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

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

2025/3/11
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Megyn Kelly: 我回顾了婴儿Lisa失踪案,并与调查人员Bill Stanton和Phil Houston一起分析了案件的证据。我质疑了警方对Lisa母亲Deborah的关注,并探讨了媒体在塑造案件叙事中的作用。 我采访了参与此案的律师Cindy Short,以及目击者Lisa Parscale和Megan Wright,以获得更多信息。 我发现警方在调查中存在偏见,并且没有充分调查其他嫌疑人,例如John Tanko。 我呼吁警方重新调查此案,并关注其他线索,例如目击者看到一个男人带着婴儿的证词。 Bill Stanton: 我认为三个独立目击者都看到有人带着一个没有包裹的婴儿,这非常重要。警方应该关注这个线索,而不是过度关注Lisa的父母。 警方没有进行事实模式分析,也没有充分调查John Tanko。 媒体的24小时报道也影响了调查,导致公众过度关注Lisa的父母。 Phil Houston: 我认为警方在调查中存在偏见,并且没有充分调查其他嫌疑人,例如John Tanko。 警方内部对案件的主导意见影响了调查,导致他们忽略了其他证据。 警方没有充分调查John Tanko的背景,也没有考虑到狗没有吠叫的线索。 Cindy Short: 我相信有人入侵了Lisa的家并带走了她。 我认为警方在制造戏剧性场面以指向Deborah,并且没有充分调查John Tanko。 John Tanko有入室盗窃的背景,并且在Lisa失踪当晚出现在社区中。 Lisa Parscale: 我和我的丈夫看到一个男人带着婴儿,这让我感到可疑。 我们向警方报告了此事,但警方似乎没有重视我们的证词。 Megan Wright: 我是John Tanko的前女友。 John Tanko有吸毒和暴力倾向。 我不确定John Tanko是否与Lisa的失踪有关,但我愿意协助调查。 Deborah Irwin: 我是Lisa的母亲。 警方对我的审讯让我感到无法再继续合作。 我相信有人入侵了我的家并带走了我的女儿。

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This chapter sets the stage for the investigation into the disappearance of 10-month-old Lisa Irwin. It highlights the 12 years that have passed since the incident and introduces the key players: Lisa's parents, Debra and Jeremy, and the investigators who will be featured later in the episode. The chapter also establishes the intense scrutiny on Debra and the conflicting narratives surrounding the case.
  • Disappearance of 10-month-old Lisa Irwin
  • 12 years since the incident
  • Intense scrutiny on Lisa's mother, Debra
  • Conflicting narratives surrounding the case

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Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and episode two of our special series, Megyn Kelly Investigates on the Disappearance of Baby Lisa. 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. In this episode, I will be joined just a bit later by investigators Bill Stanton and Phil Houston with their expert analysis. 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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Here's where we left off. After hours and hours of police interviews that felt more like an interrogation, Debra and Jeremy decide there's nothing left to say. Deception expert Phil Houston has interviewed Debra at length, finding her credible. And I asked Debra some hard questions about her drinking that night as I was covering the story for Fox News 12 years ago.

Thanks to anonymous benefactor Christy Schiller, there's now a $100,000 reward, and Lisa has been missing for 10 days. The scrutiny on Debra is relentless. I want to know why baby Lisa hasn't been found. The parents under suspicion. Mommy and daddy refuse to talk to cops separately. In order for mommy to talk to cops, she's got to have daddy there. 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? Bill Stanton is steering the media away from Debra and toward the search for an intruder. I know everybody's watching this family and watching this house, and that's fair. 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. But Deborah needs to be defended. I think sometimes we forget.

who these two people are and what they're going through. -Thanks to Christy and her team, Joe Takapina, a big gun in the world of defense attorneys, takes up Debra's case. If that name sounds familiar to you, it may be because he has defended former President Donald Trump in New York criminal court. -Someone out there obviously knows something.

Takabina hired local attorney Cindy Short to handle things on the ground in Kansas City. 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. Cindy ran an all-female firm. 17 women went to work on this case. The women in my group and in my law firm were women.

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,

that perhaps we could do something that would find the child. 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? 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. It was no more sophisticated than that. Yeah, I think so. You know, having been in the house, the house is a ranch style house. It's very small. As I recall, there were wood floors. 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.

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

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.

Nor have I. They 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. 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. They cut

pieces of carpet that they took away. They took soil samples from the backyard. Investigators have been taking blankets, toys and clothing from the home. Cindy Short. 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. 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. That's according to a police affidavit. We learned Friday that cadaver dogs had a positive hit at the foot of their bed, but last night the rug was still there. 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.

I really believed that they were creating theater to make it look as if Debra was responsible. And I felt that that was really unfair. Debra Zant, Cindy Lorette.

I remember the CIA people were taking the carpet from the garage, walking it up the driveway. This is on TV, too. This makes the news. They have this carpet. They walk it up to the end of the driveway. It goes right back down into the garage. And everybody in the world thought that that carpet came out of Debbie's bedroom. Are you frigging kidding me? Are you kidding me?

Meanwhile, what else and who else was being investigated? Remember Onesto and Lisa Parscale, the couple who lived around the corner from Deborah and Jeremy? They both say they saw a man with a baby walking down the street just after midnight. But the fact that she and her husband verified that they were discussing a baby being carried by a man the night before, that came into their heads before they knew there was a missing baby, definitely speaks to their credibility.

Absolutely. Here's Lisa Parscale talking to a local reporter. He was carrying a baby and he kind of was pushing it against his chest. And my husband kept looking at him. And then the gentleman just kind of kept walking. He wanted me to call the cops. And I hate that I didn't call him last night. 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.

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. 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

With Mike Thompson, again, attorney Cindy Short. Yeah, so Mike Thompson was an individual who worked for Ford Clay Como and he was getting off work and it was closer to, I want to say, 3.30 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 two-year-ways, and he turned and looked at me, and I looked at him, and I could tell he had a baby with him. She had a t-shirt and either pleating pants or a diaper on.

It was too cold for that. 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. When Mike heard about baby Lisa being missing, he told his cousin what he had seen. He said, well, you better call the police. 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 the next morning they came to my house. Two detectives did question me and left. Now, three different people, the Parscals and Mike Thompson, say they saw a man carrying a baby in the early morning hours of October 4, 2011.

Bill Stanton on CNN back then. I think it is compelling. I think the simple fact that you have three separate witnesses all saying something to the effect of they saw someone carrying a child that wasn't wrapped up in a blanket, that wasn't necessarily wrapped up in baby clothes.

So, if it was the same man who was spotted with the baby walking past the Parscale's 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.

And who is this man? Police looked at the people who got closest to Deborah and Lisa that night. Reporter Jim Spellman. 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. A family that lived directly next door. That's Samantha and James Brando.

Their family was close with the Irwins. But that day, the Brandos were separating, something they had decided earlier that afternoon. James moved out just hours after Debra and Samantha started drinking. Debra remembers the conversation. I was trying to help her through it and, you know, just give her the best advice I could. And she was kind of spilling her guts, you know, what she went through, what she's hoping she will accomplish next, you know.

custody stuff, you know, just the deep things that come with, you know, separation of family. Police investigated and questioned James Brando. Then there was Shane Beegley, the 33-year-old landscaper who was the grandson of a neighbor. He dropped by while Debra was drinking with Samantha Brando.

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. So if you were to take Shane Beagley and James Brando and John Tanko and line them up, Tanko's about 10 years older, but they all they look incredibly similar. Same builds, same general kind of haircut.

Police immediately ruled out Shane Beegley 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. While some people believe he might have had something to do with it, James, her soon-to-be ex-husband, maybe because he was angry, angry,

That you were there, a confidant. You know, I've heard people speculate along those lines. Deborah Bradley. I've heard that too, but we have at this point no reason to believe that. We have nothing to substantiate that at all.

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. 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.

All of that stuff. That to me says this was a very thorough investigation. James Brando was ruled out. Attorney Cindy Short always had one person in mind. The primary person for me was John Tanko. 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. - The person we have to talk about is this guy, John Tango, who's from New Jersey, known as Jersey.

and people described him as being sketchy. Soon, reporters were trying to find him. The last known sighting of Jersey the Handyman that we can confirm was Saturday, October 1st here at One Eye Jack's Tavern. The owners of the bar tell us they kicked him out for being a rude drunk who was spitting on customers on the patio.

What was significant for me was that he had a pretty healthy background in burglary and particularly in residential burglary. We know that the day that Baby Lisa disappeared, he was working for this family named the Watsons around the corner, moving some sprinklers around.

for them. 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. And if you got to know him a little bit more, there were some really disturbing things that come up. And as we get closer and closer to the time of this abduction,

his relationship with this community is significant. October 3rd in particular, which is the day of the kidnapping, he's at the Watson's house. He turns on the sprinkler at 11 a.m. 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 Hertz, don't do anything to turn it off.

But at 11 p.m., they noticed that it has been turned off, so they figured Tanko was back in the neighborhood to turn that off. 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. 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 1215th.

He knows how people are moving in and out of this community. He knows about the pets in the neighborhood. There were a few dogs in the neighborhood, notably the house next door on the right side of the Irwin house. 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.

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 uh with a round of barking this dog is in the house next door to baby lisa's house 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? But after I did that a couple of times, this dog was actually very friendly and the dog stopped barking. So that's definitely something that I think investigators were looking at and something I think is worth looking at. But no reports, as far as we know, of people saying they did hear the dog barking?

No reports said people heard a dog barking that night. 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. Along that route, there was another dog. Again, reporter Jim Spellman. 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. I think a very reliable witness. So she had a dog that disappeared the day that baby Lisa disappeared 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.

The dog pops up a few miles later, a couple of days later. But I can't say how reliable that witness is that saw John Tanko, but the dog did disappear. The dog was not there. She reported the dog missing. The dog was found a few days later. 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.

And we know that police took footprints, impressions from her backyard the day after this. Here's that neighbor, Mary Hurt, explaining this back in 2011. There was a sprinkler that happened to be on in that yard that made it moist over here as the rest of the ground was dry because there hadn't been any rain. Now, this sprinkler tells these people were not home, right? Who was operating this sprinkler? Hey, their handyman.

they had that the police were actually looking for in the area of Jersey. 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. They spoke to him more as a kind of a person in the community. And

When you interview someone as a suspect versus someone as a witness, that interview is very different. They've come out and said, and they said early on, that...

They've moved on from him. They don't believe he's their guy. Why would they do that? 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. I think a second reason, and this would be a legitimate reason, that one of the witnesses in the case, the lady that...

She's talking there about Lisa Parscale. And she did not believe that the person carrying the baby was, in fact, Tanko.

I don't know whether she reported that to the police, but let's assume that she did. And so that that was one way that they would have eliminated him. In fact, Lisa Parscale 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.

Eyewitness identification is a tricky business. And in Cindy Short's mind, this was not enough. I don't think that that should have been the end of the story. I think when you look at the totality of what he was doing, particularly from July through October, it's

they should have done more to look at him. For several days, attorney Cindy Shore and reporter Jim Spellman, independent of one another, searched for an elusive John Tanko, trying to get his side of the story. 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.

And I've chased a lot of people around jails and police stations and stuff. And it definitely gave me the sense that they were trying to hide him in the jail and judicial system.

Nobody who gets arrested on a simple bench warrant gets moved from place to place the way that they were moving him. He had been incarcerated in Missouri for a burglary. He had been released from his incarceration and then he had absconded, which meant that he had escaped from basically a halfway house.

He was then living in an unhoused situation with a woman named Megan. Megan Wright was 20 years old, new to Kansas City, and was John Tanko's girlfriend for a time. They had since broken up. Tell me about John Tanko.

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

They break up. He wants to get back with her. She becomes homeless. He ends up setting her car on fire. Her car was set on fire and she reported it and it was investigated. And she thought that John Tanko, Jersey, did it. But nobody was ever able, as far as I can tell, to confirm that he was the one that did it or...

Or what exactly happened there? Fire is important here because we'll end up having a fire the night of the kidnapping. That was the dumpster fire on the night of baby Lisa's disappearance. 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. In fact, Megan Wright lived farther away by at least another mile.

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

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? Back then, Megan Wright was a confused young woman, not completely coming clean about her own drug use. I found out that he was getting into some drug activity. Do you know what his drug is? A meth, from what I understand. She's had a hard life, struggling with abuse, addiction, and mental illness, and

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

You don't have to be here. You could easily have said to me, I don't want to do it. It's traumatic for me and I don't want to go back over it. You're doing it because you want... It is. Will you tell us why you're doing it? I'm doing it because it's important to me to not participate in something that's going to be a circus. What's important to me is that the story gets told fully. I haven't seen that done yet. I haven't seen anybody...

investigate whether Jersey was actually involved or not. 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. 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? No.

You know, there were reports about whether this was he did this and that was his motivation. I think where that stems from is the situation leading up to him and I breaking up. 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. 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. Again, attorney Cindy Short. In September, he's becoming more erratic.

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. He was quick to anger, last to understand. And I just couldn't handle it anymore. How likely is it, do you think, that Jersey, John Tanko, was involved in baby Lisa's disappearance?

It's hard to say, honestly. 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. And most of the time that we were together, you know, we were using drugs together. It wasn't a healthy relationship where you learn what somebody is capable of.

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. 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.

He is a good little burglar getting to case the joints. He knows who has children. John Jersey Tanko was interviewed by the police, and he denies any involvement in the disappearance of baby Lisa. The case remains open. 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. Maybe, maybe John Tanko, the handyman, the good little burglar across the street. The thing about the neighbors to the Irwins, the Parscals, both of them, seeing a man with a baby is huge. It's huge.

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

Now what? Now we have to rethink everything. 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's honey. Make sure you lock the doors. 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.

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

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." We did that. 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.

And I tell you, one of my main things about and 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. 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.

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. Her story changed, which is true. You know, Deborah's. The dogs alerted, right? The cops were telling people essentially it was her.

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. I mean, Bill, you've been part of that ecosystem, as have I. That's how it works. Yep. If it bleeds, it leads. And they want a nice, finite end to the story. And that's why they were so ravenous at getting to Deborah 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 the equivalent of several football teams in and out of that house, you know, after the crime occurred. And then they go in. I forgot how many days or weeks later after the crime occurred with the crime scene unit. I mean, that was, you know, played out in front of the cameras. That to me was let's cover our ass.

Let's show everyone that we're doing our job. And, you know, for us in the know, you know, it was pathetic. OK, 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. That's a very good fact for John Tanko.

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. Maybe that's why they ultimately prove not so interested in Tanko.

Absolutely, Megan. I think a major part of the problem is the people they had on the case were 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, but the bureau guy was

clearly had a very strong opinion about the parents. 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...

draw evidence, but they know how to debunk other people's opinions. And the Bureau guy brings a certain amount of gravitas to the situation. And he just took it over. And what we also...

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. Yeah. 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.

as a handyman and so forth. There's a guy that was arrested already for breaking in people's windows in neighborhoods. And they seem, I don't want to know what, I can't read their minds, but they seem to ignore most of that. And let's not forget what Jim Spellman told us about the dog not barking.

and about 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 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 just to take the phones. The baby could have been an afterthought.

But was that looked into? 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. When you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. 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.

Because on the one hand, you have them ruling out a lot of very alarming evidence about a potential theft of a child. And on the other hand, you have them ignoring many facts about Debra that work toward her benefit, like you interviewing her and saying what you said, like the fact that the

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. That's an important piece too. It's not like Deborah was some child abuser who had been bringing the baby into the ER over and over. There's zero evidence to that effect by all accounts, a loving mother. So

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? They could be key to this entire case. Plus, new theories emerge that we will explore for the first time. Tomorrow, episode three. 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. 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. 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. That would be very helpful.

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

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