Murder in the Heartland (33 page)

J
udy Shaughnessy received a call from one of Lisa’s attorneys on Thursday night, November 17, 2005, but she wasn’t home. David Owen left what she described later as an unsettling message: “I’m calling to tell you about the deal yesterday. Call me back.”

After hearing Owen’s voice, Judy had a hard time sleeping. She wasn’t a newspaper reader or television watcher. Lisa wasn’t talking to her, nor were many in the family. She wasn’t keeping up to date on the status of Lisa’s court case, and now worried that something “bad” had happened. Although their lives together had been filled with aberration, anarchy, and unhealthy behavior, not to mention yelling and screaming and fighting, Judy insisted she still cared deeply for Lisa.

“I think it was right after Christmas in 2002, Lisa and I went to Oklahoma to pick up her children, and I also had another granddaughter with me and we all went to Texas to my sister’s house.”

They spent the day together as a family going to the Alamo, the Boardwalk, and a few other historical landmarks.

“We had a great time. When my sister Ann was in the hospital, Lisa was there for me. The day my sister died, Lisa came to the hospital and stayed with me and helped me cope with the loss. At the funeral, she didn’t have much to say, [but] she carried herself very well. Over the last few years, I noticed how she distanced herself when the Montgomery family was around, because I think she was telling them stories I knew to be untrue, and she was afraid I would tell them if they said something to me. So this is why they distanced themselves from me and my new husband. I know the kids love their mother and they should. I know they went a lot of places together, and they did have fun with her. It wasn’t all bad.”

The next morning, November 18, Judy called David Owen and heard him confirm what she had since found out on the Internet: the government was going to pursue the death penalty. According to Judy, that was the “deal” Owen was speaking about on Judy’s answering machine the previous night.

“No matter what, Lisa is my daughter. I do love her. It just hurts so bad. I have to pull myself together….”

When Judy’s mother died in 1996, Lisa dropped everything and showed up with two of her children. “She was a big help to me then, too. It’s almost like she went in spurts. But all in all, Lisa did have good points, and I just don’t want anyone to think she has been evil, or whatever people are saying about her. I know Carl and [his second wife] would say how evil she was all the time. But I don’t think Vanessa took the time to know her. I think Carl influenced the way she thought about Lisa. I still have this thing about Lisa having a split personality because it’s like she’s good and then the opposite happens. Who knows? I don’t. I wished I could be stronger now. Back when it all happened, I lost weight, and I couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep.”

As the Christmas season dawned, all Judy could do, she said, was hope and pray for the best.

I
n February 1998, Carl drove back to Bartlesville with Alicia and Ryan, leaving Lisa in New Mexico with Rebecca and Kayla. Lisa said she would be leaving New Mexico about a month later and moving to Kansas. Judy was remarried and living in Topeka then. At least Lisa would have someone to fall back on when she needed help with the kids. They agreed Carl would get custody of Alicia and Ryan, and Lisa would get custody of Kayla and Rebecca. One weekend, Carl would take all four; the other weekend, they would go to Lisa. It seemed like a fair deal to Carl; after all, he would never take her back again.

“I was finished. For real this time.”

According to Carl, the handshake deal he made with Lisa before he left New Mexico was a sham. Lisa finally made it to Kansas and moved in with Judy and her new husband, but not before stopping in Bartlesville to grab the other two children.

“The lawyer she had held on to the papers I sent him to dispute the custody,” said Carl, “and I had no chance of being heard.”

Lisa was ultimately awarded custody of all four children. Carl claimed she used a friend’s address and phone number and lied on court documents to make it appear as if she lived in New Mexico, where she had filed.

By the time Lisa arrived in Kansas, Judy had moved on to another relationship and was living with Danny Shaughnessy, whom she would eventually marry. When Judy left her husband for Danny, Lisa was on her own again.

“She couldn’t handle the kids alone,” recalled Carl, “so she came and stayed with me for a while.” In order to make sure the children were taken care of, Carl once again took her back in. “It was okay, because that meant the kids would be with me, too.”

In 1999, Lisa began a job as a security guard in Topeka at a wire manufacturing plant, where she met—and soon became involved with—Kevin Montgomery, who was working at the same plant.

Kevin was a happy-go-lucky divorcé who had spent his entire life in Melvern. When he met Lisa, Kevin had just ended a broken marriage, in which he’d fathered three kids.

Those who knew Kevin during that period claim that when he met Lisa, she viewed him as a pawn she could manipulate without complication. “He was a pushover,” one former acquaintance said. “She saw that right away and used it to her advantage.”

“Mom always talked bad about Dad to Kevin,” recalled Kayla. “Like, she would say she always had to buy our food and stuff…but that isn’t true. My grandmother [Carl’s mom] is the one who did all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping.
Not
my mom.”

According to Carl and Kayla, as soon as Lisa moved in with Kevin later that same year, she launched a concerted effort to destroy Carl’s reputation as a father. Instead of praising Carl for opening up his home when she needed a place to stay, while she underhandedly filed for divorce and sole custody of the children, Lisa attacked Carl’s character behind his back and initiated a series of lies that would have an impact, ultimately, on both their lives.

“It was a pretty rotten and awkward time,” remembered Carl. “When she lived with me, but was dating Kevin, she used to write Kevin letters quite a bit. I found a few of them and—being curious, nosy, and maybe even wrong—read them. She told Kevin once that she was pregnant and didn’t know if she wanted the baby because they weren’t married.”

It was another fabrication designed to trick Kevin, Carl insisted. Kevin’s parents, Lisa learned quickly, were a churchgoing couple who believed unreservedly in the church and its values. Lisa used the moral fiber the Montgomerys held so closely to their hearts as an asset. Carl believed that if Lisa told Kevin she was pregnant and threatened to go to his parents with the news, knowing they would disapprove, she felt she had Kevin exactly where she wanted him.

“Kevin actually gave her three hundred dollars to have an abortion,” confirmed Carl, “according to what I was told.”

To add more legitimacy to her argument, and perhaps play on Kevin’s sympathies, Lisa named the child Sarah. It was the name Kevin and his previous wife had chosen for their stillborn child, who was buried in Melvern.

Reading the letters proved to be an education for Carl in just how far Lisa was willing to go to wield control over the new people in her life.

“She had even told Kevin she’d had a daughter by [her stepfather after he raped her] and the state had taken the child.”

Kevin, like any man, at the mercy of a woman he was falling in love with, “believed it all,” maintained Carl.

Moreover, as she became part of the community of Melvern, Lisa played off the town’s compassion, positioning herself as a poor little divorcée who’d had a rough go of it with a man she described as a deadbeat dad who didn’t want to do anything for his children.

“Lisa began telling everyone in Melvern she had to buy groceries and clean the house when she was staying with me,” said Carl. “The kids and I got a kick out of it. She
never
did a
thing
. She told members of my family I was trying to sleep with her while she stayed with me. What a joke! I had to give her money to go back and forth to Kansas to be with Kevin, and let me tell you, it was well worth the investment. We were divorced, and I made sure she knew it. Imagine your ex-wife living with you, and she is making up lies about you, and has a boyfriend that lives one hundred and fifty miles away. It was very uncomfortable, to say the least.”

While Lisa was living with Carl during that period, Carl said they talked a lot. “Remember, we had been together for about fifteen years by then, we had four kids. We had a lot to talk about. But still, she felt she had the upper hand.”

To put it bluntly, Lisa talked about
Lisa
, and how great Kevin was going to be for the kids.

“I actually felt sorry for Kevin then.”

Kevin had gone through what he described to Carl and Lisa as a “bad divorce.” Carl saw that he was vulnerable, and Lisa was “filling his head full of garbage.”

“I didn’t want him raising my kids,” Carl said. “Heck, I didn’t want
any
man other than myself raising them. The kids and I were extremely close at the time; we were each other’s world.”

Strangely, for a woman who had often proclaimed her undivided attention and devotion to her kids, after she moved out of Carl’s and into her own apartment not far away, Lisa never wanted to have the children over.

On weekends, Kevin would drive up from Melvern and stay with Lisa. To integrate the children into her relationship with Kevin, she would pick them up at Carl’s and take off with Kevin, but only for a few hours. “Never for an entire weekend,” Carl said.

It was not only a culture shock for the children when Lisa and Kevin moved into their own place in Melvern, but an emotional shock as well. They had adjusted to a way of life with Carl in Bartlesville. Friends. After-school activities. Little League. Soccer. Moving to another state was not easy for thirteen-, twelve-, eleven-and ten-year-olds.

To the kids, it hadn’t mattered that Carl and Lisa were in the middle of a divorce; what mattered was that they were all together as a family again before Kevin came into the picture. Now their family was gone—and some new man was taking their dad’s place. Lisa’s relationship with Kevin was clearly serious. She was already talking about marrying him.

“We actually did things together as a family,” said Carl, speaking of the year when Lisa and the kids lived with him. Kayla also recalled the time as one of the more memorable, pleasant periods of their lives together—but also one of the worst.

“When we lived with Dad, whenever he got paid, he would take us to Wal-Mart and let us get a new Barbie, or something like that. On Saturday nights, we would have our ‘family night.’ We would get all this junk food, get a board game out, and we would all sit together and just be a family.”

All of the kids knew the move was inevitable, but when the time came, Lisa showed little sympathy toward the situation, or the children’s feelings. One day, without warning, she showed up in Oklahoma and just knocked on Carl’s door. Carl’s mother was watching the kids.

“I’m taking the kids with me today,” said Lisa.

I
t was a marvelous autumn afternoon, eight weeks or more before the new millennium, the kind of day when the two most extreme seasons hung in a state of uncertainty. Mid-morning could bring Indian-summer heat, while evenings could turn bitter cold. The leaves, crisp as a paper shopping bag, were a bronze maple-syrup brown, dropping from the Custer Elms, Osage County Cottonwoods, and Post Office Oaks. Lisa and Carl were now officially divorced for a second time. Living with Kevin Montgomery in Melvern, she was planning a spring 2000 wedding.

On this day Carl drove up from Oklahoma to drop the kids off after having them for the weekend. At times, when he and Lisa exchanged the children, Carl met her at a nearby park in Lyndon. To many residents, the park was a symbol of the family unit, a sanctuary of arrowhead-shaped shrubs, manicured grass, merry-go-rounds, monkey bars, and ball fields. But for Carl and Lisa, it had become a suburban drive-through window for broken families, a public stage to swap “property.”

The children were running around and playing while Lisa and Carl stood nearby and talked.

“Stop with the lies, Lisa,” Carl said. “You’re spreading rumors about me. I’m tired of it.”

Lisa didn’t respond at first. So Carl asked again. “Why are you spreading these lies, Lisa? You better stop it.”

Instead of answering Carl, Lisa walked toward the children.

“Come on, kids; it’s time to go.”

Nine-year-old Kayla ran over and asked why; then she looked at Carl.

“I’m not going, Daddy. I can’t leave you,” she said, grabbing his legs. She wiped tears from her eyes and reached up for him.

“It’s okay,” Carl said, picking her up. “I love you. I’ll see you soon. Don’t worry about anything.”

Kayla continued to cry.

“I won’t go.”

Carl started walking toward Lisa’s car as Kayla clung to him tighter.

“You
have
to go,” Carl whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. I’ll see you soon.”

Kayla grabbed his jacket and wouldn’t let go as he tried to put her in the car. Lisa looked on, held her tongue, and shook her head.

Kayla said later she couldn’t “remember” her mother saying anything to her on that day. “But I can say that normally, when I would cry, she would say to me, ‘Stop it—or I’ll give you something to cry about.’”

“Come on,” Carl said, opening the door, trying to lead Kayla into the backseat. “It’s okay.”

Kayla grabbed hold of the door. “No, no, no.”

“I wouldn’t let go…,” she remembered. “Dad had to pry my fingers off the door and make sure I couldn’t grab hold of anything else, so he could shut the door. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being with my mom; it was just that I wanted to stay with ‘daddy’ forever.”

Watching Lisa pack up the rest of the children, Carl was distressed. He couldn’t do anything to diminish their pain. He felt helpless. In their young lives, the Boman kids had gone through their parents’ divorce twice. One divorce was torture on a child’s emotions. Carl had given it a second chance because of them. But it didn’t work.

It would never work
.

Kayla sobbed as she watched an image of her dad standing, waving, getting smaller, as Lisa drove away.

“I looked out the back window of the car as we were leaving,” Kayla said, “watching my dad until I could no longer see him.”

Carl pulled over down the road after leaving the children and cried before returning home. He was troubled and enraged at the same time. The level of uncertainty the kids felt ate at him. They were being yanked, emotionally, in so many different directions, and now they were expected to adapt to new surroundings and a new father figure.

That day was the beginning of the worst years of Carl Boman’s life, he later said. But even then, as Lisa moved on with her life, to settle so far away, Carl could not have believed what Lisa would do in order to prove to everyone she hadn’t been lying about being pregnant.