Baby Goes Missing, Mother Questioned - Part 1 of Megyn Kelly Investigates: Baby Lisa's Disappearance | Ep. 1022

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Speaker 7 I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and our special series, Megan Kelly Investigates.
This is on the disappearance of baby Lisa.

Speaker 7 Over the next five days, we will bring you deep into a story that captivated and horrified America, including yours truly. It has stuck with me since I first covered it at Fox News.

Speaker 7 13 years later, it is a case that has never been solved.

Speaker 7 It is about the mystery of baby Lisa Irwin, a beautiful, healthy baby girl who vanished in the middle of the night, never to be found, right out of her crib.

Speaker 7 I want to start with why we're bringing you this, all right?

Speaker 7 As you're going to see throughout this episode and the four that come after it, I covered my story this self, as I I mentioned, as it happened back in 2011 and then in the many years thereafter.

Speaker 7 I remember at the time I first got sent to Kansas City, Missouri, I had my own baby girl in a crib at home and just couldn't fathom what it would be like to go in to check on her in the middle of the night or go get her in the morning and see an empty crib.

Speaker 7 Speaking to her parents at the time was a before and after moment for me. It was shocking for the reasons that you will hear in this series.
And the case has never been solved.

Speaker 7 This is not a series where at the end we're going to say this person was arrested, but you are going to have some theories. So a couple of years ago, I began reporting this story anew.

Speaker 7 I decided since we launched the Megan Kelly show to take this on with my own resources and to devote countless hours to figuring out what happened to this baby with the help of some producers and very talented investigators.

Speaker 7 The investigative team, you will know from this show, Bill Stanton, former NYPD, and Phil Houston, former CIA, known as the Human Lie Detector, that will be put to the test, that moniker, in later episodes of this series.

Speaker 7 But I started interviewing all the key players again, and I got to some critical new ones, some of whom have never before been interviewed by anybody other than law enforcement in connection with this case.

Speaker 7 We tried and may have gotten to the truth of what happened here. We uncovered quite a bit.
See for yourselves. Here's episode one.

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Speaker 7 We begin on North Lister Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. A family neighborhood, quiet, working class, and on October 4th, 2011, about to become the center of the biggest crime story in America.

Speaker 8 This winter, maybe been

Speaker 8 break your home.

Speaker 7 10-month-old baby Lisa Irwin disappeared in the middle of the night. Father Jeremy came home from his night shift at 3.45 a.m.
and found the lights were on.

Speaker 7 A window window was open, the screen pushed in, the front door unlocked, and his baby girl was not in her crib. Must be a reasonable explanation, he thought.
His first instinct, don't panic.

Speaker 9 That's the last thing you expect is that one of your kids is going to be missing. So initially, when she's not in the crib, it's like, okay, well, she's in bed with Deborah.

Speaker 9 She's in bed with one of the brothers.

Speaker 8 She's...

Speaker 9 maybe fallen out of bed and she's asleep under the crib.

Speaker 7 He woke up the baby's mother, his partner, Deborah Bradley, out of a sound sleep. She appeared to have no idea why baby Lisa was not in her crib.

Speaker 7 Jeremy ran next door to see if somehow the neighbor had the baby. Then he called 911.

Speaker 7 Jeremy and Deborah immediately went public, begging for help.

Speaker 10 No questions asked. Just drop her off with somebody at a hospital, a church, the fire department, the police station, anywhere.

Speaker 10 Just please bring her home.

Speaker 7 How do you think about it today?

Speaker 7 Jeremy Irwin.

Speaker 9 It's still pretty similar to the way it has been. It's a lot of frustration and some anger and mostly just feeling like you're missing a huge giant chunk of your life.

Speaker 7 Deborah Bradley was just 25 then. She's 38 now.
Your case is so unique because it became a huge national news story. And you now have old interviews of yourself and press conferences.

Speaker 7 You know, when you look back on that, what do you think?

Speaker 14 I think I can't believe I survived.

Speaker 7 And though so much time has passed, what happened to Lisa that night remains a mystery.

Speaker 7 News of Lisa's disappearance traveled fast. Search crews combed the neighborhood, police dogs were deployed, and the media descended on North Lister Avenue.

Speaker 7 A classic crescent-shaped suburban street just north of the Missouri River. Deborah's aunt, Cindy Lorette, still chokes up remembering that terrible day back in 2011.

Speaker 16 It was crazy, unlike anything I've ever seen before or I've seen thus. I mean,

Speaker 16 every which way you look,

Speaker 16 there was police officers, there was cars, there was people.

Speaker 16 I remember the CNN van. I remember HLN van.
I mean, you couldn't get down the streets. There was literally reporters climbing in trees,

Speaker 16 trying to get snapshots of us.

Speaker 11 What were your first impressions of the story and the scene?

Speaker 7 Jim Spellman was there from the start, reporting the story for CNN and its sister channel, Headline News.

Speaker 8 This was a neighborhood not unlike where I grew up, a kind of a working-class-ish neighborhood, well-kept homes, but but not the kind of families that would be prepared to deal with the onslaught of media, police, lawyers, and everything else that would be involved in something like this.

Speaker 8 It's also a neighborhood that was shocked because, you know, this was a neighborhood full of kids and families, and one of their own was dealing with, I think, every parent's nightmare.

Speaker 7 In those critical early hours and days, Kansas City police, the FBI, the ATF, and a group of local volunteers searched the area. They did not find Lisa or any hard evidence.

Speaker 7 Within a week, a timeline of the day began to emerge. 2.30 p.m., Deborah's dad comes by with her brother, Philip Nets.
4.45 p.m., Deborah and Philip go buy baby formula and boxed wine.

Speaker 7 They're seen on store security video.

Speaker 7 Around 5 o'clock p.m., next-door neighbor Samantha Brando drops by.

Speaker 7 5.15 p.m., Jeremy, an electrician, gets a call from his boss and soon leaves to work at a Starbucks, unaware of the chaos and tragedy about to unfold just hours later. 6 p.m.

Speaker 7 Deborah makes dinner for Samantha, Sam's daughter, as well as Lisa and her two half-brothers, five-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Blake. 6.30 p.m.
Deborah puts Lisa to bed.

Speaker 7 By 7 p.m., Samantha's daughter and Deborah's boys are inside playing. Baby Lisa is supposed to be in her crib asleep.
Both moms sit on the front step smoking, talking, and drinking.

Speaker 7 Between 8 and 10 p.m., Shane Beagley, a 33-year-old landscaper who was the grandson of a neighbor, stops by the stoop for a visit.

Speaker 7 Sometime around 10.30 to 11 p.m., Deborah said, she checked on baby Lisa, then went down the hall and got in bed with the two boys.

Speaker 7 Before bed, Deborah leaves three cell phones on the kitchen counter. two with restricted use because of non-payment.
It is believed only one worked normally.

Speaker 7 They all end up missing. 10.30 p.m.

Speaker 7 Samantha Brando is back home. She reportedly later said that she noticed the lights were turned off at Deborah and Jeremy's house.
Some leads quickly emerged with possible sightings of a kidnapper.

Speaker 7 The next morning, seven-year-old Blake tells police he heard noises during the night. Also the next morning, the Parscals, who lived around the corner, told police what they had seen.

Speaker 7 Husband Onesto was leaving for his overnight shift and wife Lisa was awaken inside. Once again, reporter Jim Spellman.

Speaker 8 He thinks this is weird enough that he phones her in the house from the car and says, hey, come and take a look at this.

Speaker 8 And she sees this man walking up the street holding a baby, not wearing clothes.

Speaker 8 And having been in the window where she could see this happening and having been standing where his car was parked, it would not be a problem to view this, even even though it's past midnight.

Speaker 8 There were plenty of street lights. So, show me exactly what you did.

Speaker 5 You looked out this window, tell me where your husband was, and tell me what you saw.

Speaker 8 My husband was. Nobody's mind immediately goes to, oh, somebody's kidnapping this baby.
That's what she told me. She said, My mind did not immediately think kidnapping.

Speaker 8 But the first thing in the morning when she saw this commotion going on was she told the police about this.

Speaker 11 What time of night did she say she saw the man with the baby?

Speaker 8 I'll tell you, and she had it exactly because she showed me the phone records from her husband calling calling her.

Speaker 8 12.15.

Speaker 11 12.15 a.m.

Speaker 17 Stranger abductions put children in the most dire situation.

Speaker 17 And so we know time is ticking.

Speaker 7 Callahan Walsh of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Speaker 17 Those early hours are the most critical because within the first two hours, there's a 70% chance you'll recover the child deceased and about a 90% chance after 24 hours.

Speaker 17 In a case like this, where we don't know exactly who took baby Irwin and it's a possibility that it's a stranger abduction, we know time is of the essence.

Speaker 7 Was Lisa the baby in the man's arms?

Speaker 7 More suspicious things happen in those early hours. 2.30 a.m.

Speaker 7 There's a dumpster fire in a parking lot not too far from the Parscals house. Could this be related? At 2.45 a.m.

Speaker 7 A nearby BP gas station surveillance camera shows a man in a light t-shirt emerging from the woods that bordered the neighborhood. It's too dark and grainy to see if he's carrying anything.

Speaker 7 And then, as I reported for Fox News at the time, Deborah's first account of her timeline gets a serious revision.

Speaker 7 Turns out she was drinking more than she originally claimed, and she's no longer sure about when she last saw her baby girl.

Speaker 18 When you went in at 10:30 after the neighbor left, what did you do?

Speaker 18 Probably went right to my room.

Speaker 18 Why do you say probably? Because

Speaker 18 sometimes sometimes I check on her. Well, most of the time I check on her.
And then the boys, so I'm assuming that I went and checked on her too, but

Speaker 18 I don't know. You don't remember? No.
Let's talk about the wine.

Speaker 18 How much did you consume that day?

Speaker 18 I had

Speaker 18 several, several glasses of wine.

Speaker 18 When you say several, more than three? Yeah.

Speaker 18 But that has nothing to do with her.

Speaker 18 More than five?

Speaker 18 Probably.

Speaker 18 More than 10? No.

Speaker 18 Was it just wine or was it? Yeah, just wine.

Speaker 18 Just wine. Lisa was in bed and the boys were laying down watching a movie with the neighbor's daughter.
Were you drunk?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So the last time Deborah is sure she saw Lisa was at 6.30 p.m. before she started drinking.
Could something have happened accidentally?

Speaker 7 Maybe Lisa fell or was dropped, or Deborah unknowingly rolled over on her while they slept. Or worse, did she deliberately kill her own child? At the very least, Deborah is drunk and unreliable.

Speaker 7 It was a tough interview. I went pretty hard on you.
Very difficult.

Speaker 7 You

Speaker 7 fessed up. You said, I had a lot of drinks that night, someplace between six and ten, and I think I blacked out.
Now, a lot of people wouldn't have admitted that.

Speaker 7 A lot of people would not have sat down with the press and said that at all. They would have been worried that it would have made them look some certain way.

Speaker 14 I didn't care how I looked.

Speaker 16 I mean, yes, Debbie drank.

Speaker 7 Deborah's aunt, Cindy Lorette.

Speaker 16 Debbie probably still drinks. It doesn't fucking matter.
It does not matter. Sorry, I said that.

Speaker 16 We all do. And if you're the perfect parent, then good for you.

Speaker 16 Because this could happen to anybody. You don't plan on things like this to happen.
You don't plan on turning the TV on and seeing one of your relatives missing, let alone a 10-month-old baby.

Speaker 11 The door wasn't locked, right?

Speaker 7 Reporter Jim Spellman.

Speaker 8 The door was not locked, but keep in mind that by her own admission, Deborah Bradley was drinking that night.

Speaker 8 I'm not sure that she could be trusted to confidently say whether she locked the door or not.

Speaker 19 Obviously, they are our main focus. I'm not calling them suspects.

Speaker 7 Knowing her timeline was problematic and wanting to prove to police she had nothing to hide, Deborah volunteered to take a polygraph. And then she took police remarks to mean she had failed it.

Speaker 14 We were done. I was like, okay, so you know what what happens now and he goes it gets real close to me and he goes i think that you're very bad mother

Speaker 14 and i just broke down i and i said that it's not possible that i failed and he just kept saying i think you're a bad mother you need to tell us what you did and i just kind of fell apart um

Speaker 14 not gonna lie my nerves i actually wet my myself because I couldn't believe what he was saying to me.

Speaker 7 Exhausted and emotional, Deborah and Jeremy decide they have shared everything they can think of to help the investigation and need a break.

Speaker 7 But Kansas City police publicly criticize the couple for not continuing to talk to them.

Speaker 7 The news coverage is walled around.

Speaker 20 Just a couple hours ago at a news conference held by Kansas City police and investigators in the case.

Speaker 21 They've always been free. They've been cooperative up to this point, but early this evening, they decided to stop cooperating with detectives.

Speaker 7 Kansas City attorney Sean O'Brien.

Speaker 12 And so the public impression was these parents had something to hide.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 that came through on the news coverage.

Speaker 15 All along, police said Lisa's parents, Jeremy Irwin and Deborah Bradley, cooperated with police until Thursday night. Her parents are no longer cooperating with police.

Speaker 20 I don't get it because as a parent myself, if my child was missing, I would give anything I have.

Speaker 7 Despite the sighting of the man with the baby, one week into the case, police seemed to have only one suspect, her mother.

Speaker 7 ABC News legal correspondent Dan Abrams asked Jeremy the question on everyone's mind, could Deborah have done something accidentally?

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 19 Maybe she tried to cover it up after.

Speaker 25 The first time I even thought that was when the police had started asking us about it.

Speaker 26 So just from the statistics standpoint, it didn't surprise me that law enforcement was really going after Deborah and also Jeremy.

Speaker 7 That's Marissa Rendazo, the former chief research psychologist at the U.S. Secret Service.
She would soon be tapped to work on this case.

Speaker 26 From the criminal psychologist side of me, I wondered what involvement she or her husband might have had.

Speaker 7 And so did I. And so did lots of people.
But when Kansas City attorney Sean O'Brien started working with Deborah and Jeremy, he quickly realized no one was getting the whole story.

Speaker 12 Because the police kept saying the parents aren't cooperating, the parents aren't cooperating. It was like the mantra they were putting out on television.

Speaker 12 And it wasn't until after I got into the case I realized that was totally not true. You know, they had spent 40 hours in questioning with the police

Speaker 12 before I was brought into the case. These were people who were trying to help the police find their baby.

Speaker 7 So why were the police saying that? Were they just making that up?

Speaker 12 I think they didn't have a better suspect.

Speaker 12 Interrogation is not investigation, It's a strategy to get a suspect to make an incriminating statement, period. That's all it is.
And so it's a really dangerous position for them to be in.

Speaker 12 The other thing that I found out later had been done was that they pulled a strategy on them that's called the prisoner's dilemma.

Speaker 12 And what you do when you have two suspects in a case is you tell each of them that the other one is implicating them.

Speaker 12 And so they they better start talking and get out ahead of it, or they're going to be the one left holding the bag. And so they did that with Jeremy and Deborah.

Speaker 12 They had each done like a 10-hour videotaped interview and they took a little snippet out of each one.

Speaker 7 Jeremy Irwin.

Speaker 9 The cop comes in and he's like, hey, I

Speaker 9 want you to see something.

Speaker 9 So he sets his laptop down in front of me. And it's a video of Deborah.
It is Deborah's interrogation video from like day two and three.

Speaker 9 And he scrolls and he scrolls and he scrolls and he scrolls and he scrolls and he scrolls. Finally finds whatever he's looking for, swings the laptop back around.

Speaker 9 Plays me a 12-second clip of Deborah clearly frustrated, crying.

Speaker 8 And she says, Well, I don't know.

Speaker 9 I guess maybe he did it

Speaker 9 or something to that effect. He did what? I could have stubbed my toe on the door.
I could have spilt the cup of coffee.

Speaker 13 He did what?

Speaker 9 Like, you literally showed me nothing.

Speaker 8 But that was just one of the

Speaker 9 little things that they'll do to you while you're in there.

Speaker 7 And the polygraph? According to one of Deborah's attorneys, Deborah had, in fact, passed it.

Speaker 9 Obviously, their whole thing was it was Deborah. Deborah did it.
Deborah did it.

Speaker 9 So I always kept asking them, Deborah did what? Go ahead, finish your sentence and there was no sentence to be finished

Speaker 26 psychologist marissa rondazo says that's confirmation bias essentially what confirmation bias is that once you develop a theory it's human nature to seek out information that confirms that theory and disregard information that would undercut that theory it appeared that they were not pursuing alternate possibilities as with as many resources or sort of energy as they were their theory that it was Deborah and or Jeremy.

Speaker 24 Investigators are quickly closing in on the baby's mother, Deborah.

Speaker 7 Jeremy's sister Ashley Irwin thought the writing was on the wall and said so in an interview with ABC News.

Speaker 8 Do you think

Speaker 24 Deborah may be facing an arrest?

Speaker 27 Probably, to be real honest with you, yes.

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 27 Because it's what the police do. They don't have any leads, so they have to pivot on somebody.

Speaker 6 Do you think it's inevitable?

Speaker 27 Yeah, kind of.

Speaker 7 We're not a pressure. Captain Steve Young of the Kansas City Police Department.

Speaker 19 You know, we're under pressure to find a child. We're not under pressure to pin this on anybody or wrap it up or make an arrest.

Speaker 7 Even so, the pressure on Deborah was intense.

Speaker 16 Oh, she was just a mess.

Speaker 7 Cindy Lorette remembers the stress of it. She was staying with the family to help out.

Speaker 16 She just didn't know which way was up or down, or and she would just cry and she would

Speaker 23 nestle her head under my arm or next to me or she just nobody knew what to do

Speaker 7 and now we can introduce you to one of the most intriguing players in this whole story Christy Schiller is a Houston horse breeder socialite one-time playboy model and a broadcaster what was the first you heard about the Lisa Irwin case so i got a call from my stepson and he said, hurry and turn on Fox News.

Speaker 28 And you were reporting. And he said that there's a baby that's been kidnapped in Kansas City.

Speaker 7 Then Christy got a call from a family friend, Deborah's cousin, Mike Lorette.

Speaker 28 And he called me and he said, I'm here in Kansas City. I'm trying to protect my cousin and her husband.
He said, there's news people shoving cameras to the windows.

Speaker 11 I'd like to thank all the people of Kansas City, the

Speaker 25 local, national media, for the continued support and coverage to keep Fabianisa's picture out there.

Speaker 13 He said, I'm just scared.

Speaker 28 He said, I just don't know what to do. He said, I'm trained for DEF CON 4 and I just don't feel like anybody's coming here to help us.
And I said, help is on the way.

Speaker 7 Christy had her own theories. She had spent that summer glued to the trial of Casey Anthony, a mother accused of murdering her three-year-old daughter.

Speaker 28 I thought for sure that, you know, she was going to go down.

Speaker 7 And when the verdict came in? We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.

Speaker 7 And just stood there frozen. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 28 And I turned around to somebody who was a complete stranger and I said, mark my word, the next parent that does not trim their child's nails right,

Speaker 28 they're going to serve hard time.

Speaker 7 Sure that Deborah was caught in this backlash, Christie swung into action, tapping into the brain trust of police and legal professionals that she met through her charity, Canines for Cops, created in tribute to a police dog killed in the line of duty.

Speaker 7 She called Bill Stanton, a former New York City police officer, private investigator, and TV commentator who was on her canine board.

Speaker 7 Bill assembled a team that included Phil Houston, a CIA veteran of 25 years.

Speaker 7 Phil created the deception detection method still being used by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and law enforcement agencies around the nation. He is known as the human lie detector.

Speaker 7 Former Secret Service psychologist Marissa Rondazo was also part of the team. First order of business, they needed to determine what, if any, involvement Deborah may have had.

Speaker 7 By this point, the baby's father, Jeremy, had essentially been ruled out because there's a security video of him working on an electrical project at Starbucks through most of the night baby Lisa went missing.

Speaker 7 Christie's team began to plan their own videotaped interviews with the parents. Marissa worked with Phil on the questions for Deborah and Jeremy.

Speaker 26 I helped really to talk through with Phil around what angle, what to think about when talking with someone who may be responsible for the disappearance or we were really concerned about possibly the death of baby Lisa.

Speaker 26 So we know that the parents, especially the mother, was under suspicion by law enforcement.

Speaker 26 and to figure out kind of what the different angles were, why parents, especially mothers, the sort of top motivations of why they do kill their children and to use those angles and perspectives to help formulate the questions that Phil would be asking them.

Speaker 7 Now there was a plane waiting thanks to Christy Schiller. Bill and Phil headed to Kansas City.

Speaker 7 Once in the Kansas City area, in a rented house at a secret location away from the throngs of media, Phil and an associate interviewed Deborah.

Speaker 7 Phil Houston had seen their press conferences and how they answered questions. Like so many of us, he already had his suspicions about the couple.

Speaker 13 They've been asked, did you do it? Did you do it? Did you do it?

Speaker 13 And so you have to craft an approach to the questioning that cuts through that, that minimizes all of the histronics that have led up to this meeting, if you will.

Speaker 13 And I was convinced that they were guilty until we asked that first question.

Speaker 7 We have it on tape, that moment where you got to ask your first question of Deborah. Let's watch it.

Speaker 4 Debbie, I think the first question that I need to ask you this morning, okay,

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 7 what involvement

Speaker 4 did you have in the disappearance of Lisa?

Speaker 7 None.

Speaker 2 The only thing I did wrong was

Speaker 7 drink that night

Speaker 25 and

Speaker 2 possibly not be alert, not hear.

Speaker 8 Sorry.

Speaker 7 What did you glean from that? What are we seeing there?

Speaker 13 First of all, if you noticed, I didn't ask her, did you do it? I upped the ante by asking her a presumptive question.

Speaker 13 I'm presuming that it's quite possible, maybe even probable, that you did this, that you were involved. What involvement did you have?

Speaker 13 And her response to that was immediately, without hesitation, none.

Speaker 13 But then she throws a curveball at us. She says, the only thing I did

Speaker 13 wrong.

Speaker 13 So she's confessing. She's saying, look, this is what I, this is the only thing I did wrong.

Speaker 26 Phil's reaction coming out of this was, no matter the angle that we tried, No matter the approach of the question,

Speaker 26 she was answering them truthfully and not showing deception.

Speaker 7 In a twist even he didn't see coming, Phil determined Deborah is telling the truth, that she had nothing to do with her daughter's disappearance.

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, I, like you, flew out there thinking they did it. It's always the parents.
When the wife gets killed, it's always the husband. We all know this.
And I remember being flabbergasted.

Speaker 7 I just couldn't believe, like, what do you mean? Challenged all my own biases, but I think led to better reporting on my part in covering the case, right? Just check your bias. You could be wrong.

Speaker 7 Have some humility. There are people smarter than you are at detecting deception who say she's not lying, and neither is Jeremy.

Speaker 7 Armed with this knowledge, Christy Schiller anonymously offers a $100,000 reward for information leading to the return of baby Lisa. Bill Stanton made the announcement.

Speaker 29 There's going to be a $100,000 reward put up for the safe return and/or

Speaker 29 conviction of personal persons involved in this horrible crime.

Speaker 7 Until now, no one knew it was Christy who offered the reward, a secret she managed to keep even from her own husband. Is it true?

Speaker 7 He once said to you, hey, did you hear they posted a reward for the baby? And you were like.

Speaker 28 And he said, tell me it wasn't you. And he said, what were you thinking? And I said, we don't need our name on the side of a building.

Speaker 28 I want to know that this mother and father are being reunited and the two little boys with their siblings.

Speaker 7 Announcing the $100,000 reward was just one way Stanton kept the baby Lisa story in the news. But Bill had a problem.

Speaker 22 After the press conference, and I said an anonymous benefactor, this nasty rumor of it was either NBC or ABC, and they were paying behind the scenes to get all the exclusives and attention.

Speaker 7 And that's when he called me.

Speaker 22 No one believes the anonymous benefactor. I need for you to verify it to your comfort level and we'll go from there.

Speaker 7 And I was thinking, sure, yes, I'm interested in this story at any level. But of course, what I would ultimately like is to talk to the parents.
And that's where it landed.

Speaker 7 And, you know, explosive details came out that day. You know, it had its highs and lows for Deborah because that's when the public learned she had between six and ten drinks.

Speaker 18 Do you have a drinking problem? No.

Speaker 18 I don't think so.

Speaker 18 Some folks are going to have an issue with you having

Speaker 18 more than five drinks while you're looking after a little baby and two little boys. She was sleeping.

Speaker 7 I wanted to ask, why did you choose to share that with me?

Speaker 14 Because it has nothing to do with Lisa.'s abduction and i want to be honest about everything so that people will look for her because i feel like if they're like oh she's being honest about that, she's got to be telling the truth about other stuff.

Speaker 14 And any publicity for Lisa is good, whether people like what I say or not.

Speaker 13 That's true.

Speaker 7 The wall-to-wall media coverage continued.

Speaker 30 And they are still searching urgently for the child, although they do say that as every hour passes, this case gets harder to solve.

Speaker 30 And at this point, police freely admit they have no suspects and no leads.

Speaker 7 That was always one of the biggest mysteries about this case. Like,

Speaker 7 what kind of criminal, whether it's, you know, a parent, a family member, or an intruder, like is so good

Speaker 7 that they don't leave behind a fingerprint, DNA, or any other really meaningful clue? Because no matter who did this, they did escape, you know, without a trace. Reporter Jim Spellman.

Speaker 8 So I think there's two possible answers to that.

Speaker 8 The first is if it's somebody who you expect to have in the house, in any house in a crime scene, if you expect to find their DNA and their fingerprints, then that evidence is of little help to investigators.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 8 I think what you're asking is really an incredible question because as you try to run through potential scenarios in your head, guessing more than anything, they just so many of them lead to dead ends.

Speaker 8 Is there some way that Deborah Bradley or her husband Jeremy somehow did this themselves and were able to pull this off in a short matter of hours?

Speaker 8 It seems incredibly unlikely right but then could some stranger somehow know that this was a house that had a baby in it where the husband was working a very rare night shift uh where the you know the mom was perhaps not at her best having you know uh done some serious drinking that night and then that's the night you stealthily get in and out of the house making it through neighbors and and everything else that seems equally as unlikely

Speaker 7 there's so much we don't know about the evidence because Kansas City PD won't talk to us. They say that's because this is still an open investigation.

Speaker 7 We have our doubts about how much investigating is really going on, and for that matter, about how they handled this case. Now I'm joined by Phil Houston and Bill Stanton.

Speaker 7 They will be my partners in crime on this, my go-to criminal experts, as we take a hard look at the facts of this case.

Speaker 11 Looking back now, it's 12 years later, is there's no nest cameras in every door. There's no even low-grade security cameras.

Speaker 11 Even the like every gas station now has a good camera that will show you most of what happened there. In today's day and age, they'd be able to zero right in on whoever that was that emerged.

Speaker 11 And what a difference a decade makes.

Speaker 22 And that's why 12 years later, we're still talking about it, trying to solve it, because it's every person's, every parent's worst nightmare.

Speaker 22 Someone coming into your home in the middle of the night and taking the most precious thing that you'll ever have in your life, your child.

Speaker 11 The police really do seem to be guilty of some tunnel vision here. I mean, what we're learning already is that they're really interested, Phil, in Deborah.
and Jeremy.

Speaker 11 And in the opening hours of an investigation, one can completely understand that.

Speaker 13 Absolutely. And they both look guilty as sin if you look at it just from a global perspective.

Speaker 11 And then you have Deborah admitting to excessive drinking, you know, to the point of possibly blacking out.

Speaker 11 And you have cops saying that the parents stopped cooperating, which, you know, that leads everybody to be like, oh, that's it. They're guilty.

Speaker 13 She was done being interrogated over and over and over and over by police she definitely accurately believed had a foregone conclusion about her and the other part to that too is is that deborah is no shrinking violet i mean she's not afraid you know when you reach a certain point to really let people know what she's thinking about what how they're behaving towards her and i don't know this i'm speculating but that she probably became fairly angry and that anger could have could have been misinterpreted in the interrogations plus just the odds the overwhelming odds, you know, are she did it.

Speaker 11 That's the biggest obstacle to ruling her out. But let's spend a moment ruling her in.
How does that look? What evidence does point to Deborah?

Speaker 22 Okay, it's a tough one. So let's go with this hypothesis.
So was it intentional or unintentional? If it was intentional,

Speaker 22 Then we're going to say she didn't drink as much. She was tossing the alcohol, making it seem like she was drunk to the friend, right? Doing everything she normally does.

Speaker 22 She knows her husband is working at least until 3, 4 a.m. And she just doesn't want the burden of the child anymore, right?

Speaker 22 So she acts like she's drunk. She puts the kids in bed with her.
The kids fall asleep. Then she wakes up, takes her child, and either sells the baby or,

Speaker 22 you know, makes the child go away. Right.
That would be one theory.

Speaker 11 On that theory, she would also have to get out of the house and dispose of the remains and then get back into the bed before Jeremy gets home and sees her at what he said was sleeping.

Speaker 11 You know, he believed, and you know, and you're the spouse, you can tell when your spouse is legit asleep and when they're not, but keep going.

Speaker 22 The accident theory is far harder for me to go over because, listen, we've all been in that half-buzz state, you know, where you go to bed drunk and then you wake up half sober.

Speaker 22 How do you negotiate that? She wakes up, she finds that she smothered her baby, right? Now I have to get rid of it because I can't face reality.

Speaker 22 How does she do that within walking distance and have the presence of mind? Oh, let me take the phones, let me not be seen. And if my kids wake up, there are so many variables to that theory.

Speaker 22 It's very hard for me to pursue that one. Far easier for me to go further down the road with she sold a child, which I do not believe.

Speaker 11 You know,

Speaker 11 when

Speaker 11 every new mother knows, they know you don't take your baby in your bed with her, with you. Like it's very dangerous.
You can smother your baby inadvertently, but some do it anyway.

Speaker 11 I mean, some don't know. And then some do know, but they take the risk anyway because they're exhausted and the child's crying a lot and they just make a mistake.

Speaker 11 They fall asleep there and one thing leads to one other terrible thing. But the fact that she had her two boys in the bed with her, actually,

Speaker 11 right, Bill? I mean, that just works against that theory.

Speaker 22 Like, absolutely. Those boys were interviewed and they were old enough to know if their baby sister was in the bed with them.
Yeah. Right.
There are just

Speaker 22 so many different ways, you know, that if she did it, she would have gotten caught. Again, these are simple people, and I don't mean that in a detrimental sense.
They're not master criminals.

Speaker 22 You know, if someone planned this out, they wouldn't be able to do it. Just too many variables.
You know, it was, in my opinion, again, the perfect storm of,

Speaker 22 you know,

Speaker 22 Jeremy being away, her being overserved, the boys being in the bed.

Speaker 22 You know, for her to roll over on a baby and then get rid of the child, you know, could have done it. but she would have got caught real quick.
And then again, just think about the guilt.

Speaker 22 This isn't someone that's, you know, a sociopath serial killer that could kill a person, you know, once a week and then go out in life.

Speaker 22 To stay married with your husband, to look at your children in the eyes, to, you know, the pain that she went through, you know, behind the scenes that we've all saw. just doesn't play out to me.

Speaker 11 No, she's not a sociopath. And she continues to talk to us, even though, you know, you guys know I've had many a very tough segment on Deborah on my various shows.

Speaker 11 I just feel like the actual murderer would not keep putting themselves in this harm's way.

Speaker 11 Can we talk about the next-door neighbor, Samantha Brando, for a minute? Because while we have been unable to reach her, you guys did talk to her.

Speaker 11 You also put her through the Phil Houston treatment to find out whether it was true, what, that she was sitting with Deborah, that they were drinking together, that things went down the way Deborah said they did.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and most importantly, she validated the level of intoxication she said i hate to say this about deborah but i don't know if i've ever seen her and i'm paraphrasing here but but i don't know if i've ever seen her that that intoxicated before there was more wine there than deborah told us originally well that could explain why Deborah didn't hear an intruder for sure.

Speaker 22 Well, to your point, Megan, when Jeremy came home, no one heard him come in. He was walking around the house.
He shut the window. He turned out the lights.
He went into the bedrooms.

Speaker 22 Didn't wake them up for him either.

Speaker 7 That's true.

Speaker 11 So why didn't anyone ever come forward? If somebody stole this baby and did something with her, there's not one person who needed $100,000

Speaker 11 enough to come forward and quietly say, I know what happened to her.

Speaker 22 The reason why I think no one has claimed the reward, because it was a sole actor who committed this crime and no one else knows about it. Because to your point, Megan,

Speaker 22 that's $100,000

Speaker 22 and they could do right and they could have done it at that time.

Speaker 22 Now, was the baby sold

Speaker 22 or something more nefarious?

Speaker 11 That would explain it if it were a sole actor who then kept his mouth shut.

Speaker 11 But that's one of the troubling things about this whole thing. Like if it was

Speaker 11 anybody who blabbed or if it were a group, somebody would have turned on somebody else and that just hasn't happened. So as it stands at this point, all eyes are on Deborah.

Speaker 7 Coming up in our next episode, police continue to bear down on Deborah. If she didn't do it, who did? What else was going on in the neighborhood that night?

Speaker 7 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 7 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 7 You can also pass along tips on the baby Lisa story to the Kansas City Police Department or encourage them to get active on this case.

Speaker 11 That would be very helpful.

Speaker 7 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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Speaker 2 Hey weirdos, I'm Elena and I'm Ash and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 1 Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 2 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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