Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  “When I came home on leave in 1982, we got to know each other again,” Carl said of his dad. “We have a very good relationship. My mother remarried the man she left my dad for and had a daughter.”

  Carl has no ill feelings toward his mother or father. “They did what they had to do.”

  The foundation of both families—Lisa’s and Carl’s—was a complex, mixed bag of remarriages and divorces. After five years of marriage, Judy would leave Richard for another man, marry that man, stay with him for two years, leave him and marry Danny Shaughnessy.

  For Carl, the years before he met Lisa consisted of moving around the country, “running from myself.” The navy hadn’t done much to harden Carl, or prepare him for life. But leaving three-and-a-half years after he enlisted wasn’t a letdown; he had lost interest and knew he didn’t have what it took to dedicate his life to the structured, disciplined lifestyle of the military.

  When Carl ran into Lisa the first time at his grandmother’s house during Thanksgiving, he didn’t even notice her. (“Nice to meet you.” She shrugged. “Hey.”) He was older. By marriage, Lisa would become his stepsister. At the time, Richard and Judy were planning their wedding.

  Lisa seemed to take little pride in her looks. She wore no makeup and cared little for the fashion trends set by her peers. She always appeared somewhat reserved and secretive, putting a protective shield around her emotions.

  At the Thanksgiving dinner, Richard seemed happy. He wanted to celebrate the beginning of a new life with someone he loved, and share that joy with a son with whom he’d recently reconnected.

  There was no attraction whatsoever, Carl insisted, the first time he and Lisa sat together and enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner. He would not have guessed that the taciturn young woman he was sitting next to at the dinner table would be his wife inside the next two years.

  80

  “To me,” Carl said adamantly, “Lisa was kind of, well, she was ugly back then. She wasn’t attractive at all. I wasn’t paying attention to her. I wasn’t looking for anyone. She was a kid. There were no sparks or anything like that. I had no intentions other than meeting my new family, having dinner, and then heading back to Oklahoma to find a life for myself.”

  After a hot cup of coffee and dessert, Carl returned to his home in Bartlesville. His dad’s future wife and family were a strange bunch, Carl thought. Nonetheless, he was delighted to see his dad so happy. He’d finally found someone to love—and perhaps someone to love him back. Judy seemed fun and outgoing. She’d had a horrible experience with her last marriage, had been coping as best she could with a nasty divorce over the past few months, and didn’t want to move in with Richard before her previous marriage was behind her legally. Carl respected that decision.

  “They seemed like they loved each other, and they did,” recalled Carl.

  Days later, Carl heard that her divorce had gone through, allowing her, along with the kids, to move into Richard’s home in Sperry.

  Throughout the past year, Carl had fallen into a deep depression. No single event triggered it, he said. It was more of a “self-imposed, self-pity” thing. He was twenty-three years old and hadn’t found any direction in life, bouncing around from state to state, job to job, essentially waiting for life to grab him by the collar and shake some sense into him.

  But nothing was happening.

  His own behavior over the past few years bothered him. Running with the wrong crowd, “smoking a little weed,” getting into trouble—he was a punk. Bartlesville had little to offer; he knew that. But he returned home, anyway, after the navy, and started working at a feed store. The job partly paid the bills, but it did little for his self-confidence.

  After Richard and Judy settled down, Richard called one day. “Why don’t you move up here to Sperry, son? Maybe live with us for a while, and then think about finding a career.”

  “Maybe.”

  Richard had recently been hired as a guard by a prison not too far from his home. It was the perfect job for a former police chief. He felt Carl was just fumbling around trying to figure out where he should root himself, and he knew his son needed to get his priorities in check. Carl was turning twenty-four soon. He wasn’t going to school. His life was heading nowhere.

  “What are you doin’?” Richard asked. He sounded fed up.

  “I don’t know, Pop.”

  “I can probably get you a job up in the prison. They’re hiring.”

  Was there much to consider? “Sounds okay.”

  “You can help out, too, ’round here with them kids.”

  Richard insisted if Carl moved into the house, he would have to act as a mentor to Lisa and her siblings. They looked up to him in many ways already. But Carl was a grown man. He didn’t know these children. It wasn’t as if he had grown up with them in the same house. They had just met.

  Carl realized he needed some sort of regimented arrangement to keep him focused on acting like an adult. It seemed Richard was offering as much. And now the kids, Richard said, were depending on Carl to be there for them. Judy was looking forward to Carl moving in and setting an example.

  “Yeah, sure,” Carl told his dad before they hung up. “I’ll be up as soon as I close out a few things down here.”

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  Lisa Montgomery was presented as scheduled in court on Thursday, December 23, 2004, to face a federal judge in Missouri for the first time. Since her arrest, authorities had released Lisa’s booking photograph, which revealed how the past week had weighed on her. If she had let herself go during the past few years, as some opined, not caring much about hygiene or her looks, her mug shot showed a woman who looked ten years older than her thirty-six years.

  In one photo, she had the skeletal appearance of an anorexic—her cheekbones high, and pointed—while a double chin she had carried most of her life was almost completely unnoticeable. The second photo—authorities took two: one with Lisa wearing glasses and one without—showed sunken cheekbones and pale, yellowish skin as Lisa stared into the lens of the camera.

  She was not talking to many. She wasn’t saying much to her lawyers. And she wasn’t speaking up for herself in court. Kevin was there at every hearing. The kids were split, confused, and wanted time to work out their feelings. Having all this happen during the holiday season, of course, didn’t help. And now here was their mom, looking desolate and empty, plastered all over the world on the Internet and front pages of newspapers from Missouri to California, New York to Bali, Japan to Australia.

  One headline, putting a dark twist on a popular film series, said it all: WOMB RAIDER.

  Carl was shopping in Wal-Mart one afternoon in Bartlesville with Ryan and Alicia. Just a casual trip to the store for a few domestic items. While standing in line, unloading the shopping cart, Carl noticed Alicia was “visibly shaken and upset.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  In front of Alicia, a tabloid was open to an article. Her eyes were teary, fixed on the page.

  Carl looked in the same direction and noticed an old photograph of himself, a friend he hadn’t seen in a dozen years, and Lisa, who was holding an infant, Kayla.

  Carl picked up the popular magazine. It carried a story relating that Lisa supposedly once had discarded in the toilet several hamsters she’d had as pets. Another part of it told a tale of Lisa playing a Halloween trick on people by placing a doll on a chair, and after someone sat on it, she screamed, “My son! You just sat on my son.” Everything Lisa had ever done throughout her life now seemed suspect; the press, Carl considered, if it wanted to, could make anyone out to be a monster, turn any situation sinister.

  “Don’t look at that garbage, Alicia,” Carl said, folding it in half and placing it back in the rack. When he looked at it again, he noticed Lisa’s mug shot on the cover with WOMB RAIDER underneath.

  Leaving the store, Alicia turned to her father and said, “I feel like everyone is looking at us. I feel different. Embarrassed.”

  “It’ll be all right, honey. Don’t
look at that stuff. They don’t know your mother.”

  82

  During the week before Christmas, Lisa was in court twice. Her first appearance, on Tuesday, December 21, was a mere formality. She was in and out of the courtroom within ten minutes as she waived extradition, allowing her case to be transferred to Missouri, where the U.S. Attorney’s Office said she would stand trial. She had been arrested in Melvern, Kansas, but was going to be charged in the state where the murder and kidnapping had occurred.

  The following Thursday, December 23, was a bit more complicated. Dressed in what had become her normal attire, an orange prison jumpsuit, handcuffs, and leg chains, Lisa, looking somber and withdrawn, was quiet, save for the jingle of the chains binding her as she was led into court. Kevin was sitting in the front row again, looking at her, cracking a comforting smile best he could. It had to be sobering for Kevin to sit and look at the woman he had been married to for the past four years. A week ago, they were making plans for a newborn, looking at baby clothes, getting the child’s room ready, discussing baby names. Now Lisa was quickly becoming the most hated woman in America.

  U.S. magistrate judge John T. Maughmer began the hearing by asking Lisa if she had read the complaint the government lodged against her.

  “Yes, I have,” she answered, but her response was nearly inaudible because she spoke so softly.

  The purpose of the hearing was to decide whether Lisa could afford her own attorney. If she couldn’t, the government was required to provide her with the best public defenders available.

  “How frequently did you receive a paycheck?” the judge asked at some point.

  “Every…every two weeks.”

  “Do you own your own car?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Four.”

  At the end of the proceeding, the judge indicated Lisa would likely qualify for public defender assistance, which she was later granted. Anita Burns and David Owen, who were in court beside her, were the best candidates, since they had been working on Lisa’s case since her arrest.

  For a lawyer, defending Lisa could be a career builder. It would likely become the most high-profile murder case since the Laci and Scott Peterson case in Modesto, California. At trial, television networks and cable shows would run live updates. “Breaking news” and “special report” would set the tone of the coverage. The lawyers involved would be put under a public microscope, their faces piped into the living rooms of millions of people throughout the world.

  After the brief court hearing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office released its first statement in three days. It hadn’t made a determination whether to seek the death penalty, but obviously it was taking the matter seriously.

  “We’re way too early here in this to make a decision,” Todd Graves said, then stated that his office was studying every option, the death penalty being one of many.

  At this point, he added, Graves and his office were unsure as to the question on everybody’s mind since the crime had occurred.

  “Further arrests,” Graves told reporters, “remain a possibility.”

  Lisa herself would complicate matters regarding her possible involvement in Bobbie Jo’s murder as she communicated with Carl Boman and her children over the telephone and through letters. One day after her arrest, she called the house, and Carl’s wife, Vanessa, “surprisingly allowed the call to go through,” Carl remembered.

  “What the hell did you do now, Lisa?” Carl asked as soon as he got on the phone. It was the first time he had spoken to her since her arrest.

  “I don’t have a memory of anything,” Lisa said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Carl had heard that Lisa confessed to killing Bobbie Jo. He’d read the affidavit. Was she trying to persuade herself that the story she had told authorities wasn’t what really happened?

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” she claimed.

  “How did you get the baby, then? They found the baby in your arms, Lisa. What is this?”

  She stumbled over her words, crying. “I just picked it up,” she said. “I have no idea how I got there.”

  “What?” Carl reacted. “What the hell are you talking about?” He was frustrated and upset when Lisa wouldn’t admit to being at Bobbie Jo’s house. It was as though, to Lisa, it was all happening to someone else. It was so much like Lisa, Carl thought. Every time she got caught doing something wrong, she pushed the blame to someone else or totally denied any involvement. (“It was a ploy,” commented Carl. “I know she knows what happened that day, and I know she remembers what she did.”)

  Lisa was quiet for a time. Carl said, “Lisa, come on now…it’s all over. You’re in jail. Why not admit what you did so we can deal with this?”

  “I don’t want to be put to death,” Carl recalled her saying. “I can’t spend the rest of my life in prison, Carl. I can’t do it.”

  “You know what, Lisa, I’m done with this phone call now.”

  “I know she did it,” said Carl, reflecting. “I have never doubted it. That phone call was her way of denying it all to herself. I had heard it for twenty years. Lisa avoided truth at all costs. She never dealt with the actual. She would just talk around things she didn’t want to admit or contend with.”

  Carl said his heart “broke for Lisa” after that call. He couldn’t understand why she had such a hard time coming to terms with what she was being accused of: “I can’t understand it. Why not finally come clean? I mean, she’s caught red-handed. Who does she possibly think she’s fooling?”

  83

  Carl Boman and others have said that Lisa Montgomery projected a social standing in Melvern that wasn’t a true portrait of her life. After she married Kevin, as the years passed, Lisa presented herself to the community and her few friends as a devoted homemaker and mother. She told people she used a spinning wheel at home to make yarn from sheep’s wool, after which she would knit sweaters and winter hats for the kids.

  “Everyone knew she bought the spinning wheel,” a former friend remarked, “and never thought twice about her taking it home and using it. But no one knew she really didn’t use it. It was just a prop.”

  Every year, Melvern hosted a large craft show. Lisa would attend, setting up a table and displaying crafts and homemade soaps she claimed she’d made herself.

  “I was there visiting the kids one time during a craft show,” recalled Carl. “People would come up and watch her knit and look at her crafts.” Lisa would talk about crafts to people at the shows as if she were the host of her own show on the Home & Garden Channel. “They assumed that is what she did and how she lived. But in reality, the stuff was only made for the craft shows. She never did dishes, cooked, or cleaned the house. The kids always did it. She spent her time on the computer chatting or whatever, or reading, or watching television. She had very few friends that knew her outside of work, or intimately. Kevin grew up and went to school in Melvern, and yet very few people ever went over to the house to see them.”

  Her carefully constructed image of motherhood was a figment of her own imagination. As Carl Boman told the press at the time, white lies grew into a dangerous mixture of schemes and faked pregnancies, forcing Lisa to come up with larger lies to cover the smaller ones.

  The sacrifices most mothers readily endured were things Lisa turned away from. The “less glamorous” the domestic chore was, according to Carl and some of the children, the more bothersome it was to Lisa.

  “If it had no appeal, she wasn’t interested,” Carl said. “She became basically lazy. When the kids, as babies, cried, it irritated her. She expected me to deal with a lot of the staying up late when they were sick, even though she didn’t work. When people were around and we went visiting, the show started. It used to bother me, but it became normal when she pretended to be the perfect mother and housewife. A lot of people knew better, but no one said anything. With the four kids, it became too much for her. She would never admit it, but
she relied on me to clean the house and fix meals when I was with her. I couldn’t do it all. I worked a lot of hours so we could buy a house. She even told me on several occasions she couldn’t handle another child. Lisa’s priority was always Lisa. When it came to what was needed in the house, Lisa came first, no matter what.”

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  On December 30, during a brief hearing, Judge John T. Maughmer granted a motion filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office the previous week. His decision secured Lisa’s pretrial detention, solidifying the government’s argument that the best place for Lisa Montgomery was in federal custody at a facility in Leavenworth, Kansas. A trial date hadn’t been set yet, but the motion indicated in stark detail just how serious the charges against Lisa were. She had committed a “crime of violence,” said one of several “Supporting Suggestions” accompanying the motion: a “felony,” involving “an offense where the maximum sentence is life imprisonment or death.”

  The government had a great concern that Lisa would “flee” if allowed to go free on bond. Additionally, “there is a serious risk,” the motion stated, “that the person will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure, or intimidate, or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate, a prospective witness or juror.”

  Apparently, the government was wary of her tampering with its case, if given the opportunity.

  During the early part of January 2005, Lisa described, privately, the crimes she allegedly committed as if someone else were there with her at Bobbie Jo’s. While talking to certain members of her family, Lisa couldn’t recall having struggled with Bobbie Jo or cutting the child from her womb. Instead, she claimed she couldn’t remember any of it, saying that the baby was “handed to me” by someone else.