Families of missing women want closure, and dogged investigator looks for answers
Bridget McKeown and Brenda Lamson share similar tragic stories.
Both had female family members mysteriously vanish more than a decade ago in Kansas City and declared dead, even though no bodies were found.
Both purchased engraved headstones, with hopes of bringing their loved ones home, but the headstones still mark nothing.
And in both cases, no one has been convicted of murder.
This week, the women began sharing something else: the investigator overseeing their cases.
Kansas City Police Sgt. Everett Babcock, who doggedly pursued the killer of Lamson’s daughter, 16-year-old Tabitha Brewer, now has picked up the homicide investigation of McKeown’s mother, Shirley McKeown, 71.
“We hope to stir things up,” Babcock told Bridget McKeown Tuesday after driving to her house to introduce himself. “I have a pretty good idea who’s responsible. ... As long as I’m around, he’s not going to get to rest.”
Babcock has a reputation for being tenacious.
“If I ever got murdered,” said his former supervisor, retired homicide Sgt. Dave Bernard, “I would want him on my case. I’m absolutely serious.”
Bernard’s squad initially investigated Shirley McKeown’s disappearance in 2002. One of his biggest regrets on the job is not being able to solve the case before he retired.
“I’m excited about Everett going after it,” he said. “Maybe he can do it for me.”
Bridget McKeown and Lamson plan to meet Friday nightfor the first time at the monthly meeting of the support group Parents of Murdered Children. Babcock invited them. He recently joined the group’s board and will serve at his first meeting.
Babcock likes talking to loved ones at the meetings. It reminds him why he works so hard. His efforts in the homicide cases of Shirley McKeown and Brewer will focus on finding their bodies, he said.
“At this point,” he said. “I think the families want the bodies more than convictions.”
Bridget McKeown was out of town Aug. 24, 2002, when her mom vanished while driving to Bridget’s midtown home. Her mother planned to drop off an old ice cream parlor chair she picked up at a yard sale and to check on Bridget’s cat. But she never made it.
Ten days later, police found Shirley McKeown’s white Cadillac abandoned in a vacant lot in the 3300 block of Highland Avenue with enough of her blood in the car and trunk that a medical examiner said she could not have survived. Investigators later found the ice cream parlor chair, with blood on it, inside the home of an 18-year-old man who lived near the vacant lot.
The man told police he bought the car for $50 and didn’t know anything about the missing woman. Witnesses told police they saw four young men riding around in Shirley McKeown’s car after she vanished. Her credit card records revealed her car was filled with gas in Olathe. Grainy video surveillance showed several young men with her car.
Babcock, then a detective, interrogated the man with the chair for hours but could not get him to budge off his story. No charges were filed.
Bridget McKeown’s hopes used to soar each time human remains turned up in the metropolitan area. But not so much anymore. She can’t take the emotional roller coaster. She feels defeated.
“I promised my dad on his death bed that I would take care of her,” McKeown said, choking back tears. “I’ve had such guilt for going out of town and leaving her.”
The loss of her mother is one thing. But not having her body is an insult that never loses its sting, McKeown said.
“Is she just thrown out in a field somewhere?” McKeown asked. “Did they throw her in a Dumpster? How would they feel if it were their mother, or grandmother or sister?”
McKeown didn’t get to have a proper funeral with her mother’s body. Instead, she kissed the wall of her mother’s house after selling it and moving her mother’s belongings.
Brenda Lamson of Overland Park is one of the few people who truly can know McKeown’s pain.
Lamson’s daughter Tabitha Brewer vanished April 27, 1998, after leaving her father’s apartment in Shawnee with her boyfriend, Nicholas Travis, and a 17-year-old they knew from their alternative high school.
The young couple was never seen alive again. A few days later, authorities found Brewer’s burned purse in a trash bin in the 5500 block of the Paseo in Kansas City. Inside the purse were her keys, checkbook and makeup as well as the jewelry she had been wearing the day she disappeared. A lighter and chain Travis wore also was inside the purse.
Nearly four months later, a man preparing to pour concrete for a patio at a duplex in the 5400 block of the Paseo found Travis’ body in a shallow grave. The duplex was owned by the father of the teenager last seen with the young couple. Police found Travis’ blood inside the duplex.
Police suspected the teenager had something to do with the deaths but could not charge him.
That changed after Babcock picked up the case. He worked relentlessly for five years, interviewed 500 people, established robbery as the motive and produced a case file with thousands of pages to secure two first-degree murder charges against the high school acquaintance in 2006. A jury later acquitted him, stunning the victims’ families.
“I just want to bring her home so we have a place we can go visit her,” Lamson said.
In the meantime, Lamson had a cemetery stone made that she placed in her front yard outside the window of Brewer’s old room.
“It’s the only place I can go,” Lamson said. “I know she’s not there, but it’s the closest thing I’ve got.”
Lamson sorts through Brewer’s purse and contents for comfort at times. She keeps the belongings in a box and taps the box when she speaks of Brewer, as if the box represents her missing daughter.
Next month will mark 16 years that Brewer’s been missing. She would be 32 years old.
Lamson believes her daughter is dead but can’t know for sure without a body. That makes the loss of her daughter even more torturous.
“I just wish that somebody, after all these years, would bring her home,” Lamson said. “I don’t want to die without knowing what happened to my baby.”
Anyone with information about either homicide should call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (8477) or call Babcock directly at 816-413-3686.
Anyone interested in the support group Parents of Murdered Children can go to
This story was originally published March 6, 2014 at 10:56 PM with the headline "Families of missing women want closure, and dogged investigator looks for answers."