Murder In The Heartland. M. William Phelps
aren’t you still in bed, Mother?” Rebecca continued. Rebecca, like her younger sister Kayla, spoke fast: her words ran all together and came out quickly. Whether she was talking to her mother or anyone else, she was hard to follow at times. “My theory,” she said later, “is that, because Mom was always reading a book or on the computer, growing up we had very little time to talk to her. You had to talk fast to get out what you wanted to say to her.”
“They made me drink a bunch of apple juice,” Lisa said as Kevin helped her get comfortable in the truck. “They made me go to the bathroom before I could leave.”
When the truth was later known, it must have been doubly devastating for Kevin to accept. Years ago, Kevin and his first wife had lost a child, a girl, at birth. Some claimed Kevin had never recovered from the loss and that Lisa wanted to give him a girl to help ease his pain.
Ryan and Rebecca, however, were bewildered, to say the least. Could it be possible? Maybe their mom hadn’t been lying about being pregnant, after all. The kids believed Lisa, but they always had misgivings. “My son had serious doubts,” Carl Boman said later. “You have to believe Kevin had to have doubts himself.”
One day, it seemed, Lisa was parading around Melvern, her stomach as flat as a fitness instructor’s, telling everyone she was in her last trimester; and the next, she was sitting in her car at the Long John Silver’s in downtown Topeka holding an infant she claimed she had just delivered.
Kevin and Lisa’s two children pulled out of downtown Topeka on the evening of December 16, with Lisa and her new baby. According to Lisa’s story, she had given birth to the child only hours ago. If that story were true, authorities later wondered, why was she in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant waiting for a ride home? Why wasn’t she at the hospital, which was just blocks away from Long John Silver’s? Or, better yet, at the Birth and Women’s Center, about fifty feet from the parking lot where Kevin and the kids met Lisa, the place where, she claimed, she’d given birth?
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Although 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.
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With 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