Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  As far as Ben Espey was concerned, as long as doctors were saying the child had even a “chance” of surviving the attack, he was going to do everything in his power to try to find her. Still, as time went by and the child wasn’t evaluated by a doctor, her chances of survival dropped significantly. A newborn baby outside the womb, born prematurely under such unsanitary and violent conditions, was at risk of many things. Prenatal care expert Chmura noted, “Hypothermia (temperature dropping), blood and/or volume loss leading to anemia, respiratory distress, and, of course, infection” were chief among them.

  These issues could cause big trouble for a newborn who was not maintained under sterile medical conditions in a hospital environment immediately after birth.

  “Bobbie Jo’s infant,” Chmura explained, “was born about one month early, which makes for a great survival rate, since the lungs are fully developed toward this trimester. If she was kept warm and dry and stimulated to cry in order to get the fluid out of her lungs so she can, essentially, take that ‘first breath,’ and was given immediate nutrition, then she would be safe.”

  In addition, the umbilical cord, the end which would ultimately become the child’s navel, needed to be clamped at the time of birth, or more trouble could arise.

  Nobody in law enforcement knew for sure if Bobbie Jo’s assailant had taken any of those precautions. They were assuming that whoever had taken the child was in a state of panic. Under those circumstances, anything could happen.

  If the child was healthy and had survived the delivery without any lacerations or serious injuries, authorities believed Bobbie Jo’s attacker had chosen to take the child at the perfect time, a factor that was likely a big part of the reason Bobbie was chosen as a victim in the first place.

  “A lot of young pregnant women go into labor at thirty-seven to thirty-eight weeks,” Chruma added. “Maybe Lisa Montgomery had a feeling she needed to wait until thirty-six weeks’ gestation for a healthy baby, but not too long after, or Bobbie Jo would have gone to the hospital already. A little planning on her part, perhaps?”

  After all the evidence was collected, there would be little doubt in the government’s opinion that Lisa had planned on taking Bobbie Jo’s child for at least one month prior to Bobbie Jo’s murder. The very nature of the crime required premeditation and planning. How could Bobbie Jo’s attacker know, for example, Zeb would be at work? And, how could she know no one else would be at Bobbie Jo’s home when she arrived?

  Ben Espey considered that whoever had gone to such great lengths to murder Bobbie Jo and cut her child from her womb had probably done a bit of research about how to keep the child alive. At least that’s what he hoped as he faced a full night of searching.

  20

  Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s killer had a thirty-minute jump on law enforcement, enough time to get away without anyone noticing. Driving to Melvern, Kansas, where she lived, couldn’t have been a trip Lisa Montgomery had plotted out in advance. With a three-and-a-half-hour car ride ahead of her on a good day, without any traffic or car problems, she had to maintain the health of a baby, who had been born prematurely out of a hospital, as she drove.

  By the time Ben Espey sent word out regarding what had happened, Lisa was not heading into Melvern, however. She was on her way to Topeka, Kansas, where, authorities say, she would put the second part of her plan in to effect.

  Still a long trip, at two-and-a-half hours, Topeka was a town Lisa had chosen as part of her after-the-kidnapping plan because she would have to, at some point, explain to her husband, Kevin, that she’d given birth to their child. She couldn’t just show up at home with her. He would wonder: Why didn’t you call from the hospital?

  She had to prepare a story explaining the birth. Kevin and two of her own children would play roles in the scenario she planned.

  21

  Beyond trying to cut through the red tape of getting an Amber Alert issued, Sheriff Ben Espey had several other problems as the critical hours after the murder ticked away. Most important, he had to rally several different law enforcement agencies and undertake the daunting task of knocking on doors in Skidmore, with the hope of gathering as much information as he could about the last minutes of Bobbie Jo’s life.

  While Espey was in the investigation room in the basement of the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department, filling his blackboard with information, a lead came in that seemed, at least on the surface, extremely promising. The first twenty-four to forty-eight hours of any investigation are vital to solving the case. With an infant born prematurely—and under the most inhumane circumstances imaginable—time becomes your biggest opponent. Espey hoped someone in the neighborhood had seen something, anything. The murderer was, likely, covered with blood—maybe the baby, too. There was also an indication the murderer had blond hair. Crime-scene technicians had uncovered several strands of blond hair from both of Bobbie Jo’s hands.

  Then a call came into the sheriff’s department regarding a resident at a nearby nursing home who supposedly had been involved in selling black-market babies for $6,000 each. Espey sent two deputies to fetch the man. When they got him back to the department, however, they realized immediately that getting anything out of him was going to be almost impossible, or at least a long, tedious process that would eat up crucial hours they didn’t have to spare.

  “The guy was a deaf mute. I had to sit,” explained Espey, “and write out all of my questions to him. We spent all night trying to get things out of him.”

  While that was happening, Espey had to brief the media, who were clamoring for a story. He stepped out from the basement of the department and held a short press conference in the back parking lot of the station.

  “Someone was wanting a baby awful bad,” Espey said. “The victim was killed no more than an hour before she was found. She may have struggled with her killer…. Blondhair was found in her hands.”

  Reporters shot questions at Espey in rapid-fire succession. He could give out only certain information. The investigation was ongoing. A killer was at large. A baby was missing. Compromising the investigation at such an early stage by giving out the wrong information was something Espey didn’t want to do. “There were no visible signs of forced entry into the home,” added Espey when pressed.

  Reaffirming that the investigation was multipronged, Espey commended the many different law enforcement agencies helping out, “all over northwestern Missouri,” including the St. Joseph Police Department (PD) nearby, which had sent in a CSI team. “They are very well-trained…and very good.”

  Espey made it clear Bobbie Jo’s husband, Zeb, was no longer considered a suspect, because he had an alibi: he was working at Kawasaki Motors when the murder occurred and had several witnesses to confirm his whereabouts.

  Eight FBI agents were sent to the region and became part of the task force. A murder committed in the course of a kidnapping was a federal crime, especially with a suspect possibly crossing state lines.

  As Espey saw it, the FBI’s presence early on was a godsend—specifically two agents who arrived hours after the murder.

  Outside the department, on the street, Espey was still briefing reporters. “The doctors who examined Bobbie Jo gave us information indicating we probably would have a live child if we could find her….”

  As twilight turned the Missouri sky as black as the ocean floor, police in Atchison County, Missouri, radioed in a report of sighting a “red car.” They were in pursuit of it.

  Could it be?

  But as cops tailed the car, they couldn’t get a good bead on the driver. As they approached the car to get a closer look, the driver turned off the headlights and, racing along the back roads of northwestern Missouri, took a turn into the woods alongside the main road. Within minutes, it vanished.

  A glimmer of hope for Bobbie Jo’s family was gone as quickly as it came in. It would be the beginning of a long night of highs and lows for Ben Espey, as varying reports flooded the system.

  “That red car in Atchison
County,” said Espey, “that wasn’t our car. I knew it right away.” He could feel it, he said.

  Espey had his own hunch about the case he was about to follow through on—a gut feeling that, in the end, would help solve the case.

  22

  Police in Topeka had the description Espey sent out via teletype and were combing the region for a “red, dirty car with an H on the hood.”

  Lisa Montgomery worked her way through busy downtown Topeka, weaving in and out of traffic. By this point, anyone with a television set or radio knew what had happened in Skidmore. A woman with a newborn, a baby possibly bloodied and hurt, likely purplish in color, would stand out. Yet beyond escaping capture, Lisa soon had to face her husband and explain how she’d given birth to their child without letting him know she’d even gone into labor. Certainly he’d have questions.

  While driving through a seedy section of town, filled with dingy bars, Laundromats, and check-cashing stores, Lisa drove past the Birth and Women’s Center on SW Sixth Avenue and slowed her car. She saw the Birth and Women’s Center sign written in white paint on the blue tarp overhanging the doorway. Directly across the street was a Long John Silver’s fast-food restaurant.

  Although Sixth Avenue was a busy thoroughfare, with people departing work and heading home, Long John Silver’s appeared empty.

  She could pull into the parking lot and, using her cell phone, call home.

  23

  As Ben Espey continued to push the MSHP to issue an Amber Alert, he was learning more about Bobbie Jo’s murder. The ligature marks on her throat, doctors indicated, proved “she had been strangled from behind.” Also, many of the postmortem tests conducted on Bobbie Jo’s body pointed toward Espey’s earlier assumption of her being “…dead at the house.”

  These corroborations were significant for several reasons. The fact that the Stinnett home had shown no signs of forced entry seemed to indicate that, although Bobbie Jo might not have known her killer, she trusted her enough to turn her back to her. In addition, it appeared that whoever had extracted the child knew what she was doing. The Cesarean section—if what was done could be called that—had to be carried out quickly, or the child could suffer permanent damage. With the results from the hospital, Espey knew for certain the baby, not Bobbie Jo, was the target of the attack.

  Ben Espey hoped for helpful information from one other piece of evidence taken from the crime scene by St. Joseph PD CSI technicians: Bobbie Jo’s computer. It was being examined as Espey continued to run the investigation from the basement of his office.

  Today, more than any other time in law enforcement history, electronics—cell phones, iPods, laptops and personal computers—are among the first pieces of evidence collected at crime scenes. Most electrical devices contain information that can lead to arrests, and—as Ben Espey was about to learn—the Bobbie Jo Stinnett murder case would be no exception.

  With two children of his own, two grandchildren, cousins, and kids around him his entire life, Sheriff Ben Espey was fighting exhaustion, fatigue, fear of not finding the baby in time, and concerns about what might have happened to the child. But, as the evening hours wore on, the bureaucracy involved in issuing the Amber Alert ate at him most.

  Finding Bobbie Jo’s child was more than just a job for Espey. He was a family man. He raised horses and cattle, farmed hundreds of acres. But the most pleasurable part of his life, he explained, was just being around his family, which included a new grandchild. His wife worked up the street from his office. On most days, they ate lunch together; took long walks, hand in hand, on his property; and rode horseback. (“The best friend I ever had,” he recalled.) Espey felt lucky. Grateful. He had what Zeb Stinnett would never have. Yet he could give back to Zeb the one thing that might help the man get through the toughest days of his life ahead.

  His infant daughter.

  Each time he explained to the higher-ups why issuing the Amber Alert was probably one of the only chances they had of finding her alive, his pleas were met with a resounding no. Although many agreed with Espey’s stance, no one, it seemed, wanted to stick his or her neck out to make it happen. There just wasn’t enough information to send out the alert, Espey was told again and again. An Amber Alert could not be issued for a “fetus.”

  24

  Kevin Montgomery arrived home from work at 5:15 P.M. He had already arranged to take off the following day, a Friday. “Kevin had taken that day off from work so he could go to the hospital with Lisa,” a family member later confirmed. “Lisa had told him she was going to have her baby on that Thursday or Friday, so he put in for the day off.” Kevin was becoming a bit unnerved by the entire situation. Too many times Lisa had taken him with her en route to a doctor’s appointment, only to come up with an excuse along the way and send him back home. Every prenatal appointment Kevin and Lisa had planned on going to together failed to happen. Lisa would always instigate a fight so she could blow off the appointment at Kevin’s expense. Kevin wasn’t going to let that happen on Friday, he had said earlier in the week. He had gotten the day off and told Lisa there was no way she could stop him from going with her.

  Kevin had short brown hair dusted with a tinge of gray, a thick goatee he kept well-groomed, and brown eyes. Kevin had been a self-proclaimed electrician his entire adult life, one source claimed. He and Lisa were married during the spring of 2000, about a year and a half after Lisa divorced Carl Boman for a second time. Kevin, too, had been divorced, and, like Lisa, had brought children from his first marriage into the new union. “Kevin was the type of guy whose mother, right up until the time he left high school,” said someone who knew Lisa and Kevin for years, “still laid all his clothes out every morning.”

  The house Kevin and Lisa lived in on South Adams Road in Melvern, Kansas, was a modest farmhouse, big in structure and space, like many a Midwestern prairie home. Kevin and Lisa, many said, were attracted to the 1800s-era lifestyle made famous by the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Mike Wheatley, Kevin and Lisa’s pastor, said Kevin’s parents had been members of the church for over thirty years. So Kevin had strong, firmly planted roots in the Christian community of Melvern. With fewer than 450 people in the town, everyone knew Kevin, and no one had a bad word to say about him.

  When Kevin got home on the evening of December 16, he wasn’t shocked to find Lisa was still out. Although she didn’t leave the house much, she had explained to him the previous night that she was getting up early that day to go shopping in Topeka for baby clothes and a Christmas present for Kayla. Kevin thought the trip out of the house would do her some good.

  Around 5:30 P.M., Lisa called. She was in the parking lot, she said, of the Long John Silver’s restaurant in downtown Topeka. It just so happened the restaurant was across the street from the Birth and Women’s Center on SW Sixth Avenue.

  “My water broke and I went into labor and had the baby,” Lisa said.

  “What?”

  “I delivered the baby. I’m on my way home right now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Long John Silver’s in Topeka.”

  “I’m coming to get you,” Kevin said.

  “No, I’ll drive home. I’m okay.”

  “No,” Kevin said. “Me and the kids will come and get you. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Lisa’s fifteen-year-old son, Ryan*, was home at the time with Kevin. Soon after Lisa called, Rebecca walked through the door.

  “Damn it,” Kevin said to the kids after hanging up.

  “He was a bit mad,” Ryan recalled, “that Mom had the baby.”

  Grabbing the two children, Kevin hopped into his pickup truck and hit the road en route to meet Lisa and his daughter in Topeka.

  It was time to celebrate. After all the talk of Lisa’s being pregnant and having one miscarriage after another, year after year, it seemed she had finally given birth to a child.

  25

  Heading northbound on U.S. 75 from Melvern, Topeka was a forty-minute drive. The plan was for Rebecca and
Ryan to drive Lisa’s Toyota back to Melvern, while Lisa, Kevin, and the baby followed in Kevin’s pickup. Kevin was excited. He was a father again. After so many complications and failed attempts at having a child over the past four years, here it was: time to hand out the cigars.

  It’s a girl!

  When Kevin, Rebecca, and Ryan pulled into the parking lot of Long John Silver’s, Lisa was sitting in her car, a baby in her arms.

  “When we got up there, Mom was in the car with the baby,” Ryan said later. “We had the truck. If I felt anything, it was happiness, but it wasn’t very strong. Kevin was happy. Very happy.”

  Lisa got out and stepped toward Kevin’s truck. “Get her things,” Kevin said to one of the kids as he took Lisa by the arm. “You okay?” he asked her.

  She moaned and put her hands around her stomach. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to still be in the hospital?” Rebecca asked. Rebecca had taken parenting classes in school. She knew about the birthing process and the recovery time involved.

  Lisa continued holding herself, acting as if she were in serious pain.

  “Why aren’t you still in bed, Mother?” Rebecca continued. Rebecca, like her younger sister Kayla, spoke fast: her words ran all together and came out quickly. Whether she was talking to her mother or anyone else, she was hard to follow at times. “My theory,” she said later, “is that, because Mom was always reading a book or on the computer, growing up we had very little time to talk to her. You had to talk fast to get out what you wanted to say to her.”