Prenatal Predators snatch babies from their mothers’ wombs. Why? — Obsessed with Babies — Crime Library
The news came from Skidmore, Missouri, on December 16, 2004, that a pregnant woman, Bobbi Jo Stinnett, 23, had been murdered. Expecting a baby girl in mid-January, she’d been the victim of a deranged woman with a bizarre obsession. While it’s not the only such incident, this one became international news.
At 3:30 in the afternoon, Bobbie Jo’s mother, Becky Harper, drove onto the dead-end street where Bobbie Jo lived with her husband, Zeb. They’d been married just two years and were about to have their first child. Becky noticed the door slightly ajar, which concerned her. It was too cold for that, especially since Bobbie Jo was pregnant. She went inside to look around, and as Diane Fanning reported in Baby Be Mine, she found her daughter on the floor, literally butchered. Bobbi Jo was barely breathing and it looked to Becky as if her intestines had exploded. As Becky called 911, she tried to revive her daughter with the dispatcher’s instructions, but it was too late. Bobbie Jo expired before she arrived at the hospital. She had been murdered, apparently to kidnap her unborn child.
M. William Phelps also wrote about this story in Murder in the Heartland, although both authors published their books before legal issues surfaced and the trial had begun. The chief suspect had made a confession, but the investigation was still active. Phelps came at the story from a different angle as he spoke with Carl Boman, the ex-husband of the perpetrator, gaining an advantage when Boman offered to say all that he knew about his controlling, mentally unstable wife.
Lisa Montgomery, the suspect, had been telling people she was pregnant with twins, but had miscarried one of them. She acquired an ultrasound photo from the Internet to show people “her” baby and even told them her expected due date in December. She had purchased a number of items, as any expectant mother would do, and had set up a nursery in her home.
Yet, as Phelps and several reporters point out, it was not the first time she’d claimed to be pregnant, and on those other occasions, she’d never produced a baby. She’d even bloated her stomach convincingly in a hysterical pregnancy, but in the end she could not sustain the ruse. (Some women are able to swallow air to simulate the hardness of a pregnant belly.) One never knew what to believe with Lisa Montgomery. In fact, Boman knew that after their fourth child, she’d had her tubes tied to prevent having more children, so why she was parading this pregnancy was anyone’s guess. Lisa’s mother would say she was simply desperate to have a baby.
So desperate, in fact, that she was willing to plot a murder and carry it out. She’d put an elaborate plan in motion, had picked her victim, and had decided just how she would get the baby and bring it home. Bobbie Jo had no idea that day what was coming.
She had met Lisa Montgomery on an Internet message board about dogs and they had exchanged emails about Bobbie Jo’s prize rat terriers. Montgomery expressed an interest in seeing the puppies at the Stinnett home, and Bobbie Jo was happy to find someone else with a fondness for these dogs. She invited Lisa, who was using a false name, to come over. Little did Bobbie Jo know that Montgomery had no interest in her dogs; she had targeted Bobbie Jo because she was pregnant. She had even baited her with photos of rat terriers, posted on a message board a few days before their meeting. It was clear, in retrospect, that she had covered all her bases in the pursuit of stealing Bobbie Jo’s baby.
On the afternoon of December 16, Montgomery arrived at the Stinnett’s home, driving 170 miles from Kansas. It is not known if she made a pretense of appraising the puppies or got right down to business, but at the point at which Montgomery thought she had an advantage, she struck from behind, strangling Bobbie Jo with a rope and then slashing her belly open with a kitchen knife to remove the baby. The child was a girl.
Montgomery fled, taking the child with her back to Kansas, where she hoped to convince her husband, children, and friends that she’d just given birth. She called her husband from the road to tell him, and he apparently accepted this development without question. In the meantime, Bobbie Jo was found in a pool of blood.
That morning, Bobbie Jo had been on the phone with her mother and had told her that a woman had just arrived from Fairfax, Missouri, whom she’d met on the Internet. They ended their conversation. Becky gave this information to the police. They went through the neighborhood as well, to ask residents what they’d seen.
The medical examiner indicated that Bobbie Jo had been cut open laterally to facilitate removal of the baby without harming it, and the umbilical cord had been cut. In Bobbie Jo’s hands were strands of blond hair, indicating that there had been a struggle before she died. In fact, there were blood splotches all over the room, as if the perpetrator had had a difficult time subduing Bobbie Jo. This, too, supported the possibility that a woman had been involved.
After some bureaucratic problems, an Amber Alert was called to expand the search for the missing baby across state lines, while detectives versed in computer forensics examined Stinnett’s e-mail. They soon determined the identity of her likely attacker, who was using the name Darlene Fischer (screen name Fischer4kids) and was ostensibly seeking to purchase a puppy. That rang true with what Becky Harper had reported. Neighbors told investigators that a dirty red Honda had been parked at the house that day, so they included this information in the bulletin. They hoped that someone out on the road had seen it. There was no telling what this brutal kidnapper might do.
A tip phoned in by someone who spotted a red Honda resembling the one the authorities were seeking helped to establish that Bobbie Jo’s killer had fled to Kansas. Police there found the car but lost it on a dark lane when the driver shut off the lights and kept going.
On the following day, thanks to computer security specialists, authorities learned the address of Bobbi Jo’s visitor and located the red Honda in a driveway at a home in Melvern, Kansas. There, they found a baby girl and arrested Lisa Montgomery.
Her claim that she had given birth at the Topeka Birth and Women’s Centre the day before turned out to be a lie. In her car were a rope, a knife, gloves, a ski mask, and other incriminating items. The child was in good health and DNA tests soon confirmed she was the Stinnetts’ baby. Zeb Stinnett was allowed to take her home. Conflicted over the loss of his wife, he nevertheless rejoiced to have his daughter back safely, and named her Victoria Jo.
With the FBI involved, Montgomery, 36, finally broke down and confessed to the murder and kidnapping. Since she had deceived her husband about being pregnant, he was not charged. Eventually the story came out.
Montgomery had set up Stinnett by showing interest in her dogs. A photo surfaced, indicating they may have met some months earlier at a dog show. Apparently, she had estimated when Bobbie Jo would be about a month from delivery, which ensured that the baby could survive if delivered prematurely. So she had made the appointment and done the deed, leaving Bobbie Jo to bleed to death.
Then Montgomery had phoned her husband from Topeka to say that she had given birth while on a shopping trip there. He drove to meet her, and took her and the new baby home, little suspecting that this child not only was not his but had been ripped out of a murdered woman. Montgomery actually showed the infant around to people in a bank, alerting a neighbor to notify the police because the infant was obviously premature.
Montgomery’s former husband, Carl Boman, told reporters for the Associated Press that Montgomery had often sought attention by pretending to be pregnant, but she’d had her tubes tied fourteen years earlier. She was charged with kidnapping resulting in a death and held in prison. Before her trial commenced, several complicated issues arose.
The prosecutors expected there would be an insanity defense. What woman would be so desperate for a child that she’d kill and mutilate another woman, unless she was outright psychotic? She had confessed to the killing, so the only move left to her attorney was an insanity defense. Her history of hysterical pregnancies would help, as would the extreme nature of the crime and the inability of most normal people to even fathom it. That she had strangled Bobbie Jo with her own hands could seem to jurors the work of a madwoman.
In fact, reporter Kevin Murphy had dug up a potential diagnosis: pseudocyesis, or the seeking of attention by faking or being deceptive about a pregnancy. He also mentioned dissociation, in which some women can convince themselves so well they’re pregnant that they show physical symptoms. The underlying cause is usually intense anxiety. Apparently, the idea of being pregnant has a calming effect. Montgomery’s mother had once tried to have her committed, but she’d been assessed as not being a danger to self or others, and the commitment was refused. This, too, would come up at trial.
U.S. Attorney Todd Graves announced in January 2005 that he was considering seeking the death penalty. By November, he confirmed it, and then in March 2007, issues arose over philosophical concepts. Montgomery’s lawyer, Fred Duchardt, questioned whether the child she had allegedly cut from the womb was legally a person. Relying on U. S. Supreme Court rulings (Roe v. Wade), he said that if Victoria Jo was viewed as a fetus before her mother died, then she could not have been legally kidnapped, because she was not technically a person. In addition, Montgomery had been a danger to only one person, Bobbie Jo, which reduced the circumstances from being considered a capital crime. Duchardt thus asked the court to prohibit prosecutors from seeking the death penalty.
Graves argued that once Victoria was taken from her mother’s womb, she was a person and could thus be kidnapped. In addition, in April 2004, President Bush had signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act into law, protecting unborn children from assault and murder. They were thus defined as persons. In that case, the kidnapping charge was still relevant, and Montgomery had posed a danger to two people.
The trial was delayed so mental health professionals could finish their reports, but hearings occurred at the end of August 2007 with a battle of neurologists. The prosecution’s expert, Dr. Alan Evans, said Montgomery’s brain scan was close to normal, while the defense expert, Dr. Ruben Gur, declared that she had an abnormality that might have resulted in a mistaken belief that she was pregnant. That is, abnormalities on her brain were consistent with a diagnosis of pseudocyesis. As reported in the Kansas City Star, Gur claimed that Montgomery had suffered from a previous head injury that affected an area of the brain that controlled aggression, and perhaps she could not stop herself from committing the crime. The prosecutor challenged the credibility of this report on scientific grounds, and clinical neurologist Helen Mayberg stated that making a diagnosis about Montgomery’s behavior from a brain scan “is basically impossible.”
The trial was scheduled for October 2007, with an insanity defense that included evidence that Montgomery suffered from depression, post traumatic stress, pregnancy delusions, and impulsivity. It was up to U. S. District Judge Gary Fenner to decide what he would accept as science, but at this writing he had not yet made his decision. Jury selection began October 1, and the trial was expected to last a month, with over 100 pieces of evidence and nearly as many witnesses. The philosophical issue had been resolved, at least, with the decision to consider Victoria Jo a person, with full rights.
Yet it wasn’t the first such incident, and others have had far worse outcomes.
In Addison, Illinois, in 1995, a couple named Fedell Caffey and Jacqueline Williams desperately wanted a baby, and they knew of a woman, Deborah Evans, who was ready to give birth. They believed the child’s father was Lavern Ward, Williams’ cousin and Deborah’s former boyfriend. Deborah did have a son with him, who was then nineteen months old. She also had a restraining order against Ward for domestic abuse, and he was angry enough over it to have threatened to kill her. However, Deborah had often been kind to Williams, which makes the incident even grimmer.
have been the father of Deborah’s child.
The three of them entered Deborah’s home on the evening of November 16, and either Williams or Caffey shot Deborah in the head, but the bullet hit bone and only incapacitated her. Ward and Caffey then stabbed her ten-year-old daughter to death to eliminate the child as a witness. While Deborah was still alive, the three offenders performed a crude cesarean section on her with a pair of kitchen shears to extract her unborn child. They then stabbed her in the neck, cleaned the baby up in the sink and left, taking Deborah’s eight-year-old son, Joshua, with them. Williams and Caffey took both children to a friend’s place for a while and then to their own home, where they cut Joshua’s throat. They then took the body about ten miles away to dump it, returning home to attend to their new baby.
In the meantime, Deborah’s current boyfriend came home and found her dead, with two children missing. One boy was still there, unharmed, and since he was Ward’s child, suspicion fell on Ward. In addition, the friends who had seen the two children before Joshua was killed told the police about it.
Detectives caught up to all three offenders and arrested them. Willams told police that Caffey wanted a male child and had been pressuring her over it, so she had faked her pregnancy to coincide with Deborah’s. She had gained weight to pass as pregnant so no one would question how she’d suddenly delivered a baby.
All were convicted at trial. Williams and Caffey went to death row, while Levern Ward received a life sentence. Then-Governor Ryan commuted all death sentences permanently when he left office in 2003. In January 2012 Williams petitioned the court to have her case reopened, “I am a very good person and feel I deserve to be back in society,” she wrote. Williams has also filed a motion for executive clemency.
The baby, Elijah, was unharmed in this incident and is being raised by relatives. Both of these incidents involved a home invasion, but in the next case, the victim was lured to the lair.
In April 2005, Sarah Brady claimed she was lured to an apartment in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, according to a story in the Washington Post, and she found herself in the midst of a room full of surgical tools. A nursery was all set up for a baby in this home, but there was no baby. Sarah had come there because another woman, “Sarah Brody,” aka Katie Smith, had told her that they had both registered for gifts at the same store but the store had mistakenly delivered Brady’s there. It was an understandable mistake, since their names were so similar.
Sarah, 26, was nine months pregnant, and in the midst of her baby showers, so the story was credible to her. She was, in fact, registered at that store and she couldn’t have imagined that someone was actually luring her to her death. However, once she was at Smith’s home, she quickly became aware that the phone call had been a hoax and she’d been tricked into coming. But she was trapped.
Smith came at her with a knife to try to kill her and remove her baby, but Sarah fought fiercely. She managed to wrestle the weapon away and stab her assailant, an unemployed nanny, to death. In the process, she suffered a few cuts, but her baby was unharmed. She immediately went to the police to report the incident. Improbable as the situation seemed, the evidence supported Sarah’s story, and no charges were filed.
An investigation turned up evidence in Smith’s computer that she had selected Sarah via an online baby registry. Since Smith was dead, she wasn’t around to answer questions, but it’s likely that Sarah physically matched what Smith had in mind. She also lived in the right area. Apparently, Smith, 22, had formed an elaborate plan. For a couple of months, she had worn padded clothing to deceive those who knew her into thinking she was pregnant. Smith even carried a photo of a fetal ultrasound of twins to show people “her baby” as it developed. Unmarried, Smith told friends she’d been pregnant before but had lost the baby. (The autopsy revealed that she’d never delivered a child.) Having picked out Sarah, she bided her time before making the call that ended in this shocking incident. Among other such situations, it was unique for the manner of calculation. It was also unique in that it was the perpetrator who died, not the targeted woman.
The Brady/Smith incident was the ninth assault on a pregnant woman in the U.S. since 1987, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Seven of the nine women had died, and seven of the stolen babies had survived. (Sarah Brady and her daughter both survived).
The odd thing about this type of crime is that while the predators seem to be mentally unstable, they’re highly organized and usually have an elaborate plan carried out over several months. Although their methods may differ, they have a fairly predictable pattern. Such crimes are generally committed by women using a confidence-type scam and they have a history of deception in other areas of their lives. Usually, they work alone, developing a relationship with a “predetermined target,” but some have enlisted assistance.
Dr. Phillip Resnick, who assisted in the defense of both Andrea Yates (who drowned her five children) and Deanna Laney (who stoned hers), told reporters that he interpreted the act of fetal snatching as the maternal instinct gone wrong. Its clinical name is “newborn kidnapping by cesarean section.” The perpetrators are typically women who’ve learned they cannot have children or who have lost a child. Their longing to be mothers develops into a crafty determination to get a baby, so they look for a vulnerable pregnant woman. Mentally, they’ve gone so far beyond normal that the cost of a life to acquire a child seems minimal to them. The baby, they think, will complete them, and they’re often jealous of women who do have babies or are about to give birth. Resnick says that being barren takes on terrible symbolism, so stark on the minds of these offenders that they can see only their own need, and not the ultimate consequences to themselves or others.
In 2002, a study was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences on kidnap by cesarean section. The study examined six such incidents, extracted from 199 cases of infant abduction that had occurred between 1983 and 2000. Five of the perpetrators wanted the baby for themselves, while one was going to sell it. In some cases, they hoped to cement a failing relationship, while others were obsessed with having a baby.
It was found that those who commit such crimes are self-centered, obsessed with babies, and tend to live in a delusional fantasy world, but they are not considered psychotic. That is, they are fully aware of reality; they just prefer their fantasy. In general, they’re socially functional until they swing into their fantasy, at which point they tend to dissociate and lose psychological integration. “To use a metaphor,” says Burgess, “their identity and integrative capacity is held together by a shoestring. When the shoestring is untied, they unravel.” Typically, they’re cold and detached as individuals, and clearly self-absorbed to the point of having callous disregard for how they treat others. Often, they manifest a personality disorder of some type, and the inability to have a child in the way they want can be a blow to their narcissistic sense of self.
Their MO involves a confidence-style approach, in which they pretend to be something they’re not in order to win their victim’s trust. They have also conned others into believing they’re pregnant. Usually, they use a knife or cutting device to remove the child, but kill the mother with bullets or strangulation. Several have had prior criminal records.
Strangely enough, they’re often so engrossed with preparing for the day they will get their baby that they fail to think ahead to the questions they’ll be asked, or about practical matters such as birth certificates. That’s usually how they get caught.
The New York Daily News, along with several other sources, listed similar cases in which women so strongly craved babies that they were motivated to murder:
- In Oklahoma in 2003, Effie Goodson shot Carolyn Simpson, who was six-months pregnant, in order to steal her child but the baby died as well and Goodson was arrested.
- In 2000, Michelle Bica had responded to an ad for selling a car placed by Theresa Andrews in Ohio, who was close to giving birth. Bica informed her husband that she was pregnant and then shot Anderson, grabbing the baby to claim as her own. She buried the mother in a shallow grave in her yard. The police closed in, so she committed suicide rather than face the music. The baby was returned to the father.
- That same year, Kathaleena Draper was suffocated by her aunt, Erin Kuhn, after she decided not to give her aunt the baby she was carrying. Kuhn cut the child from Draper’s womb with a knife, but the infant died.
- Carethia Curry and Felicia Scott were friends in Alabama. Curry was pregnant and Scott decided that she wanted the child, so she killed Curry in 1996 to get it, enlisting her boyfriend to assist. They dumped the body into a trash can and tossed it into a ravine; it was found two months later. The baby survived, but Scott was arrested. In 1998, she was convicted of capital murder.
- In 1987, Darci Pierce, a nineteen-year-old married woman, abducted Cindy Ray near a prenatal clinical in New Mexico and then attacked. Pierce strangled the pregnant woman, and used a car key to remove the unborn baby girl, which survived the attack. She tried to get a birth certificate from a local hospital, and they required that she submit to an exam. It showed that she had not recently had a child, so she was caught. She was found guilty but mentally ill and received a 30-year prison sentence.
- A 1992 case involved a doctor in Mexico in cahoots with the fetal abductors; the physician performed a C-section, handing the child over. It started in Brownsville, Texas, when two sisters befriended a pregnant woman at a social gathering. One sister claimed that she, too, was pregnant, and persuaded the victim to see her obstetrician. He removed the child by cesarean section and the mother survived but brought charges. One sister served several months in jail but the other evaded arrest.
Of the women who were caught, two committed suicide, two were convicted and sent to prison, one was placed on probation, one was found incompetent to stand trial and the trials for others are still pending. In one case, a woman was barely saved by a boy with the right instincts.
In Manor, Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh, Valerie Lynn Oskin was waiting to give birth in another month, but her next-door neighbor, Peggy Jo Conner, was not about to wait any longer. She had watched as Valerie’s pregnancy developed and then on October 14, 2005, she made her move. Going to Valerie’s house with a baseball bat, Conner, 38, smashed her over the head, knocking her out. She then got Valerie into her car, drove around for a while and then went to a secluded area fifteen miles away. There she pulled Valerie from a car and used a razor blade to start cutting along a scar from a previous cesarean section. She managed to inflict a wound six-to-eight inches long. By some reports, she had delivered the baby.
However, the area she’d selected was not as isolated as she’d hoped, and around 5:00 that afternoon, seventeen-year-old Adam Silvis drove by on an all-terrain vehicle. He spotted Valerie on the ground by the car, lying in a pool of blood, and inquired if she needed help. Conner attempted to convince him that all was well. He didn’t believe her, but didn’t let on that he was concerned. He told Conner he was going to check on his tree stand and drove away. Conner apparently smiled and waved. He then headed home to alert his father to the weird situation. They checked it out, and Conner seemed to be incoherent, so Silvis called the police, who rescued Valerie and placed Conner under arrest.
Valerie, 30, was transported to Allegheny General Hospital, where she and her baby were saved with an emergency C-section. When she revived she recalled that she’d been attacked and she identified her neighbor as the person who had hit her with a bat. Two other neighbors had actually seen Conner taking Valerie, bleeding, from her trailer home that morning, but had not thought to alert anyone. Conner had also put Valerie’s seven-year-old son in the car, dropping him off at another house before driving to the woods.
Conner was charged with attempted homicide, aggravated assault, and aggravated assault on an unborn child. She had a baby swing and bassinet in her home, in preparation to bring the baby there. She had also told her live-in partner that she was pregnant and he insisted he had a sonogram that she’d given him to prove it. He said he’d felt the baby kick in her stomach. She’d already had three children, ages 11, 14, and 16, and he said she was not capable of committing this atrocious act. In fact, he said, the two women were close friends. They were “pregnant together” and helping each other.
When the case got to court, Oskin testified against Conner, who then pled guilty. On May 22, 2007, Conner was given a prison sentence of 22 to 50 years. She apologized through tears, insisting she had been on drugs and was not “that kind of person.” However, no drugs had been found in her home or her body. Court psychologists indicated that she had deep-seated psychological issues, including depression and bipolar disorder.
The baby, which survived, was put up for adoption apparently the plan all along. Valerie has indicated that she still suffers from nightmares, and her son is now terrified of being alone.
On September 21, 2006, a young sailor on leave called the police to report that his girlfriend, Tiffany Hall, 24, had admitted that she had killed a woman and stolen a fetus. This was the same young woman who had summoned police on September 15 to Frank Holton Park, claiming she had gone into labor and the baby had died. She was taken to a local hospital, where she told a sex crime detective that she had been raped, causing a miscarriage. However, her story was inconsistent and full of holes, and she left before she could be examined.
Apparently, she persuaded her boyfriend that she had miscarried his baby, so they had buried the child together, giving it the name Taylor Horn. But then Hall admitted that she’d miscarried his child some time before and had stolen this premature infant from her cousin. That’s when he called the police. Hall was arrested, and the story turned even darker.
Soon thereafter, the mutilated corpse of a young woman was found in a weedy field in southern Illinois, and the autopsy indicated that she had been dead for several days. Someone had bludgeoned her with a blunt object and had cut into her belly with a sharp implement, delivering an unborn fetus. A pair of scissors found near the body was presumed to be the cutting tool, and St. Clair County Coroner Rick Stone indicated that the cause of death was bleeding from an abdominal wound.
The victim was Jimella Tunstall, a close friend and cousin of Hall’s. The infant had died, but Tunstall’s children were missing, so investigators dragged a nearby lake, in case they had drowned, and searched the 1,100-acre Frank Holton Park. They stated to reporters that they had no evidence to believe the children were dead, so they remained optimistic about finding them. They had been seen since their mother’s death, in the custody of the suspect, and the suspect’s home was searched without turning up any indication of foul play.
But then on September 25, 2006, newspapers across the country reported that a fetal snatching incident perpetrated in Illinois was worse than first believed. Hall had told police what she had done in a desperate bid to acquire a baby.
According to the News Democrat, Hall indicated that after killing Tunstall, she had drowned her three children. They’d been there for several days. The oldest, age 7, was found in the dryer and the others, ages 1 and 2, in the washing machine at their East St. Louis apartment. But the appliances had not been turned on and there was little water in the washing machine, so it was clear that they’d been killed elsewhere, probably drowned in a bathtub, and then placed in the machines.
Tunstall had been seven months pregnant when she died, and Hall had kept the body in her mother’s basement for several days before dumping it in a lot nearby, behind her house. The infant had been unable to survive on its own.
After an October indictment, Hall pled not guilty to the deaths of Tunstall and the fetus. Given the nature of the crime and the possibility that it involves a psychotic delusion, it’s likely that if she goes to trial, her defense, like Lisa Montgomery, will be some form of insanity or diminished capacity. In fact, Hall’s attorney, public defender Randall Kelley, indicated he’d have her tested for mental competency. It’s not clear, despite her claim to her boyfriend and others, that Hall was ever even pregnant. However, her two daughters had been removed from her custody for three years in 1999, due to abuse, but were returned to her four years ago. Psychiatric testing will probe the effect on her of this circumstance.
On February 5, 2007, the prosecutor decided to seek the death penalty for Hall. In April, she was charged with killing the other three children, for which she will face a second death penalty. The reason it took so long for the second charge was that the prosecutor wanted to develop a solid body of evidence against her.
In the most recent case, there was actually a happy ending.
Amanda Howard, 18, was expecting her first baby as early as a week hence, and she didn’t realize she’d been targeted for assault until too late. Two girls, Lauren M. Gash, 19 (or 20), and Alisa D. Betts, 17, had lured her out of her home on July 31, 2007 with a ruse. Apparently they’d met her on the Internet, on MySpace, where she’d placed an ad looking for baby clothing. They told her they would show her where she could purchase inexpensive goods for babies. They picked her up but then started talking between themselves about a “plan.” One asked the other, “How are we going to do this?”
Amanda sensed she should not have gotten into the car with them and she reached for her cell phone to call 911, but they sprayed her in the face with Mace, and as she struggled to recover, bound her with duct tape. Forcing her into their car, they drove her to a motel, the Interstate Inn in Blue Springs, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, and took her into a room they’d rented to imprison her.
They had apparently plotted together to steal Amanda’s baby, but at one point, Betts left the room and called the police to tell them there was a woman in labor. Officers arrived at once, believing they might have to perform a delivery, and went to the hotel room, demanding to be let in. They found Gash there, and she told them her “friend” was in labor. However, they discovered Amanda in the bathroom with duct tape over her mouth and rope burns on her wrist, so according to one newspaper account, they sprayed Gash with pepper spray to subdue her. They then transported Amanda to a hospital for treatment.
The complaint indicated that Gash had sat on Amanda’s distended stomach and twisted her head back and forth in an attempt to injure or kill her. Amanda told police that they had planned to cut her open and let her die there in the room; she was certain that Gash had been trying to break her neck, as she’d felt her neck joints pop several times which Gash was manhandling her. Betts had been there, too, but had walked out.
Betts initially said they were holding Amanda there so the baby’s father could come and take the baby after it was born. She also said that two men had asked them to kidnap and tie up the victim, so they could cut the baby from her womb. She apparently didn’t know which story she should tell.
In the room, police found duct tape, an X-Acto knife, scissors, a syringe, insulin, a plastic drop cloth, and faked copies of a birth certificate, labeled “Johnny Gash.” There was also a list of “needed” items that included a baseball bat, a rope, and a hammer. Gash, it turned out, had told family and acquaintances that she had recently delivered a baby by C-Section at a local hospital. That way, no one would be surprised when she showed up with a baby. She was heavy-set, so a pregnancy story was feasible. She’d taken to wearing maternity pants and had even had a baby shower. During the police interview, they asked if she was pregnant, and she responded, “Not anymore.”
Betts and Gash were both charged with first-degree kidnapping, and Gash also received a charge of assault. At the hospital, a sonogram showed that the baby was unharmed, and he was born without complication the next day, on August 1. It took several weeks, but Amanda finally spoke to reporters, telling them she suffered from post traumatic stress, but believed the incident would inspire her to be much more careful, for herself and her baby.
The police surmised that the two abductors had been inspired by the Bobbie Jo Stinnett case, since that had occurred not far away and involved the same idea. While the case was being processed, Amanda was the recipient of an overwhelming number of donations, including so many baby clothes she had to give some away.
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