Tyler knew there was something unusual about her family. When her dad was arrested, she learnt the truth.

It was Tyler Wetherall's 12th birthday, and she was going to have her first taste of lobster.

She and her sister, Caitlin, were a long way from their English home, on a special trip to visit their father on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.

He had a new job as the manager of a hotel there. It was his first proper job, as far as Tyler could recall. He'd always worked. At least, she assumed he did. He carried a locked briefcase, scribbled numbers on yellow legal pads, and had long phone calls, often at payphones (Tyler liked to help by handing him the coins). But this hotel job was the first time he actually went to a workplace, or even spoke about what he did.

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He was also using a new name. He was Paul, instead of Ben. Tyler didn't ask why.

That birthday evening, she washed the salt and sand from her sun-freckled skin, put on a nice dress, and walked with Caitlin to their father's office. They were meeting him there before heading out for a special dinner in nearby Rodney Bay. But as they walked in, they found him speaking on the phone. Tyler recognised her mother's shrill, panicked voice on the other end.

Their father looked up. "I need you to go back to your rooms and pack your bags," he told them, earnestly.

The police had been to their mother's home in England. They'd found the girls' flight details. They were on their way to Saint Lucia.

The lobster dinner was cancelled, and the presents were left unopened. As Tyler and Caitlin hurriedly packed their bags — something they'd become quite good at over the years — they braced themselves to say goodbye. They didn't know when they would see their father again. Or even if.

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Tyler Wetherall's childhood.

Tyler Wetherall was born in San Francisco in 1983, at home in her parents' bed. That house was the only home for the first two years of her life. From there, she, her older sister and brother were bounced to more than a dozen places across Arkansas, Italy, London, Portugal, France and the UK.

What the children didn't know at the time was that they were fugitives.

Their father, Ben Glaser, was involved in a criminal organisation that had imported more than 100 tons of marijuana to the United States from Thailand in the 1970s and '80s. He was wanted in the US on charges of "continuing criminal enterprise" — a drug trafficking law known as the "kingpin statute".

Ben Glaser, Tyler Wetherall's father. Image: Supplied.

And so Tyler lived a strange itinerant early childhood, growing up in communities of other "dubiously wealthy" families; all safe in their mutual secrecy. In the French commune of Mougins, for example, Tyler's family counted arms dealers and exiled dictators amongst their neighbours.

They eventually settled in England when Tyler was around 4 years old. A short time later, her parents' marriage ended.

Speaking to Mamamia's No Filter podcast, Tyler, now 41, recalled how her mother, desperate for some stability, for real friends, made the brave decision to leave with her and her siblings.

"She did a really good job of making our childhood as normal as possible under the circumstances, which very un-normal," Tyler said.

Tyler and her siblings spent the next few years in relative stability. They went to school and saw their father every other weekend. Still, Tyler was old enough by then to tell they had something to hide. She knew the name called out on roll call each morning didn't match the one on her passport. She knew that some people called her father Martin, while others called him Ben.

"I understood there was something unusual about our family," she said. "We'd lived in 13 houses in five countries… I would tell people, and I could see that they found it odd. And I liked that curiosity, that thing that made me different."

It wasn't until 1993, when Tyler was nine, that she knew her father was in trouble with the law. Tyler and her sister came home from school one afternoon to find officers from Scotland Yard talking to their mother. Smuggling associates of Ben's had been arrested and given up his name. The police raided Ben's London home, but he'd already fled.

"Mum was living under her real name by that point, and they turned up looking for him and to see if she had any information," she said. "After that, we started to notice them."

Tyler noticed officers waiting in a car outside her school, even following her home. Tyler's mother also feared they had bugged their car, phone, and house.

"You know when you're a kid, and you spend hours on the phone with your friends?" she said. "All those conversations, in the back of my head, I'd be like, 'Are they listening to this?'"

A week after the visit from police, Tyler's mother sat the girls down (her brother was away at boarding school) and explained why they were being watched. She spoke in deliberately vague terms; partly, Tyler assumes, to protect them and partly because of her fears about surveillance. She said simply that their father had committed a crime before they were born and that he was in hiding. She told them they couldn't tell anyone; not even their best friends. It was a secret they must keep to themselves.

"Everything you've believed to be true suddenly changes," Tyler said. "Me and Dad were always incredibly close. He was a very loving dad. He was always very hands-on… And this secret that he had kept from me was very hurtful."

Still, the children maintained contact with Ben via letters and phone calls — never to their landline. They would arrange to be at a particular payphone at a particular time, and he would call it. The next call would be at a different time and location, just in case.

They even took the occasional trip to see him.

"It was really exciting, and there was still a way that Dad had of making these trips feel kind of normal," Tyler said. "I think my sister found them harder because she was more aware of the risks and also aware of how hard Mum found it to say goodbye to us, and how scared Mum was that if he were to be arrested while we were there, what would happen to us?"

Tyler said there was one close call where they had to flee his accommodation in the middle of the night. But for the most part, they got away with it.

Through it all, Tyler and her sister still didn't know exactly what he'd done. Their mother believed it was Ben's place to tell them, but he said nothing. As Tyler later put it, "We never asked the questions we knew he didn't want to answer".

"For all those years that we were taking cars, planes, ferries around Europe to go visit him on the run, knowing that he was being pursued, knowing our phones were tapped, knowing we were being followed, we didn't know what he had done, so we would speculate. And I was a kid, so I'm like, 'do you think he robbed a bank?'"

It wasn't until after his eventual arrest that she learnt the truth.

One of Ben's associates had tipped off Scotland Yard to the fact that Tyler would be flying to see him for her 12th birthday. They followed her to St Lucia, where he was later arrested.

He ultimately spent five years and four months in a Californian prison, during which Tyler and Caitlyn visited him every summer. In the years since, she's had to work to reconcile his actions as a drug smuggler with the "loving, good guy" she knew him to be.

"Whatever choices he made — right or wrong, criminal or not — his job was to be there for me," she said. "He's my dad, and on that very simple daughter level, that was what I had to figure out. Could I forgive him for those choices and love him all the same?"

Tyler Wetherall with her sister and father, Ben Glaser. Image: Supplied.

The answer came through learning his truth. Tyler, a journalist and author, spent months collaborating with her father on a memoir. It started as his story, gleaned from more than 300,000 words Ben had inked out on a prison typewriter, and daily interviews Tyler conducted with him. They'd sit under the lemon tree in the backyard of his Los Angeles home and, finally, talk.

But as she pulled together all the pieces, Tyler realised the only story she could tell with authenticity and honesty was her own. And so she published her memoir, No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run.

"We've had stories of male misadventures, often at the expense of the women and children in their lives," she said. "I felt quite strongly that we hadn't had a story of what it was to be that collateral damage of a man's decisions. And I really wanted to tell it from that perspective."

Tyler said her father was wounded by her choice at first, but he understood. And she, too, has come to understand him. It's been a healing process for them in many ways, Tyler said. She got to hear her father's side of the story, his explanations, justifications, and regrets. And she got to shrug off a lifetime of secrecy.

It wasn't easy. When she first told publishers about the book she claimed it was about someone else's family. The warnings of her childhood were still echoing loudly in her ears two decades later: 'It's a secret, and if you don't keep the secret, you're sending people to prison.'

"It was so strong that fear with me. And by the story being out in the open… what I came to understand is that Dad could have got away with it. He could have disappeared. A lot of the guys in his organisation left their wives and kids behind and went off and they never saw them again. They chose their freedom," she said.

"I think knowing that he loved us enough that he wasn't going to give us up, and he was willing to risk getting caught, opened up the pathway to forgive him."

No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run by Tyler Wetherall. Image: Supplied.

You can purchase No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run by Tyler Wetherall here.

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Feature image: Supplied.