Murder In The Heartland. M. William Phelps
out the entire case and keep track of it, step by step.
Espey returned to the department and began a push to get the Amber Alert issued. Find the baby, find the killer. It seemed that simple. His emphasis was on finding the child first. After clearing Zeb Stinnett and informing him that his wife had been killed and his child kidnapped, Espey promised Zeb he would get his child back.
Getting an Amber Alert issued for an unborn child would be an unprecedented move, and Espey would run into harsh opposition in the coming hours regarding his desire to get it done, because an Amber Alert had never been issued for, as some were calling Bobbie Jo’s child, “a fetus.”
A major factor that made Ben Espey an asset to his community was his determination to get a job done when the powers to be, bound by bureaucracy, stood in his way. If Espey believed an Amber Alert was warranted, he was going get it—and no one was going to tell him he couldn’t.
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In the state of Missouri, Amber Alerts are issued by the Missouri State Highway Patrol when a child is said to be in danger. The MSHP relies on “detailed physical descriptions…such as the color, license plate, and type of vehicle to watch for,” MSHP patrol spokesman Captain Chris Ricks told reporters. The reason the detail has to be as exact as possible is, Ricks added, “you’re flooding your system with calls that don’t mean anything.”
If any vehicle even remotely matching the description became suspect, law enforcement had to chase down hundreds of leads that might never amount to anything. As of September 25, 2005, 377 children had been involved in 316 published Amber Alerts, issued in forty-two different states. It is a system that produces results when put into effect immediately.
How was the program initiated? In January 1996, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her bicycle in a remote Arlington, Texas, neighborhood when a neighbor heard her scream. It was a terrifying cry for help, not as if Amber had fallen off her bicycle or was being chased by the neighborhood bully. There was no doubt she was scared and yelling for help.
When the neighbor ran toward Amber’s voice, she saw a man pull the helpless child off her bike and toss her into his pickup truck.
Within seconds, the child was gone.
The neighbor ran back to her house and called 911 immediately. She provided a detailed description of the man who had abducted Amber, along with the vehicle he was driving.
It was enough to get law enforcement started, especially since the call had come in promptly after the abduction.
Police in Arlington, working with the FBI, canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed several other neighbors while a massive search got underway for the vehicle Amber had been abducted in and for the suspect, who had supposedly grabbed her.
Sadly, though, four days later, Amber’s body was located in a ditch about five miles from her home. Her throat had been slashed.
Several concerned citizens, feeling angry and sick over Amber’s death, thinking more could have been done to save her life, contacted a Dallas, Texas, radio station and changed the way law enforcement officials deal with child abductions today. One of the callers suggested local radio stations “repeat news bulletins about abducted children just like they do for severe weather warnings.”
An early warning system was subsequently initiated by the Dallas–Fort Worth Association of Radio Managers, who teamed with local law enforcement agencies in northern Texas, developing an innovative system to help locate abducted children, or at least get word out of the abduction as fast as possible.
It was a brilliant idea, and general managers from several radio stations throughout the Dallas area signed up. Everyone agreed it was a public service that could save lives potentially, simply because time is an abducted child’s worst enemy after being kidnapped.
Thus, by July 1997, about eighteen months after Amber’s death, the Texas Amber Plan went into operation. Other states adopted the program in short order.
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According to the Amber Alert Portal, a Web site dedicated to providing information about the Amber Alert plan, “once law enforcement has been notified about an abducted child, they must first determine if the case meets the Amber Alert Plan’s criteria for activating an Amber Alert.” Each law enforcement agency, “whether local, state, or regional, establishes its own Amber Alert Plan criteria.”
Espey didn’t have time for bureaucracy. He needed the alert issued right now, no questions asked.
“Let’s find this child and fight about it later.”
The first problem Espey faced came in the form of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which suggests three criteria be met before an Amber Alert is activated: “Law enforcement confirms a child has been abducted; law enforcement believes the circumstances surrounding the abduction indicate that the child is in danger of serious bodily harm or death” and, most important to the dilemma facing Ben Espey, “there is enough descriptive information about the child, abductor, and/or suspect’s vehicle to believe an immediate broadcast alert will help.”
In the Stinnett case, not much was known about Bobbie Jo’s assailant. Espey was told no right away. An Amber Alert wouldn’t work in this situation. Sorry. But it’s not going to happen.
Espey didn’t have time to deal with red tape. The sun had gone down. The child could be anywhere and Bobbie Jo’s murderer was long gone. All he wanted was a chance.
“We can’t issue an Amber Alert for a fetus,” he was told over and over.
Meanwhile, Espey learned of a second major obstacle: could the child have survived such a traumatic delivery by the hand of an untrained perpetrator, who had murdered her mother in the process? Doctors had said the child still might be alive, but looking at the crime scene, it seemed almost impossible. Espey had touched Bobbie Jo’s cold body. He saw all the blood.
Prenatal care expert Elizabeth A. Chmura, who has worked in emergency room prenatal care for twenty years (but wasn’t involved in the Stinnett case), later said, “With pregnant women who suffer an insult—such as strangulation—it is difficult to know exactly how long an infant in the womb can survive. But we know that, in some cases, it can be thirty minutes if the mom has some signs of life, which, from the evidence left behind, Bobbie Jo clearly did.”
In general, if a pregnant woman dies before giving birth, the infant has approximately four minutes before hypoxia, “a pathological condition in which the body as a whole, or region of the body, is deprived of adequate oxygen supply,” sets in, at which time death will likely occur for the child. Hypoxia is sometimes associated with high altitudes. If, say, an airplane’s windows are blown out during flight at high elevations, passengers can die because there is not a sufficient amount of oxygen in the plane’s cabin to sustain life.
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