Murder in the Heartland (30 page)

S
an Diego didn’t turn out to be a place for charming moonlit walks along the La Jolla Cove shoreline or romantic hikes up in Mission Trails for Carl and Lisa after they moved back in together during the summer of 1990. The problems they had seemed to be churning inside them like a virus, just waiting to ruin everything again.

When Lisa had given birth to Kayla in August, they had set aside their problems, at least for the time being. But part of the relationship had been severed. Things would never be the same. If anything, the situation was worse. Carl just hadn’t realized it yet.

“What was important to Lisa,” said Carl, “was never important to anybody else.” Lisa lived in her own fantasy, which she constantly tried to transform into some sort of reality. “She believed she could manipulate anyone, and still does,” Carl said.

Carl Boman has blamed himself frequently for the problems he had with Lisa throughout their lives. As they got settled in San Diego, Carl said, “I guess I was working too much. She started “having affairs,” he later told the press, “with one of our neighbors.”

A friend of Lisa and Carl’s had driven out to San Diego with them; he had been staying at the apartment for a time. After Carl found out the guy was bisexual, he “kicked him out” the guy subsequently got his own place right around the corner.

“This guy, our friend, knew Lisa was seeing another man, but he didn’t want to tell me.”

The proof Carl needed—and he always demanded some sort of confirming evidence, besides someone else’s word—came in the form of a phone call one day. Lisa was on the phone with her lover when the evicted friend, who was there gathering some things he left behind, picked up the other phone and handed it to him.

“Here,” he said, “you don’t believe me…see for yourself.”

Carl listened.

“Next time,” Lisa’s lover was telling her, “we need to get us a hotel room. I don’t like it on the floor.” It appeared they were meeting in an abandoned apartment for which the guy had a key. “I think we left the gas on the last time we were there.”

As the conversation between Lisa and her lover continued, Carl slammed the phone down so Lisa could tell he had been listening. On his way out the door, he walked around the corner of the room as Lisa was heading into another section of the apartment. He nearly bumped into her.

“Oh,” Lisa said as Carl headed for the door in a huff, “you’re leaving already? Have a good night at work, sweetie. I’ll see you when you get home.”

Carl shook his head. “I was hurt,” he remembered. “It was a good thing, looking back now, that I didn’t start fighting with her then.”

While starting his car outside the apartment, Carl nearly broke down.

Here we go again.

B
y the beginning of summer 2005, the government had filed its suggestions regarding a schedule and trial order. It detailed the trial scheduling conference the lawyers had taken part in back on February 9, when they sat down to discuss certain issues that would come up along the way leading to trial. Among the discovery items, several things came to light, some of which were already public, others that were not.

Lisa’s defense, said the government’s suggestions, “does not anticipate a competency motion,” but the defendant “may rely on a defense of insanity or diminished mental responsibility,” and the defendant “does not anticipate an alibi defense,” but that she is “relying on the defense of general denial.”

In other words, “I didn’t do it.”

The government was obligated under the order to file its “Notice of Intention to Seek the Death Penalty” on or before September 16, 2005.

The legal case against Lisa Montgomery, at this point, had come down to paperwork and motion filings. The bottom line was, Lisa was scheduled to be tried for kidnapping resulting in death, beginning on April 24, 2006, and the government was going to seek the death penalty.

A
s Carl Boman would later tell the press, on the night he learned his wife had been “having affairs” on him once again, he allowed his feelings to fester inside while he stood watch on his regular midnight to 8:00
A.M
. guard shift. He was angry, sure; but he was hurt more than anything. Deep down, he wanted it to work out with Lisa. He still loved her.

With his second job starting at nine o’clock, later that morning, Carl knew he could lose himself in work and try to fight off any thoughts of running home and confronting Lisa.

Is there any way I can ever trust her again?

A few days passed and Carl decided he needed to confront Lisa before he left for work one night. “What the hell, Lisa? Again?”

“What? No, Carl. What are you talking about? You have it all wrong.”

By now, Carl knew Lisa’s MO: first deny, then cry.

“Come on, Lisa. This is getting old.”

“No, Carl, I swear.”

“Stop that! Just stop it, damn it.”

Then came the tears.

“It was…an accident, Carl. I swear it was,” Lisa cried. Then she curled up into a ball on the couch. “Please…you’re working so much. I was lonely. I needed someone.”

The one thing Lisa wouldn’t have to worry about anymore was the chance of an unwanted pregnancy. In August, after Lisa went into labor with Kayla several months prematurely, doctors gave her “all sorts of drugs,” hoping to delay the birth. But after they realized there wasn’t much they could do to slow it, they gave Lisa dose after dose of steroids to try to help Kayla develop her lungs and organs. As a result of the complications surrounding Kayla’s birth, Lisa’s insides swelled up, mainly her uterus. Because of that, when she had her tubal ligation surgery, doctors couldn’t simply “tie” her tubes, as was done in as a popular form of birth control back then; instead, they had to burn them apart. Thus, there would never be a chance for Lisa to have her tubes reconnected.

That was why, Carl said, when she started making claims of being pregnant years later, he knew there was no way it could be true.

“We had always talked about this throughout our marriage. We were only supposed to have three kids and then Lisa would have her tubes tied off and we would go on with life, happy campers. Kayla came along—and believe me, we were both, Lisa and I, happy to have her; it wasn’t about not wanting her or anything like that—but we weren’t going to have a whole house full of kids. We talked it through many times.”

After Lisa married Kevin, she never complained to Carl about having had her tubes tied. “She never came to me and said, ‘You bastard, you made me tie my tubes, and now I want another child.’ It was just never part of the discussion while she was faking all those pregnancies.”

In January 1991, Carl approached Lisa. He had done a lot of thinking about the marriage. “Listen, this is
not
working. I cannot do this anymore. The trust is gone.”

“Carl, come on,” Lisa pleaded, “please try. If not for me, for the children.”

Carl thought about it. “Well…I’ll tell you what, Lisa…”

B
ack in January, Kayla Boman’s sister Rebecca drove down to Georgia to visit with Kayla. It was time, everyone agreed, for Kayla to return home. She’d been gone since August 2004. Mom was in prison facing trial. Bobbie Jo was dead. Although reporters were still calling the house every once in a while, it was nothing like it had been.

“Do you want to come back home with me?” Rebecca asked as she and Kayla sat and talked about what had happened.

As she had said on the phone several times previously, Kayla repeated, “No, I’m staying here for a while longer.”

Georgia offered Kayla what she felt she couldn’t get anywhere else: serenity. Back home, she would face reminders everywhere. Staying at Auntie Mary’s, she could go about life in surroundings that were still a bit foreign to her. Kids in school didn’t bug her to answer questions. She wasn’t put on the spot and asked to explain things. Some of her close friends knew what happened, but they didn’t push the issue.

So, Rebecca, disappointed, left without her.

Two months later, in March, Kayla was talking on the phone with her brother, Ryan, one night. (“He sounded depressed,” Kayla remembered, “and something in his voice just told me that it was time I go home. At first, I was just going to go home for my two weeks of spring break, but then I decided to stay.”)

In less than one year’s time, Kayla had gone from living in a household with her mom to living with a friend of the family, to staying with her dad and his wife, whom Kayla had never lived with before. (“I didn’t like my stepmother, so for the first few days we ‘clashed,’ so to speak, but then finally, at my dad’s request, I apologized to her, and we learned how to get along. It was a lot different being with them, but I was glad to be back around family. Going back to school, I was sorta nervous. I hadn’t seen most of the kids in my class for about ten months…. I didn’t want to switch schools again, and I definitely didn’t want to have to try and make new friends. I just wanted some sort of normalcy in my life.”)

A normal life was something Lisa Montgomery had stolen from her children, regardless of whether she was innocent or guilty. For the most part, Kayla hadn’t been in contact with Lisa since her arrest. “She killed my friend and took her baby.”

In late May, Lisa sent Kayla a card and letter. Kayla’s fifteenth birthday was approaching in August. Lisa wanted to give her a bit of advice along with a birthday wish. The heading of it read:
GOD HAS A
MASTER PLAN
,
AND ALL OF US PLAY A SPECIAL ROLE IN IT
. Then, in the body, “Today we
celebrate
the part where
you
come in!
Happy Birthday
!”

Lisa quoted Jesus Christ next, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me….” Underneath, she made a box out of X’s and hearts. Inside the box, she said she was “so glad” Kayla had been a “part of God’s plan.” She was grateful for “Him”…“allowing me to have you.”

A one-page, single-spaced letter accompanied the card. After talking about one of their rat terriers, Lisa said if she got a chance to “come home,” she was thinking about showing dogs again. She wanted a “toy fox terrier,” she wrote. It had to be a small dog, because she was planning on getting a “small apartment.” She wanted a cat, too. And perhaps even a “toy poodle” she could dress up with “bows” and “paint” its “nails.”

“She’s living in some fantasy world,” Kayla said aloud while reading. “I cannot believe this.”

Later in the same letter, Lisa spoke of her discontentment at the notion Kayla might be dating, which she vehemently denounced. Sixteen years old was the age Lisa agreed her daughters could begin dating. If Kayla didn’t abide by this rule, she would be “in defiance of me and God’s laws.”

“Let me see that,” Carl asked when Kayla told him about the letter.

“Here, Daddy, look.”

Carl shook his head. “You’d think, by reading this, Lisa had been arrested on a DWI charge.”

At the end of the letter, Lisa took a jab at her mother. First, she told Kayla she had “unconditional love” for her and the rest of the kids. Nothing would ever change that. She didn’t have to “like” what Kayla did—if, in fact, she was dating—“…but I will still love you.” Then she said she would never “turn” her back on Kayla in the same way, she felt, Judy had on her. “I had enough” of her “‘conditional’ love,” Lisa concluded.

F
rom San Diego, Carl, Lisa, and the four kids moved to El Cajon, just northeast of Lemon Grove, maybe twenty miles north of San Diego. When Lisa asked Carl to “please try” for the sake of the kids, Carl thought about it and decided, against his better judgment perhaps, to give Lisa one more chance. (“Actually, things were going a lot better.”) It was now well into the spring of 1991. (“Our relationship was working…. We started talking again, communicating better.”)

According to Carl, he and Lisa “cleared the air” one night about a lot of things and “opened up to each other” for what was the first time in years.

Looking back, Carl said he had to, at times, “allow Lisa to get things off her chest” while he was there “to listen to her.” He had never done that before they moved to El Cajon. “I needed to start allowing her to justify her actions,” he added. “It was like a game we played.”

Lisa often used guilt as her weapon, and started to blame him for things.

“Okay, okay, okay, Lisa. It’s my fault.”

Carl said, “It got better when we moved because I allowed it to. Not that I let Lisa run over me and stomp on me. But I let her vent and be ‘Lisa.’”

Lisa and Carl had different ways of showing affection toward each other. Lisa liked to hold hands and cuddle. Carl didn’t. Lisa enjoyed dinner for the two of them alone while the kids slept. Carl didn’t. Lisa wanted someone to hold her at night and tell her everything was going to be okay. Carl rarely was willing to do that. To him, working two jobs and taking care of his family financially showed the love he felt.

After they settled in El Cajon, Carl cut back his hours. He took walks with Lisa, while she hung on his shoulder. (“I had never done that before.”)

El Cajon didn’t turn out to be the best place to fix the marriage. After a few months, as the relationship seemed to stay afloat, they decided it was time to head back to the Midwest—back to Bartlesville.

“The reason we moved back to Oklahoma at that time,” Carl said, “was because of Judy. A lot of these things were because of Judy and my father. We moved out to San Diego because my dad wanted us to. During this whole relationship Lisa and I had—and I don’t want to sound like I am blaming her for anything—Judy was involved in every way she possibly could. Sometimes, with me in the wrong, I took up Judy’s side against Lisa, which caused a conflict.”

Carl said at that time he trusted Judy more than Lisa.

As soon as they got settled back in Bartlesville, Carl left his job as an operations manager at Wells Fargo (he had transferred from San Diego) and went to work for a refining company. Although he had cut back on his hours to help in mending the marriage, he and Lisa decided “together” that Carl would once again start working “a lot of overtime in order to purchase a house” of their own. They wanted a two-story Colonial, with big rooms for their large family.

At this point, Lisa neglected her duties as a mother and allowed the kids to live in filth, some later said. She rarely washed dishes, or kept clean clothes on the children. Carl couldn’t do much about it because he was always working.

Lisa, Carl would later tell the press, soon met a local Bartlesville man, who was also married, and started an “affair.” Carl found out when the guy’s wife showed up at the house one day and “kicked Lisa’s ass right there on the front lawn.”

After the fight, Carl decided he’d seen enough. He moved out and into his sister’s house across town. With the marriage over, Carl gathered the paperwork for what he described as a “quickie” divorce. He and Lisa agreed on the terms, filled out the paperwork together, and submitted it. While they waited for it to go through, Carl took the four kids, transferred back to Wells Fargo in San Diego, and moved in with his father and Judy, who were still living together.

On the divorce papers he and Lisa filled out, Carl sought sole custody of the children. But while he was in California with the kids, he decided to return to Oklahoma alone to look for a place to rent so the children could be closer to Lisa.

With the kids in California with Judy and his dad, Carl took off for Bartlesville. But as soon as Lisa got word of his return, she took off for San Diego. Part of the divorce filing they had agreed upon stipulated that the kids were not to move out of the state where either parent was living. If a parent moved and took the kids, the divorce would be nullified before it even went through.

Although Carl said he was “on vacation” in San Diego, just putting some space between him and Lisa while they figured out how to make the divorce legal, he claimed Judy enrolled one of the kids in school out there behind his back, thus violating the quickie divorce they were seeking.

Lisa, while out in California with her new boyfriend, decided she was going to take the kids back to Oklahoma with her.

“She literally tried taking Alicia right out from Judy’s daughter’s hands,” Carl said. “At this time, you have to understand, no one in Lisa’s family would have anything to do with her.”

Judy was in church when Lisa showed up. Ryan was sitting with Judy, Kayla in the church nursery, while the other two girls were in Sunday school, in the basement of the church.

“I was told Lisa was in town trying to get the kids, so I grabbed Ryan and gave him to my other daughter’s husband,” Judy recalled. Judy then ran outside, where she spied Lisa coming up the church steps with her boyfriend.

“Stay out of my way,” Lisa said, heading toward Judy in a rush.

Just then, Judy’s son came out of nowhere and, according to Judy, jumped on Lisa’s back and struggled with her.

While Lisa was fighting with her brother, Judy ran and gathered the kids together and put them in the car. (“I took them and hid them where Richard was working.”)

After handing off the kids, Judy switched cars, drove to the town house where they were all staying, grabbed some of their clothes, and called Carl. “Meet me at my sister’s house in Texas.”

“I’ll be there, Judy.”

Lisa had a legal right to get her kids and bring them home. She believed Carl and Judy conspired to hide the children in California while Carl worked at getting legal custody back in Oklahoma. Seemingly, Lisa figured it out and wanted her children back.

As Judy took off to her sister’s house, Lisa went to the police.

En route, Judy called home. Her pastor, who had become involved, answered the phone.

“Judy, if you don’t bring the children back, they are going to arrest Richard.”

“Pastor,” Judy said, “what should I do?”

“Keep going. I’ll take care of Richard.”

Later, Judy said, “I was told they had a warrant out for me for kidnapping. Oh, well. Lisa should have known better than to come to the church with another man and try to take the kids. She failed.”

From California, Judy drove to San Antonio, where she and Carl agreed to meet.