Murder in the Heartland (15 page)

T
he sinking feeling Kayla Boman had regarding the new baby was washed away by one simple conversation she had with her sister Rebecca and Mom before she left for school. The photographs of the baby that Rebecca had e-mailed helped. Now Kayla was in school, photographs in hand, bragging to fellow students about how beautiful the child was. “I’m
finally
a big sister,” she said to more than one classmate.

Kayla liked living in Georgia with Auntie Mary. She and her mother had been moving away from each other emotionally at the time she left Kansas. If you ask Kayla, she’d say her mother rarely paid much attention to her or her siblings; everything Lisa did, at least during the final year Kayla was in Kansas, revolved around her own selfish needs.

Lisa “loved the children,” but the “newness” of them being babies always wore off, Carl said, by the end of the first year. Her interest in them continued to diminish in their formative years and teens.

“This is why,” Kayla added, “I think it’s crazy now that my mom wanted another child so badly—especially after having four of us she pretty much ignored.”

Nonetheless, as she went about her day on Friday in school, Kayla couldn’t have been happier for her mother.

“Can you believe it—she’s my sister.”

The photographs proved it. Mom had finally given birth.

Lisa Montgomery and Carl Boman’s children had always been well-behaved, closely controlled kids. Despite the emotional ride Carl and Lisa put the children on during their years of marriage and divorce, the children, for the most part, had managed to deal with their lives in a healthy way, staying focused on the future.

Rebecca, the oldest, was admired by the others. According to Carl Boman, not only had Rebecca cultivated a more mature relationship with her mom, but the other children always turned to her for advice, even comfort. Certain characteristics of the children’s personalities were framed around the way Lisa raised them. For instance, no matter whom they were speaking to, the children talked in rushed sentences, lacking any structure or continuity, as if they were jockeying for position with an invisible opponent. At times, Lisa would ignore the children to the point where they had to tussle with one another for attention. When Lisa decided to turn from her computer screen (or lift her head up from whatever book she was reading) and focus on what the children were saying, they struggled to keep her attention by speaking quickly. This, Boman said, was Lisa: selfish, unsupportive, nefarious, and abusive. Two of the children said when they were younger, she would whip them with a long stick.

For Kayla Boman, moving to Georgia was like being rescued from a sinking ship; only she didn’t realize it until later on, when she was able to look at the situation and put it all together. Certain parts of her mom’s personality became clear to Kayla after she stepped back from the family and had time to look at the way she had been treated for the past ten years. Not that Carl Boman was the father of the year; but his shortcomings had been in the form of abandonment. What Carl
didn’t
do was the problem, not what he did. Kayla now realized the life she’d had with her mom, although she loved her, was not the kind of life a child deserved.

K
ayla was kicking stones and staring at her watch. Waiting. Wondering.
Where is he? Why is he so late?

She stood outside the front door of her school, unsure of why her ride home was late. The woman Kayla lived with in Georgia had a son, seventeen years old then.
Robert
^*
attended the same high school. Generally, Robert would meet Kayla out front and drive her home. But not today. For some reason, he was running awfully late.

Where is he?

Kayla didn’t know it, but Robert had taken the day off.

Auntie Mary’s next-door neighbor
Julie Harrison
^*
routinely left for work at three or four in the morning and wanted someone to be in the house when her daughter woke up at 5:30
A.M
. Kayla would stay over at times, wake the child up, and make sure she got ready for school in time. It soon dawned on Kayla while she stood outside waiting for Robert that Julie was likely home and could possibly pick her up.

“Robert didn’t show up today…. I need a ride home,” Kayla said when she got Julie on the phone.

“Sure, honey. I’ll be right there.”

As Kayla sat on the curb waiting, Auntie Mary was back at home deciding how to tell Kayla what had happened. Thus far, Kayla had no idea what was going on back in Melvern; that her mom had been arrested for killing a young woman and stealing her baby. Within the next hour, Kayla’s life was going to be flipped on its side. The authorities’ allegations would be doubly disturbing to her because her mom had not only supposedly committed murder—but Bobbie Jo Stinnett was someone Kayla had looked up to and valued as a friend.

“By the way,” Julie said as she and Kayla headed home, “my computer isn’t working right today for some reason. I have to get it fixed.” Julie knew Kayla liked to stop by the house and use the computer before she went home to Mary’s.

“Okay,” Kayla said.

By December, Kayla had gotten used to life in Georgia. She liked living amid different surroundings and began to see the life she left behind from a different perspective. First and foremost, she understood, even at fourteen years old, how much her mother had lied to her throughout the years, neglected her, and failed to parent her in a way she needed. Not that Kayla didn’t miss her mother and siblings, she did. But living in Georgia had cleared her mind. She was focused now on training and showing rat terriers.

When they arrived at Julie’s, Kayla noticed her dogs were already outside next door at Auntie Mary’s. One less chore she had to do.

She walked into Julie’s with the thought of doing some laundry. Kayla kept clothes at both Julie’s and Mary’s. She had a room at Julie’s, too.

While sorting her dirty clothes—“jeans, whites, lights, darks,” it was like a song she sang to herself to pass the time while separating the items—Kayla heard the front door open. Julie had gone into another room by then and was busy doing household chores herself.

It was Auntie Mary. Kayla poked her head around the corner and watched Mary walk into the house.
That’s odd
, she thought,
Auntie’s still wearing her nightgown
. Her face was reddish, flushed, as if she had been running.

B
en Espey sat at his desk and looked over his notes. A pool of reporters outside the sheriff’s department braved the cold temperatures, waiting for Espey to emerge with an update. It was Espey’s job, he knew, to keep the media at bay as much as he could. As news spread about the arrest of Lisa Montgomery, it was impossible for Espey to think he could ignore the mass gathering.

By early evening, word of Lisa’s arrest had hit the international wires and airwaves.
WOMB-SNATCH KILLER
, one headline in an Australian newspaper read.
WOMB-THEFT BABY HOME
, echoed a South African headline. From Japan to Russia to England, and all across the United States, the arrest of Lisa Montgomery and what she had reportedly done to Bobbie Jo Stinnett struck a nerve with people. Here was a young, twenty-three-year-old victim brutally murdered in Small Town, USA, pregnant, newly married, her baby ripped from her womb as if part of some satanic ritual. For some, the girl next door and the American Dream were destroyed in one night.

As gruesome as the story appeared to be, it was news, nonetheless. It meant ratings. During what was normally a slow news period, most Americans would celebrate Christmas exchanging some sort of opinion about the most merciless murder the Midwest had seen in years. The only cause for celebration was that Victoria Jo had been found alive and would be returned to her father and Bobbie Jo’s family.

Espey walked slowly from the basement room he had turned into investigation ground zero and opened the door. He had tears in his eyes before he uttered a word.

“We’re confident we have the little girl that was taken from Skidmore,” Espey told reporters while standing in the back parking lot of the sheriff’s department. “We have canceled the Amber Alert.” Later, Espey recalled the moment he emerged from the basement and addressed the press for the first time since finding Victoria Jo: “It was one of the happiest moments of my life, just to say that we had found that baby alive. I could hardly get the words out of my mouth.”

FBI SA Rick Thorton then took a step toward the microphones, further spreading the joy that anyone who had been involved in the investigation surely felt. Unfortunately, most child abductions didn’t turn out this way. It was time to spread the good news.

“The father of the child will be reunited [
sic
] with the baby,” Thorton said. It was obvious he, too, was holding back emotion.

In handling any story that tugs at the heartstrings, reporters generally have the professionalism to stay objective. Such discipline is part of their credo. But this story, in all of its horror, seemed to expose a vein of emotion many reporters couldn’t keep buried. Many news agencies focused on the prospect of a happy ending. Having Victoria Jo in the arms of her father was, in spite of Bobbie Jo’s death, a small victory.

As word spread, residents of Melvern, especially those who knew Kevin and Lisa, began to look at the last twenty-four hours in an entirely different light. Suddenly, everything Lisa and Kevin had done seemed suspect.

A
s soon as he heard about Lisa’s arrest, Darrel Schultz called Pastor Mike Wheatley. It was about ten minutes before the evening news came on. Darrel was Kevin’s boss and a member of the First Church of God in Melvern.

“Do you know anything about this?” Schultz asked. “Were you in the middle of it all?”

“Of course not, Darrel,” the pastor explained.

Lisa’s arrest had caused people in Melvern to look for explanations. How could she fool us like that? Was Kevin in on her plan, too?

“Actually, what makes this whole thing so difficult,” Wheatley told reporters, “is that she had everybody pretty snowed. I mean, as far as we knew, everything was just absolutely normal about Lisa. She was just doing her working and going home, and back and forth. There wasn’t any sign at all of any difference in her.”

Wheatley pointed out that the people of Melvern, beyond Kevin and the kids, didn’t see Lisa every day. No one could really know a person without living with her; and even then, who really knew the person they slept next to every night?

“I mean, the last time I saw her,” added Wheatley, “was in October when she came by the house and appeared to be pregnant. So, that was the only time I’d seen her since, before the day she came by with the baby.”

Lisa may have appeared to be “normal” to her small circle of friends and townspeople she saw occasionally, but those closest to her, especially Carl Boman, had seen signs of a person struggling with a perception of reality for a long time.

“Lisa was the type of person who could pick up anything,” said Carl, “and was capable of doing it. She was smart. She was amazing that way, with certain things. When it came to artsy type of things, lace and doilies, she could do it. But she could also lie to your face and make you believe what she wanted you to.”

Indeed, Lisa had no trouble convincing people she was a respectable member of the community, having been involved in the local 4-H club and other community-oriented programs. But that was one of Carl’s points: Lisa showed the veneer of a normal person, so she could pull the strings behind the scenes more convincingly.

The impression Lisa had given to neighbors regarding how she lived, Carl added, and the actuality of the situation were “two totally different things.” She lied, Carl went on to say, to Wheatley and everyone else in town, not just about being pregnant.

“Her whole life was a deception.”

In 1998, shortly after Carl and Lisa divorced for the second “and last” time, Lisa took two of the children and moved from New Mexico to Topeka, while Carl took the other two and moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Lisa ended up moving in with her mom and immediately, Carl insisted, started making up stories about him.

“She turned into someone totally different than who she truly was, and projected this ‘new’ person on the community there in Topeka. She told people all sorts of stories about me.”

As Carl told the press at the time, Lisa cheated on him no fewer than six times throughout both marriages, he said. “But it was probably a lot more.” When she arrived in Kansas, right around the time she met Kevin, she played a “whole different role there, like she had just come out of an abusive marriage.”

It was all part of an elaborate plan, Carl maintained. Lisa worked hard to take the focus off herself and put it on someone else so she could play the role of victim, culling as much sympathy as she could from people. Her secrets would be better hidden that way.

Some of the rumors Lisa spread about Carl when she got into town began trickling back to him.

“In a way, now it’s funny. It doesn’t even anger me because it is all so far-fetched. There’s people there in Kansas who hated me but would not have even known me if they saw me on the street.”

Carl believed Lisa could influence people into thinking whatever she wanted, as she did after meeting Kevin and moving to Melvern. Soon she had many in the town believing she was repeatedly pregnant and regularly losing her babies. The pattern, according to Carl, was a continuation of what she had been doing to him for years.

“Lisa, what the hell are you doing, telling people all these lies about me?” Carl asked one day after hearing a story about himself.

“Oh, please, Carl,” she said. “I never said any of that.”

That kind of denial would get to Carl the most. He’d talk to Lisa and, at times, he was sure she didn’t even listen to him, blowing off his questions as though he had never asked them.

“She never confronted anything.”

Furthermore, whenever Carl would hear she was pregnant and call her on it, Lisa would say, simply, “Whatever, Carl.”

“Avoidance, even to the point of hanging up on me,” he said.

Whereas Lisa had people from all across the Midwest bad-mouthing her, claiming she lied at dog shows regarding the pedigree of her dogs, not many—outside the family—had a bad word to say about Carl Boman. He had a solid reputation of being a hardworking man, a “Sunday Christian,” and a person who liked to keep to himself without interference from outsiders. To have to defend himself tore Carl apart as time went on and Lisa’s stories became more bizarre.