KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A case developing in southwest Missouri is eerily similar to another gruesome crime that happened closer to the metro– the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnet in Skidmore, Missouri.

On December 16, 2004, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo was found in her Skidmore, Missouri home with her stomach cut open.

“We believe this to be a murder and she’s pregnant and the baby’s missing. There’s no baby in her,” said Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong, who worked the case as a detective decades ago.

Bobbie Jo, then eight months pregnant, was found by her mother.

“The dispatch was that the victim’s mother said that she was pregnant and it looked like her stomach exploded,” Strong said during a 2021 interview.

Bobbie Jo’s killer, Lisa Montgomery, has posed as someone else online in order to gain access to a pregnant woman.

In Montgomery’s case, that was posing as a potential customer for Bobbi Jo’s dog breeding business.

It’s similar to the case against Amber Waterman, and her husband, Jamie Waterman in the abduction and murder of Ashley Bush from Maysville, Arkansas.

Prosecutors say Amber Waterman created a fake Facebook account with the name “Lucy Barrows” and posted about giving away baby items.

“We believe that Lucy was a fictitious name, an invented persona and that Amber was the real person,” said Benton County, Arkansas Prosecutor Nathan Smith.

In both cases, the baby was found outside of the mother’s womb.

Lisa Montgomery took the child she cut from Bobbie Jo’s womb to Melvern, Kansas making it a federal kidnapping case. That child survived.

The Waterman case is also federal.

Amber Waterman is charged with kidnapping Ashley Bush and taking her across state lines from Arkansas to Missouri where she died. Jamie Waterman is charged as an accessory.

Investigators say Ashley Bush was shot and her body was burned. They are not saying how the baby died or how it ended up separated from Ashley’s womb. Both bodies were found in Pineville, Missouri.

“At this point, the bodies were recovered in the state of Missouri and so I won’t go any further than that, but they were recovered in the state of Missouri,” Smith said.

The Waterman’s are in federal custody awaiting extradition to Arkansas to face additional charges.

Lisa Montgomery was executed for the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett in January 2021. She was the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years.