Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  The blood–soaked wood-grain floors left behind in the den of Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s house were an indication of the horror that took place in Skidmore that afternoon. The house Bobbie Jo and Zeb rented had a tiny living room off to the right side as soon as you walked in, which was directly across from their bedroom. If you walked toward the back of the house, there was a kitchen with a small dining room attached to it, which led into the den on the left. Bobbie Jo had fixed up this room—where, law enforcement later said, she and Lisa ended up—for her dogs. It had two black metal dog cages on the floor and an old dresser in the corner, where Bobbie groomed the dogs.

  Bobbie Jo and Lisa must have talked for a time about rat terriers. They’d had several discussions online about the canines and here they were now face-to-face, brought together—albeit by a lie—because of the dogs.

  Being eight months pregnant, Bobbie Jo was, of course, clearly showing. Photographs from the time prove she wore her extra weight well and had a lovely expectant-mother glow.

  Bobbie Jo was under the impression that Lisa, too, was in the final stages of pregnancy. Lisa had told Bobbie Jo via e-mail and instant messages that she was carrying twins. Still, why wasn’t Lisa showing? She wasn’t overweight, nor was she trying to hide the fact that she wasn’t pregnant. Wasn’t she worried about what Bobbie Jo might say when they met in person?

  Crime-scene photographs give clues as to what happened. In those photographs, blood is spread from one end of the room to the other; heel marks and palm prints were fused with several units of blood and smudged all over, as if a child had gone wild on the floor with red finger paint, proving there was movement in the room after Bobbie Jo had been cut open. Moreover, authorities would later discover evidence on Lisa Montgomery’s personal computer proving she had downloaded an Internet video of how to perform a Caesarean section.

  “They struggled,” said one official. “You can see, from the photographs, that Bobbie Jo didn’t die immediately. Or you wouldn’t have blood or blood clots spread all over the room like it was.”

  Because of the blood spread all over the floor, law enforcement believed there had been a violent struggle for life and death. Bobbie Jo fought for her child. That much was clear.

  “What [happened] was that she [Lisa] took a quarter-inch rope and choked Bobbie Jo out with it.”

  The theory was that Lisa talked Bobbie Jo into bending down to open one of the dog cages on the floor, so she could pick up a terrier to show it to Lisa. The position made her vulnerable because she had to turn her back to Lisa while she was doing it.

  “When Bobbie Jo bent over, Lisa came up from behind and choked her out. So she [Bobbie Jo] passes out, and Lisa starts cutting her open with a four-inch serrated paring knife she brought from her home.”

  Unlike the way it plays out in movies, choking a human being to death is not easy. It takes several minutes to cut off someone’s oxygen enough to cause death. Yet, within a matter of seconds, the person being choked loses consciousness—as Bobbie Jo did. If the person doing the choking doesn’t continue, the victim will regain consciousness at some point.

  “After Bobbie Jo passed out, Lisa started cutting her open and…that’s when Bobbie Jo came back to life.”

  Blood clots scattered around the floor in different areas of the room provide clues to a struggle that resulted after Bobbie Jo regained consciousness. While bleeding profusely from her abdomen, she fought for her and her child’s lives.

  “Well, the struggle was then back on…. Then Lisa managed to get Bobbie Jo choked out for a second time. By then, she had lost enough blood and was being choked to where she…well…she died.”

  During the fight for life and death, Bobbie Jo grabbed her assailant’s hair and ended up with strands of it in both her hands. DNA testing later proved the hair to be Lisa Montgomery’s.

  Graphic doesn’t even begin to describe the scene in Bobbie Jo’s den when Becky Harper decided to walk over to the house and find out why Bobbie Jo wasn’t answering her telephone.

  11

  Twenty-three-year-old Chris Law had lived a few houses away from the Stinnetts ever since they moved into the neighborhood. Law, though, had known Zeb, he told reporters later, “since we were in Head Start together.”

  On occasion, Zeb would pop over to the Laws’, and the two men would work on cars together. Bobbie Jo would wander over sometimes, most likely just to be near Zeb, but Law said she rarely spoke and, at times, “hardly said a word at all.”

  On December 16, Law planned on visiting Bobbie Jo. Not to have coffee or chat about the latest gossip in town, but mainly to be a “good neighbor” and check up on his friend’s pregnant wife.

  “They were good-natured people,” said Chris Law.

  So, Chris Law was going to do what anybody else in town might have done under the same circumstances. Bobbie Jo had been to the hospital recently for several prenatal tests. As far as Law knew, she faced no major complications, but it wouldn’t hurt to stop in and say hello on his way into Maryville to run a few errands.

  “I observed a pinkish red two-door vehicle,” Law told the FBI later, “in front of the Stinnett residence…possibly a Mazda, a Toyota, or a Hyundai.”

  Law was referring to Lisa Montgomery’s car; she had been inside the house with Bobbie Jo at the time Law was considering stopping by.

  When Law turned onto the corner of West Elm from North Orchard, he spied a “dirty” vehicle sitting in the Stinnett driveway and drove around the block in his truck, he said, “rethinking his decision” to pop in.

  Well, she’s got company, Law told himself, and I won’t bother her.

  “I never considered the idea that [Bobbie Jo] was in danger,” Law said later on television. “Stuff like that just doesn’t happen ’round here.”

  Moreover, the front door to the Stinnett house was wide open the entire time Law observed the red car in the driveway. It was winter. Although it was an unseasonably warm day, leaving the door open wasn’t something Bobbie Jo likely would have done.

  Then again, as Law explained it later, “If it had been a stranger, [Bobbie Jo] never would have let them in the house.”

  To some, Law appeared rough around the edges, with his gold earring, five o’clock shadow, grease under his fingernails, and mechanic hands as rough as sandpaper. He spoke with a Western drawl, like most in the neighborhood.

  “[Lisa] was pretty much a part of Bobbie Jo’s life, anyway,” Law told a British television producer. “They went to dog shows together, swapped dog secrets, you know. I thought she was a friend.”

  Indeed, the visitor had to be someone Bobbie Jo knew and, perhaps, trusted. This led some to later speculate when Lisa showed up at the door, Bobbie Jo must have recognized her as Lisa Montgomery. The question became then: with her cover blown, did Lisa charge at Bobbie Jo and push the door open, forcing her way into the house? (Law reported the door being wide open when he drove by.)

  Or did Bobbie Jo, recognizing her, invite her in?

  12

  Becky Harper started walking to her daughter’s house sometime around 3:18 P.M., after she tried calling Bobbie Jo a few more times, but got no answer. Since Bobbie Jo had not shown up at Harper’s place of work to pick her up, she decided to walk to West Elm Street and see what was going on.

  A mother’s instinct.

  “I keep thinking,” Harper later told a reporter, “I wish I had gone over there earlier.”

  When Harper arrived, Bobbie Jo’s door was wide open. That was strange, since those unseasonably warm temperatures that had moved in during the early-afternoon hours had given way to the low thirties by late afternoon. There was also a slight southerly wind curling up around the fields south of town, kicking the mercury down a notch further.

  Why was the door open?

  “Bobbie?”

  No answer.

  “Bobbie,” Harper said, walking in. “Honey, you here?”

  The porch swing Bobbie Jo and Zeb had hanging from the ceiling of t
he overhead porch was rattling a bit in the wind. It was spooky. Bad karma was in the air. Something was obviously wrong.

  At 3:26 P.M., Becky Harper entered the room in which the horribly bloodied body of her daughter lay. Bobbie Jo’s arms were folded up over her chest; her face was covered with blood.

  Although quite unnerved by what she was looking at, Harper reacted immediately, reaching for her cell phone to call the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department in Maryville.

  Speaking to the 911 dispatcher, Harper was frantic and struggled to find the right words. It couldn’t be real. It had to be some sort prank, some inconsiderate joke that didn’t make any sense.

  “My baby is dead!” Harper screamed into the phone at 3:28 P.M., her voice raw with agony. “My baby…she’s lying in a pool of blood.”

  “Ma’am, please tell us what happened,” said dispatcher Lindsey Steins with as much composure as she could manage. “Please try to remain calm and give me an address.”

  Ben Espey, the county sheriff, was sitting in his office ten feet away when he heard the call come in. He walked toward Steins’s desk, which was flanked by three computer screens, a switchboard, and several two-way radios. It was located in a dark area of the sheriff’s department, in front of a line of jail cells. As Steins and dispatcher Melissa Wallace sat wearing headsets and typed on a keyboard, their work area resembled some sort of Bat Cave setting.

  “It’s my…my daughter…It appears as though her stomach is exposed.”

  Stomach exposed? thought Espey, looking at Steins.

  As Steins and Wallace, who was now listening in, typed, Espey stood over their shoulders and read the computer screen, realizing there was a “major problem” in Skidmore.

  “Hey,” yelled Espey to one of his deputies.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Radio my lieutenant investigator now and tell him to meet me in Skidmore ASAP. Give him the address.”

  Harper was delirious by this time. Bobbie Jo was sprawled on the floor, blood all over the room, a large pool of it underneath her lifeless body.

  What is going on?

  Even more disturbing to Harper was that Bobbie Jo’s midsection was flat.

  “It looks like her stomach exploded!” screamed Harper, in tears.

  13

  Within eleven minutes of the 911 call, Nodaway County sheriff Ben Espey arrived in Skidmore, one of his chief investigators not far behind. Espey was contemplating several different scenarios. “It looks like her stomach exploded” kept playing back in his mind. What went on inside that house?

  “Nobody here could ever conceive of this taking place,” said Espey. “It’s inconceivable.”

  With sixteen towns in Nodaway County, housing some twenty-three thousand people in about five thousand households, the county seat is located in Maryville, a family-oriented town held together by strong bonds of community. Petit larcenies and drug-related felonies largely account for the majority of Nodaway County’s criminal activities. In the twelve years Ben Espey had been sheriff, he responded to six murders, all of which he and his deputies, with help from other agencies, solved within a twenty-four-hour period.

  Maryville and its surrounding counties are farming country, semiflat land amid rolling short hills spread out far and wide. People watch one another’s backs and try to keep their communities as safe as they can. A crime such as the one just called into the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department on the afternoon of December 16 was beyond comprehension. As Sheriff Espey drove to Skidmore, he could see Christmas ornaments up all over the county. Inflatable Santa Clauses perched in front yards along the roadside, with plastic reindeer and tinsel dressed on pine trees throughout town greens. Churches were planning food drives and Secret Santa programs, midnight services and holiday celebrations. Houses were decked with colored lights and fake snow.

  When Espey arrived at Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s house, he ran into the den, where Becky Harper, crying desperately while pleading for help, was trying, she believed, to keep Bobbie Jo alive by administering CPR. One of Espey’s 911 dispatchers, Melissa Wallace, had instructed Harper over the phone on how to do CPR properly.

  “Does she have a pulse?” Melissa asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she breathing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you how to do CPR. Have you ever done CPR?”

  When Espey first looked at Bobbie Jo, he could tell “immediately,” he said, it was too late. “I took a pulse and there was no life.”

  “Give me your cell phone,” Espey told Harper. It was covered with Bobbie Jo’s blood, dripping as Espey told his dispatcher, “I’m here…. I’ll continue the CPR.”

  Despite the horror of the scene, Harper kept her composure and focused, she thought, on trying to keep Bobbie Jo alive.

  “It was a pretty gruesome sight,” Espey commented. One of the worst he had seen in his two decades of law enforcement experience.

  Since Harper had started CPR, by law Espey had to continue.

  “Step aside, ma’am,” he said as calmly as he could after folding Harper’s cell phone and throwing it out of the room. “Go get me a wet washcloth and bring it back.”

  Bobbie Jo’s face was covered with blood, her mouth full of it. “I needed the cloth to wipe off all the blood.”

  “My daughter’s eight months pregnant,” Harper cried at one point.

  Espey looked down. Her stomach’s flat. Pregnant? Her words made no sense to him.

  Within five minutes, medics came into the room and took over. As the medics responded, Espey began to think about what could have happened.

  “She’s eight months pregnant,” Harper said again. “She’s pregnant!”

  For Espey, a seasoned cop who had thought he’d seen everything, what Harper was telling him sounded implausible. Pregnant? What? Where is the child? There’s no bulge in her stomach.

  As Espey began to assess the situation, a paramedic pulled him aside so Harper couldn’t hear the exchange.

  “The baby was cut out,” the paramedic said softly. “The umbilical cord,” he noted, “has been cut. Look,” he added, pointing to Bobbie Jo, “there it is.” He paused to allow the implications to sink in. Then he spelled them out. “The baby’s gone, Sheriff.”

  Later, Espey said, “I would have never thought it possible.”

  Espey told two of his deputies, who had since arrived, to “seal off the house. Do not let anybody in.” After photographs were taken, Bobbie Jo was placed on a body board and taken outside.

  What happened here?

  With his mind racing, neighbors and townsfolk congregating around the scene, Espey ran out of the house searching for one of his deputies.

  “We gotta baby missing. We gotta try and find us a baby,” he said.

  14

  Sheriff Ben Espey’s reputation had come under fire recently, during what had turned into a heated reelection campaign for a chance at serving as Nodaway County’s sheriff. During a debate in late September 2004, Espey, a proud Republican, spoke openly about his experience running the department. He had been in office almost twelve years, and during one election earlier in his career, he had run an unopposed campaign for the first time in sixty years of elections in the county.

  The voters of Nodaway County adored Ben Espey. This last election, however, had turned into an old-fashioned Red-and-Blue fight for office with nastiness emerging from both sides. Still, with the race for office the closest in which he’d ever been involved, Espey didn’t jump in and start playing politics. He hit the streets and lobbied for votes the same way he had every other election: “The community,” he told voters, “should always come first.

  “When you arrest somebody’s spouse or kid,” Espey said along the campaign trail, “some of the people aren’t going to be happy with what you do.”

  Espey worried about the close contact between community members and deputies. One of the rules in his office had always b
een that his deputies were not allowed to drink in the local bars. “If you want to drink,” Espey told them, “drink at home.”

  The grapevine was always a setback to living in a small town. Arresting someone you went to school with, or bowled with, or ran into every day at the general store or service station, didn’t always sit well down at the Legion Hall, PTA, or neighborhood gin mill. But Espey was strict. It didn’t matter who you were; if you broke the law, you were going to face the consequences. If his deputies were sitting there having drinks with people they might have to arrest at some point, it could lead to problems.

  The sheriff’s department needed to, Espey said, “do what was right” and “do it in a professional manner.” He didn’t think his opponent could achieve those tasks the way he could. It wasn’t that his opponent was a bad person; Espey was just confident he could do a better job for the community because he had been in office so long and knew the people he served.

  Throughout the campaign, “community first” became Espey’s mantra. He had little patience for slackers and bureaucrats who wanted to milk the system. He was committed to giving the community the best law enforcement he could offer.

  His opponent saw Espey’s last few terms in office differently, and called for “new blood” in the position. During a debate, Rick Smail, who had made a few critical comments regarding Espey’s ability to keep a tight grip on the department, claimed that Espey and his office did not respond to what Smail saw as “less serious calls” in a timely fashion, or sometimes not at all.

  Standing at the podium, Espey hammered back by saying how hard it was to respond to every single call with only one full-time deputy on staff. Drastic measures called for drastic means, and Espey emphasized that he was fully prepared to lead the charge and meet the demands and needs of the community, regardless of what his opponent had to say about the way he commanded the ship—or, more to the point, how he handled 911 calls.