Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  “Important calls must take precedence,” Espey said.

  After the debate, feeling he had fully defended himself and his position as sheriff, Espey said, “Rick’s a good guy, but he doesn’t really work the road and doesn’t necessarily know how to control a budget. He’s out of touch with making arrests, the booking process, and court work. I do these things all the time.”

  Rick Smail responded that it was time for a change in Nodaway County, and he was the man who could lead a much-needed revolution.

  In the end, Espey won reelection. It was a long night and a close call (Espey won by fewer than twenty votes), but he was back in the department as sheriff, which was all that really mattered to him.

  Now, a mere six weeks after the election, he was standing in Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s den, staring at the remnants of her butchered body.

  Who could do such a thing? Espey thought. Had it been a ritualistic murder? A Charles Manson–type slaying? Maybe a serial killer had passed through town and randomly chosen Bobbie Jo?

  But the thought prompted by his investigative instinct was: Could her husband have done it?

  The number one cause of death among pregnant women, most experts claim, is homicide. The most common perpetrator? Spouse or boyfriend. The recent deaths of Laci and Conner Peterson and Lori Hacking have helped put maternal homicide at the forefront of American crime news. But the truth is, for centuries, pregnant women have been targeted by their husbands.

  “Send someone out to Kawasaki,” Espey said to one of his deputies. “Check out the husband. See what he knows.”

  Could Zeb have committed such an unbearable horror? Would a man murder his wife and cut their child from her womb?

  The idea seemed too horrible to consider. But regardless how surreal it seemed, while neighbors and townspeople gathered around the house, wondering why all the emergency vehicles and cruisers were lined up and down the street, it was Ben Espey’s job to weigh all possibilities.

  An even more awful thought crept into Espey’s mind: Could Bobbie Jo have done it to herself? Was it possible Bobbie Jo had delivered the child herself in order to get rid of it? Good cops had to put themselves into every possible situation—getting to know both victim and perpetrator—to turn up leads when there were none to follow. It was a fact that sometimes young women delivered babies at home and disposed of the infants’ bodies to cover up an unwanted pregnancy. Espey didn’t know this family personally; he only knew what his twenty years of law enforcement experience had taught him: never assume anything.

  As Bobbie Jo’s body was being whisked away to the hospital, Espey and his deputies checked the entire house for bloodstains, trying to understand what had happened at the Stinnett home. “Go out and check all the garbage cans,” said Espey.

  In the end, they found nothing. But then, as it appeared they would have little to go on, a name that would later become synonymous with the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett surfaced. Darlene Fischer.*

  Before Becky Harper was taken away from the scene, Espey said later, she told him Bobbie Jo had “talked to someone named Darlene Fischer about coming over to the house to look at one of the dogs.”

  With that, Espey started calling teams of investigators in to help. His first objective was to find the baby, he said. Now at least they had a name to check out.

  The Buchanan County (Missouri) Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Unit was called in to go through the house and see what it could find. Part of its job would include logging on to Bobbie’s computer and seeing what the machine yielded in the form of leads.

  “You got to think of everything,” said Espey, “because you don’t know anything.”

  With the crime scene filling up with law enforcement, Espey did his best to lead the investigation. While cops did their jobs working in and around the house, Espey walked next door, to “the neighbor to the west,” and started asking questions.

  “A red car,” the neighbor said. “There was a red car there…. It had a big H on the hood.”

  When they met up with Zeb and Bobbie Jo’s neighbor Chris Law some time later, “he confirmed there was a red car there in Bobbie Jo’s driveway,” Espey said. But it was the neighbor next door who broke the “red car” lead, not Law.

  Espey and his team had the following tips: a “red car” with an H on the hood, a “Darlene Fischer” name of unknown origin, and a premature newborn “hopefully still alive.” Considering it was so early in the investigation—an hour hadn’t even passed yet—Espey had quite a few leads.

  Espey realized the first thing he had to do was find Bobbie Jo’s missing child. No one knew what the child’s kidnapper had in mind after cutting the baby from the mother’s womb. For Espey, it felt personal. His daughter had just given birth to his second grandchild the week before. He knew what it was like to hold a newborn in his hands. He knew how special a time it should be for Becky Harper and Zeb Stinnett. With Bobbie Jo gone, finding the baby would be the only real victory he could give back to the family.

  “I needed to find that baby,” he said. “It was very personal to me—and, no matter who got in my way, I wasn’t going to stop until I did.”

  15

  Prosecutors believe that Lisa Montgomery left Skidmore with the child and traveled west out of town on Highway “DD,” toward Hickory Creek and the Nodaway River. “The blacktop road,” Ben Espey called it.

  “She was heading out of town, going west,” said Espey, “while we were heading into town, from the east.”

  They missed each other by fewer than thirty minutes.

  Lisa probably chose Highway “DD” because it bypassed the more direct route of Highway 113 to Highway 71 toward St. Joseph and Kansas City. She must have realized urban authorities, outnumbering those in the outlying towns almost ten to one, would be looking for anyone—male or female—traveling with a newborn baby.

  When Espey found out that the last vehicle to be seen at Bobbie Jo’s was a red car, he radioed the lead out to every law enforcement agency, while his office in Maryville sent out a teletype. Shortly after the call went out, a Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) cruiser engaged a red car in a high-speed pursuit on Highway 71 near Maryville.

  “That pursuit,” said Espey, “ended up back in toward us in Skidmore, so we joined the chase.”

  Espey wouldn’t normally have left his post at a crime scene, but someone over the radio said, “Red car in pursuit on seventy-one, possibly connected to the death in Skidmore.”

  When Espey heard that, he took right off.

  Fifteen to twenty minutes later, law enforcement ended up cornering a man in a red car on Route 29. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime. He was running from police because he had some overdue tickets and thought they were going to put him in jail.

  Learning this, Espey headed back to the Stinnett home.

  By now, the Buchanan County CSI team had logged on to Bobbie Jo’s computer and figured out Darlene Fischer was, indeed, the last person to meet with Bobbie Jo, according to the e-mails they were able to retrieve. Based on one specific e-mail Darlene had sent to Bobbie Jo, authorities thought they knew where she lived: Fairfax, Missouri, one county over.

  Espey and one of his deputies took off, lights flashing, sirens blaring, for Fairfax, to see if they could locate Darlene Fischer.

  16

  Heading south on Route 59 after leaving the blacktop road, Lisa Montgomery is believed to have hit Highway 29 and set a beeline for Topeka, Kansas. She had to be careful. It wouldn’t take much to get pulled over: running a red light, speeding, weaving, maybe a broken turn signal on her vehicle she didn’t even know of.

  At some point during her trip, she pulled over on the side of the road, washed the baby, sealed her belly button with a pair of “clips” a hospital might use for the same purpose, and threw the bloodied towels and blankets into the trunk, where they sat next to the rope she allegedly used to strangle Bobbie Jo and the serrated paring knife she used to cut her open, law enforcement said.


  Lisa admitted later that here, along the side of the road, she started to put her elaborate story of giving birth to the child into effect.

  After cleaning up the child, she called Mike Wheatley, pastor of the First Church of God in downtown Melvern, Kansas, where Lisa’s children had been going to church for the past four years.

  “I just gave birth,” she told Pastor Wheatley. She seemed excited.

  “Congratulations, Lisa,” answered Wheatley.

  Lisa pulled out from the side of the road, Bobbie Jo’s baby next to her in a carry-on car seat, and headed for Kansas.

  17

  While family members of Bobbie Jo Stinnett were contacted on the evening of December 16, doctors at St. Francis Hospital in Maryville pronounced the twenty-three-year-old wife and mother dead. The trauma had been too much. Her petite body couldn’t take the punishment authorities claim Lisa Montgomery had unleashed in the act of violent fury that was, by now, being reported around the world.

  Satellite trucks were pulling into Skidmore as Bobbie Jo lay on a gurney somewhere in St. Francis Hospital. All the major networks were sending reporters to the region: MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, even the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Every major metropolitan newspaper across the country posted the story on their Web sites. The Christmas season was generally a slow news period. The murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett was going to be a huge story. By nightfall, the world would hear of the horror in Skidmore. By the following morning, reporters would be swarming the area, looking to uncover anything they could about what had happened inside the small house at West Elm Street.

  As word spread throughout town, Skidmore residents locked their doors and watched their backs, noting that until Bobbie Jo’s killer was caught, things would never be the same. Most were obviously appalled such a crime could take place in their tight-knit, close community. And to think it happened right in the middle of the day.

  “Things like that just don’t happen ’roun he’a,” said one local.

  Reverend Harold Hamon, who had married Zeb and Bobbie Jo about twenty months earlier, said he was likely “addressing Christmas cards” when the murder occurred. He remembered the time of day because a member of his congregation had called about the commotion going on up the road from his parish.

  “Reverend,” asked the worried neighbor, “I heard an ambulance down by the church. Was anyone near the church hurt?”

  Hamon could see Bobbie Jo’s house from the church rectory as he looked out the window. “Hold on,” he said, staring down the street. “There’s police cars down there. Don’t know what’s going on, though.”

  “It’s almost unbelievable,” Hamon recalled, “that right under your nose something terrible can be happening.”

  After talking it over with doctors, Sheriff Ben Espey was convinced there was a strong possibility Bobbie Jo’s child was still alive. He had no doubt in his mind what he had to do next.

  “That’s the minute,” Espey said, “I started pushing to get the Amber Alert issued.” And that was where the problems and infighting among different law enforcement agencies began.

  The base of the investigation had been moved from Skidmore to downtown Maryville. The Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department on North Vine Street, just below the center of town, was a small station compared to bigger-city police departments. But Espey felt comfortable in the building. It was a second home to him. On the wall of its large basement was a long blackboard he could fill up with leads and ideas. By this means, he could sketch out the entire case and keep track of it, step by step.

  Espey returned to the department and began a push to get the Amber Alert issued. Find the baby, find the killer. It seemed that simple. His emphasis was on finding the child first. After clearing Zeb Stinnett and informing him that his wife had been killed and his child kidnapped, Espey promised Zeb he would get his child back.

  Getting an Amber Alert issued for an unborn child would be an unprecedented move, and Espey would run into harsh opposition in the coming hours regarding his desire to get it done, because an Amber Alert had never been issued for, as some were calling Bobbie Jo’s child, “a fetus.”

  A major factor that made Ben Espey an asset to his community was his determination to get a job done when the powers to be, bound by bureaucracy, stood in his way. If Espey believed an Amber Alert was warranted, he was going get it—and no one was going to tell him he couldn’t.

  18

  In the state of Missouri, Amber Alerts are issued by the Missouri State Highway Patrol when a child is said to be in danger. The MSHP relies on “detailed physical descriptions…such as the color, license plate, and type of vehicle to watch for,” MSHP patrol spokesman Captain Chris Ricks told reporters. The reason the detail has to be as exact as possible is, Ricks added, “you’re flooding your system with calls that don’t mean anything.”

  If any vehicle even remotely matching the description became suspect, law enforcement had to chase down hundreds of leads that might never amount to anything. As of September 25, 2005, 377 children had been involved in 316 published Amber Alerts, issued in forty-two different states. It is a system that produces results when put into effect immediately.

  How was the program initiated? In January 1996, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her bicycle in a remote Arlington, Texas, neighborhood when a neighbor heard her scream. It was a terrifying cry for help, not as if Amber had fallen off her bicycle or was being chased by the neighborhood bully. There was no doubt she was scared and yelling for help.

  When the neighbor ran toward Amber’s voice, she saw a man pull the helpless child off her bike and toss her into his pickup truck.

  Within seconds, the child was gone.

  The neighbor ran back to her house and called 911 immediately. She provided a detailed description of the man who had abducted Amber, along with the vehicle he was driving.

  It was enough to get law enforcement started, especially since the call had come in promptly after the abduction.

  Police in Arlington, working with the FBI, canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed several other neighbors while a massive search got underway for the vehicle Amber had been abducted in and for the suspect, who had supposedly grabbed her.

  Sadly, though, four days later, Amber’s body was located in a ditch about five miles from her home. Her throat had been slashed.

  Several concerned citizens, feeling angry and sick over Amber’s death, thinking more could have been done to save her life, contacted a Dallas, Texas, radio station and changed the way law enforcement officials deal with child abductions today. One of the callers suggested local radio stations “repeat news bulletins about abducted children just like they do for severe weather warnings.”

  An early warning system was subsequently initiated by the Dallas–Fort Worth Association of Radio Managers, who teamed with local law enforcement agencies in northern Texas, developing an innovative system to help locate abducted children, or at least get word out of the abduction as fast as possible.

  It was a brilliant idea, and general managers from several radio stations throughout the Dallas area signed up. Everyone agreed it was a public service that could save lives potentially, simply because time is an abducted child’s worst enemy after being kidnapped.

  Thus, by July 1997, about eighteen months after Amber’s death, the Texas Amber Plan went into operation. Other states adopted the program in short order.

  19

  According to the Amber Alert Portal, a Web site dedicated to providing information about the Amber Alert plan, “once law enforcement has been notified about an abducted child, they must first determine if the case meets the Amber Alert Plan’s criteria for activating an Amber Alert.” Each law enforcement agency, “whether local, state, or regional, establishes its own Amber Alert Plan criteria.”

  Espey didn’t have time for bureaucracy. He needed the alert issued right now, no questions asked.

  “Let’s find this child and fight about it later.”


  The first problem Espey faced came in the form of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which suggests three criteria be met before an Amber Alert is activated: “Law enforcement confirms a child has been abducted; law enforcement believes the circumstances surrounding the abduction indicate that the child is in danger of serious bodily harm or death” and, most important to the dilemma facing Ben Espey, “there is enough descriptive information about the child, abductor, and/or suspect’s vehicle to believe an immediate broadcast alert will help.”

  In the Stinnett case, not much was known about Bobbie Jo’s assailant. Espey was told no right away. An Amber Alert wouldn’t work in this situation. Sorry. But it’s not going to happen.

  Espey didn’t have time to deal with red tape. The sun had gone down. The child could be anywhere and Bobbie Jo’s murderer was long gone. All he wanted was a chance.

  “We can’t issue an Amber Alert for a fetus,” he was told over and over.

  Meanwhile, Espey learned of a second major obstacle: could the child have survived such a traumatic delivery by the hand of an untrained perpetrator, who had murdered her mother in the process? Doctors had said the child still might be alive, but looking at the crime scene, it seemed almost impossible. Espey had touched Bobbie Jo’s cold body. He saw all the blood.

  Prenatal care expert Elizabeth A. Chmura, who has worked in emergency room prenatal care for twenty years (but wasn’t involved in the Stinnett case), later said, “With pregnant women who suffer an insult—such as strangulation—it is difficult to know exactly how long an infant in the womb can survive. But we know that, in some cases, it can be thirty minutes if the mom has some signs of life, which, from the evidence left behind, Bobbie Jo clearly did.”

  In general, if a pregnant woman dies before giving birth, the infant has approximately four minutes before hypoxia, “a pathological condition in which the body as a whole, or region of the body, is deprived of adequate oxygen supply,” sets in, at which time death will likely occur for the child. Hypoxia is sometimes associated with high altitudes. If, say, an airplane’s windows are blown out during flight at high elevations, passengers can die because there is not a sufficient amount of oxygen in the plane’s cabin to sustain life.