Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  Well-liked, Bobbie Jo was a cheerleader, involved in the 4-H Club, and worked on the school newspaper and yearbook. Her childhood friendship with Zeb blossomed into a high school romance (and, later, a dream marriage). Her academic work ethic made her not only an honor student, but one of the smarter kids in school. After graduation, one could easily assume, Bobbie Jo might have run away from Skidmore to find her place in a bigger city with more promise and a brighter future.

  But that wasn’t what Bobbie Jo wanted. She was content with what life had given her in Skidmore.

  “She kind of blossomed in high school,” a former teacher told reporters later. “She started to come out of her shell and [get] active in things [as she] gained popularity and friends.”

  Just out of high school, during the fall of 2000, Bobbie Jo went to work in Maryville at the Earl May Garden Center, which specialized in pets. There she turned what was a love she’d had as a child for animals into a passion for breeding and raising her own dogs.

  Her ex-boss said she was “exceptionally sweet,” adding, “She never had a bad thing to say about anyone.”

  “Bright” and “cheerful” were common adjectives attached to descriptions of Bobbie Jo. She loved all animals and, one coworker said, had a “knack for them.”

  “She loved horses, loved dogs; she adopted everything with a fuzzy face,” said a friend of the family.

  After Bobbie Jo quit her job at Earl May’s, she started along one of her first career paths. Not because she didn’t like the work at Earl May’s, or the people. Instead, she felt the need to “earn more money” and be closer to her beau. She took a job at the Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corporation in Maryville, where Zeb, like hundreds of others in the region, sought employment after graduation. The Kawasaki plant opened in 1989 and focused on the production of general-purpose engines. Covering over 700,000 square feet on 113.7 acres of land, nearly the size of Skidmore itself, the factory employed well over six hundred people, many of whom lived in the immediate region.

  “The pay is better,” Bobbie Jo told one of her coworkers at Earl May’s shortly before she quit. “Zeb and I are getting married soon. I need to make more money.”

  People who knew Zeb and Bobbie Jo admired how comfortable they seemed around each other. Essentially, they were kids. Many high-school sweethearts who took the next step into marriage faltered later when they realized perhaps an important part of their lives had passed them by, and they had missed the chance to “sow some wild oats.”

  The Stinnetts were different. Friends and family saw them celebrating fifty years of marriage, grandkids laughing and playing all around them. “They were perfect for each other,” recalled one friend.

  Part of the bond they shared was knowing each other so well.

  “[Zeb] is focused [on] car stereos and cars,” Bobbie Jo wrote on her Web site. “I am focused mostly on rat terriers.”

  It was a loving jab, typical of Bobbie Jo’s gentle sense of humor, directed at a man who had been berated by Bobbie Jo’s aunt once for pulling up to her house with his stereo blaring so loud the porch windows rattled.

  Bobbie Jo and Zeb lived their romance—that is, true romance—during a time when it seemed to exist only in Hollywood movies. Their relationship, some friends and family insisted, had been built on respect, companionship, friendship, and a storybook nuance missing in society today. It was evident in the way Zeb looked at Bobbie Jo and she at him. They could speak through a glance, a smile, or maybe just a hug.

  In recent years, Bobbie Jo had been telling friends and fellow rat-terrier breeders on the Internet message board she frequented that she was planning on becoming a “Rat Terrier Breed Inspector.”

  “I want to be a licensed judge for the NKC [National Kennel Club] and…press secretary for a UKC [United Kennel Club],” she said one day. Obviously, Bobbie Jo had dreams and goals. Working in a manufacturing plant was a stepping-stone toward something bigger, something better.

  Breeders and owners register dogs with both the NKC and the UKC. Bobbie Jo wanted to know everything she could about the business end of breeding. She wanted to be involved on every level in order to benefit her customers and dogs.

  Bobbie Jo was serious about breeding. She wanted her customers to get exactly what they were paying for and took pride in the way she ran her business.

  “We follow the…Breeder Code of Ethics,” she wrote on her Happy Haven Farms Web site. “We are not a puppy mill and do not support puppy mills.”

  The same couldn’t be said for Lisa Montgomery, who herself had been breeding rat terriers. Some had questioned the pedigree of Lisa’s dogs, saying she had misrepresented her bloodline. One woman had even written a letter to Lisa’s ex-husband, demanding access to any records he might have regarding one of Lisa’s dogs, Lucky. The AKC, the woman wrote, “require a three-generation pedigree.” As far as the woman knew, the terrier she purchased, Lucky’s grandson, was only a “two-generation” dog. She felt duped and was rather upset because she felt she didn’t get what she had paid for.

  No one ever questioned Bobbie Jo or the pedigree of her dogs. She did things the right way—always. For example, when she showed her dogs, like the time in Abilene, back in April 2004, when she met Lisa Montgomery and Kayla Boman in person for the first time, she registered with the UKC because it was a UKC show.

  “It’s just the way she was: Bobbie Jo lived by the book. She was glowing and seemed really happy.”

  Soon after Bobbie Jo turned twenty-two, she and Zeb married. It was April 26, 2003, a peaceful, gorgeous spring afternoon at the Skidmore Christian Church, located about one hundred yards north of where Bobbie Jo and Zeb lived on West Elm. The Reverend Harold Hamon presided over the service. Friends and family, along with a “full-house church,” one attendee said, watched as Bobbie Jo walked down the aisle on her grandfather’s arm while Zeb waited at the foot of the altar for his bride-to-be. As Reverend Hamon recalled later, “And I asked, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ And the grandfather said, ‘I do.’ She was a beautiful bride.”

  “They were kids in the neighborhood,” added the reverend, “nice young kids. She was just a real nice girl, real pretty, quiet and reserved.”

  The wedding was a simple ceremony for two people who really didn’t need, or expect, much out of life—the love they had for each other was enough.

  With his buzz-cut brown hair and quiet demeanor, the groom, Zebulon James Stinnett, had grown into a pleasant young man with a broad smile and round, open face. Zeb, one friend said, was “quiet and private; doesn’t say much of anything.”

  Maybe that was one of the reasons why Bobbie Jo felt so close to Zeb: they were alike in so many ways.

  After a small ceremony, which, it seemed, everyone in Skidmore attended, Bobbie Jo and Zeb rented that little place on West Elm, where they lived on the day Darlene Fischer/Lisa Montgomery walked into their lives. The white paint on the wood siding was flaking off; the roof, along with a few of the windows and doors, needed maintenance, but it was home. Zeb and Bobbie Jo were grateful for what God had given them. They had plans to buy their own place one day. They were young. Time was on their side.

  “That was Bobbie’s Jo’s dream,” a family member later told reporters, “to own her own home.”

  8

  Through the bumpy backcountry roads of Skidmore, the Kawasaki Motors plant in Maryville, where Zeb and Bobbie Jo worked, was a good twenty-minute drive from their home on West Elm Street. On the morning of December 16, Zeb grabbed his lunch bucket, kissed Bobbie Jo good-bye on the way out the door, and headed off to work. Bobbie Jo was going to be home, as she had been the past few weeks, on maternity leave from Kawasaki. She had a lot to do. In a matter of weeks, she and Zeb would welcome a new addition to their family and begin making plans to purchase a home of their own and maybe even have another child.

  Life was sweet.

  A strong guy, physically and mentally, Zeb was a few inches taller than Bobbie Jo, wh
o stood five feet six inches. Zeb had broad shoulders and radiated a country toughness that spoke of his roots in town. There was one photograph of Zeb standing next to Bobbie Jo at a dog show. Lisa Montgomery and her daughter Kayla were in the same photograph, standing to Zeb and Bobbie Jo’s right side. Bobbie Jo was smiling, while Zeb held the ribbon she had won earlier with one of her prized rat terriers. With one arm around Bobbie and the other proudly displaying the purple ribbon, Zeb beamed with happiness.

  Near the end of 2003, Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s Happy Haven Farms breeding business took flight. Their main business was breeding rat terriers. “Our dogs are all Type A’s…,” Bobbie Jo pointed out on her Web site. “We offer our puppies to GREAT homes only, as we’d rather keep ’em here, but realize we have to share.”

  By most standards, the business was small, which was what Bobbie Jo liked. She and Zeb bred, on average, about one to two litters per year, but they had three litters between the summer of 2003 and late fall 2004. Bobbie Jo adored the small canines, especially her own terriers, Belle, Tipsy, and Fonzi; along with her Dalmatian, Maddy. Several photographs of her at various dog shows depict a young woman glowing with joy, showing her prized dogs, and just loving the life she and Zeb had built.

  Near the end of March, beginning of April, Bobbie Jo officially announced she was pregnant with her first child. Within a few months, she and Zeb found out it was going to be a girl.

  So Bobbie Jo picked a name.

  Victoria Jo.

  “Tori Jo,” she told Zeb one day, “will be the child’s nickname.”

  Zeb didn’t like it all that much, but he wasn’t about to argue with his wife, who could be, some said, rather strong-willed and stubborn, but only when it pertained to good things.

  Thus, Tori Jo she would be.

  Soon after Bobbie Jo found out she was pregnant, she registered at the local Maryville Wal-Mart for things any first-time mother might desire: “newborn onesies, pink and yellow blankets, pink burp clothes, and a diaper bag.” She wanted common baby essentials that would help raise her daughter. What she could give the child more than any amount of money could buy was love—and she and Zeb, along with the Stinnett family and Bobbie Jo’s mother, Becky Harper, were fully prepared to shower little Victoria Jo with all the love she could handle.

  With a due date of January 19, 2005, Bobbie Jo was resigned to quit her job at Kawasaki near the end of her pregnancy and concentrate on readying the house for the baby and breeding rat terriers. Like millions of proud expecting parents, Zeb and Bobbie Jo were enjoying life’s bliss in a trouble-free, uncomplicated way, just counting the days until their baby was born.

  Life, indeed, should have gone on without a hitch.

  9

  By approximately 3:18 P.M., Becky Harper was getting worried about her daughter. She hadn’t heard back from Bobbie Jo after their last conversation, which Harper believed was interrupted by a customer who wanted to purchase one of Bobbie Jo’s rat terriers. A law enforcement official later said Bobbie Jo had even told Harper the person’s name.

  “Darlene Fischer.”

  Harper needed a ride to the garage to pick up her truck. But where was Bobbie Jo? What was taking her so long? Why wasn’t she answering her phone?

  Something was wrong.

  According to law enforcement, at around the same time, Lisa Montgomery, posing as Darlene Fischer, was inside the house with Bobbie Jo. They were in the den, a room off to the left after you walked in, talking about several rat terriers Bobbie Jo had for sale. What wasn’t clear later would be how Bobbie Jo reacted to meeting up with Lisa on that day, rather than with a woman named Darlene Fischer, whom she thought she had never met.

  “It seems clear to me, but we don’t know for certain,” that same law enforcement official said, “that Lisa Montgomery likely knocked on the door and just introduced herself as herself, maybe playing like she was ‘in the neighborhood.’”

  If that were the case, Bobbie Jo would not have felt threatened in any way. She and Lisa had met and talked fairly regularly online. Bobbie Jo was under the impression Lisa was pregnant, too; and Lisa knew, of course, Bobbie Jo was expecting in a matter of weeks. Perhaps Lisa told Bobbie Jo she was just stopping by to say hello and wanted to swap stories as expectant mothers often do.

  She was born Bobbie Jo Potter on December 4, 1981. That same year, Skidmore was on the verge of moral collapse. Not because the town’s soybean or corn crop had dried up from the little bit of rain the region somehow endured, or the pig farmers had lost herds to disease. No. If that were the case, those problems could be dealt with agriculturally, or even governmentally, with funding and grants.

  Instead, Skidmore’s biggest problem was an event that would set an eerie precedent for some twenty years to come.

  In 1981, a man had been running through Skidmore causing chaos and havoc. Ken Rex McElroy, a bull of a man with a beefy chest, tough jawline, and “I-don’t-care-about-anybody-but-myself” attitude, had bullied his way through life in the same fashion an obnoxious senior in high school might torment a few chosen freshmen. The only difference was, McElroy beleaguered an entire town.

  In fact, McElroy had terrorized not only Skidmore, but much of western Missouri for years. Locals had complained about his taking what he wanted, abusing the women in his life, drinking, fighting, shooting people, burning down houses, intimidating witnesses called to testify against him, and seemingly always finding a way to escape the mighty sword of the law, simply because people—judges and prosecutors included—feared his fury.

  No one, it seemed, could catch McElroy committing a crime; thus he continually found a way to evade prosecution, having been arrested seventeen times without spending a night in jail.

  On July 10, 1981, McElroy’s violent run finally ended. Several townspeople, in an act of congregated and choreographed vigilantism, unloaded round after round of ammunition into his head and chest, killing him almost instantly, as he sat in his pickup truck alongside his wife, Trena, in downtown.

  The brutal crime, immortalized in the bestselling book and movie In Broad Daylight, gave Skidmore a bit of unfortunate, violent notoriety that contradicted the true soul of the town.

  McElroy pushed his luck. The breaking point for townsfolk came after he beat a reported twenty-two criminal counts in court, but was convicted of an assault for shooting a helpless, seventy-one-year-old town grocer whom he had intimidated and threatened for months.

  Law enforcement had seen enough; the judge ultimately sentenced McElroy to two years in prison.

  Shortly before he was murdered, Skidmore residents were astonished to learn that instead of going directly to prison, McElroy showed up in town hours after he was convicted. Apparently, he had been “freed on bail during a twenty-one-day appeal” process.

  People were dazed. They couldn’t believe it. After all he had done, everyone he had hurt, here was Ken McElroy, at last being sentenced, yet escaping justice one more time.

  On the afternoon he was murdered, McElroy walked into the D&G Tavern downtown, as he had many times before, proudly displaying what was said to be “an assault weapon.” After purchasing “a six-pack of beer, cigarettes” and a package of acid relievers, McElroy and his wife walked out the door and sat in his Silverado truck.

  McElroy seemed to be patronizing an entire town by showing up after being sentenced. He was gloating, once again intimidating the people who had wanted him to pay for his crimes.

  Locals who had heard McElroy was back in town gathered at the local Legion Hall a few blocks from the D&G.

  Dan Estes, the local Nodaway County sheriff, was at the meeting, too, he later said on a radio program, trying to get a handle on what had become a mob mentality. But when he left, reports claimed, thirty or more angry residents, all armed, walked down to the D&G.

  As the mob came around the back of the storefront, McElroy’s wife, just getting into his truck, asked, “What are they doing?”

  McElroy was at a loss for words.
<
br />   “They got some guns,” Trena screamed, looking around.

  “Get in the truck,” McElroy said, starting the vehicle and lighting a cigarette.

  One shot rang out, hitting McElroy in the head. After that, another…this time hitting him in the chest…then another…and another.

  As McElroy bled to death, his foot hit the accelerator of his truck and raced the engine.

  Thirty-five to forty-five townspeople reportedly watched the murder take place and later refused to talk about it to anyone, including law enforcement. McElroy’s wife, who was sitting next to him in the truck as he was shot to death, came out of it untouched.

  One resident later called McElroy’s killers heroes, comparing them to the inventors of penicillin.

  The McElroy slaying was the first of a set of bizarre and unusually rare murders in Skidmore. In 2000, a local woman, Mary Gillenwater, was reportedly stomped to death by her boyfriend. Months later, a twenty-year-old, Branson Perry, vanished after leaving his house one afternoon. Law enforcement speculated Perry had been abducted by a local convicted child pornographer, but to date, the case remains unsolved.

  Sixty-four-year-old Jo Ann Stinnett, Zeb and Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s aunt, was Mary Gillenwater’s grandmother. Branson Perry was her grandson. Such is life in small-town Skidmore.

  “People will ask,” Jo Ann told a reporter later, “‘What’s wrong with Skidmore?’ But it’s not Skidmore’s fault. I love Skidmore.”

  10

  Two key factors would emerge later regarding Lisa Montgomery’s visit to Bobbie Jo’s home under the subterfuge of buying one of her rat terrier puppies: one, Lisa had made a promise to herself she wasn’t leaving Bobbie Jo’s house without her baby; two, that Bobbie Jo wasn’t going to stop her.