Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 29

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 child’s navel, needed to be clamped at the time of birth, or more trouble could arise.

Nobody in law enforcement knew for sure if Bobbie Jo’s assailant had taken any of those precautions. They were assuming that whoever had taken the child was in a state of panic. Under those circumstances, anything could happen.

If the child was healthy and had survived the delivery without any lacerations or serious injuries, authorities believed Bobbie Jo’s attacker had chosen to take the child at the perfect time, a factor that was likely a big part of the reason Bobbie was chosen as a victim in the first place.

“A lot of young pregnant women go into labor at thirty-seven to thirty-eight weeks,” Chruma added. “Maybe Lisa Montgomery had a feeling she needed to wait until thirty-six weeks’ gestation for a healthy baby, but not too long after, or Bobbie Jo would have gone to the hospital already. A little planning on her part, perhaps?”

After all the evidence was collected, there would be little doubt in the government’s opinion that Lisa had planned on taking Bobbie Jo’s child for at least one month prior to Bobbie Jo’s murder. The very nature of the crime required premeditation and planning. How could Bobbie Jo’s attacker know, for example, Zeb would be at work? And, how could she know no one else would be at Bobbie Jo’s home when she arrived?

Ben Espey considered that whoever had gone to such great lengths to murder Bobbie Jo and cut her child from her womb had probably done a bit of research about how to keep the child alive. At least that’s what he hoped as he faced a full night of searching.