Murder in the Heartland (31 page)

S
eptember 2005 came and went without the government filing its “Notice of Intention to Seek the Death Penalty.” A month later, the case against Lisa Montgomery became major news again after one of the top death penalty lawyers in the country filed paperwork to join Lisa’s defense team.

Born in 1953, fifty-two-year-old Judy Clarke grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, “where she dreamt of becoming Perry Mason or the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” her bio states.

Clarke had worked on a few of the most high-profile death penalty cases throughout the past few decades. In April 2005, she represented Eric Rudolph, a devoted follower of antiabortion, antigay, and anti-Semitic white supremacist groups, who eluded capture for nearly six years while hiding in the Appalachian Mountains. In 2003, Rudolph was caught in Murphy, North Carolina, and charged with “carrying out a string of bombings that killed several people and wounded over one hundred.” Covering the case, the Associated Press called Clarke an “expert at cutting deals.” Before saving Rudolph’s life, she negotiated a plea for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski that took the death penalty off the table. She had worked on the defense of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only defendant charged in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, before she joined Eric Rudolph’s team.

With her short brown hair and tomboyish looks, Clarke has always been open about her core belief that there is no room for the death penalty in American court. She was described as a “one-woman Dream Team” by an associate who helped her defend Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who avoided a death sentence after being convicted of drowning her two children. Married for twenty-plus years to Speedy Rice, an attorney and teacher at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, Clarke has developed a reputation over the years for being able to empathize with her clients in a way that convinces them to believe in her.

After successfully sparing Susan Smith’s life, Clarke donated her $83,000 fee “to a group that defends the poor in capital cases.” Moreover, when she heard that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s alleged co-conspirator, were going to be tried separately, Clarke, who rarely spoke to the press, said, “At a time when Congress and the presidential contenders appear willing to do or say anything to seem ‘tough on crime,’ Judge Matsch’s ruling should be commended by all Americans who believe in the United States Constitution. The Constitution says both of these men are innocent until proven guilty, and each of them is to be judged separately and fairly. That way, all, including the victims and survivors of the bombing, can be more certain of the ultimate outcome.”

Lisa Montgomery couldn’t have asked for a more experienced death penalty lawyer to come forward.

“She is the patron saint of defense lawyers,” Gerald Goldstein, the former head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told a reporter in 1996. “Her specialty is impossible tasks that require untold amounts of labor and imagination. There is not anybody I’d rather have at my back in my courtroom.”

Many believed that with Judy Clarke now in Lisa’s corner, Lisa had a good chance of being able to cut some sort of deal. However, Todd Graves had made it clear the government wasn’t interested in cutting a deal that would allow Lisa to escape the death penalty. Sure, she could plead her case out, but insiders said Graves would not waiver on the death penalty—that is, he would accept a plea, but only if Lisa faced a jury on the issue of sentencing.

Statistically speaking, Lisa’s chances at getting life in prison were good. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2004, 125 inmates were in prison facing a death sentence, adding to a total number of state and federal death row inmates somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,200. Throughout the past two years leading up to 2004, however, death row admissions declined. Since the latter 1990s, in fact, the actual number of death sentences decreased by nearly 50 percent. Part of the recent change in jurors’ minds, some experts claim, is that over the past three decades, “120 innocent people” have been emancipated from death row, many because of DNA evidence and the technological advancements made in science overall.

The question became: would Lisa Montgomery want to gamble with her life?

J
udy was in San Antonio with the kids when Carl arrived. He wanted them back. A deal was a deal. Lisa was in love with another man now. She was talking about getting married again. It hurt. But Carl felt he could manage. Lisa had agreed, according to Carl, to allow him to raise the kids. If she wanted to end the marriage, that was her decision—but he was getting the kids.

Lisa had apparently changed her mind. But instead of heading to San Antonio herself, Lisa made a beeline for Oklahoma, to a court of law, where she filed paperwork to take the children back legally and, at the same time, divorce the man who had, in her view, kidnapped his own children.

After spending the night in San Antonio, Carl woke up to find out he was being ordered to court later that same morning. “They subsequently awarded Lisa with custody of my kids…,” Carl recounted.

The court found Carl had not “gone on vacation” to San Diego, but had taken the children and was planning on staying out there.

The divorce went through and Lisa was awarded custody and child support. But as time moved forward, she started showing up at Carl’s house more and more, complaining about her relationship with her new boyfriend. Things weren’t going as planned, and Lisa was having second thoughts.

“She actually spent more time with me than she did with him.”

Carl sensed that Lisa’s visits had little to do with the children and more with her wanting to spend time alone with her new boyfriend. Carl became, essentially, her babysitter. He claimed she used his love and devotion to the kids to open up leisure time with her boyfriend.

With Lisa living with her new beau right down the street, Carl ended up having the children more than if he had gotten custody of them himself. Lisa would drop them off and take off for days at a time without word of where she was going or when she’d be back.

But when the boyfriend figured out he had to pay an exorbitant amount of child support to his wife and he was also going to be responsible for Lisa’s four children, he left.

By herself now once again, Lisa did what she had always done when faced with living life on her own: she ran back into the arms of Carl Boman.

A
s her trial date neared, Lisa sat in prison working on drawings and sending letters to her children. Soon she would have to decide whether to fight for her freedom at a full-fledged, high-profile trial, or see what type of plea deal Judy Clarke could cut for her. In either case, it didn’t look good for Lisa.

Rebecca, who had moved in with Kevin’s parents after Lisa was arrested, was focusing on work and school. She was a firm supporter of her mother, one of only a few left. Every Tuesday, she drove from Melvern up to Leavenworth to sit and talk with her mom. Rebecca had mixed feelings toward Carl. As she saw it, she could overlook the many times her dad promised to visit but failed to show up, or that, in her view, he had faked having cancer. Yet there was one instance, even when she spoke about it later, she couldn’t seem to shake.

“The worst was, my dad and his wife moved like two miles from where we lived with Kevin and my mom.” Indeed, Carl and Vanessa, shortly after they married, rented a house maybe a mile-and-a-half down the road from Kevin and Lisa’s farmhouse. It was, for a while, the perfect situation: the kids would ride their bikes over to the house and visit their dad whenever they wanted. Lisa could drop them off if she and Kevin wanted some time alone, or Carl could even pop in and just say hello to them.

One day, after school, the kids rode their bikes over to the house and sat with their dad for a while just talking.

Everything seemed fine.

After an hour or so, Rebecca recalled, “We had to go home to do a few chores.”

When they were finished, they rode back.

“They were completely gone,” Rebecca said later, her voice cracking. “They just up and left without saying a word.”

According to Rebecca, for years afterward, the kids would only see or hear from Carl and Vanessa sporadically.

Carl viewed the situation differently.

“Lisa was at the house all the time. Lisa and Vanessa fought. It was not a good atmosphere for the kids, or our relationship. Vanessa didn’t understand what Lisa was like at that time, but she soon learned. It was my decision to leave and not tell the kids. It was wrong, I know. It has been thrown in my face. I just couldn’t face them with this disappointment:
I moved up there just to move out again
. But to me it was an unbearable situation with Vanessa and Lisa. I took the coward’s way out, and it has haunted me and hurt the kids and my relationship, especially with Rebecca.

“And believe me, Lisa played it for all it was worth.”

Rebecca was quick to say later, “I love my dad to death…. I love all of my family.” But part of her, still, feels torn between a mother in prison, awaiting trial for murder and kidnapping, and a dad who, she said, hasn’t been there for her. She started college in the fall of 2005. No one helped her. She bought all her own books, paid for tuition, and worked two jobs in order to keep up with a mountain of bills. Even her high-school graduation was marred by disappointment when she had to pay for her own cap and gown.

“It’s really hard,” she said. “I live here in Kansas, and they [my dad and sisters and brother] live in Oklahoma. They never call me. I have to call them. They never come see me. I go see them. It takes two, you know. I tell them: ‘You guys have to make the effort, too.’”

A
fter Lisa split up with her boyfriend, she was left with a house full of kids and no one to take care of her.

Lisa went back to what she knew—and started working on Carl. Thus, in early 1995, despite everything they had been through, Carl was faced with the notion of taking Lisa back. “I decided to hear her out.”

One might wonder why Carl Boman kept reuniting with a woman he knew was eventually going to let him down. How could he allow Lisa back into his life after she routinely disappointed him? Did he expect her to change?

“Why would a woman being abused by her husband keep going back?” asked Carl later, comparing his motives to those of a battered spouse. “My family included Lisa at that time. She had nowhere to go. We didn’t jump right back into it in an instant as if nothing happened. We talked about how we could start fresh and see if there was any way to work it out. We didn’t sleep in the same room. I worked ten-hour days, six days a week while Lisa took care of the kids. We grew back together naturally…. You have to realize my desire to keep my family together. I grew up without my dad. We connected later, but he was gone for a major part of my life. I always longed for my own family. I love my children as much as any father. I guess I had one last try in me.”

In the end, Carl said, “I did it for the kids.”

Throughout the early 1990s, several large food corporations had built up a presence in Springdale, Arkansas. When Lisa and Carl moved back in together, most were advertising in Tulsa and Bartlesville newspapers, looking for workers. Carl had just gotten laid off from a job he enjoyed at a local food warehouse. Although he and Lisa were now officially divorced, they were talking regularly and trying to work out their differences.

“At the time, there wasn’t a lot of work in the area where we lived in Oklahoma. The oil business busted. In Springdale, they were begging for people to come to town and work.”

Carl knew Lisa couldn’t make it on her own. He also figured new surroundings might help them make a fresh start—Lisa would be taken out of a familiar environment and placed in a setting where she didn’t know anyone.

“Who would take care of Lisa the way she was, with her personality and everything?” Carl asked later, defending the choices he made. “Lisa made bad choices and had nowhere to go: I needed the kids as much as she did.”

They were talking one day.

“I’m going to Springdale, Arkansas,” mentioned Carl, “and I’m taking the four kids with me, and there is
nothing
you are going to do about it.” He admitted later there was no way, legally speaking, he could get away with it, but what did he have to lose?

“I’ll go with you then,” Lisa said without hesitating. “I’ll babysit the kids while you work. I’ll watch the kids, Carl. It’ll work.” There was never any discussion at this point of the two of them actually getting back together romantically. “There won’t be any child support for you to pay,” Lisa added as Carl sat and thought about it.

“Okay, Lisa, let’s try it.”

After arriving in Arkansas, Carl made sure he and Lisa had separate bedrooms.

Known in some respects as the “Heart of Northwest Arkansas,” Springdale is a conservative town insofar as religion is concerned. Faith is strong in Springdale, which lies in the middle of the Bible Belt.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormon Church—had a strong presence in the area. A knock on the door one afternoon opened the way for two Mormon missionaries looking to recruit the new family in town.

“Come on in,” Carl said.

Both women sat down and explained to Carl and Lisa that joining the church was the only option they had left.

“You two should be together for the sake of the children,” said one of the women. “Your relationship,” she went on, “is all wrong under the eyes of God. You’re living in sin.”

“You are their parents,” the other woman added, while Lisa and Carl listened attentively. “You owe them that much.”

I
n 1992, author Jim Carrier published a book titled
Hush, Little Baby
. The book detailed the story of Darci Kayleen Pierce, a young, attractive wife from New Mexico, who, on the afternoon of July 23, 1987, showed up at an Albuquerque hospital emergency room “covered in fresh blood.”

In Darci’s arms was a newborn baby, also covered in blood. “I’ve just given birth to this child in my car,” Darci told hospital officials as the baby wailed.

Doctors rushed Darci and her newborn to an examining room, but Darci “refused all routine medical treatment.”

As doctors and nurses became suspicious of the story Darci told, someone in admissions called authorities.

After the police questioned Darci Pierce for a few hours, she admitted the baby wasn’t hers. Eventually she said she had kidnapped twenty-three-year-old Cindy Lynn Ray outside a prenatal clinic and driven her to a “remote rural area” in the desert east of Albuquerque. After strangling Cindy Ray unconscious, Darci claimed she “used a car key to perform a crude Cesarean section on her, stole her baby…[and] left her to bleed to death.”

The child lived.

Cindy Ray didn’t.

Twenty-year-old Darci Pierce was tried nine months later for murder, convicted on all counts, and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

Darci’s sexual promiscuity as a young child and teenager, set in motion by sexual abuse by a cousin the same age (six years old), became a pivotal defense position during her trial. Darci claimed she was insane at the time of the crime. Some said a “tortured dream of motherhood” while growing up later compelled Darci to commit her crime. She had been pregnant in her late teens, but had lost the child. Every nine months after that miscarriage, Darci Pierce claimed she was going to have a baby. She had put pillows underneath her blouse as a child and paraded around the house as though she were pregnant. As a young teenager, she slept with men four and five times a week. Everything she did throughout her life seemed to be structured around an obsession to have a baby.

The
Journal of Forensic Sciences
published a study in 2002 titled “Newborn kidnapping by Cesarean section,” authored by A.W. Burgess, Nahirny C. Baker, and J.B. Rabun. “The female abductors, in essence, become a mother by proxy, by acting out a fantasy of them delivering a baby,” the report stated.

A common thread among these women is that they all seem to be “delusional” in some fashion. In many of the cases studied, the women often “show off” the kidnapped child within the first few hours after abducting it, displaying it to the world as “their baby.”

Experts claim a mentally unstable mix of “delusion and pride” generally aids law enforcement in its quest to catch the women soon after they commit the crime.

In many ways, Darci Pierce’s story ran parallel to Lisa Montgomery’s. Could Lisa somehow have taken Darci’s story and used it as a road map?

A former acquaintance of Lisa’s related that Lisa had become totally absorbed with Jim Carrier’s book. One night while Lisa and her friend were watching a forensic television show—an episode about a woman who had faked a pregnancy—Lisa brought up
Hush, Little Baby
and said she had read it.

“Lisa told me about that book. You know what I’m saying? I don’t know if she was reading it at the time, or she just wanted to tell me about it. She went into detail and told me about this book. She’s read it.”

Because Lisa, Carl, and the kids had lived in New Mexico once, and Darci Pierce committed her crime in the same state, Lisa felt some sort of “connection” to the story. Moreover, the acquaintance felt Lisa understood the book, cover to cover.