John and Yoko’s daughter comes out of 50-year hiding to reveal KIDNAPPING horror: Shaking, she bravely relives the moment of reunion with her long-lost mother

Kyoko Ono waited until she was 30 years old before she finally made the telephone call.

Wracked with nerves, she took a breath and dialed. When the return call eventually came, it was a voice she hadn’t heard in decades. It was her mother.

The relief was instant. Suddenly Kyoko’s fears fell away along with the guilt and sadness that had haunted her adult life.

Now, sitting for an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, the 61-year-old daughter of Yoko Ono is telling her story for the first time.

It is a tale as dramatic as any blockbuster thriller – indeed it has featured in countless biographies and documentaries about her famous mother and stepfather John Lennon. But it is one that Kyoko herself has never told, until now.

Kyoko was just eight years old when she had last seen or heard from her mother. That was the year she was snatched by her father – Yoko’s second husband, Anthony Cox – who kidnapped her amid a bitter custody battle and hid her away in the vastness of rural America.

She then grew up in a cult and knew nothing of Yoko and John’s frantic efforts to find their missing child. Their bid was as desperate as it was public, costing $1.5million in today’s money. It was the stuff of headlines and late-night talk shows.

And so today, the first thing Kyoko wants to make it clear is that she knew nothing of the couple’s frantic search.

‘When people hear about my story, they don’t understand what it was like before Facebook,’ she says. ‘There’s my mom and John doing all these things to appeal to me. 

‘It makes me sound heartless. But I was living on a farm in Iowa. We didn’t own a TV. And a lot of people don’t understand that there’s a lifestyle like that.’

The echoes of Yoko are undeniable. Sure, Kyoko is taller – but shares her mother’s delicate features and fine-boned frame.

Often emotional during our interview, she remains wary – in a way that only the child of mega-celebrity would be.

Kyoko lives a quiet life in Colorado, having divorced her husband, lawyer Jim Helfrich, in 2018. They have two children together: Emi, 27, and John, 25.

‘I’m not really interested in being a public figure. But I am also my mom’s daughter, and I want the story to be told properly,’ Kyoko says, visibly shaking with nerves.

‘I was there when my mom and John first got together,’ she points out, ‘Look at how terribly John Lennon was treated.’

Yoko didn’t fare much better, she says, referring to the racialized insults routinely thrown at her Japanese mother who was by turns slammed as an untalented groupie and blamed for breaking up the Beatles.

Kyoko was born to Yoko and American filmmaker Cox in 1963. Three years later, Yoko met John at a gallery in London where she was preparing an exhibit, sparking an instant chemistry.

They’d both leave their spouses to be together.

At first, Yoko’s arrangements with Cox to look after Kyoko were informal and amicable.

Cox remarried – to Melinda Kendall – and the two couples even spent New Year’s Eve of 1969 together in Denmark, where he and Melinda were living.

Meanwhile, Kyoko often stayed with her mother and stepfather at their expansive London home and travelled with them internationally.

When John and Yoko staged their infamous bed-in in Montreal, photographers captured a tiny Kyoko amidst the sheets.

Today Kyoko admits, ‘I was very scared by that fame.’ There was, she says, ‘a lot of competition for John and my mom’s attention from other people – even the nanny.’

As frontman of The Beatles, Lennon was perhaps the most famous man in the world; the pressure was enormous. And amid it all, the peace between Cox and Yoko unraveled.

In 1971, Cox and Melinda vanished with 7-year-old Kyoko to Spain, enrolling her in a transcendental meditation preschool in Majorca.

Yoko, who only learned of the move through her lawyers, immediately flew to the Mediterranean with John, picked Kyoko up after classes and took her to their hotel, where she and John were promptly arrested.

Ironically, Spanish school staff had called police to report Kyoko kidnapped.

She was returned to Cox and the matter hushed up, but not before a traumatic appearance in a Spanish court, during which Kyoko had to make an agonizing choice.

‘The judge said to me, “Who do you want to go home with?”,’ she recalls. ‘And I’m like, I can’t make that decision.’

But the judge insisted.

‘So, I said my dad, and my mom was upset… I felt like I had an impossible choice to make.’

Kyoko loved her mother and thought John was ‘pretty cool’ but, she says, ‘My mom and John were incredibly busy people. Usually when I went and stayed with them, I had a nanny, and I sometimes wouldn’t see them all day long. And [with] my dad and my stepmother, I’m their only child.’

Following the Spanish judge’s ruling, Cox let Kyoko visit her mother back in London, but it wasn’t long before he took her away again – this time to his native US.

Yoko and John followed and filed for custody. In September 1971, a judge found in Yoko’s favor, but the ruling had no practical effect – by then Kyoko’s whereabouts were unknown.

A few months later, Cox went to a court in Houston – and this time, the judge ruled in his favor, granting Yoko only visiting rights, which, in any event, Cox refused to honor.

On Christmas Eve 1971, he failed to produce his daughter at the court-appointed time and was jailed.

Released on bail he seized his chance and vanished with Kyoko for what would turn out to be the entirety of her youth.

Cox and Melinda had been experimenting with different religions and philosophies even before they became fugitives – including time in communes and at a UFO cult. Kyoko was to be taken along for the ride.

They started attending the Assemblies of God, described by Kyoko as ‘a traditional, charismatic, Pentecostal church.’

‘When we left Houston, we were on the lam,’ Kyoko recalls. ‘And we went to Los Angeles and we went to a church connected with our church in Houston… and they took us in for a short period of time.

‘Then [the congregation] told us, “We’ve prayed about it and you really need to return Kyoko to her mother,” which was not what my dad wanted to hear.’

According to Kyoko, her father pushed back, afraid he would go to prison. 

‘They were giving him really good and Christian advice, but he didn’t trust them. He still had a very Sixties mentality. They just did not trust the police or prison or anything like that.’

Then came another, more dangerous move… into a full-blown cult.

The Living Word Fellowship began in California in 1951 under the leadership of John Robert Stevens, who established a farm retreat community and headquarters in Iowa. (The organization eventually folded in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations).

Kyoko reflects: ‘Today, as an adult, the biggest irony to me is we left a cult, in a way, when we left the Beatles and John and Yoko. People are fanatical [about them] on the level of being cult members.’

‘I was very scared by that fame,’ she says. ‘So being in this very simple Christian community seemed very safe, like an easier life.’

Cox moved the family to an Iowa farmhouse ‘in the middle of nowhere.’ Kyoko kept busy with chores such as cleaning and husking dried beans while listening to recordings of cult-leader Stevens’s sermons.

Cut off from the world, she had no way of knowing that Yoko and John were making regular public pleas to find Kyoko and attempting to reach her through their music.

In one desperate 1972 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Yoko showed a picture of her daughter, lamenting, ‘John has to switch the TV to another channel whenever I see a child, because I just can’t stand seeing a child.’

But at the farm, Kyoko says, ‘We never talked about my mom and John. We avoided people who would talk about it. Going into a cult was like the perfect place to go if you were scared of being tracked down by the FBI.

‘Nobody there gave a damn. They were in love with the cult leader and trying to read the Bible and do whatever the cult leader said and listen to his sermons.

‘They didn’t even listen to mainstream Christian music.’

It was, she says, often ‘lonely’, but there are some happy memories.

Melinda taught her to read. ‘She was wonderful,’ Kyoko says. ‘She’s a pretty important person.’

Still, Kyoko pestered her father to let her contact her mother.

‘There were so many times that I said to my dad, “I really want to get back in touch with my mom”,’ she says.

‘And he would say, “Well, if you do, first of all, it’s not what God wants you to do, and then second of all, you’ll put me in jeopardy. Your mom is for sure going to put me in prison”.’

And so Kyoko relented. 

Cox let her call her Yoko only once for Christmas – a short conversation that her half-brother, Sean Lennon, recalls overhearing from his mother’s end of the line.

Quoted in journalist David Sheff’s biography of Yoko, Sean said: ‘After a while, I heard my mom ask, “So where are you?” and there was a click. I’m sure [Cox] hung up. Then my mom had tears in her eyes.’

When the cult moved from Iowa to California, Kyoko, her father and Melinda moved too – with Kyoko now enrolling at a Junior High in Los Angeles.

It was there that she read the diary of Anne Frank.

‘I was fascinated by it. I’d never heard of the Holocaust before I was 13,’ she says. ‘So, I went to the library, and I looked up the Third Reich and I realized that it was like my church.’

Around the same time, the Fellowship took a sinister turn and, Kyoko says, became ‘kind of Charlie Manson-scary’, with ‘services where we would pray for the death of people.’

It was at this point that Cox, finally, started to doubt the Fellowship. But, sensing his growing skepticism, other cult members began escorting Kyoko to and from school.

And so one day, her father arrived early and they fled.

But if Kyoko hoped her father had seen sense, she was left disappointed.

‘When we got out of the cult, he said: “We’ve been gone for so long. The best thing for me to do, and I can earn money doing this, is to make a documentary film about what happened to us, so that John and your mom will forgive you.”‘

Kyoko describes her father as ‘impossible,’ ‘self-deluded’ and a ‘major narcissist.’

And despite his departure from the cult, Cox remained steadfastly religious and insisted Kyoko attend conservative Christian Wheaton College in Illinois, where she met her future husband, Jim Helfrich.

Cox was not keen on the match. He said Helfrich wasn’t Christian and he ‘did not want me to be involved with someone who could potentially help me get back in touch with my mom.’

He was right to be concerned. Helfrich, a lawyer, told Kyoko it was highly unlikely that Yoko or the government would prosecute Cox if she ever reached out to her mother.

Indeed, Cox was never imprisoned for kidnap.

Kyoko married Helfrich in 1992, but it wasn’t for two more years that she finally picked up the phone to call her mother.

She was 30 years old, and she hadn’t spoken to Yoko for more than two decades.

‘By that point, I’d been teaching at public school for six years. And I really understood kids and families better than my parents ever had,’ she says.

So why had it taken her so long to make contact?  

Perhaps there is no simple answer. She worried, she says, that her mother would be angry or dislike her. And, despite her husband’s assurances, part of her remained petrified that her father could go to jail. 

But Kyoko’s estrangement from her mother weighed heavy. It was a constant ache and absence. She grew depressed and anxious, and ultimately knew the only remedy would be to confront her fears and reach out to Yoko.

And in fact, when she did, her initial call ended in disappointment: Yoko didn’t pick up. 

But she called back – and it was quickly apparent that she had no interest in punishing her ex-husband. She wanted only to be reunited with the daughter she had lost so many years before.

‘She wanted to see me right away and then we just started spending time together,’ Kyoko says.

The mother-daughter connection was so natural and immediate that, Kyoko adds, right from the start it felt like they had spoken just, ‘yesterday.’ 

Kyoko has since forged a loving, close relationship with her 92-year-old mother.

And now, reflecting on her storied upbringing, she is remarkably forgiving of the chaotic adults who let her down as a child.

‘They were all such kids. They were just like little children, all of them. It’s really crazy. Being a parent – it’s a hard thing to do.’