Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Pilgrim Media Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 24) I watched two Lifetime movies on TV: Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard and Murder at the Country Club. Stolen Baby was Saturday night’s Lifetime “premiere” and Murder at the Country Club – shot under the working title Country Club Scandal until someone at Lifetime apparently thought “murder” would be a bigger draw to audiences than “scandal” – was last night’s “premiere.” Stolen Baby didn’t yet have an imdb.com page when we watched it last night (my husband Charles joined me for the last half of it), though it does now, albeit with a horrible and risible mistake in the synopsis: “Based on the true story of the murder of Magen who was murdered by her friend Heidi.” It was in fact Magen Fieramusca (Emily Osment) who killed Heidi Broussard (Anna Hopkins), not the other way around, and as the overall title suggests her motive was to kidnap Heidi’s two-week-old baby and raise her as her own. The movie was based on a real-life case from Austin, Texas in December 2019 – though for some reason writer Alexandra Salerno changed the names of all the true-life characters except Heidi’s and Magen’s. Heidi’s live-in boyfriend and the baby’s father, Shane Carey, became “Cody Maxwell.” The baby herself, Margo Carey, was turned into “Emma Maxwell” in the film, and Magen’s boyfriend, Christopher Green, became “Greg Bowman.” Magen and Heidi had met 10 years before in a Christian youth group called the Texas Bible Institute (a meeting that’s dramatized in the film, with Kendall Christie as the younger Heidi and Morgan Douglas as the younger Magen), and they had become and remained close friends. The crisis is precipitated when Greg Bowman tells Magen over dinner that he’s going to leave her, and Magen announces, “I’m pregnant.” She isn’t, but she figures she can avoid having Greg throw her out (which will leave her homeless) by lying and pleading with him to let her stay at his place at least until the baby is born. Then she has to go whole-hog impersonating a pregnant woman, including buying one of those body appliances you can wear around your chest to make you look pregnant (one of the odd things I’ve learned reading mystery novels is there’s enough of a market for those things they’re mass-produced commercially), only this puts her under the burden of having to produce a baby nine months later.

Magen lures Heidi Broussard into her car with Emma with yet another lie – she says Greg is beating her and wants the two of them to go to a local coffeehouse to talk about it – only once she gets Heidi alone she strangles her with a dog’s leash as well as her hands. Director Michelle Ouelette (one of Lifetime’s better filmmakers, actually) doesn’t show the murder (which is probably just as well), though she does show Magen carrying the dead weight of Heidi’s body and stuffing it into the trunk of her car. Then Magen leaves the car parked behind Greg’s home for the next 10 days, while the cops, local detective Bonnie Majors (Sonia Dillhon Tully) and FBI agent Paul Richards (Paulinho Nunes), grill Cody as the primary suspect in his fiancée’s disappearance, presumably on the ground that the spouse is always the prime suspect. They even give him a lie-detector test and the polygraph examiner declares his results “inconclusive.” Meanwhile, Greg is as unimpressed with being a father as he was with staying Magen’s boyfriend. When Magen asks him to pick up some formula, Greg says he’s on his way to work but he’ll do it on the way home. Greg has noticed that the baby suffers from jaundice and needs medical attention, and gets suspicious when Magen refuses to take the kid in, but ultimately his purchase of the formula alerts the authorities to Magen as a potential suspect. Two officers of the Texas Rangers show up at Magen’s and Greg’s home under the guise of doing a “welfare check” on “Lily,” as Magen has renamed Emma (the actual false name Magen gave the kidnapped baby was “Luna”). They demand to see the inside of her car’s trunk, and Magen, realizing the jig is up, goes along and meekly surrenders as they arrest her for Heidi’s murder. Ultimately the real Magen Fieramusca pleaded guilty – though that didn’t happen until this year, almost four years after the murder – and was sentenced to 55 years in prison; obviously the plea deal she cut was to avoid the death penalty, which Texas is notorious for (Texas executes more people than all other death-penalty U.S. states combined).

There are potential subtleties in the real-life case this film misses – including the likely jealousy of Magen for Heidi, who’s considerably better-looking and has a partner who genuinely loves her instead of a doofus like Greg who just wants to bail – but the film is nicely acted, especially by the two principals. Emily Osment is pitch-perfect as Magen – homely but not altogether unattractive, quiet and unassuming except when she loses her temper, and the sort of person you could imagine getting away with a major crime just because she doesn’t look like “the type.” And Anna Hopkins matches her as Heidi – even though Salerno’s script contains so many flashbacks we aren’t always sure when as well as where we are (I suspect Hopkins actually got more screen time in flashbacks than she did when her character was still alive). Ian Lake is also effective as Cody, looking hunky though not so hot we suspect he’s up to no good (given the usual Lifetime iconography that really hot, sexy men are villains); and he’s had a big-screen career, including one of the Star Trek movies. The faults are in Salerno’s sometimes confusing script and the continuing (and confounding) flashbacks; when Charles joined me in mid-movie I had to explain to him that one of the women in the scene was the victim and it was a flashback.