The State - News from July 1, 1987

The homosexual companion of the late Frank Batey said he will fight in court to keep Batey’s fundamentalist Christian former wife from regaining custody of their 16-year-old son, unless the youth chooses to be with his mother. “Brian has told me, the press and his mother that he wants to stay here with me,” Craig Corbett said. “Why can’t Betty Batey just leave us alone?” In a telephone interview from his home in Palm Springs, Corbett, 49, who was Batey’s companion for 13 years, said he would not stand in the way if the boy wanted to live with his mother. “But that is not what he wants,” he said. Frank Batey, who won a bitter custody battle with his former wife, who had fled with Brian in 1982 after losing a custody battle in San Diego courts, died Friday after a long battle with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.