Murder in the Heartland (6 page)

B
ecky Harper started walking to her daughter’s house sometime around 3:18
P.M
., after she tried calling Bobbie Jo a few more times, but got no answer. Since Bobbie Jo had not shown up at Harper’s place of work to pick her up, she decided to walk to West Elm Street and see what was going on.

A mother’s instinct.

“I keep thinking,” Harper later told a reporter, “I wish I had gone over there earlier.”

When Harper arrived, Bobbie Jo’s door was wide open. That was strange, since those unseasonably warm temperatures that had moved in during the early-afternoon hours had given way to the low thirties by late afternoon. There was also a slight southerly wind curling up around the fields south of town, kicking the mercury down a notch further.

Why was the door open?

“Bobbie?”

No answer.

“Bobbie,” Harper said, walking in. “Honey, you here?”

The porch swing Bobbie Jo and Zeb had hanging from the ceiling of the overhead porch was rattling a bit in the wind. It was spooky. Bad karma was in the air. Something was obviously wrong.

At 3:26
P.M
., Becky Harper entered the room in which the horribly bloodied body of her daughter lay. Bobbie Jo’s arms were folded up over her chest; her face was covered with blood.

Although quite unnerved by what she was looking at, Harper reacted immediately, reaching for her cell phone to call the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department in Maryville.

Speaking to the 911 dispatcher, Harper was frantic and struggled to find the right words. It couldn’t be real. It had to be some sort prank, some inconsiderate joke that didn’t make any sense.

“My baby is dead!” Harper screamed into the phone at 3:28
P.M
., her voice raw with agony. “My baby…she’s lying in a pool of blood.”

“Ma’am, please tell us what happened,” said dispatcher Lindsey Steins with as much composure as she could manage. “Please try to remain calm and give me an address.”

Ben Espey, the county sheriff, was sitting in his office ten feet away when he heard the call come in. He walked toward Steins’s desk, which was flanked by three computer screens, a switchboard, and several two-way radios. It was located in a dark area of the sheriff’s department, in front of a line of jail cells. As Steins and dispatcher Melissa Wallace sat wearing headsets and typed on a keyboard, their work area resembled some sort of Bat Cave setting.

“It’s my…my daughter…It appears as though her stomach is exposed.”

Stomach exposed?
thought Espey, looking at Steins.

As Steins and Wallace, who was now listening in, typed, Espey stood over their shoulders and read the computer screen, realizing there was a “major problem” in Skidmore.

“Hey,” yelled Espey to one of his deputies.

“Yes, sir?”

“Radio my lieutenant investigator now and tell him to meet me in Skidmore ASAP. Give him the address.”

Harper was delirious by this time. Bobbie Jo was sprawled on the floor, blood all over the room, a large pool of it underneath her lifeless body.

What is going on?

Even more disturbing to Harper was that Bobbie Jo’s midsection was flat.

“It looks like her stomach exploded!” screamed Harper, in tears.

W
ithin eleven minutes of the 911 call, Nodaway County sheriff Ben Espey arrived in Skidmore, one of his chief investigators not far behind. Espey was contemplating several different scenarios. “It looks like her stomach exploded” kept playing back in his mind.
What went on inside that house?

“Nobody here could ever conceive of this taking place,” said Espey. “It’s inconceivable.”

With sixteen towns in Nodaway County, housing some twenty-three thousand people in about five thousand households, the county seat is located in Maryville, a family-oriented town held together by strong bonds of community. Petit larcenies and drug-related felonies largely account for the majority of Nodaway County’s criminal activities. In the twelve years Ben Espey had been sheriff, he responded to six murders, all of which he and his deputies, with help from other agencies, solved within a twenty-four-hour period.

Maryville and its surrounding counties are farming country, semiflat land amid rolling short hills spread out far and wide. People watch one another’s backs and try to keep their communities as safe as they can. A crime such as the one just called into the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department on the afternoon of December 16 was beyond comprehension. As Sheriff Espey drove to Skidmore, he could see Christmas ornaments up all over the county. Inflatable Santa Clauses perched in front yards along the roadside, with plastic reindeer and tinsel dressed on pine trees throughout town greens. Churches were planning food drives and Secret Santa programs, midnight services and holiday celebrations. Houses were decked with colored lights and fake snow.

When Espey arrived at Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s house, he ran into the den, where Becky Harper, crying desperately while pleading for help, was trying, she believed, to keep Bobbie Jo alive by administering CPR. One of Espey’s 911 dispatchers, Melissa Wallace, had instructed Harper over the phone on how to do CPR properly.

“Does she have a pulse?” Melissa asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is she breathing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you how to do CPR. Have you ever done CPR?”

When Espey first looked at Bobbie Jo, he could tell “immediately,” he said, it was too late. “I took a pulse and there was no life.”

“Give me your cell phone,” Espey told Harper. It was covered with Bobbie Jo’s blood, dripping as Espey told his dispatcher, “I’m here…. I’ll continue the CPR.”

Despite the horror of the scene, Harper kept her composure and focused, she thought, on trying to keep Bobbie Jo alive.

“It was a pretty gruesome sight,” Espey commented. One of the worst he had seen in his two decades of law enforcement experience.

Since Harper had started CPR, by law Espey had to continue.

“Step aside, ma’am,” he said as calmly as he could after folding Harper’s cell phone and throwing it out of the room. “Go get me a wet washcloth and bring it back.”

Bobbie Jo’s face was covered with blood, her mouth full of it. “I needed the cloth to wipe off all the blood.”

“My daughter’s eight months pregnant,” Harper cried at one point.

Espey looked down.
Her stomach’s flat
.
Pregnant?
Her words made no sense to him.

Within five minutes, medics came into the room and took over. As the medics responded, Espey began to think about what could have happened.

“She’s eight months pregnant,” Harper said again. “She’s pregnant!”

For Espey, a seasoned cop who had thought he’d seen everything, what Harper was telling him sounded implausible.
Pregnant? What? Where is the child? There’s no bulge in her stomach.

As Espey began to assess the situation, a paramedic pulled him aside so Harper couldn’t hear the exchange.

“The baby was cut out,” the paramedic said softly. “The umbilical cord,” he noted, “has been cut. Look,” he added, pointing to Bobbie Jo, “there it is.” He paused to allow the implications to sink in. Then he spelled them out. “The baby’s gone, Sheriff.”

Later, Espey said, “I would have never thought it possible.”

Espey told two of his deputies, who had since arrived, to “seal off the house. Do
not
let anybody in.” After photographs were taken, Bobbie Jo was placed on a body board and taken outside.

What happened here?

With his mind racing, neighbors and townsfolk congregating around the scene, Espey ran out of the house searching for one of his deputies.

“We gotta baby missing. We gotta try and find us a baby,” he said.

S
heriff Ben Espey’s reputation had come under fire recently, during what had turned into a heated reelection campaign for a chance at serving as Nodaway County’s sheriff. During a debate in late September 2004, Espey, a proud Republican, spoke openly about his experience running the department. He had been in office almost twelve years, and during one election earlier in his career, he had run an unopposed campaign for the first time in sixty years of elections in the county.

The voters of Nodaway County adored Ben Espey. This last election, however, had turned into an old-fashioned Red-and-Blue fight for office with nastiness emerging from both sides. Still, with the race for office the closest in which he’d ever been involved, Espey didn’t jump in and start playing politics. He hit the streets and lobbied for votes the same way he had every other election: “The community,” he told voters, “should always come first.

“When you arrest somebody’s spouse or kid,” Espey said along the campaign trail, “some of the people aren’t going to be happy with what you do.”

Espey worried about the close contact between community members and deputies. One of the rules in his office had always been that his deputies were not allowed to drink in the local bars. “If you want to drink,” Espey told them, “drink at home.”

The grapevine was always a setback to living in a small town. Arresting someone you went to school with, or bowled with, or ran into every day at the general store or service station, didn’t always sit well down at the Legion Hall, PTA, or neighborhood gin mill. But Espey was strict. It didn’t matter who you were; if you broke the law, you were going to face the consequences. If his deputies were sitting there having drinks with people they might have to arrest at some point, it could lead to problems.

The sheriff’s department needed to, Espey said, “do what was right” and “do it in a professional manner.” He didn’t think his opponent could achieve those tasks the way he could. It wasn’t that his opponent was a bad person; Espey was just confident he could do a better job for the community because he had been in office so long and knew the people he served.

Throughout the campaign, “community first” became Espey’s mantra. He had little patience for slackers and bureaucrats who wanted to milk the system. He was committed to giving the community the best law enforcement he could offer.

His opponent saw Espey’s last few terms in office differently, and called for “new blood” in the position. During a debate, Rick Smail, who had made a few critical comments regarding Espey’s ability to keep a tight grip on the department, claimed that Espey and his office did not respond to what Smail saw as “less serious calls” in a timely fashion, or sometimes not at all.

Standing at the podium, Espey hammered back by saying how hard it was to respond to
every
single call with only one full-time deputy on staff. Drastic measures called for drastic means, and Espey emphasized that he was fully prepared to lead the charge and meet the demands and needs of the community, regardless of what his opponent had to say about the way he commanded the ship—or, more to the point, how he handled 911 calls.

“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.”