Murder In The Heartland. M. William Phelps
“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.
14
Sheriff 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