Police Narratives, Mystery Man Holding Baby - Part 2 of Megyn Kelly Investigates: Baby Lisa's Disappearance | Ep. 1023

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Speaker 3 I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and episode two of our special series, Megan Kelly Investigates on the Disappearance of Baby Lisa.

Speaker 3 How could a baby vanish in the middle of the night? It's a question that has lasted more than 12 years after the disappearance of then 10-month-old baby Lisa Irwin.

Speaker 3 In this episode, I will be joined just a bit later by investigators Bill Stanton and Phil Houston with their expert analysis.

Speaker 3 But first, we return to Kansas City, Missouri, where new clues emerge and police begin to look beyond Lisa's mother for some answers.

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Speaker 3 Here's where we left off. After hours and hours of police interviews that felt more like an interrogation, Deborah and Jeremy decide there's nothing left to say.

Speaker 3 Deception expert Phil Houston has interviewed Deborah at length, finding her credible.

Speaker 3 And I asked Deborah some hard questions about her drinking that night as I was covering the story for Fox News 12 years ago.

Speaker 3 Thanks to anonymous benefactor Christy Schiller, there's now a $100,000 reward, and Lisa has been missing for 10 days.

Speaker 3 The scrutiny on Deborah is relentless.

Speaker 4 I want to know know why baby Lisa hasn't been fair.

Speaker 5 The parents under suspicion.

Speaker 6 Mommy and daddy refuse to talk to cops separately. In order for mommy to talk to cops, she's got to have daddy there.

Speaker 7 Why? The family just released this home video of this baby. Why would they just release this video now? Why didn't they release this video about five days ago?

Speaker 3 Bill Stanton is steering the media away from Debra and toward the search for an intruder.

Speaker 9 I know everybody's watching this family and watching this house, and that's fair.

Speaker 11 Keep one eye on them, but also keep the other eye out on the streets, in every place, because there is a bad guy out there or bad people with this child, and we want to get this child.

Speaker 3 But Deborah needs to be defended.

Speaker 5 I think sometimes we forget who these two people are and what they're going through.

Speaker 3 Thanks to Christy and her team, Joe Takapina, a big gun in the world of defense attorneys, takes up Deborah's case.

Speaker 3 If that name sounds familiar to you, it may be because he has defended former President Donald Trump in New York Criminal Court.

Speaker 10 Someone out there obviously knows something.

Speaker 3 Techabina hired local attorney Cindy Short to handle things on the ground in Kansas City.

Speaker 8 Well, my gut tells me without any doubt that somebody unknown to the family came into this home, was in and out of the home very, very quickly.

Speaker 3 Cindy ran an all-female firm. 17 women went to work on this case.

Speaker 8 The women in my group and in my law firm were

Speaker 8 aching as mothers and we wanted to be able to make a difference. We were hoping that if we were really on the ground talking to people, spreading ourselves out,

Speaker 8 that perhaps we could do something that would find the child.

Speaker 3 Cindy Short had another reason to be so deeply committed to finding Lisa. As a young girl, Cindy was very nearly abducted by a stranger in her own home.
Is it possible, Cindy?

Speaker 3 I mean, is it actually possible someone just walked in there, took no other measures besides wearing a pair of gloves, took the baby, walked in the front door, walked out the front door, and that was it.

Speaker 3 It was no more sophisticated than that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I think so. You know, having been in the house, the house is a branch-style house.
It's very small.

Speaker 14 As I recall, there were wood floors.

Speaker 8 And so the distance between the front door and that baby's room is maybe five to seven to eight steps. It's very short.

Speaker 8 I spent many hours in that neighborhood late at night. And that neighborhood is extraordinarily quiet, very, very dark.
So I do think that someone could come in and come out.

Speaker 5 Now, if she was to have been taken out of the house at night, this is almost pitch black.

Speaker 3 Reporter Jim Spellman showed viewers just how dark by turning off the camera light. And if someone got in and out, could they do it without a trace?

Speaker 3 I mean, I imagine one of the things that they were doing was taking fingerprints. I never heard anything about a recovery on any sort of a hit on the fingerprints.

Speaker 15 Nor have I.

Speaker 5 They not only took fingerprints, they were prepared to take tool marks. That would be if somebody used a screwdriver or something to claw their way into a window.

Speaker 5 It was a very active investigation centered around the house. So there were searches, there were dogs, there were investigators in hazmat-type suits going in and out.

Speaker 5 They cut pieces of carpet that they took away. They took soil samples from the backyard.

Speaker 20 Investigators have been taking blankets, toys, and clothing from the home.

Speaker 3 Cindy Short.

Speaker 8 I was in the case by the time the search warrant was done and they brought the dogs in. And then they made this announcement about the dog alerting in the house.

Speaker 20 Authorities seem to be scouring every inch of the home where baby Lisa Irwin disappeared. The search comes days after an FBI cadaver dog reacted to the scent of a dead person inside the house.

Speaker 20 That's according to a police affidavit.

Speaker 4 We learned Friday that cadaver dogs had a positive hit at the foot of their bed, but last night the rug was still there.

Speaker 3 Cindy Short pointed out at the time that the carpet inside the house remained intact, meaning no sample left the house, calling into question whether the cadaver alert was real.

Speaker 8 I really believed that they were creating theater to make it look as if Deborah was responsible, And I felt that that was really unfair.

Speaker 3 Deborah's aunt, Cindy Lorette.

Speaker 18 I remember the CIA people were taking the carpet from the garage, walking it up the driveway. This is on TV too.
This is on the this makes the news. They have this carpet.

Speaker 18 They walk it up the end of the driveway. It goes right back down into the

Speaker 18 back into the garage. And everybody in the world thought that that carpet came out of Debbie's bedroom.
Are you friggin' kidding me?

Speaker 21 Are you kidding me?

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, what else and who else was being investigated? Remember Onesto and Lisa Parscal, the couple who lived around the corner from Deborah and Jeremy?

Speaker 3 They both say they saw a man with a baby walking down the street just after midnight.

Speaker 3 But the fact that she and her husband verified that they were discussing a baby being carried by a man the night before that that came into their heads before they knew there was a missing baby definitely speaks to their credibility.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 18 Here's Lisa Lisa Parscal talking to a local reporter.

Speaker 19 He was carrying a baby and he kind of was pushing it against his chest.

Speaker 19 And my husband kept looking at him and then the gentleman just kind of kept walking.

Speaker 8 He wanted me to call the cops and I hate that I didn't call him last night.

Speaker 3 There was the grainy BP gas station surveillance footage. and the suspicious dumpster fire just over a small grassy hill several hundred yards from the Irwin home.

Speaker 3 There were reports of baby clothes turning up in the dumpster. They did not appear to be baby Lisa's and nothing came of that.

Speaker 3 And then another person, Mike Thompson, comes forward to say that at 4 a.m. a few miles away, he saw a man carrying a baby.
Can you talk about that next sighting? with Mike Thompson?

Speaker 3 Again, Attorney Cindy Short.

Speaker 8 Yeah, so Mike Thompson was an individual who worked for Ford Clake Como, and he was getting off work and it was closer to I want to say 3 30 or or so in the morning and he was on a motorcycle and he came to a stoplight under a bridge and he was about to get on the highway and so he sees a man which he said was underdressed with a baby that he also thought was underdressed and he was up Peterways

Speaker 15 And he turned and looked at me and I looked at him. I could tell he had a baby with him.

Speaker 15 She had a t-shirt and either training pants or a tight one.

Speaker 15 It was too cold for that.

Speaker 8 He felt like it was really odd. And his first instinct was to stop and offer them a ride, except he was on a motorcycle.
And so he really couldn't do that.

Speaker 3 When Mike heard about baby Lisa being missing, he told his cousin what he had seen.

Speaker 15 He said, well, you better call the police.

Speaker 10 So he dialed the police and he told them that I had witnessed a man carrying a baby. And they talked to me on the phone and then next morning they came to my house.

Speaker 10 Two detectives did, questioned me and left.

Speaker 3 Now, three different people, the Parscals and Mike Thompson, say they saw a man carrying a baby in the early morning hours of October 4th, 2011. Bill Stanton on CNN back then.

Speaker 11 I think it is compelling.

Speaker 11 I think the simple fact that you have three separate witnesses all saying something to the effect of they saw saw someone carrying a child that wasn't wrapped up in a blanket, that wasn't necessarily wrapped up in baby clothes.

Speaker 3 So, if it was the same man who was spotted with the baby walking past the Parscals house, who may have had something to do with the dumpster fire in the nearby townhouse development, who then went through the woods to emerge near the BP gas station, and then went on to where Mike Thompson spotted him, that would mean the man spent close to four hours within a three-mile radius, which makes you wonder what else could have been happening during that time.

Speaker 3 And who is this man?

Speaker 3 Police looked at the people who got closest to Deborah and Lisa that night. Reporter Jim Spellman.

Speaker 5 They were taking DNA swabs from most of the people that were in the immediate homes on either side and family members down the line. That was one of the first things they did.

Speaker 5 The family that lived directly next door.

Speaker 3 That's Samantha and James Brando. Their family was close with the Irwins, but that day the Brando's were separating, something they had decided earlier that afternoon.

Speaker 3 James moved out just hours after Deborah and Samantha started drinking. Deborah remembers the conversation.

Speaker 22 I was trying to help her through it and,

Speaker 22 you know, just give her the best advice I could. And she was kind of spilling her gut, you know, what she went through, what she's hoping she will accomplish next, you know,

Speaker 22 custody stuff, you know, just the deep things that come with, you know,

Speaker 22 separation of family.

Speaker 3 Police investigated and questioned James Brando. Then there was Shane Beagley, the 33-year-old landscaper who was the grandson of a neighbor.

Speaker 3 He dropped by while Deborah was drinking with Samantha Brando.

Speaker 3 And now someone new enters into the mix. John Tanko, nicknamed Jersey.
a handyman with a criminal background who had been working on a neighbor's lawn.

Speaker 5 So if you were to take take shane beagley and james brando

Speaker 5 and john tanko and line them up tanko's about 10 years older but they all they look incredibly similar same builds

Speaker 5 same general kind of haircut police immediately ruled out shane beagley as a suspect while james brando stayed on everyone's radar when we in the media came across James Brando, when I was the first person to interview him, and there was a lot of, I don't know, perhaps excitement almost in people that were following this closely that maybe this was a big lead.

Speaker 3 Well, some people believe he might have had something to do with it, James, her soon-to-be ex-husband, maybe because he was angry

Speaker 3 that you were there, a confidant. You know, there, I've heard people speculate along those lines.
Deborah Bradley.

Speaker 8 I've heard that too, but we have at this point, no reason to believe that. We have nothing to substantiate that at all.

Speaker 5 He was the focus of this investigation in the initial days. All of his alibi had been checked out by the police.
They got surveillance camera tape from Walmart.

Speaker 5 They interviewed people that he crossed paths with. They checked his cell phone to whatever degree for its location.
They placed him on the Air Force base where he worked.

Speaker 12 All of that stuff.

Speaker 5 That to me says this was a very thorough investigation.

Speaker 3 James Brando was ruled out. Attorney Cindy Short always had one person in mind.

Speaker 8 The primary person for me me was John Tanko.

Speaker 8 He was an individual who was essentially homeless at the time, but he had connections to the neighborhood and had connections to a household that was only several doors up from the Irwin's home.

Speaker 5 The person we have to talk about is this guy, John Tanko, who's from New Jersey, known as Jersey. And people describe him as being sketchy.

Speaker 3 Soon, reporters were trying to find him.

Speaker 21 The last known sighting of Jerry Jane Handyman that we can confirm was Saturday, October 1st here in One Eye Jack's Tavern.

Speaker 21 The owners of the bar tell us they kicked him out for being a rude drunk who was spitting on customers on the patio.

Speaker 8 What was significant for me was that he had a pretty healthy background in burglary and particularly in residential burglary.

Speaker 5 We know that the day that Big Luis had disappeared, he was working for this family named the Watsons around the corner, moving some sprinklers around for them.

Speaker 5 People in the neighborhood, some knew him and some had hired him to do yard work, that sort of thing. But, you know, he was a guy who was, you know, one rung above homeless.

Speaker 5 And if you got to know him a little bit more, there were some really disturbing things that

Speaker 5 come up.

Speaker 8 And as we get closer and closer to the time of this abduction,

Speaker 8 his relationship with this community is significant. October 3rd, in particular, which is the day of the kidnapping, he's at the Watsons house.
He turns on the sprinkler at 11 a.m.

Speaker 8 The next door neighbors see him turn the sprinkler on. The Watsons are not there.
The sprinkler is still on at 9.30 p.m. And so the next door neighbors, the Hurts, don't do anything to turn it off.

Speaker 8 But at 11 p.m., they notice that it has been turned off. So they figured Tanko is back in the neighborhood to turn that off.

Speaker 3 Speculation was that Tanko might have been wearing gloves for his handyman and yard work and would not leave fingerprints or cells from the skin.

Speaker 8 So now we've got Tanko in the neighborhood within an hour of what we believe will be the kidnapping because the Pascals are going to see this kidnapper with the baby at 12.15.

Speaker 8 He knows how people are moving in and out of this community. He knows about the pets in the neighborhood.

Speaker 3 There were a few dogs in the neighborhood, notably the house next door on the right side of the Irwin house.

Speaker 3 That dog was notorious for barking at strangers from a fenced-in area in its family's backyard, as reporter Jim Spellman demonstrated at the time.

Speaker 5 This is the first obstacle somebody coming this way would face, is this dog. Every time we've come back here, night or day, this dog greets us with a round of barking.

Speaker 5 This dog is in the house next door to baby Lisa's house.

Speaker 5 But the first couple of times I did this, this dog in the neighborhood went nuts, barked, you know, came after me, very disruptive, not just the kind of random barking, the kind of barking that a neighbor could possibly hear and say, what's going on back there?

Speaker 5 But after I did that a couple of times, this dog was actually very friendly. And the dog stopped barking.

Speaker 5 So that's definitely something that I think investigators were looking at, and something I think is worth looking at.

Speaker 3 But no reports, as far as we know, of people saying they did hear the dog barking?

Speaker 5 No reports said people heard a dog barking that night.

Speaker 3 So no barking could mean that somebody carrying baby Lisa was familiar to the dog or did not go through the woods behind the house at all, but instead went out the front, down North Lister, toward the corner where the Parscals would see.

Speaker 3 Along that route, there was another dog, again, reporter Jim Spellman.

Speaker 5 One of the most troubling things that came to mind that I was aware of was: okay, so you have this Watson family that he was working for Movie Sprinklers. Then you have Mary Hurt, who lives next door.

Speaker 5 I think a very reliable witness. So she had a dog that disappeared the day that baby Lisa disappeared.

Speaker 5 And her next-door neighbor, I know there's a lot to keep track of, her next door neighbor says she saw John Tanko take the dog.

Speaker 23 The dog pops up a few miles later, a couple of days later.

Speaker 5 But, you know,

Speaker 5 I can't say how reliable that witness is

Speaker 5 that saw John Tanko, but the dog did disappear. The dog was not there.
She, you know, reported the dog missing. The dog was found a few days later.

Speaker 5 But certainly people speculated that if anybody wanted to create an easier path for themselves, to leave the neighborhood through here, getting rid of that dog would be key.

Speaker 5 And we know that police took footprints, impressions from her backyard the day after this.

Speaker 3 Here's that neighbor, Mary Hurt, explaining this back in 2011.

Speaker 25 There was a sprinkler that happened to be on in that yard that made it moist over here, whereas the rest of the ground was dry because there hadn't been any rain.

Speaker 26 Now, this sprinkler tells these people were not home, right? Who was operating the sprinkler?

Speaker 25 Their handyman they had that the police were actually looking for in the area of Jersey.

Speaker 8 So, according to Mary Hurt, that would place John Jersey tanko in the neighborhood that night i think he really was one of the best suspects or persons of interest and although the police did speak to him they did not speak to him as a suspect um they spoke to him more as a kind of a person in the community and

Speaker 8 you know when you interview someone as a suspect versus a someone as a witness that interview is um very different they've come out and said, and they said early on that

Speaker 3 they've moved on from him. They don't believe he's their guy.
Why would they do that?

Speaker 8 I think one reason they would do that is because they have one theory and they've stuck to that theory all these years, that it was the parents.

Speaker 8 I think a second reason, and this would be a legitimate reason, that one of the witnesses in the case, the lady that was several doors up from the Irwins at 1215, who saw the man carrying the baby.

Speaker 3 She's talking there about Lisa Parscal.

Speaker 8 And she knew

Speaker 8 Jersey because he had done work across the street at the Watsons home, and she did not believe that the person carrying the baby was, in fact, Tanko.

Speaker 8 I don't know whether she reported that to the police, but let's assume that she did.

Speaker 9 And so that that was one way that they would have eliminated him.

Speaker 3 In fact, Lisa Parscal told us she and her husband told police they did not think the man carrying the baby looked like John Tanko, but they couldn't be 100% certain.

Speaker 3 Eyewitness identification is a tricky business, and in Cindy Short's mind, this was not enough.

Speaker 8 I don't think that that should have

Speaker 8 been the end of the story. I think when you look at the totality of what he was doing, particularly from July through October,

Speaker 8 They should have done more to look at him.

Speaker 3 For several days, attorney Cindy Short and reporter Jim Spellman, independent of one another, searched for an elusive John Tanko, trying to get his side of the story.

Speaker 5 He was a guy who had been in and out of trouble with the law. And just a few days after the disappearance, he was arrested on outstanding felony warrants.

Speaker 5 And I've chased a lot of people around jails and

Speaker 5 police stations and stuff. And it definitely gave me the sense that they were trying to hide him in the jail and judicial system.

Speaker 5 Nobody who gets arrested on a simple bench warrant gets moved from place to place the way that they were moving him.

Speaker 8 He had been incarcerated in Missouri for a burglary. He had been released from his incarceration and then he had he had absconded, which meant that he had escaped from basically a halfway house.

Speaker 8 He was then living in an unhoused situation with a woman named Megan.

Speaker 3 Megan Wright was 20 years old, new to Kansas City, and was John Tanko's girlfriend for a time. They had since broken up.

Speaker 8 Tell me about John Tanko.

Speaker 8 She's an ex-boyfriend of mine. We dated for about five slides.

Speaker 5 So about a month, six weeks before Baby Lisa disappeared, Megan had lived for a period of time in this townhouse development that you could get to by cutting through these yards just around the corner from Baby Lisa's house.

Speaker 8 And there is a lot of disruption or arguments between Megan and Jersey. And later on in the summer, about September, he ends up getting arrested again.

Speaker 24 They break up.

Speaker 8 He wants to get back with her. She becomes homeless.
He ends up setting her car on fire.

Speaker 5 Her car was set on fire and she reported it and it was investigated and she thought that John Tanko, Jersey, did it. But

Speaker 5 nobody was ever able, as far as I can tell, to confirm that he was the one that that did it or what exactly happened there.

Speaker 8 Fire is important here because we'll end up having a fire the night of the kidnapping.

Speaker 3 That was the dumpster fire on the night of baby Lisa's disappearance.

Speaker 3 People zeroed in on this because many believed Megan Wright still lived in that townhouse near the dumpster and thought Tanko, if he had the baby, may have been trying to go see her.

Speaker 3 In fact, Megan Wright lived farther away by at least another mile.

Speaker 3 And here's one more piece of information that made for a possible motive.

Speaker 8 Megan and Jersey are kind of an odd couple. She's much younger than he is, but they start talking about in July having children.
Megan would like to have children.

Speaker 8 There's a theory about him wanting to get back together with her. And is this one of the reasons that he would have spontaneously taken this baby?

Speaker 3 Back then, Megan Wright was a confused young woman, not completely coming clean about her own drug use.

Speaker 8 I found out that he was getting into some drug activity.

Speaker 5 Do you know what his drug or what drug is?

Speaker 8 Mess, from what I understand.

Speaker 3 She's had a hard life, struggling with abuse, addiction, and mental illness.

Speaker 3 And so, after so much scrutiny and criticism in the months after baby Lisa went missing, Megan vowed not to talk about this case again.

Speaker 3 Last October, she decided to make an exception and spoke with me for two hours, much of it tearful.

Speaker 3 You don't have to be here. You could easily have said to me, I don't want to do it.

Speaker 3 It's traumatic for me and I don't want to go back over it. You're doing it because you want.

Speaker 3 Will you tell us why you're doing it?

Speaker 8 I'm doing it because it's important to me to not participate in something that's going to be a circus.

Speaker 8 What's important to me is that the story gets told

Speaker 18 fully.

Speaker 8 I haven't seen that done yet.

Speaker 18 I haven't seen anybody investigate whether Jersey was actually involved or not.

Speaker 8 I wanted to participate in something that was going to light a fire under the ass of the police department and the FBI because Lisa deserves that. The Irwins deserve that.

Speaker 3 That's the goal. She says she has always wanted children, but that she knew she did not want them with John Tanko.
Did Jersey ever offer to get a baby for you?

Speaker 24 No.

Speaker 3 You know, there were reports about, you know, whether this was, he did this and that was his motivation.

Speaker 8 I think where that stems from is the situation leading up to him and I breaking up.

Speaker 8 When I broke up with him, it was because I told him he wasn't the type of man I could see myself having a family with.

Speaker 8 And I feel like it has been twisted for the last 12 years as a motivation for him or what would be his motive to take her if he did.

Speaker 3 Again, attorney Cindy Short.

Speaker 8 In September, he's becoming more erratic.

Speaker 8 And so I think, again, this is significant. And some of the erratic behavior has to do with his drug use.
He would disappear for hours on end with no explanation.

Speaker 8 He was quick to anger, last to understand. And it was, I just couldn't handle it anymore.

Speaker 3 And how likely is it, do you think, that Jersey, John Tanko, was involved in baby Lisa's disappearance?

Speaker 8 It's hard to say, honestly.

Speaker 8 I didn't know him very well. He and I were together for less than six months, and we only lived together for a couple of months of that.
So I didn't really know him all that well.

Speaker 8 And most of the time that we were together,

Speaker 8 you know, we were using drugs together. It wasn't a healthy relationship where you learn

Speaker 8 what somebody's capable of.

Speaker 8 So we have an individual who's using methamphetamine, who's breaking into homes in the community, who has a history of arson in this same community.

Speaker 8 Meanwhile, he somehow ingratiated himself with a very nice couple, the Watsons, who live just several doors down from the Irwins, which means that he has an opportunity to really be watching what people are doing in this community.

Speaker 8 He is a good little burglar getting to case the joints.

Speaker 16 He knows who has children.

Speaker 3 John Jerzy Tanko was interviewed by the police, and he denies any involvement in the disappearance of baby Lisa. The case remains open.

Speaker 3 Now I'm back with my go-to experts, Phil Houston and Bill Stanton. Let's talk about intruder.
Now we have a name, potential name.

Speaker 3 Maybe, maybe John Tanko, the handyman, the good little burglar across the street. The thing about the neighbors to the Irwins, the Parscals,

Speaker 3 both of them seeing a man with a baby is

Speaker 3 huge.

Speaker 3 It's huge.

Speaker 3 Why doesn't that steer the whole investigation in a different direction when the Parscals tell both the husband and the wife tell the cops they saw a man with a baby?

Speaker 11 Because it's not Jeremy and it's not Deborah. And it throws a huge monkey wrench in the narrative.
Now what?

Speaker 11 Now what? Now we have to rethink everything.

Speaker 11 Who is this guy at a quarter after, you know, midnight, which lines up perfectly, you know, in the chill air without a blanket that they made such a note that it pinged on their radar, where the husband calls the wife, honey, make sure you lock the doors.

Speaker 11 To your point, they should have been all over that, and that should have been the main focus of the media, but it wasn't.

Speaker 3 And then there's a third person who sees a a man with a baby, this guy, Mike Thompson. And yet they seem to dismiss that as well.

Speaker 14 And one of the things that the police apparently did not do was to do what we call a fact pattern analysis, where they take each individual and compare that to the set of evidence and facts of the case that they have.

Speaker 14 And often when you do that very systematically, you'll see one or maybe one and a half persons jump out to the top of the list and say, wait a minute, this fits much more so than this guy that we thought.

Speaker 14 And we did that. And then we related that to the police and to the FBI agent.
And they didn't want to hear it. It was their bias again.

Speaker 3 And I tell you, one of my main things about in looking back at this is the problem of the 24-7 media requirements. The media has so much time to fill and they have no answers in a case like this.

Speaker 3 So they just sit and they speculate all day long. All the channels do it.
All the anchors do it. All the shows do it.

Speaker 3 And at the same time, you've got the police who are going with the stats that the parents always do it, putting out these little nuggets like the parents have stopped cooperating.

Speaker 3 Her story changed, which is true, you know, Deborah's.

Speaker 3 The dogs alerted, right? The cops were telling people, essentially, it was her.

Speaker 3 And the media checks all skepticism because that's an exciting story that they believe anyway. And it will fill the 24-7 cable news requirements.

Speaker 3 I mean, Bill, you've been part of that ecosystem, as have I. That's how it works.

Speaker 11 Yeah, if it bleeds, it leads and they want a nice, finite end to the story.

Speaker 11 And that's why they were so ravenous at getting to deborah and and jeremy jeremy to interview them to wrap this up to see them taking out in cuffs how about the maneuverings with the carpet with the suits coming in after the fact come on they had like uh the equivalent of several football teams in and out of that house you know after the crime occurred and then they go in i i forgot how many days or weeks later after the crime occurred with the uh the crime scene unit i mean that was, you know, played out in front of the cameras.

Speaker 12 That to me was, let's cover our ass.

Speaker 11 Let's show everyone that we're doing our job. And, you know, for us in the know, you know, it was pathetic.

Speaker 3 Okay, so Phil, if the Parscals really did see a man with a baby, both the husband and the wife saw a man with a baby, but did not think that man looked like anyone they knew.

Speaker 3 That's a very good fact for John Tanko.

Speaker 3 And is it the kind of fact that might lead sophisticated law enforcement or anybody to say, that's not him. That's not our guy.

Speaker 3 That's maybe that's why they ultimately proved not so interested in Tanko.

Speaker 14 Absolutely, Megan. I think a major part of the problem is the people they had on the case were

Speaker 14 not in alignment as to who they thought did it. And we saw this when we had a conference call with the lead detective, the sergeant, who was a woman, who seemed to me to be pretty level-headed.

Speaker 14 But the bureau guy clearly had a very strong opinion about the parents.

Speaker 14 He was the person that I would call the internal champion. And the internal champion in a case like that can make getting to the right conclusion very difficult because they not only

Speaker 14 draw evidence but they they know how to debunk other people's opinions and the bureau guy brings a certain amount of gravitas to the situation and and just took it over and what we also um took away is that tanko began in our minds to take on a more prominent role and one of the i was shocked when they said that they had cleared him They'd move on from him.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 14 When in fact he was in the neighborhood or appeared to be in the neighborhood that night. Also, you know, from a fingerprints perspective, here's a guy that wears gloves all day long

Speaker 14 as a handyman and so forth. Here's a guy that was arrested already for breaking in people's windows in neighborhoods.
And they

Speaker 14 seem,

Speaker 14 I don't want to, you know, know what, I can't read their minds, but they seem to ignore most of that.

Speaker 3 And let's not forget what Jim Spellman told us about the dog not barking

Speaker 3 and about

Speaker 3 the neighbor who's claiming she knew Jersey and she saw him take the dog. I don't know whether that's true or not, but

Speaker 3 that's exactly the kind of thing that would get a red flag going for a cop. Back to the theory of it was a planned burglary, potentially, potentially just to take the phones.

Speaker 3 The baby could have been an afterthought, but was that looked into?

Speaker 14 When we train investigators, Megan, there's an interesting saying that we use, and we borrowed it from the medical community. This is what they tell med students.

Speaker 14 When you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Speaker 14 Don't make it more complicated than what it is. And I think that there was a little bit perhaps of investigative panic, and everybody was just in scramble mode trying to get something.

Speaker 3 Because on the one hand, you have them ruling out a lot of very alarming evidence about a potential theft of a child.

Speaker 3 And on the other hand, you have them ignoring many facts about Deborah that work toward her benefit, like you interviewing her and saying what you said, like the fact that

Speaker 3 where would she have taken the baby and disposed of the baby that quickly in order to get back into her bed with no footprints or evidence that she had left the house, the boys hearing absolutely nothing, and no history of abuse.

Speaker 3 That's an important piece, too. It's not like Deborah was some child abuser who had been, you know, brought bringing the baby into the ER over and over.

Speaker 3 There's zero evidence to that effect, by all accounts, a loving mother.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 you know, this makes perfect sense that they were running the stats, the odds with her to the exclusion of all this other evidence. Coming up, remember the stolen cell phones?

Speaker 3 They could be key to this entire case. Plus, new theories emerge that we will explore for the first time tomorrow, episode three.

Speaker 3 But first, if you're watching right now, please take a look at this picture of Lisa as she might look now. If you're listening, you can see the photo on YouTube or just go to MeganKelly.com.

Speaker 3 If you see her or think you might have any information that can help find her, please write to me. The address is megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at megankelly.com.

Speaker 3 You can also pass along tips on the baby Lisa story to the Kansas City City Police Department or encourage them to get active on this case. That would be very helpful.

Speaker 3 Reach out at kccrimestoppers.com, kcrimestoppers.com, or call them at 816-474 TIPS. T-I-P-S, that's 816-474-8477.

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