On October 4th, 2011, 10-month-old Baby Lisa Irwin disappeared in the middle of the night in Kansas City, Missouri. She was last seen in the early morning hours of the morning, when her father, Jeremy, went to check on her and found that she was not in her crib.
00:00:00.320I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and our special series, Megyn Kelly Investigates.
00:00:06.500This is on the disappearance of baby Lisa.
00:00:09.940Over the next five days, we will bring you deep into a story that captivated and horrified America, including yours truly.
00:00:18.120It has stuck with me since I first covered it at Fox News.
00:00:22.680Thirteen years later, it is a case that has never been solved.
00:00:26.360It 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.
00:00:39.140I want to start with why we're bringing you this, all right?
00:00:41.400As you're going to see throughout this episode and the four that come after it, I covered my story this self, as I mentioned, as it happened back in 2011 and then in the many years thereafter.
00:00:50.220I 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.
00:01:07.860Speaking to her parents at the time was a before and after moment for me.
00:01:14.200It was shocking for the reasons that you will hear in this series.
00:01:21.960This 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.
00:01:28.380So a couple of years ago, I began reporting this story anew.
00:01:33.400I decided since we launched the Megyn 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.
00:01:48.280The 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.
00:02:01.780But 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.
00:02:14.900But we tried and may have gotten to the truth of what happened here.
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00:03:17.300We 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.
00:03:30.700This one may be better than you, please, bring your home.
00:03:36.220Ten-month-old baby Lisa Irwin disappeared in the middle of the night.
00:03:40.360Father Jeremy came home from his night shift at 3.45 a.m. and found the lights were on.
00:03:45.720A window was open, the screen pushed in, the front door unlocked, and his baby girl was not in her crib.
00:03:53.020Must be a reasonable explanation, he thought.
00:03:57.440That's the last thing you expect, is that one of your kids is going to be missing.
00:04:02.140So initially, when she's not in the crib, it's like, okay, well, she's in bed with Debra, she's in bed with one of the brothers, she's maybe fallen out of bed, and she's asleep under the crib.
00:04:14.000He woke up the baby's mother, his partner, Debra Bradley, out of a sound sleep.
00:04:18.700She appeared to have no idea why baby Lisa was not in her crib.
00:04:22.860Jeremy ran next door to see if somehow the neighbor had the baby.
00:10:27.980Callahan Walsh of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
00:10:30.740Those 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.
00:10:42.080In 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 times of the essence.
00:11:04.360At 2.45 a.m., a nearby BP gas station surveillance camera shows a man in a light t-shirt emerging from the woods that bordered the neighborhood.
00:11:14.960It's too dark and grainy to see if he's carrying anything.
00:11:20.200And then, as I reported for Fox News at the time, Debra's first account of her timeline gets a serious revision.
00:11:27.380Turns out she was drinking more than she originally claimed.
00:11:31.460And she's no longer sure about when she last saw her baby girl.
00:11:35.520When you went in at 10.30 after the neighbor left, what did you do?
00:19:23.900Essentially, 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.
00:19:37.420It appeared that they were not pursuing alternate possibilities as with as many resources or energy as they were their theory that it was Deborah and or Jeremy.
00:19:51.660The investigators are quickly closing in on the baby's mother, Deborah.
00:19:56.660Jeremy's sister, Ashley Irwin, thought the writing was on the wall and said so in an interview with ABC News.
00:20:02.840Do you think Deborah may be facing an arrest?
00:20:07.300Probably, to be real honest with you, yes.
00:22:26.640And I turned around to somebody who was a complete stranger, and I said, mark my word.
00:22:31.000The next parent that does not trim their child's nails right, they're going to serve a hard time.
00:22:38.520Sure that Deborah was caught in this backlash, Christy 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.
00:22:52.800She called Bill Stanton, a former New York City police officer, private investigator, and TV commentator who was on her canine board.
00:23:02.200Bill assembled a team that included Phil Houston, CIA veteran of 25 years.
00:23:08.420Phil created the deception detection method still being used by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and law enforcement agencies around the nation.
00:23:18.560He is known as the human lie detector.
00:23:20.780Former Secret Service psychologist Marissa Randazzo was also part of the team.
00:23:25.900First order of business, they needed to determine what, if any, involvement Deborah may have had.
00:23:31.320By this point, the baby's father, Jeremy, had essentially been ruled out because there's security video of him working on an electrical project at Starbucks through most of the night baby Lisa went missing.
00:23:42.680Christy's team began to plan their own videotaped interviews with the parents.
00:23:46.840Marissa worked with Phil on the questions for Deborah and Jeremy.
00:23:49.660I 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.
00:24:02.280So we know that the parents, especially the mother, was under suspicion by law enforcement 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.
00:24:24.040Now there was a plane waiting, thanks to Christy Schiller.
00:24:30.140Once 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.
00:24:39.160Phil Houston had seen their press conferences and how they answered questions.
00:24:43.160Like so many of us, he already had his suspicions about the couple.
00:24:46.620They've been asked, did you do it, did you do it, did you do it?
00:24:50.440And 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.
00:25:05.120And I was convinced that they were guilty until we asked that first question.
00:25:09.940We have it on tape, that moment where you got to ask your first question of Deborah.
00:25:15.240Debbie, I think the first question that I need to ask you this morning, okay, is what involvement did you have in the disappearance of Lisa?
00:28:32.900After 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.
00:29:55.060The wall-to-wall media coverage continued.
00:29:58.600They are still searching urgently for the child, although they do say that as every hour passes, this case gets harder to solve.
00:30:06.300And at this point, police freely admit they have no suspects and no leads.
00:30:11.540That was always one of the biggest mysteries about this case.
00:30:13.840Like, what kind of criminal, whether it's, you know, a parent, a family member, or an intruder, like, is so good that they don't leave behind a fingerprint, DNA, or any other really meaningful clue?
00:30:31.360Because no matter who did this, they did escape, you know, without a trace.
00:30:37.740So I think there's two possible answers to that.
00:30:39.600The 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.
00:30:52.180But I think what you're asking is really an incredible question, because as you try to run through, you know, potential scenarios in your head, guessing more than anything, they just so many of them lead to dead ends.
00:31:04.420Is there some way that Deborah Bradley or her husband, Jeremy, somehow did this themselves and were able to pull this off in a short, you know, matter of hours?
00:31:17.100But 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, where the, you know, the mom was perhaps not at her best ever, having, you know, done some serious drinking that night?
00:31:35.680And then that's the night you stealthily get in and out of the house, making it through neighbors and everything else.
00:32:39.460And 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.
00:32:49.640Someone 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.
00:32:57.840So, the police really do seem to be guilty of some tunnel vision here.
00:33:03.040I mean, what we're learning already is that they're really interested, Phil, in Deborah and Jeremy.
00:33:10.000And in the opening hours of an investigation, one can completely understand that.
00:33:40.220She was done being interrogated over and over and over and over by police she definitely accurately believed had a foregone conclusion about her.
00:33:49.260And the other part to that, too, is that Deborah is no shrinking violet.
00:33:53.400I mean, she's not afraid, you know, when you reach a certain point to really let people know what she's thinking about, how they're behaving towards her.
00:34:02.600And 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.
00:34:14.020Plus, just the odds, the overwhelming odds, you know, are she did it.
00:34:20.040That's the biggest obstacle to ruling her out.
00:34:22.700But let's spend a moment ruling her in.
00:35:17.000On 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.
00:35:33.040The 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.
00:37:18.960You know, it was, in my opinion, again, the perfect storm of, you know, Jeremy being away, her being over served, the boys being in the bed.
00:37:32.200You 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.
00:37:40.340And then, again, just think about the guilt.
00:37:43.400This 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.
00:37:51.920To 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.
00:38:04.640You know, 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 Debra on my various shows.
00:38:14.060I just feel like the actual murderer would not keep putting themselves in this harm's way.
00:38:20.500Can we talk about the next door neighbor, Samantha Brando, for a minute?
00:38:23.720Because while we have been unable to reach her, you guys did talk to her.
00:38:29.640You also put her through the Phil Houston treatment to find out whether it was true, what, that she was sitting with Debra, that they were drinking together, that things went down the way Debra said they did?
00:38:43.460Yeah, and most importantly, she validated the level of intoxication.
00:38:48.460She said, I hate to say this about Debra, but I don't know if I've ever seen her, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I don't know if I've ever seen her that intoxicated before.
00:38:58.980There was more wine there than Debra told us originally.
00:39:03.080Well, that could explain why Debra didn't hear an intruder, for sure.
00:39:08.440Well, to your point, Megan, when Jeremy came home, no one heard him come in.
00:39:21.920So why didn't anyone ever come forward?
00:39:26.420If somebody stole this baby and did something with her, there's not one person who needed $100,000 enough to come forward and quietly say, I know what happened to her.
00:39:40.420The 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.
00:39:51.260Because to your point, Megan, that's $100,000, and they could do right, and they could have done it at that time.
00:40:00.600Now, was the baby sold, or something more nefarious?
00:40:08.180That would explain it, if it were a sole actor who then kept his mouth shut.
00:40:14.500But that's one of the troubling things about this whole thing.
00:40:17.200Like, if it was anybody who blabbed, or if it were a group, somebody would have turned on somebody else, and that just hasn't happened.
00:40:26.620So, as it stands at this point, all eyes are on Debra.
00:40:31.720Coming up in our next episode, police continue to bear down on Debra.