Pregnant Woman Slain, Fetus Taken
A premature baby girl cut from her mother's womb in a ghastly attack remained missing Friday. Authorities expanded their search for the baby into surrounding states, hoping they would find the infant in time to offer much needed medical attention.
The child's mother, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, didn't survive the attack. Married for little more than a year and eight months pregnant with her first child, Stinnett was found slain in her northwest Missouri home Thursday afternoon by her own mother.
"It was a pretty gruesome sight," Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Espey said Friday. "We want to get a suspect, but let's get the baby back first."
Authorities from several agencies, including the FBI, were racing to find the premature baby. Espey said Friday afternoon authorities were chasing down a tip the girl was taken out-of-state and may be up to three or four hours away from Skidmore, which is not far from Missouri's border with Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska.
He did not offer any additional details about the tip. An earlier tip, which followed an Amber Alert issued just after midnight, that the baby had been abducted so it could be sold had so far failed to pan out, he said.
In Kansas, the state's bureau of investigation issued a public "secondary alert" Friday seeking help in finding the girl, which doctors said could have suffered a variety of traumas during the assault, including a lack of oxygen.
The Kansas City Star quoted the director of the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Kansas Hospital as saying a baby taken from its mother's womb would need immediate medical attention.
"I'm afraid my imagination can come up with some really rather horrible possibilities that I don't care to contemplate," Perry Clark told the newspaper.
Espey said investigators know Stinnett was still alive within an hour of being found around 3:30 p.m. Thursday. Paramedics tried to revive the young woman, who was pronounced dead later at St. Francis Hospital in Maryville. Espey was still frustrated Friday afternoon that it took hours for a statewide Amber Alert to be issued. It didn't appear until about 12:30 a.m.
"We had a live baby, and I thought that should qualify as an Amber Alert," he said. "The information I was getting was that we didn't have enough information such as hair color, eye color, skin complexion, size and weight."
Stinnett's body was taken to Kansas City for an autopsy by the Jackson County medical examiner. Espey expected it would establish she was strangled and resisted the attack.
"The autopsy is going to show us there was some blond hair probably found in her hands," the sheriff said. "That would also help us with the DNA."
Espey said there was no indication of forced entry into Stinnett's small white home in this small community of about 500, located north of St. Joseph in the extreme northwest corner of Missouri.
The sheriff said Stinnett worked at Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing in Maryville. Her husband was at work at the time and is not a suspect, he said.
Espey said investigators were looking for a car that had been reported seen in the driveway at the Stinnett home Thursday afternoon, a red two-door Honda hatchback from the late 1980s to early 1990s. It's possible the car had nothing to do with the abduction, Espey stressed.
He said that at about 12:45 a.m. officers in Atchison County saw a car that appeared to match that description and began chasing it, but lost sight of it after its lights were turned off.
Chris Smock and his wife Elaina went to school with Bobbi Jo Stinnett and live right behind the Stinnett's house. The couple, who found out about the killing while they were at work, said they were "shocked and horrified."
"It's not your average every day thing, of course," Chris Smock said. "I think Skidmore will react the same way any town would react. I mean, how would you react?"