Lisa Irwin, a 10-month-old baby from Kansas City,
vanished from her home sometime in the middle of the night last Monday, October 3. Lisa’s mom, Deborah
Bradley, put her to bed at about 7:30 p.m., and then went to bed herself by
10:30 p.m. Lisa’s father, Jeremy Irwin, was
working the late shift and when he came home at 4 a.m., he discovered the front
door unlocked, most of the lights on in the house, and a window with a bent
pushed in screen. When he woke up his
wife to ask her why she had left the lights on and the door unlocked, they
noticed that Lisa was missing.
Earlier in the night, Bradley had been transferring phone
numbers from an old cell phone into a new one, and she had left the phones on
the counter (there were 3 phones total, one was broken). The intruder reportedly
took these phones, according to Bradley and Irwin, to prevent them from calling
for help. Irwin used his work cell phone
to call police.Today marks seven days that Lisa has been missing, and the outcome looks worse with each day that passes. The case is gaining national media attention and the parents have appeared on Good Morning America and The Today Show. Massive search efforts have been conducted by the FBI, including canine searches, ground area searches, and neighbor interviews.
Hopefully, baby Lisa is alive and well, and someone is
caring for her. The alternative is just
too sad to imagine. I read a lot of true crime blogs and forums, and there has been a lot of speculation about whether or not this is a real abduction, or if this is a cover-up by the parents. I haven't seen anything concrete to point me in either direction, so I'm just going to try and break down the possible scenarios.
Intruder Theory
Let’s think about the intruder theory for a second. First, is this theory even possible? If yes, is it even probable? According to the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children, there have been 278 infant abductions in the U.S. since 1983. This of course doesn’t mean that it could never happen; it’s just interesting to note how rare it is.
Let's say that someone broke into the house in the middle of the night. Someone would have to get into the house (either through the window with the bent screen or through the unlocked door), take the sleeping baby (without the baby making a sound), turn on all the lights in the house, take three cell phones from off the kitchen counter, and leave with the baby (either through the window or through the unlocked door). I would think it would be especially difficult to hold on to a baby while going through the window, so perhaps they exited through the front door. Below are two pictures of the house, both from the front. Yesterday, investigators went back to the Irwin house to re-create the scene, and as you can see from the pictures, it certainly does look possible for someone to crawl into the house through the window, as the investigator is seen doing.
Captain Steve Young, from the Kansas City Police Department, told Good Morning America they were able to confirm that a neighbor reported seeing someone walking down the street at about 2 a.m. that night, with what looked like a baby in a diaper in his arms. Unfortunately, nothing has come out of that lead thus far, and witnesses like this are not always reliable.
This intruder scenario leaves me with a lot of unanswered questions. First, the family has said they have a black lab mix that lives with them at their home. The night of the disappearance, the dog was sleeping outside on the deck. Neither the family nor the neighbors reported hearing the dog bark that night. Why didn't the dog bark, as this intruder was lurking around outside and going through windows in the middle of the night? The mother reported that she always had the baby monitor on, yet she didn’t hear anything? Not a peep, or a footstep, or anything? The father said that this was the first night he worked the late shift at his job, and the mother said that this was the first time she had accidentally left the front door unlocked….lucky intruder, huh? The father just happens to be gone, and the door is unlocked.
The parents also say that the screen to the window looked
like it had been bent, possibly taken out, and then put back in place by the
intruder. Why would the intruder bother to replace the screen?
The taking of the cell phones “to make sure they couldn’t
call for help” is also very bizarre to me.
Why would the intruder just assume that those three phones were the only
phones in the house? And if the intruder
didn’t want them to call for help, and therefore taking their cell phones,
wouldn’t that only buy him/her a few minutes? Surely, they would find another
way to get help right away, ie: go to a neighbor’s house, drive to the police
station, etc.
But if Lisa wasn’t abducted by an intruder, what the heck
happened?
I’m completely on the fence as to whether I think Lisa was abducted by a stranger, or not. An interview with Lisa’s parents, shortly after the disappearance,
can be found here. They both seem like distraught parents to me, and it’s
actually very heartbreaking to watch.
In a later interview given on Good Morning America, however, Bradley admits that investigators told her
that she failed her lie detector test. I know that lie detector tests aren’t
the most reliable things in the world, and they certainly aren’t admissible in
court, but it just makes you wonder. Irwin
said that he has not yet been asked to take a lie detector test, but he will do
so if asked.
Investigators have now been to the home twice, and both
times they removed items from the property. No word on what was taken. On Thursday, investigators spoke to the media
and said that Bradley and Irwin were no longer cooperating with the
investigation. The next day, Bradley and Irwin came out to the media and denied
that was true. Whether or not they are
in fact cooperating, there’s no doubt that they have not been ruled out as
suspects, at least not yet. The good news about the intruder scenario is that if it is true that Lisa was taken by a stranger, there's a very good chance that she is still alive. Another statistic provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children states that out of the 278 infant abductions in the U.S., only 12 of those children are still considered missing (1 child was found deceased).
Accidental Death?
I think that because I followed the Casey Anthony case so
closely, my mind quickly went to an accidental death scenario when I first heard about this. There
are still a lot of unanswered questions with this scenario too though, and I’m
not really sure that this makes any sort of sense either. Let’s say for a second that the mother was
home with Lisa, and something horrible happened that resulted in little Lisa
passing away. She would have disposed of the body, cleaned up any evidence, hid
the cell phones (was she concerned that the phones ‘pinged’ somewhere and so
she had to place that on the intruder?), bent the window screen to look like a break-in, and got into
bed so that it would appear that she was sleeping when her husband got home.
The questions with this scenario would be: Would she have
left the house to dispose of the body? Would neighbors have heard her leave? Why
wouldn’t she call for help in the hopes of saving her daughter, if in fact something
did happen? And finally, if she was acting in those media interviews, she definitely deserves an Academy Award, because she certainly looks devastated to me.
Nothing has come out in the media to suggest that either Bradley
or Irwin have any sort of criminal or violent past, so I’m not even really letting my mind go that route yet.
This case is just so confusing to me, and every day new
info seems to leak out. I’ll keep
updating as I hear things.Lisa is described as 30 inches tall with blue eyes and blond hair. She weighs between 26 and 30 pounds and was last seen wearing purple shorts and a purple shirt with white kittens on it. She has two bottom teeth, a small bug bite under her left ear, and a "beauty mark" on her right outer thigh. She had a cold with a cough, before she disappeared.
To report any info about this case, please call 816-474-TIPS.
SOURCES:
- http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-08/us/us_missouri-missing-girl_1_missing-missouri-missouri-girl-police-station?_s=PM:US
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/09/lisa-irwin-missing-statistics-stranger_n_1002196.html
- http://video.foxnews.com/v/1208764392001/exclusive-parents-of-missing-baby-lisa-speak-out/
Your blog rules!
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