Megyn Kelly revisits case of Lisa Irwin, who vanished from her crib in KC 14 years ago
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is revisiting the cold case of Lisa Irwin, the baby who disappeared from her Kansas City crib in 2011 and became known nationally as Baby Lisa.
This week Kelly devotes five episodes of her Sirius XM podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” to the mystery. The fourth installment drops Thursday, March 13.
Baby Lisa was reported missing early on Oct. 4, 2011. Her mother, Deborah Bradley, told police she last saw the 10-month-old infant when she put her in the crib at their home at 3620 N. Lister Ave.
Lisa remains missing today.
Kelly interviewed Bradley and Lisa’s father, Jeremy Irwin, years ago for her former Fox News show. She said on her podcast the “story that captivated and horrified America including yours truly” stuck with her.
“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,” Kelly said in the first episode.
“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. 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.”
Kelly said she began reporting the story again a couple of years ago when she launched her new show, using her own resources and devoting “countless hours to figuring out what happened to this baby with the help of some producers and very talented investigators.
“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.”
She got help from CIA veteran Phil Houston and Bill Stanton, a retired New York Police Department officer. She interviewed Lisa’s parents again, other family members, journalists who covered the story and Kristi Schiller, the glamorous Houston socialite who got involved in the case and anonymously put up a $100,000 reward.
She also interviewed Kansas City attorney Cyndy Short who briefly worked on the case at the request of high-profile New York defense lawyer Joe Tacopina before the two had a falling out and he dropped her.
Kelly creates a detailed timeline of the night Lisa disappeared and revisits the national attention, which Bradley’s aunt calls “crazy” with paparazzi climbing into trees trying to get photos of the family.
According to Kelly’s timeline, around 4:45 p.m. that day, Bradley and her brother went to the store to buy baby formula and boxed wine, verified later by the store’s security video.
Around 5 p.m. Bradley’s neighbor, Samantha Brando, dropped by. About 15 minutes later Irwin, an electrician, got a call from his boss and was sent to handle a job at a local Starbucks.
Around 6 p.m. Bradley made dinner. She put Lisa to bed by 7 p.m.
She and her neighbor sat on the front step smoking, talking and drinking between 8 and 10 p.m.
Sometime between 10:30 and 11, Bradley said she checked on Lisa and got into bed with the baby’s two young half-brothers — Blake, 7 and Michael, 5.
Irwin found the baby missing when he got home at 3:45 a.m..
Kelly said Lisa’s father found lights on in the house, an open window with the screen pushed in and the front door unlocked.
Lisa was not in her crib.
He thought there must be a reasonable explanation, he told Kelly.
His first instinct? Don’t panic.
“That’s the last thing you expect is that one of your kids is going to be missing,” he told Kelly. “So initially when she’s not in the crib it’s like, OK, well, she’s in bed with Deborah, she’s in bed with one of the brothers. She’s maybe fallen out of bed and she’s asleep under the crib.”
He woke Bradley out of a sound sleep and she appeared to have no idea why baby Lisa was not in her crib, Kelly said.
Irwin ran next door to see if the baby was there for some reason, then called 911.
The couple quickly went public, begging for information or for whomever might have taken her to leave her at a hospital, church, a fire station.
Bradley and Irwin believed someone broke into their home and snatched Lisa while she slept.
But public perception of Bradley as a bereaved and anxious mother took a turn, especially after Kelly interviewed her on her Fox show.
Kelly revisits that interrogation from 14 years ago in which Bradley admitted drinking more that night than she originally claimed. She also admitted not remembering whether she checked on the baby at 10:30, as she said she typically did.
“Were you drunk,” Kelly asked her point blank.
“Yeah,” Bradley said.
Kelly lobbed random possibilities in that first interview.
“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? Maybe Lisa fell or was dropped or Deborah unknowingly rolled over on her while they slept,” Kelly said.
“Or worse, did she deliberately kill her own child? At the very least Deborah is drunk and unreliable.”
For some reason Bradley agreed to be interviewed by Kelly again for the podcast.
“It was a tough interview,” Kelly told her about that first interview. “I went pretty hard on you.”
“Very difficult,” Bradley said.
“You fessed up. You said, ‘I had a lot of drinks that night ... between six and 10 and I think I blacked out.’ Now a lot of people wouldn’t have admitted that. 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,” Kelly said.
“I didn’t care how it looked,” Bradley said.
Bradley’s aunt told Kelly that, “yes, Debbie drank. Debbie probably still drinks. It doesn’t (bleeping) matter. It does not matter ... we all do and if you’re the perfect parent then good for you 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.”
Kelly reports on the polygraph test Bradley took and the questions Kansas City Police Department investigators asked the couple.
Bradley recalled one detective getting “real close to me and he goes, ‘I think that you’re a very bad mother.’ And I just broke down and I said that it’s not possible that I failed (the polygraph) and he just kept saying, ‘I think you’re a bad mother and you need to tell us what you did.’
“And I just kind of fell apart, not going to lie, my nerves, I actually wet my myself because I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me.”
After that, Kelly said, the parents, who had cooperated with police up to that point, decided they needed a break. Public chatter grew that the couple had something to hide.
Kelly explains what was happening behind the scenes.
Lisa would turn 14 this year. She was last known, as a baby, to be wearing purple pants and a purple shirt with kittens on it.
She has a birthmark on her right thigh.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has a photo of what she would look like at age 12.
Anyone with information about her disappearance should call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (8477).
Lisa’s father told Kelly his feelings today about what happened are 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.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 5:45 AM.
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