An argument over birdseed ended with a 23-year-old mother dead — and the man who shot her was a former police officer.
On the evening of Sunday, July 6, 2025, 23-year-old Bailey Scott was shot outside a house on East Logan Street in Moberly, Missouri. She died that evening. She left behind a three-year-old son, Bentley.
Moberly is a railroad town of about thirteen thousand people, the largest city in Randolph County, in north-central Missouri — roughly two hours from both Kansas City and St. Louis. It is the kind of place where the people in a story like this one already know each other, or know someone who does.
Who Bailey Scott was
Bailey Elizabeth Scott was born in White Salmon, Washington, in November 2001. After high school she worked a string of jobs — a sandwich shop, a hardware store, a distribution centre, a freight company — before landing at a company called Grain Bin Supply. She stayed three years. She started with no background in the work at all, and by the end she was the office manager. The company’s owner later told a reporter that he and his wife had come to think of her as closer to a daughter than an employee.
The dispute
David Heyde — known around Moberly as Kip — was 68 in the summer of 2025. He lived on East Logan Street. He was a former Moberly police officer, and, as his own attorney pointed out in court, he had no criminal record at all before July 6.
What set the two of them against each other was birds. In the days after the shooting, neighbours told ABC 17 News that there had been an ongoing problem on that block: Heyde had been putting bird feed out in the street in front of his house — not in a feeder, not in his own yard, but in the road itself.
The trial and the sentence
Heyde claimed self-defense. The case was heard as a bench trial in Randolph County Circuit Court, in Huntsville, Missouri — a judge, not a jury, weighed that claim, and rejected it. He was convicted of second-degree murder.
Missouri’s sentencing range for second-degree murder runs from 10 to 30 years, or life. On August 21, 2026, Judge Robert Koffman sentenced David Heyde to 20 years in prison, noting that Heyde’s age had been taken into consideration. Bailey Scott was 23.
Watch the full case
Sources and credits
- ABC 17 News / KMIZ (Columbia, MO) — charging, trial, bond, arrest and sentencing coverage, July 2025 – August 2026. Booking photo of David Heyde credited to the Randolph County Jail.
- KRCG 13 (Sinclair) — community and victim coverage, July 2025.
- KOMU 8 — Randolph County verdict coverage, June 2026.
- Central Mo Info / KWIX (Alpha Media) — bench trial detail and verdict, June 2026.
- Bailey Scott’s published obituary and memorial fund (Ever Loved) — biographical detail and identification photograph.
- Missouri State Highway Patrol — victim identification release, July 8, 2025.
- Photographs: Downtown Moberly, MO (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0); Moberly railroad heritage display (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0); Randolph County Court House, Huntsville, MO and the Randolph County auxiliary courthouse, Moberly, MO (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0); Missouri State Highway Patrol vehicle (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0); bird feeder and sparrow (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0); public-domain street photography (Wikimedia Commons). All remaining imagery is clearly-credited illustrative licensed stock and does not depict this case.
Narration in the accompanying video is AI-generated. No re-used broadcast news footage appears in it.
Related reading
No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically yet. Further reading on the case: Bailey Scott / Moberly, Missouri true crime on Amazon
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