter, Emi, in Central Park on Dec. 29, 2000.Lawrence Schwartzwald/Sygma via Getty

Lawrence Schwartzwald/Sygma via Getty

A personal meeting soon followed, and relations quickly thawed. A spokesperson for Ono toldNew York Magazinein 1997that Kyoko visited “all the time and they have a very nice relationship. They speak everyday.” She was on hand for her mother’s 1995 peace concert in Hiroshima, Ono’s 70th birthday bash in 2003 at the New York City hotspot Mr. Chow and the opening of theLennonBroadway musical in 2005. Though Kyoko prefers a quiet life out of the spotlight, she reportedly remains close to Ono, now 91.

Yoko Ono and Kyoko Cox in 2001.Mediapunch/Shutterstock

“When Kyoko finally appeared, I was totally in shock,” Ono reflected in 2003. “It felt like the part of me that was missing came back.”

source: people.com