Murder in the Heartland (9 page)

A
lthough Lisa’s second oldest daughter,
Alicia
^*
, hadn’t been there when Kevin and Lisa arrived home with Rebecca, Ryan, and the baby, one of the kids called her at work and shared the good news with her. Alicia wanted to rush home “to see the baby,” but had to wait until the end of her shift. “She was all excited,” a family member recalled. “Really looking forward to holding the baby and sharing in her mother’s happiness.”

When they got settled at home, Lisa dressed the child in a cute little white T-shirt with pink lettering:
I’M THE LITTLE SISTER
.

“It was very busy that night because Kevin was so proud and he wanted to tell his family,” Ryan said later.

So while Lisa marveled at the child, with Rebecca and Ryan by her side, passing her around, playing with her, holding her, showing her the nursery she had spent weeks converting from an old bedroom, Kevin called family members with the good news:
It’s a girl
.

Lisa then called her aunt. While she was brimming on the phone with excitement, describing the child’s features (“How cute is she? Beautiful little girl, huh?”), Kevin’s aunts, uncles, mother, and father showed up to share in the celebration.

Later on, Ryan called Kayla in Georgia. Like Kayla, Ryan was puzzled over the events of the past few hours.

“Kayla, how many people are in our family?” Ryan asked. His tone was stoic, as if he
knew
the answer, but wanted someone else to clarify it for him.

“I don’t know,” Kayla said. She was even more mystified now than she had been throughout her mother’s last failed pregnancy. “
What
are you talking about?”

“Well…we have a new addition, you know.”

“What?”

After that brief conversation, Kayla questioned Alicia, who had just gotten home from work. Kayla believed Alicia would know more about the child than anyone else.

“What time was the baby born?” Kayla asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How much did she weigh?”

“Not sure.”

“How long is she?”

Alicia didn’t know. In fact, when Kayla asked the same set of questions later that night and the next day, Ryan and Rebecca didn’t have any of the answers.

“Where was she born?”

“I have no idea.”

“That, in and of itself,” recalled Kayla, “gave me a bad feeling. I told Auntie M I thought it was weird that they couldn’t answer any of my questions.”

Lisa remained calm throughout the evening. When she complained about pains in her stomach from the delivery, family members gathered around and comforted her. Kevin was seriously concerned about his wife and the pain she was experiencing and did everything he could to comfort her.

“You okay, Lisa?”

“I’m fine,” Lisa said. “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”

For the infant’s first night, Lisa put her to sleep downstairs. “It was warmer than it was upstairs.” The baby cried only once, Rebecca recalled; otherwise, mom and baby slept soundly through the entire night.

W
ith everything else going on, Nodaway County sheriff Ben Espey was now contending with a public relations person from the FBI poking his nose into an investigation Espey believed he had well under control. The PR man’s insistence on taking over and running the investigation turned Espey inside out.

Espey wasn’t some hayseed local sheriff who could be pushed around; he was a consummate professional, soft-spoken and generally tranquil—the type of person who never showed his frustration or anger in a public setting. He acted on his instincts and moved forward despite opposition, doing, Espey noted, exactly what he thought Victoria Jo needed at the time.

By the middle of the night, the case was becoming overwhelming—not the investigative end of it (Espey could handle that), but his obligation to the press. Every hour, it seemed, Espey was sending out a news release.

Frustrated, he told a colleague, “If they won’t issue an Amber Alert, I’ll use the press in place of it.”

Finding someone from the media wouldn’t be difficult. Looking up the block from his office, Espey could see scores of satellite TV trucks camped in downtown Maryville, lighting up Main Street like a football stadium on game night. Espey had obtained the full cooperation of Sheldon Lyons, the MSHP’s public relations official, who assured him the MSHP would do everything in its power to help him, especially where the press was concerned.

“That was a lot off of my shoulders,” remembered Espey. “After I thought about it, I realized I needed the press to help me find the child.”

There was still no Amber Alert. Its absence became the broken spoke in the wheel of justice during those crucial first hours. The sheriff continued to push for it, but was repeatedly told no.

The FBI’s public relations agent from Washington, DC, soon explained to Espey and Lyons that they “weren’t doing this right.” His arrival included an incident with Espey’s dispatcher. He had walked into the foyer of the sheriff’s department, a four-by-eight-foot white tiled room, with vanilla-painted concrete blocks for walls, a door into the office and holding-cell area to the west, and a Plexiglas booth to the north, where the dispatcher spoke through a talkbox to anyone who entered.

Espey’s dispatcher looked up as the FBI agent opened the door, took off his sunglasses and black leather gloves, and approached the window. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m with the FBI. This is
my
case. I’m taking over,” said the man, flashing his badge. Espey stepped out of his office.

Quite outspoken and dedicated to her boss, Espey’s dispatcher looked at the G-man, bowed her head, and said contentiously, “Yeah, and I’m Daffy Duck.”

Nevertheless, before long, the same PR man made his way into Espey’s office and assumed part of the investigation, dictating who was in charge of what and whom, seeming to ignore Espey completely.

The bottom line for Espey was finding the child. A conflict with a member of the FBI held no interest for him. Espey wanted to find the missing child, and nothing else really mattered.

Espey finally told the intruder to get the hell out of his office as he slammed the door on his back. Then, he recalled, “I focused on finding the baby.”

Espey realized that, in order to get the child back, he might have to allow the PR man into the investigation on some level. Perhaps he
could
help. Putting the well-being of the child first, Espey wasn’t about to refuse more federal help. In truth, Espey was glad to have it—as long as the federal agents didn’t get in the way of what he was doing.

“But,” Espey told another agent, who had since arrived, “you get rid of that little public relations guy, or I’ll have him escorted out of the county.” Espey meant what he said. He didn’t speak often in anger. But when he did, his words commanded attention.

“This FBI guy,” said another law enforcement official, “came in there and got in Ben’s face. It was like he had just watched a movie,
Die Hard
or something, and was trying to be the quintessential FBI agent. The FBI is
not
like that.”

“We got along real good after he left,” explained Espey. “The guys that I worked with in the FBI, Kurt Lipanovich and Mickey Roberts, were just great. The best. I liked them a lot. The problem was that little press guy who wanted to come in and tell everybody what to do. He was probably told to do that from Washington, but I didn’t want it. Not in my town.”

Espey’s problems with the FBI, however, wouldn’t end there.

O
ne of the most important investigative strategies Ben Espey initiated right away was to involve as many law enforcement agencies as possible, mainly the Missouri Major Case Squad, the MSHP, and a team of crime-scene investigators from the St. Joseph PD.

For Espey, though, every decision he made early on was based solely on the well-being of the child. The murder could be solved in due course—he was certain of that. But the baby could still be alive. She had to come first, whether anyone agreed with him or not.

With frustration building over seeing his Amber Alert requests repeatedly turned down, as it got later in the evening, Espey realized he was fighting the clock, now more than ever. He decided to turn to an old friend, Missouri congressman Sam Graves, who was nearing the end of his second term in office and planning a run for a third.

Espey had known Graves for twelve years. He’d even campaigned with him on the Republican ticket a few times, walking the streets together, waving in parades, knocking on doors, handing out buttons and bumper stickers. Graves came from a family rooted in law enforcement; his brother, Todd, had been a U.S. attorney for a number of years. Moreover, Sam supported local law enforcement and was considered an advocate of the sheriff’s offices serving his constituency. A lifelong resident of Missouri’s sixth Congressional District, he was popular among the people of Missouri because, some said, he “is one of them,” having been a small businessman and a sixth-generation farmer himself. His congressional biography states that Graves, a father of three, “spent his life working to make Missouri a better place to live, work, and raise a family.” Besides all that, Bobbie Jo’s murder had hit home for Graves: he lived about thirty miles outside Skidmore. Bobbie Jo was like one of his own, Skidmore an adopted hometown.

If anyone could help, Espey knew, it was Sam Graves. Espey knew Graves was a caring human being with morals most public officials seldom displayed. Espey also knew Graves would understand how desperate the situation was. Here was a chance to save a baby. Graves knew how tight the community was and how getting the child back mattered not only to Zeb Stinnett, but to the township as a whole.

“We are fairly good friends,” said Espey. “He became my contact person—the only one I could think of when all else failed.”

As Espey struggled to come up with a way to convince the MSHP to issue the alert, he phoned Sam Graves at his home late that evening and asked him for help. Espey explained how he had been told repeatedly the case did not meet the criteria for an Amber Alert because authorities did not know the child’s hair and eye color, or any other details. “I’m really aggravated, Sam. You have to pull some strings and get this thing done.”

Amber Alert guidelines were set in stone, however. What could a congressman do to supersede national policies and procedures? The state of Missouri was still in the process of designing its own Amber Alert standards, thus forcing state officials to fall back on what had been accepted nationally.

“I’m not sure I can get anything done, Ben. The law is the law, you know.”

“Fix the damn law,” Espey said. He was desperate. Hospital officials were telling him the child was likely alive but could be in danger of suffering problems down the road if she wasn’t found soon. Additionally, who knew what the child’s kidnapper was doing to her?

“Give me two hours and I’ll have it done,” Graves said next, without hesitation.

“He really helped me,” Espey recalled, “at a time when I needed it. Everyone helped, but Sam got things moving for us and got things done right away.”

“I’ve known [Ben Espey] for a while,” Graves said later in published reports, “and he was at the end of his rope.” In another statement, Graves added, “We’ve got a problem with our system. Nobody really thought of this contingency.”

Espey’s chief argument throughout the night was that a newborn baby “looks different than
any
other child. In three or four or five days, well, you’ve got a baby. But a
newborn
baby, if I say that a baby was born within a few hours, anybody can look at a child and tell it’s a newborn.”

He couldn’t understand why no one else, save for Sam Graves and the people inside his law enforcement circle, couldn’t see it the same way.

A
t around 12:45
A.M
. on Friday, Ben Espey finally got his wish.

Later, reflecting on that crucial time near midnight when word came down that the Amber Alert was going out, he said, “I was overwhelmed with the fact that we were going to be able to get this baby back.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out Sam Graves had pulled out some sort of trump card and used it.

“He could have easily claimed to have called a few people,” Espey explained, “called me back and said, ‘Look, I called some people and I couldn’t get it done.’ But Sam took an interest in it. Sam
made
it happen.”

Early the next morning, an official Amber Alert went out to all law enforcement agencies in the immediate area: Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska. Sent from the main office of the MSHP, the alert, in part, said police were searching for a suspect who may have blond hair and was possibly driving a red vehicle, “a two-door hatchback, possibly a 1980s or 1990s, Honda or Hyundai.” It wasn’t clear, the alert continued, if law enforcement was looking for a man or woman, but officials knew the child was female. If anyone spied a man, woman, or couple traveling with a newborn, he or she needed to call in immediately.

Time, of course, was of the utmost importance.

“I believe there is a live eight-month-old fetus out there and we need to find it,” Espey told reporters early Friday morning.

No one had an idea then of the number of tips about to flood the system, and the work ahead. It was well after midnight, the sun close to coming up. Espey hadn’t sat down or taken a break since finding Bobbie Jo’s body. It would be a long morning, he knew, but with any luck, and some help from the public, Bobbie Jo’s child would be returned to her family soon.

“It’s very hard for me to accept this,” Espey told reporters after issuing the alert. “Nobody here could ever perceive this taking place. To have a fetus taken out of a mother’s womb and then an Amber Alert to try to find that child.” He shook his head in disbelief. It was obvious the horrifying aspects of the crime and the missing child weighed on Espey. He had bags under his eyes: his skin looked gray and pasty; his lips dry and chalky, as though he were dehydrated.

“It’s pretty tragic,” continued Espey. “It’s really tragic for the family to lose a twenty-three-year-old mother. The only light spot in this is the fact that the baby can be found alive.” Espey’s deep-set, Caribbean-blue eyes gave him almost a Hollywood veneer. Yet Espey had the faith and will of any spiritual leader that side of the Missouri River. Here was a grown man who welled up with tears at certain points when he spoke about the case to his colleagues and peers.

Later that morning, Espey indicated he believed “more than one person may be involved in the crime.” Tips were coming in already. “I don’t think one person could do it,” he told reporters. “It took one person to choke Bobbie and one to cut her baby out.”

As the sun dawned on a new day, he realized he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. But he sensed that answers were about to come. Patience was the key now to saving Victoria Jo’s life.

Wait it out…. Something will come in
.