Pregnant woman murdered and baby stolen (page 2)

obiwan

Has anybody here ever heard of mental illness?

And your point is......?

Ohio community mourns slain pregnant woman


Jon Andrews, left, walks beside a man holding Andrews' son, Oscar, Sunday, at a memorial service for Andrews' wife Theresa

October 9, 2000
Web posted at: 8:19 a.m. EDT (1219 GMT)

KENT, Ohio (AP) -- More than 1,000 people filled a high school auditorium in Kent, Ohio, and dozens of others waited outside in the rain at a service to remember a pregnant woman whose killer cut her baby from her womb.

Theresa Andrews, 23, was abducted September 27 and shot to death by a woman she and her husband had met a few weeks earlier while shopping for baby clothes at Wal-Mart.

"In a sinful world where people have a choice to follow their own sinful and sometimes sickening ways, tragedy will sometimes result," Dave Iannelli, a Jehovah's Witnesses religious leader from New York, told mourners at Sunday's memorial service. "Jehovah is not to blame when bad things happen to good people."

Police say Michelle Bica, 39, had lied to neighbors, relatives and even her own husband for months, telling them she was pregnant. With her fake due date quickly approaching, she lured Andrews to her house and killed her with a single shot to the back, then performed a crude Caesarean section to deliver the baby, police said.

Bica passed the baby off as her own until five days later, when she committed suicide in a locked bedroom as police arrived to question her about calls made to the Andrews' house.


Jon and Theresa Andrews

The infant, named Oscar, survived and was given to his father late last week.

The Roosevelt High School auditorium was filled Sunday with flowers and photos of a smiling Theresa Andrews, who will be cremated. Those who couldn't find seats inside, waited in the lobby or outside.

Kristina Sparks, 21, drove with her family from Elyria, about 45 miles away, to attend the service for Andrews, whom she met through a Jehovah's Witnesses group about three years ago.

"She just seemed like such a nice person even if you didn't know her that well," Sparks said.

Also: http://www.geocities.com/firstcongo/oscar/

The story was published in Awake!

Country Girl

Sorry for going slightly off-topic, but this town has another tragedy in its not so distant past. A television movie of the week entitled "In Broad Daylight" was made (coincidentally, in the town I live in in Texas) regarding events that took place in this town over a decade ago.

Small town has been a magnet for trouble

BY SCOTT CANON AND RICK MONTGOMERY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

SKIDMORE, Mo. - (KRT) - How, wonder the people still left in this small town getting smaller, could such horrible things happen in a place they treasure for its friendly rural charms?

First came the notorious "Skidmore bully," Ken Rex McElroy, whose death made national headlines. He had so terrorized the town that when somebody gunned him down in broad daylight in 1981, nobody would admit to seeing a thing.

Then on Oct. 16, 2000, pretty Wendy Gillenwater was stomped to death by her boyfriend. Locals take comfort in knowing the killer is serving life in prison.

The next year, a 20-year-old resident vanished. Many think he was murdered.

And now the police cars and media crews are back. Somebody on Thursday killed 23-year-old Bobbi Jo Stinnett, butchering her body to pull out the little girl due next month to be Stinnett's firstborn.

"Why do they all come to Skidmore to do this?" decadelong resident Pauline Dragoo asked on Friday, her 91st birthday. "I'm going to move out of this town."

Other residents see the string of violent history as random and inexplicable.

"It's just a freak thing," said Roland Langford, who works as a custodian in nearby Maryville. "It's a real nice town. People get along. That's what you like about it here - the people."

Skidmore's crime rates are enviably low most years, but residents concede the town's reputation is a grisly one.

Travel somewhere and mention that you live in Skidmore and faces usually show a blank. But mention the McElroy case - the basis for books and movies and TV documentaries that still run on cable - and a light of recognition clicks on.

"People look at you funny," acknowledged M.C. Derr, the town's postmaster.

Skidmore is a collection of small houses and mostly shuttered businesses at the junction of Missouri 113 and Route DD. Its Little People's Park has four working swings, one small bench and a basketball backboard with no rim.

With only about 330 residents - estimated in 2003 for the census (the postmaster and others think it is more like 250) - Skidmore has lost more than a quarter of its population since July 10, 1981, when the killing of McElroy drew nationwide fascination.

Dozens of witnesses are thought to have kept quiet all these years after someone settled an old score with 47-year-old McElroy, who had a history of threatening his neighbors, chasing young girls and pilfering livestock.

Burly and hard-drinking, McElroy was free on bond after a second-degree assault conviction when he was shot in his truck outside Skidmore's only bank. The townspeople clammed up. The national media streamed in to report on the town's "vigilantes," which many locals considered a slur at the time, citing a legal system that kept a belligerent McElroy on the streets.

Even sightseers drove through. A TV movie followed.

Just months ago, an independent filmmaker from Connecticut released "Without Mercy," a graphic dramatization of the McElroy story that won a top prize at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.

"What's happened now is going to be shock for them all over again," said Harry MacLean, a Colorado author. MacLean's book "In Broad Daylight," an account of the McElroy case, reached No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list.

The domestic violence that claimed Gillenwater in 2000 drew little media attention. But a year later the town was tied to another macabre mystery that remains unsolved.

Branson Perry, a slender 20-year-old with blond hair and a friendly air, suddenly went missing in 2001, never to be seen again. Authorities would investigate Jack Wayne Rogers of Fulton, Mo., on suspicion of abduction and murder in the case.

No charges were filed, but authorities found a claw necklace belonging to Perry in Rogers' possession. Earlier this year prosecutors told a federal judge that they discovered the transcript of a computer chat in which Rogers purportedly discussed Perry's abduction and mutilation.

Rogers in April received a 30-year prison sentence in a child pornography and obscenity case.

Still, overall crime is perennially low in Skidmore and surrounding Nodaway County.

The county's crime rate in 2003 was less than half the statewide average, according to the Missouri Department of Public Safety. Authorities recorded only 23 violent offenses, mostly for aggravated assault, in the county of nearly 22,000 people.

"They're quiet people ... mostly farmers who all knew each other since kindergarten," said MacLean, who while doing research for his book in the mid-1980s lived with a family outside Skidmore.

"Even then, they had sort of an `us versus the world' approach" to outsiders, he said.

"As in any rural town, I think a lot of people there feel isolated," said Horton, Kan., Police Chief Dick Luzier, who as a Nodaway County sheriff's deputy investigated McElroy's killing. "When bad stuff happens, some don't feel they have anybody they can turn to - not even to authorities - because they may feel threatened by retaliation," as many felt when McElroy stalked the streets.

A place typical of the rural terrain of northwest Missouri, Skidmore is a town few people would move to, even though a home sells there for about $30,000, according to U.S. census data.

The nearest hospital is 15 miles away. Skidmore children are bused to school in either Maitland or Graham. The town's elementary school closed three years ago.

That was about the time the bank branch closed, as did Mom's Cafe - the place outside of which McElroy died. The cafe was converted to the Newton Hall Community Building.

This fall marked the first time anyone can remember that the fall Pumpkin Show was canceled. Not enough people were interested.

But the town still puffs up its chest about its Freedom Festival - a tribute to veterans and patriotism that draws people from 20 states every year the weekend after Labor Day. Heather French Henry, Miss America 2000, showed up in 2002. Light-heavyweight prizefighter Rob Calloway of St. Joseph came this year.

"This is a really great little town," said Carla Wetzel, a chief organizer of the Freedom Festival and the mother of school-age girls who now plans to lock her doors more often. "We moved back here because it was a safe place. And it is a safe place."

Wetzel got calls on Friday from Freedom Festival visitors from Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Florida, all sending condolences to the town.

On KMBZ radio in Kansas City, drive-time talk-show host Russ Johnson wondered aloud, "Maybe there's something in the water there in Skidmore."

But residents rejected the idea that anything more than coincidence explained Skidmore's violent history.

"It's not a matter of where they lived," said JoAnn Stinnett, Branson Perry's grandmother and a more distant relative to Bobbi Jo Stinnett. "All this just happened to hit here. It could have happened anywhere."

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