The setting seemed perfect from the FBI’s standpoint. It was rural. Very few civilians were around. The G-men found plenty of places for agents to hide with no chance of Kevin or Lisa spotting any of them.
The house had five bedrooms, one master bathroom, a living room, and a dining room and kitchen, where everyone congregated during the evening. In the large cellar downstairs, Lisa kept the canned goods she demanded the kids jar up every fall. From the outside, it looked like a house filled with good wholesome family farm living. But the atmosphere inside on most nights, at least according to one of the children, wasn’t as relaxed as it might have appeared.
“When my mom was home, she was normally on the computer. She was kind of quiet, but when she was mad, she would yell and make everyone’s day miserable. Sometimes, though, she was in a really good mood. Like when we were canning, or doing something with the garden, or the animals, or stuff like that. But when she got mad, I always tried to avoid her (which was hard sometimes). She would threaten to leave Kevin, or she would get all mad at us for one thing or another (like if we were supposed to be cleaning and we didn’t, or we ate dinner an hour ago and the dishes still weren’t done). I remember sometimes it would be like nine or ten o’clock at night when we finished eating dinner, and we would have to stay up to do the dishes no matter how tired we were.”
Now there were scores of FBI agents camped out around the house, with binoculars and high-tech gadgets, waiting for Lisa and Kevin to arrive—and two rather committed investigators from Ben Espey’s county racing toward town, preparing to drive through the FBI’s surveillance and find out for themselves if Lisa and Kevin had Bobbie Jo’s child.
47
Kevin Montgomery’s mother walked into the office of Marais des Cygnes Valley (High) School and explained to the principal that Lisa’s three children had to be taken out of class.
“It’s an emergency. We need to get them home right away.”
All three kids were summoned to the office. They had no idea what was going on.
“You need to get your stuff,” Kevin’s mother said, “and come home with me now. Something’s happened. Hurry.”
Rebecca had driven her own car to school. She told Mrs. Montgomery she’d drive her brother and sister to their grandparents’ house and meet her there.
Back at the house ten minutes later, the FBI separated the children and began asking questions.
“When we got home,” one of the children said, “at first we thought [the FBI] were lawyers.”
Must have been the way they were dressed.
Throughout the entire time the children were questioned, the reason why never came up. The kids were forced to wonder what was going on as the FBI shot one question after another at them, yet failed to explain the reason why they were probing into what had been, up until that point, a rather ordinary life in the middle of nowhere.
“You can’t tell anybody about this,” said one agent to Rebecca. Largely, the questioning was framed around what Kevin had been doing over the past twenty-four hours. Why wasn’t the man at work? Why had he taken the day off? Where was he now? Then, “Tell me about the baby. Did the child have any scratches on her? Do you have any pictures of her?”
“I don’t know,” answered Rebecca, overwhelmed by being put on the spot.
“Did your mom and Kevin have any problems?”
“Normal marital things, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
The FBI wasn’t being pushy, the kids later agreed. (“They were very nice. They weren’t mean or anything. They just wanted answers.”)
After Rebecca was questioned, Ryan was pulled into the same room and Rebecca was asked to leave.
“Are your mom and Kevin happy?” asked one of the agents.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“How was the atmosphere at the house most of the time?”
“Fine.”
“What was your mom like the past few weeks?”
Ryan was “clueless,” he said, as to what was going on. Where Rebecca began questioning things in her mind, Ryan still didn’t have any idea what to think. He had spent last night with his new baby sister. He was happy for Mom and Kevin. What was the problem?
“Everything was okay last night?” pressed an agent.
“Okay, let’s…,” Ryan said, and then hesitated. He had a question of his own he needed to ask. “Is this about my mom and Kevin splitting up?”
The agents looked at each other. They had to feel sorry for the kid. Here he was thinking the FBI had pulled him out of school to tell him his mother and stepfather were separating.
“Listen,” one of the agents said, “your mom is one of two suspects in a kidnapping case we’re working on.”
Ryan was stunned. His heart raced. (“I was one of the first to see the baby, and I thought it was ours.”)
Both Ryan and Rebecca agreed that talking bad about Kevin just wouldn’t be right. Kevin had his hang-ups, but he “wasn’t a bad person.” He was quiet and reserved, sure, but he never raised his voice or hand to Lisa or the kids. And he supported them, unlike Lisa, in nearly everything they did. (“Kevin was at every single one of the games I cheered for,” recalled Rebecca. “My mom never came.”)
“He was,” Kayla Boman added at a later date, “a really nice guy, and a great stepfather.” In no way, she added, was he mean. And, while he “occasionally drank a beer,” he was “definitely not a drinker.”
Kayla said the one thing about Kevin all the kids stood behind was that, “he loved my mom with all his heart…and would do—and still will—anything for us. He loves us almost as much as he loves his three boys.”
Most of the reservations the children, especially Kayla, had were centered around Lisa, particularly her frequent statements to people around town that she was pregnant. During the past few weeks, however, Lisa’s claims of being pregnant started falling apart. Although she had moved to Georgia weeks ago, Kayla still kept tabs on things back home. Like any kid her age, she made instant messaging and e-mail part of her daily life. Lisa wasn’t calling her or writing, so Kayla kept up to date with everyone by phone and the Internet.
“Did I have questions?” Kayla asked herself later. “Yes. Did I doubt at times that my mom was pregnant? Yes!”
“It all seemed a little weird to me, but I guess it was ’cause I had a ‘bad feeling,’ which normally I do when something bad happens, or something is wrong…like a gut feeling, I guess you could say.”
From the FBI’s perspective, it was beginning to look more like Kevin was involved on some level. How could he not be? His phone line had been used to communicate with Bobbie Jo. The feds even had an e-mail in their possession fully explaining how “Darlene Fischer” had made plans to meet with Bobbie Jo. Anyone, at this point, could be Darlene Fischer: Kevin, Lisa, even one of the kids.
When the two agents finished questioning the kids, they left the Montgomery house without mentioning a word of their next move. If the kids were confused before they were questioned, now they had no idea what was going on. Like most kids, they weren’t newshounds; they had no idea that a young woman had been murdered in Skidmore and a massive search was under way for a child someone had cut from her womb. Why so many questions about the previous day? Mom had given birth yesterday.
What could the simple birth of a child have to do with anything of a criminal nature?
48
During Friday afternoon, December 17, while the kids were at the Montgomery house talking with the FBI, SA Mike Miller, watching from a foxhole somewhere around Kevin and Lisa’s Adams Road house, spotted a “dirty red Toyota Corolla, bearing a Kansas license plate…pull up in front of the residence.”
It was the infamous “red car” every law enforcement agency in the Midwest had been looking for, only there was no H on the hood, contrary to what a witness had told Ben Espey the previous day.
After Lisa and Kevin got out of the car, Lisa walked around to the back of the vehicle and took the child out of
her car seat.
The FBI agents didn’t move. They watched as Lisa and Kevin took their time entering the house through the side porch door, where an old refrigerator and washing machine sat rusting on top of rain-soaked, rotting pine planks.
Within minutes, Lisa and Kevin were inside the house with the child.
Soon after, Randy Strong and Don Fritz arrived on the scene, pulled into the driveway, and parked in back of Kevin’s pickup. They met no opposition from the FBI agents, who were still in position around the property, likely wondering what was going on.
Fritz called Espey from his cell phone: “We’re here, Ben. As soon as we know something, we’ll call you back. We’re shutting down our cell phones now.”
“Good luck…let me know as soon as you do.”
“All right. Here we go.”
Meanwhile, Espey heard a rumor that the press had figured out what was unfolding in Melvern. A few helicopters were hovering over Lisa and Kevin’s house, filming and circling it.
When he confirmed the report, Espey’s concern for the child grew.
“Someone had already killed the mother of the child—we knew that,” said Espey. “What if they came out of the house and saw the helicopters? There was a real good chance, I believed, they could dispose of the baby.”
Randy Strong jumped out of the car first and walked up to the door. Composed and collected, he knocked.
Kevin answered. “Yeah?”
“I’m a special investigator from Missouri,” said Strong. “My partner is with me. Can we come in?”
“Sure,” Kevin answered, opening the door. He seemed a bit frazzled but completely forthcoming and cooperative.
As Fritz and Strong walked in, they spied Lisa sitting in the living room holding the baby; she was watching television. Oddly enough, the Amber Alert, Strong noticed, was scrolling across the bottom of the television screen as he walked up to Lisa and asked her to hand the child to him.
“Why? What’s going on?” Lisa wanted to know.
As that happened, the FBI started coming out of hiding and pulling into the driveway.
Randy Strong took the child from Lisa and ran outside with her, handing her off to an agent, saying, “Take the child to the hospital—now.”
“It all worked out,” Espey said, “because we went out of our jurisdiction and took control.”
Immediately Lisa and Kevin were separated.
“Kevin Montgomery advised,” FBI SA Craig Arnold wrote in his report, “that yesterday, December 16, 2004, he arrived home from work at about five-fifteen P.M.”
“She called me and told me she went into labor and delivered a baby,” a thunderstruck Kevin Montgomery explained to two FBI agents asking him questions. “What’s going on?”
“Where?”
“Well, in Topeka. So me and the kids, we, we…got into my pickup truck and drove to Long John Silver’s, where she said she was.”
“What happened then?”
“We picked her up and drove back home. What’s this? What’s happening?”
Uncertainty had settled upon Kevin. The FBI? Nothing was making sense.
As Lisa stood in the living room, a startled look on her face, Randy Strong walked over to her. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together: Lisa had streaks of blond in her hair, there was a “dirty red car” in the driveway, and she’d had in her possession a baby who was, as far as anyone could tell, a day, maybe two days old. How many other suspects did they have, or sightings for that matter, matching up so perfectly? Strong asked her about the baby.
“I’ve been pregnant and delivered the child yesterday,” stated Lisa.
She certainly didn’t look like she’d just given birth. Where was the extra weight? Could she produce any records from the hospital? Maybe an identity bracelet most hospitals put on mother and child?
“Where?” asked one agent.
“At the Birth and Women’s Center in Topeka. What’s the problem here? I don’t understand….”
As Lisa continued, Strong asked her more detailed questions. It was the beginning of what would amount to a four-hour interrogation by Strong, who, Espey said, “is one of the best interrogators the state of Missouri has.”
Regardless of what Lisa and Kevin were saying, most everyone involved in the arrest had a quick moment of triumph.
“I wasn’t there physically,” one FBI agent said later on television, “but the agents and police officers who were there told me they were absolutely ecstatic. All you had in this case was the fact that you had a dead woman; you had the idea that this person, the suspect, had blond hair and was driving a red car. And that’s all you had.”
Espey heard about it immediately. “I was thrilled, but more than anything worried about the child’s welfare and getting her to a hospital. I knew with Randy on the case that he would break the suspect. I wanted that child to be evaluated immediately so she could be united with Zeb.”
As Strong kept questioning Lisa, it didn’t take long before she cracked. After one FBI agent read Lisa her constitutional right to remain silent, she started crying.
“Is there something you want to tell us, Mrs. Montgomery?” asked Strong. He looked down and saw “numerous cuts on her fingers.” Later, it would be confirmed that the presence of Bobbie Jo’s DNA was found underneath Lisa’s fingernails on her left hand.
With that, FBI SA Craig Arnold wrote later, “Lisa Montgomery…confessed to having strangled Stinnett and removing the fetus…[and] further admitted the baby she had was Stinnett’s…..”
But it was Strong, Espey insisted, who had taken Lisa’s full confession.
“I lied to my husband about giving birth to a child,” Lisa said at one point.
“Where did you go after you left Skidmore?” Strong asked after Lisa admitted strangling Bobbie Jo and cutting the child from her womb.
“I…I drove west,” Lisa said. “Yeah, west. And I stopped. I stopped about seven miles out of Skidmore and pulled over and cleaned up the baby.”
“Take it easy,” Strong advised. “It’s okay.”
“I clipped her belly button, you know…and then I…I…” Lisa broke down again.
Strong sensed how uncomfortable it was for her to make the admission. “Take your time, Lisa. No hurry here.”
“Well, I…I put all of the dirty blankets in the trunk with the rest of the stuff.”
Next to the blankets, Strong would soon find the bloody rope Lisa allegedly used to strangle Bobbie Jo. DNA from the blood and hair attached to the rope would be a match to Bobbie Jo. The knife Strong found in the trunk next to the rope had dried blood on one side of it, which would later be proven to contain a mixture of Bobbie Jo and Victoria Jo’s DNA. The handle of the knife was even more damaging—it held a blend of “genetic information” from Bobbie Jo, Victoria Jo and Lisa.
“Okay,” Strong said, “Continue.”
“Then I called Pastor Wheatley from my cell phone and told him I had the baby.”
“How long was that after you left Skidmore?”
“I don’t know, maybe ten minutes. Yes, about ten minutes.”
There it was: Lisa had been found out. She was never pregnant. She had lied to her children, mother, sisters, husband, and Bobbie Jo Stinnett.
If what authorities (and Lisa herself) said was true, Lisa had handpicked Bobbie Jo, waged a carefully thought-out campaign to kidnap her child, and hadn’t allowed murder to prevent her from carrying out the diabolical plan—all because she didn’t want people to think she wasn’t pregnant.
The announcement of Lisa’s arrest and the return of Victoria “Tori” Jo to her father would send a shot of hope throughout the heartland. But as Lisa began spending her first few days in lockup, having time to contemplate the events of the past few months, she would begin to change her story and to remove herself from the situation as if she hadn’t even been present when the crime occurred. In the next month, she would take it one step further by telling a member of her family, “No, I didn’
t do it. Someone handed me the baby…. I don’t remember being there.”
49
Good news travels fast. Within hours after Lisa’s arrest, as she and Kevin were taken into custody, the airwaves lit up with “breaking news reports.” As Victoria Jo was rushed to the Stormont-Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka and news outlets converged on Melvern, Alicia and Rebecca sat at Kevin’s parents’ house trading stories about why the FBI had taken them out of class to be questioned. They still had no idea what was going on.
While the kids were sitting on the couch, the local news channel aired an alert on the bottom of the screen: “Kansas woman in custody, suspected in the murder of Missouri woman and the kidnapping of her fetus.”
Alicia and Rebecca looked at each other: No way. It can’t be. While watching the report, Alicia, especially, had a “sickly feeling that she will never forget,” a family member said later.
That report still wasn’t enough to convince them, however. They asked Mrs. Montgomery what was going on.
She wouldn’t tell them.
A second report flashed across the screen thirty minutes later: “Tests have confirmed: the baby found in Melvern is Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s.”
The previous night replayed in their minds: Mom trying to breast-feed the child, dressing her up in that “I’m the little sister” T-shirt, cooing with her, calling her Abigail Marie, Kevin’s parents and his aunts and uncles.
It was all a show.
At this point, people had more questions than answers. How was the baby doing? Victoria Jo hadn’t been all that vivacious over the past twenty-four hours. She hadn’t cried much the previous night. She wasn’t moving her hands and legs as a newborn should. Would she survive such an ordeal? Had she suffered any brain damage during delivery? And the biggest question: What kind of monster had committed such a horrific act of violence?
Murder in the Heartland Page 13