Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  “Pull yourself together,” said Carl when Vanessa broke down on the phone.

  “I can’t help it….”

  Later, Vanessa said: “He was mad at me. I was so hurt by this and was very shocked that he was uncaring to me. I cried all the time…and couldn’t imagine how [Bobbie Jo’s] mother must have felt to have found her dying that way and with no baby there, either…Carl had told me that he hoped he would push Lisa over the edge, to get the kids, but neither of us thought anything like this would happen.”

  At first, Carl had mixed feelings. “It seemed so damn surreal,” he recalled. “I just hopped in my truck and fled home.”

  Over the years, Carl had metamorphosed from a lanky U.S. Navy brat into a solid, outdoorsy, blue-collar man’s man, who had his mind set on fighting his ex-wife in court for custody of two of their children. Before he even knew what Lisa had been accused of, Carl had made plans to drag her into family court and, among other things, prove Lisa had been lying about being pregnant all those times over the past four years. Although he hadn’t been treating the children as a father should during the past four years, Carl could make up for his shortcomings now by doing the right thing. Yet, no matter what he did, Lisa made the situation unbearable, he claimed, causing a negative impact on his relationship with the kids.

  Carl was remarried now. He was building a life in Oklahoma, and wanted the children to be part of it. He wasn’t afraid to defend himself against anything Lisa threw at him. The children, he urged, suffered the most from her lies. Lisa never cared that when she hurt him by spreading lies, she was placing a burden on the children, too; or when she talked about the children’s father, her criticism was a reflection on them.

  “Lisa cared about herself,” said Carl. “And nobody else. I haven’t done everything I should by my children, but I was willing to accept my faults, look ahead, and rebuild their lives for them. Lisa could never do that.”

  Carl later remembered little of the ride home from his sister’s house, which took about fifteen minutes. Vanessa had the television on when Carl walked in. CNN, MSNBC, and all the local affiliates were running moment-by-moment coverage.

  It was just after 6:00 P.M.

  Throwing his keys on the kitchen counter, Carl sat down on the couch and stared at the television. The first thing he saw was Lisa’s booking photo.

  At one time, I loved this woman. She’s the mother of my four kids.

  Carl had no idea then how involved the children were—that three of them had held the stolen child in their arms and played with her as if she were, as Lisa had told them, their new sister.

  “Where are my kids?” Carl said, standing up, nervously running a hand through his hair, massaging the back of his neck.

  Had Lisa taken one of the kids with her when she committed the murder? Were they in custody, too?

  After watching the television coverage, allowing the news to settle on him, Carl got on the phone and called the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department and local FBI.

  Neither would tell him anything.

  He put in a call to Kevin’s parents. Perhaps they knew what was going on. Or at least where the kids were.

  No one answered the phone. One would have to assume the Montgomerys were still being bombarded by media requests.

  When he realized he wasn’t going to get much information from anyone else, Carl called Rebecca on her cell phone, hoping she would pick it up when she saw his number appear on caller ID.

  “Rebecca,” Carl asked when she answered, “where are you guys? Is everything okay?”

  “We’re at the Montgomerys’, Dad.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Dad,” Rebecca said, fighting back an overflow of emotion, “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s going to be okay, honey.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she said again. (“Probably four or five more times,” recalled Carl.)

  “Where is everyone else?”

  “We’re all here, Dad.”

  Carl had filed for custody of Alicia and Ryan days before. He had a court date with Lisa scheduled for the first part of January. Rebecca was turning eighteen on January 11. Because of her age, Carl left it up to Rebecca where she wanted to live. With Kayla in Georgia, he had the sense “she didn’t want to hurt her mom by moving in with me. Her mom was, at one time long before all this happened, her best friend.” Kayla, who had turned fourteen over the summer, was going to be able to decide for herself whom she wanted to live with. Alicia, who had turned sixteen on July 7, and Ryan, who turned fifteen in October, had declared their loyalty to Carl and told Lisa they wanted to live with him.

  Pacing in the kitchen, shaking his head, trying to figure out his next move, Carl wondered if calling his lawyer was the next logical step. “Should I call James?” he asked Vanessa.

  “It won’t hurt.”

  After several tries, Carl heard back from his lawyer’s receptionist. “He’s out of town. He won’t be available until tomorrow morning.”

  “Great! Just great….”

  Carl wanted his children back. Right now. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow.

  Still, he didn’t want to ride into Melvern like a cowboy and demand the children leave with him; he wanted to take action legally. The kids were safe at the Montgomerys’. Carl knew the family well. He trusted and respected them. It was late. Melvern was four hours away.

  “Should I go?” he asked Vanessa.

  61

  Kevin Montgomery was released from custody late Friday night. He was not charged with the murder of Bobbie Jo or the kidnapping of her child. As far-fetched as it seemed, Lisa had apparently fooled her husband into accepting she was pregnant and had delivered a child in Topeka. Naive didn’t even begin to express what people were thinking of Kevin.

  “There’s something missing,” one Melvern convenience store owner said when reporters interviewed him. His comment seemed to summarize the town’s immediate reaction.

  Authorities must have believed what Kevin had told them, because as the sun rose on Saturday morning, December 18, Kevin was at his parents’ house in Melvern, waking up to what would be one of the most peculiar days of his life.

  For Carl and his children, the question of whether Kevin played a role in Lisa’s alleged crimes was never an issue. The kids liked Kevin, appreciated him, and spoke highly of his good nature. They knew how Lisa had treated him, which somewhat explained how she could have convinced him she was pregnant all those times.

  “Rude and bossy,” said one of the kids, describing Lisa’s attitude toward Kevin. “Always arguing with him over his ex-wife and his boys…. I sometimes wondered if she really loved him. She would always throw things in his face, especially when it had to deal with his ex-wife, their kids, or child support.”

  “Kevin was always very supportive of us,” said another child.

  When asked whether Kevin had questions about his wife’s pregnancies, another family member said, “I would sometimes wonder. But I certainly wasn’t going to question [her], because when I started to talk about ‘the babies,’ she would have to always ‘go do something else.’ She avoided talking about it. So I would never ask Kevin about it, either.”

  Lisa told all of her children she was expecting twins, and they had no reason not to believe her. Kayla, however, learned about the twins before anyone else.

  Before she moved to Georgia, Kayla was upstairs in the house one afternoon while Lisa was online with a friend, explaining how their ram had bred with their goat. At one point, as Kayla looked over Lisa’s shoulder, she watched her type “something about Kevin ‘not having to jump any fences to get to her,’” making the correlation between the animals’ breeding habits and how open Lisa was to Kevin’s advances.

  Kayla was confused. At fourteen, she was sharp, but her mom talked about some things that didn’t make sense to her. Kayla decided to ask Lisa about the online chat.

  “Are you talking about what I think you are talking about?”
r />   “Were you reading my conversation?”

  “Are you, Mom?”

  “What—a baby?”

  “Yeah!”

  Lisa nodded.

  Kayla took it as a yes.

  Kayla could not think of a time when her mother told her she had lost one of the twins. Lisa e-mailed Auntie Mary about it, however, cautioning her not to tell Kayla. But Kayla read the e-mail, which confirmed her suspicions. Lisa would not be happy until the remaining baby was in her arms, the e-mail said in part.

  “That just makes me really mad thinking about it now,” said Kayla, reflecting on the situation.

  Lisa frequently communicated with other dog breeders online. When Kayla got bored, as she often did, she’d log on to Lisa’s account and check her e-mails. “Just to see what she talked about with other people.” Kayla knew she was being nosy. “But, as she wasn’t honest with me very much, I wanted to find out more about what she told other people.”

  There were hints. Mary once said, “Your mom ‘lost’ one of the ‘twins.’” Lisa would refer sometimes to a “baby” instead of “babies.” Then, one day, Kayla saw “she” instead of “they” in one of Lisa’s e-mails.

  “But at that point I was feeling even worse about it all, so I didn’t know what to believe.”

  To make matters even more confusing, in 2002, Kayla and one of her sisters found a letter addressed to Kansas State University, written by Lisa. At the time, Kayla was looking for any sign her mother was not the liar some were claiming her to be. She wanted to believe in her mom—celebrate the fact that she was pregnant. She wanted to give her mom the benefit of the doubt.

  The letter said “something about the baby”—the child Lisa claimed was stillborn that year—“being donated to Kansas State University for study, but that [the baby] had to be returned in a year.”

  After reading it, Kayla put it in the bottom of her dresser in back of some socks, underwear, and pajamas.

  “Nobody should have known I had it there, which is why I was so confused when it came up missing later on. Kinda odd to me.”

  As Kayla woke on Saturday morning, the weight of not only losing her friend, but learning that her own mother could be responsible, hit her hard. A guttural cry turned into the numbness of emotional pain, making her entire body weak. Even though it was a Saturday, she had to go to school for a half-day of make-up finals.

  When she arrived, a friend who had no idea what had happened, but had seen Kayla the previous day showing off photographs and bragging about Abigail, came up to her and casually asked, “So, what are you getting your little sister for Christmas?”

  “Nothing,” she shot back without explaining.

  “Well, that’s mean,” he said.

  Kayla stared at her friend. If you only knew the half of it.

  62

  Carl Boman wasn’t even out of bed on Saturday morning when his mind started racing. The anxiety of what had happened was all-encompassing. He was trying to analyze everything Lisa had said to him over the past few weeks to see if she had given some sort of sign of what was to come.

  Should I have known?

  Carl viewed Lisa as an unfit parent, unstable, a bad influence on the kids. In the months leading up to Bobbie Jo’s murder, her behavior had gone from strange to outright bizarre. Carl had spent a considerable amount of time the past year working out the details of Lisa’s life so he could use her actions against her and get his kids out of her custody. Just five days before she had been arrested, on December 12, Carl had his lawyer, James Campbell, file papers in court seeking legal custody of Ryan and Alicia.

  “She was lazy,” said Carl. “When she lived with Kevin, my kids did everything around the house: clothes, cleaning, yard work. She watched television, surfed the Internet, and just lounged around all the time. Add to that the lying about being pregnant, and I was tired of her poisoning the minds of my children. It had to stop.”

  “I do know the children believed their mother,” Judy added later, speaking of Lisa’s convincing argument that she was pregnant, “and they believed her every time she told them.”

  Just about everyone outside the immediate family agreed Lisa was emotionally abusive toward the children and constantly filled their heads with so many different versions of the truth they couldn’t possibly have any idea what to believe anymore.

  Lisa was a thirty-six-year-old mother of four grown children on the day she was arrested. Medically, she’d given up the chances of being a mother again back in 1990, when she was only twenty-two. Did she really think it was possible for her to have another child?

  Lisa’s cousin in Arizona had eight children, four of them reportedly born after the woman had had her tubes reconnected. But the procedure was expensive and performed only in certain states. Had Lisa somehow raised the money and had the procedure done?

  “That would be impossible,” said Carl. “Not only because she was penniless, but Lisa had her tubes burned, not tied.”

  One day, Carl confronted Kevin, who was standing outside his parents’ home. Carl asked Kevin for the second or third time since Lisa’s arrest, “How could you not know Lisa was never pregnant?”

  “Well, she has small babies,” replied Kevin. Indeed, all of Lisa and Carl’s children were under five pounds. Kayla was under three, born prematurely. Kevin was correct about that.

  “Yeah, so…? Your point?” Carl wanted to know.

  “She looked pregnant!” insisted Kevin.

  “No, she didn’t. Listen, Kevin, you can tell that to your parents, everybody you work with, the newspapers, your friends, everybody in Melvern, and even yourself. But you can’t tell me that,” said Carl. “I had four children with the woman.”

  How could Lisa convince a town—better yet members of her immediate family—she was pregnant? This seemed to be the question everyone wanted answered as news about what she allegedly had done continued to spread. Some insisted they never believed Lisa’s stories about being pregnant. Others said she wore baggy clothes and maternity wear around town. She even had gained some weight over the six months leading up to the murder. One man who knew her well said she had a knack for being able to swallow air and extend her stomach to make it appear as if she were pregnant. One of her sisters, who said she never believed Lisa when she lied about being pregnant, put her hands on Lisa’s swollen stomach one day and swore she felt movement.

  Fooling her own kids was one thing; manipulating teenagers was not so hard to do, especially when they lived in the same house and Lisa had all the time she needed to work on them. But Kevin—the man who slept next to her every night? How could he not know?

  Carl Boman couldn’t explain it. Didn’t she have a menstrual cycle every month? Didn’t he ever put his ear up to her stomach and listen for movement? Didn’t he put his hand on her stomach and wait for the child to kick?

  The problems Lisa faced near the end of 2004, as her fabricated due date approached, mounted. She had a court date in January that would have, Carl was certain, given him full custody of the two children. Moreover, Ryan and Rebecca were beginning to figure her out, along with several other people in town.

  “Ryan especially wanted to move back in with me,” said Carl. “That was one of the reasons for the court date that month; he had expressed an opinion of wanting to live with me.”

  Ryan had always been “the quiet one” of the bunch. Fun and loving, he never had a bad word to say about anyone and generally stayed to himself, content with a video game. He liked Kevin and didn’t mind living at the house in Melvern. All the kids had moved around a lot while Lisa and Carl were married. Settling down in Melvern hadn’t been all that bad, after all. The kids had new friends. A place to call home. Stepsiblings.

  As Carl saw it, Kevin was never the problem—it was Lisa. She seemed to be forever chasing another life: the one she left behind as a child and the one ahead that she was apparently making up as she went along. Her behavior leading up to her arrest became more erratic and unpredict
able with each passing day and, near the end, began to scare the children.

  “Ryan didn’t like the situation there,” added Carl. “Looking back, his mom was, I believe, worried she was going to be discovered.”

  63

  In Melvern, on Saturday morning, a growing band of television and newspaper reporters and recognizable tabloid television-show hosts were looking for the scoop of the day: an interview with Kevin Montgomery.

  In Kansas City, Todd Graves began talking about the next step in the prosecution of Lisa Montgomery. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had an unyielding burden of proof to establish. It seemed like a fairly textbook murder prosecution, seeing so much forensic evidence was available and Lisa had, for all intents and purposes, confessed. But when defense attorneys got involved, Graves and his colleagues knew, the fight would truly begin.

  Late Friday night, Graves released a formal criminal complaint against Lisa, accompanied by a comprehensive affidavit. For the first time, the gruesome details of Lisa’s alleged crimes were made public, fueling the press’s impetus to drive the story into Tragedy TV status. The eight-page affidavit, signed by U.S. magistrate judge Sarah Hays, listed names and addresses of people involved: Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s neighbor Chris Law, Becky Harper, Dyanne Siktar, along with several others, and explained the actions of the fictional Darlene Fischer and the real Lisa Montgomery during the weeks leading up to Bobbie Jo’s murder.

  Within hours after the government put the affidavit on its Web site, it spread throughout the Internet.

  “This is a heartrending case,” Graves said outside the Nodaway County Courthouse in Maryville.

  It would be a busy weekend for Todd Graves.

  As soon as Lisa was in custody, Graves began working, he said later, “in conjunction with Nodaway County prosecuting attorney David Baird.” Then he made a point to say, at least right now, the prosecution, like the initial investigation, was going to be a multifaceted effort. Every single law that applied to the ultimate charges Lisa would face would be followed correctly, with proper procedure. Now was not the time to butt heads over which office would prosecute the case. Priority number one was filing the correct paperwork so the case could move forward in a timely manner. Some questions, Graves was quick to add, that the affidavit failed to answer would just have to wait. He wasn’t prepared to jeopardize such an emotionally charged and important legal case by giving away details prematurely.