Baby Be Mine (3 page)

Soon, people began to talk. The Nodaway County grapevine bore putrid fruit—a truth no one could keep to themselves and yet could hardly speak: Bobbie Jo Stinnett was dead. She was murdered. Her baby could not be found. In Skidmore, speculation fueled rumors and suspicion. They prayed that the killer was not one of their own. They prayed that the newborn baby survived its ordeals. Their voices rose and crowded the pathway to heaven.

Cheryl Huston, Becky Harper's close friend from high school, left her job at Wal-Mart at the end of her shift. On her way out, one of the door greeters stopped her to tell her about the horrible news coming from Skidmore that day. The greeter, however, did not know the victim's name.

As Cheryl drove home, she ran a mental list of all of the pregnant women she knew in town. Only one matched the age of the victim. Only one was eight months pregnant. The only one was her good friend's daughter, Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Her worst fears were confirmed when she drove past Elm Street—official vehicles, flashing lights and yellow crime-scene tape marked the spot.

She never knew a mother and daughter with a closer relationship than the one between Becky and Bobbie Jo. Her heart ached for the burden Becky now carried.

The word spread to the local media and they descended on the crime scene. Espey sealed off the dead-end block to keep them at bay.

An hour and a half into the investigation, the sheriff contacted the state headquarters of the Amber Alert system in Jefferson City. They asked for the hair color, eye color, skin
complexion, size and weight of the abduction victim. Espey had no answers. Officials denied his request.

They insisted there was nothing they could do. An Amber Alert had to meet specific criteria. This case did not meet the established standards to issue this public notices-he had no description of the kidnapped child.

Only one person did have that information—the one who abducted Bobbie Jo's baby. With every moment, Espey sensed that person slipping further and further from his grasp.

At the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children outside of Washington, D.C., word of the abduction hit the desk of Cathy Nahirny and she got busy. She pulled information from similar cases. She gathered contact information for the investigators who'd handled the most recent caesarean abduction in Oklahoma one year earlier.

Once she pulled it all together, she turned it over to John Rabun, who forwarded the data on to law enforcement in Missouri. They wanted investigators to know the profile of this kind of offender—to realize that they were not looking for a typical criminal. They wanted the detectives to know they were not alone—an identical crime occurred just two states away twelve months earlier. They wanted them to be able to avail themselves of the knowledge of those law enforcement agencies and not waste time following up on leads that were destined to be unproductive. Cathy and John knew knowledge was power and they wanted the investigators to have all the power they could get to bring this infant home.

The sheriff raced to the hospital and talked to the medical staff, who assured him that the baby was probably still alive. But, they continued, the infant was premature, may have suffered a variety of traumas during the assault—including the possibility of a lack of oxygen—and, thus, had special medical needs. “The newborn will survive if treated. You need to find that baby immediately,” they warned.

Espey didn't need to be told that this was the most pivotal, time-sensitive moment of his career. He knew he needed the help of the public. He knew the Amber Alert would generate thousands of vigilant eyes that would help track down the kidnapper and the baby. His request might not meet the criteria, but he was determined to shove his square peg of information into the neat round hole of the system. The authorities' stubborn refusal could not—would not—stand.

He called the home of United States Representative Sam Graves. The elected official was a quick study. He understood at once the necessity for cutting through the red tape and regulations—a child's life was at stake.

It was not just the infant's survival at issue here. Every passing moment gave the murderous abductor time to travel further from the scene of the crime—perhaps far enough to obscure the wrongdoing, hide the baby's identity and separate the infant from its real family for life. Bureaucratic process could not be allowed to aid and abet the kidnapper in achieving this goal.

Representative Graves had a secret weapon. Not only was he the congressman for the district, with a certain amount of power in his own right, he was also the brother of United States Attorney Todd Graves in Kansas City, Missouri. Sam had a lot of strings he could pull, and he jerked hard.

Sheriff Espey's call for assistance at the crime scene put a lot of law enforcement specialists in motion. The first to head toward Skidmore was Sergeant Dave Merrill of the Missouri Highway Patrol.

En route, Merrill called Commander Larry Smith at the St. Joseph's Police Department. St. Joseph was the biggest city in Missouri north of Kansas City. It had a population of 75,000. It was the town where the Pony Express began and Jesse James' notorious life came to an end, and on the trail followed by Lewis and Clark.

Heavy in history but progressive in technology, the police department's investigative and forensic officers were the best
for miles. Their department's high-tech crime-scene specialists responded to the requests of a number of area counties throughout Northwest Missouri.

After running the out-of-jurisdiction request by Police Chief Mike Hirter, Smith pulled together a team of two investigators and five evidence techs. Then, they put their mobile command post on the road. This twenty-foot-long converted recreational vehicle was equipped with five computerized work stations, an eight-person conference center, a satellite, generator, decontamination shower and a bathroom. It was an invaluable tool at any crime scene. In addition to providing an efficient work space and a secure area for discussion among officers, it was also a retreat where detectives and techs could take a break to refocus and revitalize.

Missouri State Highway Patrol vehicles from around the region congregated in the area around Skidmore. Those officers and Sheriff Espey and his deputies instituted a rigorous search for a small newborn bundle of humanity. They peered in every Dumpster—diving into any whose contents raised the slightest suspicion.

Their eyes scoured roadsides checking out any discarded trash of promising size. At every bridge, they paused to examine the creek beds, streams and riverbanks searching for anything that resembled a baby thrown over the side. At the same time, they kept a keen eye on all the passing traffic, desperate to spot any vehicle approximating the description of the car seen earlier in front of the Stinnett home.

A ticking clock pounded out its beat in every officer's head. Every minute counted. Every passing hour was cause for dread. Desperation fueled their search and their hearts as they searched for a baby they hoped was still alive, but feared was dead. They went door to door canvassing the area in a four-block radius of the Stinnett home.

Investigator Mike Wilson of the detective division was the first member of the St. Joseph Police Department to enter the home at 410 Elm Street. He crossed the front porch and
opened the door. Neither the jambs nor the lock displayed any of the telltale signs of forced entry. He stepped into the living room. His eyes scanned over a television, a sofa and an easy chair, looking for anything amiss. Not a single item was out of order. Not one surface was dulled with dust.

In the dining room, the reign of order continued. No signs of any altercation. He spotted a computer next to the wall and made a mental note of its presence.

That room led to the kitchen where the first signs of violence caught his eye. Someone attempted to clean up in the blood-spattered sink. Had the perpetrator paused there and washed his hands? He stored that question in his mind, knowing he needed to find an answer to it before he left the house.

Off to the left of the dining room was a converted bedroom. It was there that the reason for his presence was obvious. The evidence of a struggle was written in red all over the floor.

The victim's body was no longer in place, but the evidence of her life and her fight to maintain it were painted in the blood at his feet. Knowing that the person who died there was a young pregnant woman made his stomach flip.

Wilson sent the crime-scene experts in to recover any type of prints, all stray fibers and every microscopic bit of evidence they could find. Every doorframe, door knob, or table surface, and the counter around the kitchen sink was dusted with black powder. The patterns revealed were lifted in the hope that one would be evidence of a killer who left his mark.

Any place a clothing fiber snagged, tweezers plucked and bagged the thread. Any little thing that betrayed the passage of a human being was gathered, stored and documented.

The blatant and obvious would not be ignored either. The blood on the floor was examined, photographed and analyzed. Samples were taken to determine if all of it was the victim's blood or if the red mass included drops from the attacker or from the infant.

Once Sergeant Wilson finished the orchestration of his team of techs, he turned his attention back to the computer in the kitchen. He placed a call to St. Joseph's forensic computer specialist Curtis Howard. Howard worked on the strike force and in street crimes for three years before moving into computer forensics in 1996. He got additional training every year at the National White Collar Crime Center facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. Now his skills were needed to unravel clues in a far more grisly case.

Wilson asked Howard to come to Skidmore right away and bring his mobile forensics recovery device. The Patriot Act made the investigative process flow far more smoothly. Before that legislation, it would have been necessary to appear before a judge and get a computer-specific search warrant before violating the privacy of the device. Since no one with ownership of the computer—Bobbie Jo or Zeb—were considered suspects, law enforcement could move forward without hesitation or legal complication.

Howard gathered his equipment and headed north—arriving on the scene an hour after receiving the call. He moved the computer from the dining room and out of the crowded house to the relative peace and quiet of the command center parked on the street. He positioned the computer at a work station, plugged it in and booted it up. He knew he would need to image the hard drive—but he also knew the task could take up to six hours. They may not have that much time to locate the infant alive.

That thought struck Howard with a visceral dread. His baby girl Reece was born only a few months earlier this year. Irrational worry about his baby rushed to the front of his mind. He pushed his anxiety away and focused on the job at hand.

He locked down the hard drive and previewed the contents. He doubted he'd find any direct leads, but he had to try. Computer hard drives often yielded unexpected secrets.

At first, it all appeared to be just a normal household PC with ordinary activity. But when he explored chat room use, a clear clue erupted from the idle banter: a mention of a woman,
north of Fairfax, Missouri, who was supposed to meet that day with Bobbie Jo.

He typed in a keyword search for “Fairfax.” An Internet conversation between [email protected], xgringo @hotmail.com and [email protected] popped up. The Happy Haven Farms address belonged to Bobbie Jo Stinnett. The Fischer 4 Kids address belonged to a woman self-identified as Darlene Fischer. This woman talked about her four kids, her need to get out of the chat room and into the kitchen to make supper for her children. And she chatted about her plans to drop by the Stinnett house to see Bobbie Jo's puppies the next day—today, December 16, 2004.

The possibility of a dark double meaning to the Fischer 4 Kids address did not cross Detective Howard's thoughts. All he envisioned was a woman who'd planned to come to Bobbie Jo's home on the same day that she was murdered. A woman who may have seen something relevant during her visit—she may have observed the perpetrator without knowing it. He knew they needed to talk to that woman immediately.

Espey, Merrill and every available highway patrol officer in the vicinity headed to Fairfax in neighboring Atchison County. No matter how hard they searched, they could find no record of Darlene Fischer in the area—no phone number, no address, no indication that she'd ever lived anywhere near the town. Still they persevered—looking, questioning, prodding the community's memory. The name did not sound familiar to anyone they encountered—not to law enforcement or the public at large. They had to find this woman. And they had to find her now. They radiated out from the town center probing memories along the way.

Around midnight, they thought they caught a break. Highway patrol encountered a car going at high speed in Atchison County just twenty-two miles from Skidmore. It matched the description of the vehicle seen in front of the Stinnett house early that afternoon. Sheriff Espey abandoned his futile search for Darlene Fischer and joined in the pursuit. As they
streaked through the night at dangerous speeds, they feared their target would lose control of the fleeing car, causing it to wreck. Bobbie Jo's baby could be in that car—and the infant could still be alive. If they could effect a stop without harming anyone inside, they might be able to rescue the child tonight.

It was more than a professional objective for Espey. Just six days before, his daughter Jennifer gave birth to his grandson, Benjamin Wyatt. It took little use of his imaginative powers to conjure up a parallel between Bobbie Jo and Jennifer in his mind—to imagine little Benjamin Wyatt as the missing child. He visualized the possibility that it could have been his daughter in a pool of blood—it could have been his grandson fleeing with a madman through the darkness of the night. He fought the rising edge of desperation as he pursued the speeding car he had in his sights.