Murder in the Heartland (14 page)

D
uring Friday afternoon, December 17, while the kids were at the Montgomery house talking with the FBI, SA Mike Miller, watching from a foxhole somewhere around Kevin and Lisa’s Adams Road house, spotted a “dirty red Toyota Corolla, bearing a Kansas license plate…pull up in front of the residence.”

It was the infamous “red car” every law enforcement agency in the Midwest had been looking for, only there was no
H
on the hood, contrary to what a witness had told Ben Espey the previous day.

After Lisa and Kevin got out of the car, Lisa walked around to the back of the vehicle and took the child out of her car seat.

The FBI agents didn’t move. They watched as Lisa and Kevin took their time entering the house through the side porch door, where an old refrigerator and washing machine sat rusting on top of rain-soaked, rotting pine planks.

Within minutes, Lisa and Kevin were inside the house with the child.

Soon after, Randy Strong and Don Fritz arrived on the scene, pulled into the driveway, and parked in back of Kevin’s pickup. They met no opposition from the FBI agents, who were still in position around the property, likely wondering what was going on.

Fritz called Espey from his cell phone: “We’re here, Ben. As soon as we know something, we’ll call you back. We’re shutting down our cell phones now.”

“Good luck…let me know as soon as you do.”

“All right. Here we go.”

Meanwhile, Espey heard a rumor that the press had figured out what was unfolding in Melvern. A few helicopters were hovering over Lisa and Kevin’s house, filming and circling it.

When he confirmed the report, Espey’s concern for the child grew.

“Someone had already killed the mother of the child—we knew that,” said Espey. “What if they came out of the house and saw the helicopters? There was a real good chance, I believed, they could dispose of the baby.”

Randy Strong jumped out of the car first and walked up to the door. Composed and collected, he knocked.

Kevin answered. “Yeah?”

“I’m a special investigator from Missouri,” said Strong. “My partner is with me. Can we come in?”

“Sure,” Kevin answered, opening the door. He seemed a bit frazzled but completely forthcoming and cooperative.

As Fritz and Strong walked in, they spied Lisa sitting in the living room holding the baby; she was watching television. Oddly enough, the Amber Alert, Strong noticed, was scrolling across the bottom of the television screen as he walked up to Lisa and asked her to hand the child to him.

“Why? What’s going on?” Lisa wanted to know.

As that happened, the FBI started coming out of hiding and pulling into the driveway.

Randy Strong took the child from Lisa and ran outside with her, handing her off to an agent, saying, “Take the child to the hospital—
now
.”

“It all worked out,” Espey said, “because we went out of our jurisdiction and took control.”

Immediately Lisa and Kevin were separated.

“Kevin Montgomery advised,” FBI SA Craig Arnold wrote in his report, “that yesterday, December 16, 2004, he arrived home from work at about five-fifteen
P.M
.”

“She called me and told me she went into labor and delivered a baby,” a thunderstruck Kevin Montgomery explained to two FBI agents asking him questions. “What’s going on?”

“Where?”

“Well, in Topeka. So me and the kids, we, we…got into my pickup truck and drove to Long John Silver’s, where she said she was.”

“What happened then?”

“We picked her up and drove back home. What’s this? What’s happening?”

Uncertainty had settled upon Kevin.
The FBI?
Nothing was making sense.

As Lisa stood in the living room, a startled look on her face, Randy Strong walked over to her. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together: Lisa had streaks of blond in her hair, there was a “dirty red car” in the driveway, and she’d had in her possession a baby who was, as far as anyone could tell, a day, maybe two days old. How many other suspects did they have, or sightings for that matter, matching up so perfectly? Strong asked her about the baby.

“I’ve been pregnant and delivered the child yesterday,” stated Lisa.

She certainly didn’t look like she’d just given birth. Where was the extra weight? Could she produce any records from the hospital? Maybe an identity bracelet most hospitals put on mother and child?

“Where?” asked one agent.

“At the Birth and Women’s Center in Topeka. What’s the problem here? I don’t understand….”

As Lisa continued, Strong asked her more detailed questions. It was the beginning of what would amount to a four-hour interrogation by Strong, who, Espey said, “is one of the best interrogators the state of Missouri has.”

Regardless of what Lisa and Kevin were saying, most everyone involved in the arrest had a quick moment of triumph.

“I wasn’t there physically,” one FBI agent said later on television, “but the agents and police officers who were there told me they were absolutely ecstatic. All you had in this case was the fact that you had a dead woman; you had the idea that this person, the suspect, had blond hair and was driving a red car. And that’s all you had.”

Espey heard about it immediately. “I was thrilled, but more than anything worried about the child’s welfare and getting her to a hospital. I knew with Randy on the case that he would break the suspect. I wanted that child to be evaluated immediately so she could be united with Zeb.”

As Strong kept questioning Lisa, it didn’t take long before she cracked. After one FBI agent read Lisa her constitutional right to remain silent, she started crying.

“Is there something you want to tell us, Mrs. Montgomery?” asked Strong. He looked down and saw “numerous cuts on her fingers.” Later, it would be confirmed that the presence of Bobbie Jo’s DNA was found underneath Lisa’s fingernails on her left hand.

With that, FBI SA Craig Arnold wrote later, “Lisa Montgomery…confessed to having strangled Stinnett and removing the fetus…[and] further admitted the baby she had was Stinnett’s…..”

But it was Strong, Espey insisted, who had taken Lisa’s full confession.

“I lied to my husband about giving birth to a child,” Lisa said at one point.

“Where did you go after you left Skidmore?” Strong asked after Lisa admitted strangling Bobbie Jo and cutting the child from her womb.

“I…I drove west,” Lisa said. “Yeah, west. And I stopped. I stopped about seven miles out of Skidmore and pulled over and cleaned up the baby.”

“Take it easy,” Strong advised. “It’s okay.”

“I clipped her belly button, you know…and then I…I…” Lisa broke down again.

Strong sensed how uncomfortable it was for her to make the admission. “Take your time, Lisa. No hurry here.”

“Well, I…I put all of the dirty blankets in the trunk with the rest of the stuff.”

Next to the blankets, Strong would soon find the bloody rope Lisa allegedly used to strangle Bobbie Jo. DNA from the blood and hair attached to the rope would be a match to Bobbie Jo. The knife Strong found in the trunk next to the rope had dried blood on one side of it, which would later be proven to contain a mixture of Bobbie Jo and Victoria Jo’s DNA. The handle of the knife was even more damaging—it held a blend of “genetic information” from Bobbie Jo, Victoria Jo and Lisa.

“Okay,” Strong said, “Continue.”

“Then I called Pastor Wheatley from my cell phone and told him I had the baby.”

“How long was that after you left Skidmore?”

“I don’t know, maybe ten minutes. Yes, about ten minutes.”

There it was: Lisa had been found out. She was never pregnant. She had lied to her children, mother, sisters, husband, and Bobbie Jo Stinnett.

If what authorities (and Lisa herself) said was true, Lisa had handpicked Bobbie Jo, waged a carefully thought-out campaign to kidnap her child, and hadn’t allowed murder to prevent her from carrying out the diabolical plan—all because she didn’t want people to think she wasn’t pregnant.

The announcement of Lisa’s arrest and the return of Victoria “Tori” Jo to her father would send a shot of hope throughout the heartland. But as Lisa began spending her first few days in lockup, having time to contemplate the events of the past few months, she would begin to change her story and to remove herself from the situation as if she hadn’t even been present when the crime occurred. In the next month, she would take it one step further by telling a member of her family, “No, I didn’t do it. Someone handed me the baby…. I don’t remember being there.”

G
ood news travels fast. Within hours after Lisa’s arrest, as she and Kevin were taken into custody, the airwaves lit up with “breaking news reports.” As Victoria Jo was rushed to the Stormont-Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka and news outlets converged on Melvern, Alicia and Rebecca sat at Kevin’s parents’ house trading stories about why the FBI had taken them out of class to be questioned. They still had no idea what was going on.

While the kids were sitting on the couch, the local news channel aired an alert on the bottom of the screen: “Kansas woman in custody, suspected in the murder of Missouri woman and the kidnapping of her fetus.”

Alicia and Rebecca looked at each other:
No way. It can’t be
. While watching the report, Alicia, especially, had a “sickly feeling that she will never forget,” a family member said later.

That report still wasn’t enough to convince them, however. They asked Mrs. Montgomery what was going on.

She wouldn’t tell them.

A second report flashed across the screen thirty minutes later: “Tests have confirmed: the baby found in Melvern is Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s.”

The previous night replayed in their minds: Mom trying to breast-feed the child, dressing her up in that “I’m the little sister” T-shirt, cooing with her, calling her Abigail Marie, Kevin’s parents and his aunts and uncles.

It was all a show.

At this point, people had more questions than answers. How was the baby doing? Victoria Jo hadn’t been all that vivacious over the past twenty-four hours. She hadn’t cried much the previous night. She wasn’t moving her hands and legs as a newborn should. Would she survive such an ordeal? Had she suffered any brain damage during delivery? And the biggest question: What kind of monster had committed such a horrific act of violence?

As pieces of the story surfaced, people waited and wondered. Perhaps no one waited with more anticipation than Zeb Stinnett, who would have the opportunity inside the next hour to see his daughter for the first time.

It was comforting to most to think the one man who had lost and suffered the most would be able to carry on his slain wife’s legacy. By her own admission, Lisa Montgomery had, in effect, taken half of Zeb’s life from him. But that bond between parent and child, which Lisa herself seemingly craved so badly, was a part of the Stinnett family she could never separate.

“S
ee, now do you believe me?
Now
do you want to go live with your dad?” Lisa asked. It was well into the evening on the night she had presented her new baby to the family. Lisa picked up Abigail and handed her to Ryan, who had been asking lately about going to live with his father, Carl Boman. “He’s the liar, Ryan. Not me!” Lisa continued, apparently relishing having given birth, thus proving Carl wrong.

Carl Boman believes that everything Lisa did up to the point when she was arrested had been planned around her having a child that never actually existed. Kevin, Lisa’s un-suspecting husband, bought the entire scenario from day one: nine months of feigned morning sickness and nausea, no doctor visits, shopping for baby clothes, crib, nursery, and a made-up due date, December 13. Not that Kevin had been fooled because of what many later presumed was an overwhelming naïveté on his part. Lisa had done a good job of deceiving him. All those supposed “prenatal care” appointments; Lisa worked hard at getting out of them.

“I’m going to be sick, Kevin, turn around,” she said one day. They were driving toward one of her medical appointments. Kevin stopped the car and brought her back home. Once inside, Boman says, she picked up the phone and made a bogus phone call to a fake doctor’s office and canceled the appointment. Another time, he believes, she started an argument halfway there and again demanded Kevin turn the truck around and return home. When they arrived, she told him to get out. “I’ll drive myself,” she said, and took off.

Pastor Mike Wheatley knew the Montgomery family well. He had counseled Lisa. The last time they spoke was in October. Wheatley was concerned about Lisa, he said in press reports later. Not about her state of mind. But because, according to her, she was pregnant, had lost one of her twins, and was scheduled to give birth to the other child somewhere around December 13. She was worried about the second twin—if she would make it.

“I wasn’t aware of anything [unusual],” Wheatley said. “As far as I knew, everything was just perfectly normal.”

Despite what many of Lisa’s siblings, her mother, and Carl Boman were telling him, Kevin and many Melvernians were under the impression Lisa had been pregnant with twins and had lost one. But it wasn’t the first time Lisa had claimed to be pregnant. There had been at least four other instances where she had made the claim but had never produced a child.

“I had gone to doctor’s appointments with Lisa when she was pregnant with our children,” Carl Boman recalled. “I saw sonograms, medical charts…. I was in the birthing room when Lisa had each child. I paid the doctor’s bills!” Carl had a fairly decent relationship with Kevin, but at times argued with him over how the children were being treated. One day, he asked Kevin about Lisa’s supposed pregnancy. Carl had heard for the past four years about Lisa’s being pregnant and was taken aback by the notion of her seemingly fooling Kevin so easily. There was one time when Lisa told Carl she was pregnant, “but the baby was absorbed into her uterus…. I ‘lost it, Carl.’” But Carl never bought into any of it.

Was there a man alive who could be deceived so effortlessly?
Carl often wondered about Kevin. Apparently, Lisa had found him.

“How could you not do any of that?” Carl asked, referring to Kevin not going with Lisa to any medical appointments. “How could you believe her when everyone else is telling you different?”

Carl said Kevin just stared at him with the gaze of a man who perhaps knew something was wrong but didn’t want to admit or confront it. Or maybe he just couldn’t see it for himself. Carl wasn’t the only one telling Kevin about Lisa’s lies. Lisa’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, and her sisters,
Tonya
^*
and
Farina
^*
, had been telling Kevin for years that Lisa was lying about being pregnant and that it had become an obsession with her to give birth again.

Judy and her new husband, Danny Shaughnessy, took a ride into town one afternoon to discuss the situation with Judy’s lawyer.

“Can we have her committed?” Judy asked.

“What’s going on?”

“She’s lying all the time about being pregnant,” Judy explained. “I think she believes herself.” They were tired of listening to Lisa and her stories, Judy continued. Things were escalating, bordering on getting out of hand. “I’m worried she might do something.”

“You can’t commit Lisa, unfortunately, until she hurts herself or somebody else,” Judy recalled her lawyer advising.

When Carl asked Kevin about all the missed prenatal appointments, reminding him how many people were saying Lisa was lying, Kevin said, “Well, Lisa told me. And I
believe
her.”

Carl shook his head and walked away.

Many claimed Lisa had no trouble convincing Kevin of anything she wanted. While they were dating, she had told him she was pregnant and needed an abortion (a procedure she always had professed to regard with absolute disgust, both on moral and religious grounds).

“From what I understood,” a family member said, “Kevin gave her the money for the abortion.” The story was unearthed in a letter Lisa had written to Kevin while he was courting her. Early in the relationship, it appeared she was already spinning her lies and manipulation. “The letter was about her having another child and she thought it was dead, but found out it was alive—and also said something about her having twins. I think she was misleading Kevin to believe she had twins when she had the supposed abortion.”

“This is what Lisa did: she manipulated people,” said Carl Boman, who was married to Lisa twice over a thirteen-year period. Carl met Lisa when she was sixteen. She was his stepsister then. “My kids would tell me what was going on with Lisa and Kevin because they were there; they lived in the house.”

At about six feet, in remarkably good shape, Carl Boman had a deep voice that suggested a career in radio, a low baritone, like an opera singer. At times, he fumbled with his words, digging deep to find the right phrases to explain his view of things.

For years, Carl had been telling the children Lisa wasn’t pregnant. Still, they believed she was, simply because Lisa kept drilling it into them. The fact that they lived with Lisa gave her more time to control the situation. Well aware Carl had been steering them in the opposite direction, Lisa made it a point to work hard at convincing the children Carl was “the bad guy,” he said, for denying her the right to be pregnant and share that excitement with the kids. By handing Ryan the child and saying, “Now do you want to go live with your dad?” Lisa was, Carl insisted, insinuating,
I’m no liar. Your dad is the one who lies. Here’s my baby, here’s my proof.