Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  This was a major international news story now, hitting a nerve with people, reminding many that evil spared no one. If a horror of this magnitude could happen days before Christmas in a town of 342, anything was possible. Facts and evidence were, at best, sketchy, as speculation and rumor ran rampant. But the public reacted to the story with questions that defied answers: What type of person could do such a thing? Was there a human being alive who could butcher a young woman as innocent and pure as Bobbie Jo Stinnett and cut her child from her womb?

  After they woke up and got settled a bit, Lisa and Kevin decided to take their new child around town and show her off.

  Before she and Kevin left, Lisa took the child out of her crib and sat down in the living room cradling her. With two of her own children around her, getting ready for school, she took out one of her breasts and offered it to the baby. The child’s eyes hadn’t opened yet. A crusty film covering each eyelid needed to be washed off and treated. Lisa tried feeding the newborn for a while, but the baby wasn’t interested in feeding at a milkless breast, or she didn’t have an appetite.

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  In Georgia, Kayla Boman was at the house next door as usual, watching her neighbor’s daughter before school. Realizing she needed to shake off whatever uncertainties she had about her mom and her new baby sister, she figured she’d log on to the Internet while her neighbor’s daughter was getting ready for school and see if any of her siblings were online.

  I need to get in touch with someone back home, she told herself.

  Kayla’s phone calls with her siblings the previous night weighed on her. She needed some sort of answer before leaving for school. Calling home to Melvern might shake off any negative thoughts she had about Mom and her new baby sister. Maybe just sharing in the excitement would help. Things were going to change. Overnight, she had the responsibility of another life in her bloodline, and she loved the feeling, she said, of finally being a big sister.

  As soon as she logged on, she noticed Rebecca was online. “Call me,” Kayla instant messaged Rebecca.

  As she picked up the phone a moment later, she could hear the baby cooing in the background.

  “She’s so cute, Kayla,” Rebecca said.

  “I bet.”

  “You have to see her.”

  To Kayla, it was the “cutest thing,” hearing her little sister cry and make baby sounds in the background as she and Rebecca spoke. The baby, she remembered, sounded content and happy waking up in a household showering her with the warmth of a family environment.

  What Kayla didn’t know then was that even though the child may have sounded “content,” her health status was anything but. By now, she was having a hard time opening her eyes and hadn’t been able to extend her eyelids all the way. Furthermore, several bruises on her face and legs were becoming more pronounced. Her arms wouldn’t extend all the way, and her fingers were a whitish tinged hue of purple, clearly showing signs of circulation problems.

  Was anyone noticing this?

  Kayla surmised her mom must have made sure the baby was healthy, or she wouldn’t have been able to take her home so quickly from the hospital.

  “Send me some photos,” Kayla asked Rebecca. She was thrilled and reenergized. She wanted to be back home, holding the child, like Rebecca, Ryan, and Alicia had done the night before. She yearned to be a part of what was happening.

  “Sure,” Rebecca said. “Hold on.”

  Within a few minutes, Rebecca took out her cell phone, snapped several photographs of the child, then e-mailed them.

  Before they hung up, Rebecca put the phone closer to the child. Kayla could again hear her making sounds.

  Then Lisa got on the phone.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kayla said. “Good morning.” She was happy for her mother.

  “Hello, Kayla. How are you?”

  As Kayla sat at the computer waiting for the photographs to print out, she had one thought: I’m finally a big sister. She smiled. It made her feel important. She was happy her mom wouldn’t be branded a liar, like her dad and her grandmother had been telling her for the past year or more. She’d had her baby. Maybe they could stop all the fighting now.

  I’m going to take these photographs to school and brag to everyone I know about my new baby sister.

  It was getting late. Kayla made sure her neighbor’s daughter was ready for the bus and then walked next door to Auntie Mary’s. Mary was still in bed sleeping, but Kayla jumped up on her bed “real fast” and woke her up.

  “Look,” she said, holding up the photographs. “Isn’t she pretty?”

  Auntie Mary, just waking up, looked at the pictures with squinted eyes. “Yes, Kayla. She’s pretty. Yes.”

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  The child looked like a little Sunday-newspaper model all dressed up in her new outfit. Lisa was proud. She’d spent an hour, it seemed, picking the outfit out. This one here…it’s perfect! She had tried to feed the child again, but Victoria Jo didn’t want to nurse. So, Lisa dressed her in a pink Winnie-the-Pooh one-piece and got her ready for the day.

  There had been some talk about a name, but it was official now. “We’re calling her Abigail Marie.” It was a name Lisa had handpicked, she started telling everyone, from the Bible.

  Lisa was never an ultrareligious woman, the sort that quoted verses and lived by the law of the church. According to many, her pretense of faith was just another falsehood she wanted people to believe, a part of the dream she was chasing.

  “Lisa envied her cousin, who lived in Arizona*,” someone who knew her for most of her life said later, “and was trying—during that last year, 2004, when everything happened—to emulate her life.”

  Lisa’s cousin was a devout Christian and lived every part of what she preached. She was a real Christian, not someone who pushed the Bible on others, knocked on doors, and preached “the Word” to strangers. But, as one of her relatives later put it, “[She] is perhaps over the top religiously, but she’s a really good person. People respect her. She doesn’t push her religion in your face; instead, she lives it.”

  She was also a woman who had eight kids and, as it turned out, was expecting her ninth.

  “[Lisa’s cousin] was pregnant in December,” that same relative added, “and due to have her baby in January.”

  Moreover, Lisa’s cousin planned on naming her child Abigail (which she eventually did), and Lisa was well aware of it. As Lisa would later claim to several different people she spoke to while parading Bobbie Jo’s baby around town that morning, she had chosen the name Abigail for “religious reasons,” quoting the Bible as her source for the name. But like a lot of things in Lisa’s life, it was another way for her to manipulate further the people in her life.

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  After the kids left for school, Kevin drove Lisa and the baby up the road to Pastor Mike Wheatley’s parsonage across the street from the church. According to Wheatley, they arrived around 9:00 A.M.

  From afar, the First Church of God looks like any other ranch-style home in the Maple Street neighborhood just west of downtown. Wheatley had known Lisa, Kevin, and Lisa’s kids ever since Lisa and Kevin were married in 2000. Lisa and Kevin, according to one family member, weren’t necessarily Christians in the sense they went to church every Sunday morning and read Bible passages before bed each night. In fact, “I wouldn’t even consider them ‘Sunday Christians.’ It was Lisa’s children who went to church every Sunday, not Lisa and Kevin.”

  Kevin’s parents, who also lived in town, were dedicated members of the church and had been for decades. The Montgomery name, some insisted, was a staple in Melvern. Lisa had always seemed to carry herself in a different manner around town, as if she were constantly trying to live up to an image she believed the Montgomery family had of her.

  “Lisa was quiet,” Wheatley said later on television, while claiming to be the Montgomery family spokesperson. “I can tell you she was pretty much a person that would like to talk about herself a lot, and her children. If you wanted to talk
about Lisa, she was mighty happy. But she was also a person who cared a lot about her children. And my wife and I decided she could have qualified as a pioneer woman, because she was quite capable of not having all the amenities that we have today and still surviving and teaching her kids how to do that. She was just a homebody. She went to work, she went home, took care of her kids. She was kind of quiet most of the time.”

  When Lisa, Kevin, and the baby showed up that morning, Wheatley was pleasantly surprised, he later said, to see she’d had the child. Of course, he knew she’d given birth, according to one law enforcement official, because Lisa had called him the previous day and told him about it.

  “Her husband,” Wheatley added, “was obviously a very happy new father. He was just proud to be a dad…. [He]was absolutely grinning from ear to ear. He wasn’t going to come out of the clouds for a very long time. He was a very proud papa.”

  Wheatley held the child for about fifteen minutes and then handed her to his wife, who spent the next forty-five minutes with the child. “I held the little baby,” he said. “At the time, we thought her name was Abigail….”

  One could say Kathy Wheatley, the pastor’s wife, and Lisa were friends. People in town had seen them together on occasion. They picked strawberries during the season and seemed to get along well. Others said, however, because the Montgomery name carried a certain social standing in the town, Lisa had an obligation to act a certain way while out in the community. Roaming around town with the pastor’s wife was just one way for her to accomplish that task.

  “She acted different when she was around those people,” said one former acquaintance—“you know, the ‘better than thou’ people.”

  While the pastor and his wife played with the child, Lisa, at times stoic and passive, stood up at one point and talked in detail about the delivery and how her water had broken while she was “shopping in Topeka.”

  To those who were about to meet and hold Bobbie Jo’s baby, life seemed to be coming together for Lisa and Kevin. Lisa had confided in Pastor Wheatley on several occasions about her desire to have a baby, as she had to others in town. She had told him about her supposed miscarriage a while back, and Wheatley, like any compassionate human being, had expressed sympathy for the loss. But none of that mattered now as Lisa and Kevin sat in the Wheatleys’ home displaying a joy they had been looking forward to for so long. It didn’t make any difference anymore that Lisa had lost so many children. It was time to rejoice and celebrate; their gift from God had finally arrived. Here she was bouncing on the pastor’s lap, her mother and father looking on proudly with the delight only new parents could feel.

  Darrel Schultz was another member of the First Church of God, who also happened to be Kevin’s boss. The first time he heard about Lisa’s latest pregnancy was back on December 10, just a week ago, when he ran into Lisa and Kevin at the local high-school basketball game. It was parent-senior night. Most in town had attended. In the Midwest, supporting high-school sports is as much a part of life as throwing bush apples at houses when you’re a kid or raising cattle and goats.

  Schultz viewed Lisa as a “pleasant person,” he said later while sitting next to Wheatley on television. “When she talked about things—she…. They, well, they (the Montgomerys) raised goats. And she talked about how they could take the wool from them and weave different things. And the kids learned to do that. They learned how to spin yarn and stuff.”

  Like most in town, Schultz saw this as good, wholesome family living, which allowed the family unit to become closer. Lisa and Kevin were just one more blended family making a go, a second chance at happiness.

  When Darrel Schultz ran into Lisa back on December 10 during that basketball game, he hadn’t noticed she was about to have a baby. A week later, when he saw her again and she had the child with her, like a lot of people, he began asking himself questions: What’s this? Where did this baby come from?

  “And that’s why,” he stated later, “of course, seeing her [at the basketball game]…and then seeing her a week later with a baby, why, we were just sort of shocked and astonished. I had no idea she was that close to delivery.”

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  Ben Espey had a hard time finding much sympathy for the town of Melvern and the feelings many displayed later about being duped by Lisa Montgomery. In fact, Espey was disgusted with certain people involved in the case and what they later said.

  “You ask Wheatley,” suggested Espey, “how the heck he held that child and didn’t realize there was an Amber Alert out for a newborn?”

  To Wheatley’s credit, at the time Lisa was at his home with Kevin and the child, he claimed he and his wife had not yet heard about the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett. It was a breaking news story on television and radio, but Wheatley was not one to make viewing cable-television news programs part of his daily routine. He had a church to run, people in town to counsel. The day’s news events generally caught up to him, not the other way around. Beyond weather reports and the local news, he wasn’t interested in the day’s events outside his small world in Melvern, one could assume. When Lisa showed up with the child, he had no idea every law enforcement agency within a two-hundred-mile radius was on the lookout for a woman, man, or both, traveling with a newborn.

  “Even when they were there that morning,” recalled Wheatley, “I wasn’t aware of any of this. As far as I knew, everything was just perfectly normal.”

  Questions did arise, however, between Wheatley and his wife after Lisa and Kevin left the house. Wheatley, for example, thought, Why does she have a newborn baby out, showing it off so soon?

  Moreover, the child’s appearance became an issue. Wheatley noticed it had “very long fingers,” which he said neither Kevin nor Lisa had, and there were numerous bruises all over her face, both large and small, plus several visible scratches. A photograph from the previous night showed a beat-up child who had obviously gone through a turbulent delivery. Her fingers were, indeed, long and white, but also bony and bluish in color, as if she’d had problems with circulation.

  “The term for bluish white extremities is acrocyanosis,” a prenatal care specialist explained later. “This is very common in the newborn because of the folded fetal position of the infant in the uterus. The bending of the arms and legs constricts the arteries and limits blood supply to the hands and feet. This usually resolves [itself] in a couple of days.”

  Acrocyanosis would not be a major concern; however, that same expert commented, “lack of oxygen to the brain” could be. If Victoria Jo lost enough oxygen during the time it took to kill Bobbie Jo, brain damage in the child could occur later and show up in the form of cerebral palsy and/or learning disabilities, problems that may not be recognized for one to two years after birth.

  “The major question is, how long did it take to get the infant out of the womb? It’s hard to tell if an infant is truly affected until months later, when certain milestones are—or are not—met.”

  Above Victoria Jo’s left eye, almost running along the path of her eyebrow, was an unmistakable one-inch-long wound, not too deep or wide, but consistent with a scratch left behind by the blade of a knife or an adult fingernail. Underneath that same eye was a more pronounced wound, a bit longer, yet similar in shape and scope. There was also a rather large bruise in the crack of the baby’s cleft chin, and another on the right side of her face.

  Taking a closer look, it would have been easy to tell the child did not resemble Kevin or Lisa in the slightest. Babies are babies, some might say. But Victoria Jo had a pudgy face and large nostrils, neither of which Kevin or Lisa could claim. All of Lisa’s babies with Carl Boman had weighed fewer than five pounds. After eight months of gestation, Victoria Jo weighed in at eight pounds. Kevin himself had said “[Lisa] had little babies.” Additionally, Victoria Jo’s lips were plump and larger than a normal newborn’s. Both Kevin and Lisa had thin lips.

  These were features that generally showed up on babies during the first days after birth—features aunts and un
cles visiting new mothers marveled at: “He’s got your eyes…your nose…looks just like you did as a baby.”

  If anyone who saw the child that day had put a photograph of Bobbie Jo or Zeb up against Victoria Jo, the resemblance would have been unmistakable.

  As the day moved forward, and Lisa and Kevin left Pastor Wheatley’s, questions would emerge as they began showing up at other places around town. Why would this woman, who had supposedly just given birth to a baby the previous day, bring a newborn out in public so soon? Medically speaking, why didn’t the child have a cone-shaped head, like most natural-birth newborns? Entering the birth canal, newborns develop a pointed skull as they pass through the mother’s vagina and into the world. Called “molding,” the condition generally resolves itself in a period of days and a healthy, normally shaped skull forms. Other signs of natural childbirth include a condition called “caput,” which refers to a swelling on the top of the skull caused by fluid buildup during the birthing process. Caput, too, resolves itself within a few days after childbirth. One more common sign is cephalhematoma. Because of the “friction of the infant’s head against the mother’s pelvic bones,” noted one pediatrician, “sometimes there is a blood collection on the outer surface of the skull.” Generally, this condition is confined to one side of the child’s head and can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to clear up.

  But here was little Abigail Montgomery, with a perfectly round, perfectly formed skull. Sure, Lisa could have had a Cesarean section, but wouldn’t she be all stitched up and nursing those wounds—and still be in the hospital?

  Instead, Lisa was asking people to believe that, not even twenty-four hours after she delivered a child, she had been allowed to leave the clinic, take the baby home, and display her in public.

  To say the least, her behavior was bizarre—yet no one, at this point, had made the correlation between an Amber Alert issued out of Maryville and a woman in Melvern who had claimed to be pregnant five times, but had lost each child, and was now showing off a newborn who looked nothing like her or her husband.