Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 23

Within 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.