Murder in the Heartland

by M. William Phelps

  Was she blocking it all out? Or setting the wheels of her defense in motion by trying to implicate someone else? Furthermore, could a $45,000 lump-sum cash payment Lisa and Vanessa had negotiated some years before have been money Lisa needed to hire an accomplice, or purchase a black-market baby?

  During the winter of 2002 and the spring of 2003, Lisa claimed that Carl wasn’t keeping up to date on child support payments, and for the second or third time since she married Kevin Montgomery, she said she was carrying another baby.

  Soon after Vanessa and Carl married, Vanessa started her own envelope-stuffing business. She believed she could make a “great deal” of money in a short period of time. Not only would it help the family, but she thought: I could give Lisa a large cash payment to get her off our backs and, at the same time, open up the opportunity for Carl to see the kids. Lisa was holding back Carl’s visits with the kids because she was incensed over money she claimed he owed her in back child support. Vanessa, however, said money was taken directly from Carl’s paychecks and sent to Lisa for child support.

  “Lisa,” said Vanessa, when they saw each other one day, “don’t take the kids away from Carl. Please. They need their dad as much as their mum.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you being so nasty about it all?”

  “Carl hasn’t paid me child support since you two got married, Vanessa.”

  “That’s not true, Lisa. You know that’s a lie.”

  From there, “She got in my face,” recalled Vanessa, “and we started to argue.” Whenever Vanessa and Lisa had problems between them, Lisa would react by keeping the kids from Carl and not allowing them to speak to him.

  “I’m sorry,” said Vanessa after Lisa continued yelling.

  “I want that back child support!”

  “Listen,” said Vanessa, “I can get you some money in a few months. It’ll be enough to pay off the child support.”

  “How much?”

  They talked for a while, according to Vanessa, and settled on $45,000.

  But then Lisa started yelling again. “Look,” said Lisa at one point, “you have until March and no later. Or else I will go for more child support and move the kids so far away Carl will never see them again.”

  Vanessa felt panicked, she said, after she promised the $45,000, because, in reality, she had no way to come up with the money.

  Lisa asked, “Where are you getting this money?”

  “I have an inheritance coming from Germany—someone in the family I don’t even know.”

  Lisa “lightened up” a bit after that, Vanessa said, and, in the days and weeks that followed, allowed Carl to see the kids more.

  Then March came around. When Vanessa’s envelope business opportunity failed, she called Lisa with the bad news. The inheritance claim had been a lie. (“I honestly did think I could earn enough to pay her off…,” recalled Vanessa.)

  “I’m so sorry, Lisa, I can’t give you the money. But please don’t take the kids away from Carl.”

  “Carl will never see his kids again, Vanessa.” Lisa seemed composed and relaxed about it all. Not the response Vanessa had anticipated.

  “I’m sorry, Lisa….”

  “I don’t need your money. I’ll take him to court.”

  “Let’s talk about this, Lisa, come on now.”

  “I’ll ruin you guys,” said Lisa, getting louder. “You’ll pay for this!”

  As Carl and Vanessa would later surmise, Lisa’s greatest worry wasn’t back child support payments at all. She had been telling people she was pregnant, and so she needed to produce a child. When she realized she wasn’t going to get the money from Vanessa and couldn’t purchase a child on the black market to cover up “the lie” of being pregnant, she started working on Carl.

  “I want forty-five thousand to buy a piece of property,” she told Carl a day or so later. “That will take care of all the child support you haven’t paid me.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He saw her proposal as an insidious request made by a woman who was emotionally unstable, lying about being pregnant year after year, poisoning her children’s minds with all sorts of stories until they didn’t know what to believe.

  “Look, Carl,” said Lisa, “I’ll forget about bringing you to court if you just come up with the money.”

  Carl laughed.

  “She was faking another pregnancy,” remembered Carl. “She was backed into a corner. She told people she was pregnant, hoping she would get the money from us, but when it didn’t come through, well, she panicked. What’s interesting is, during any one of her faked pregnancies, she never once told me she was pregnant, because she knew I would laugh in her face.”

  When Lisa realized she wasn’t going to get the money, Carl and Vanessa agreed, she developed a story of losing the baby she was carrying.

  So what did Lisa actually need the money for?

  For Carl Boman, it was appalling, but unsurprising: “I was told she found a woman on the Internet in Alabama who would sell her a baby for forty-five or fifty thousand dollars. If she did get the money and bought the child, she would be able to prove to everyone she wasn’t lying about being pregnant.”

  85

  The twenty years Carl Boman spent with Lisa Montgomery were not without good times. Beginning a few months after they met during Thanksgiving dinner, 1984, they felt a connection that was hard to deny.

  During the time Carl courted Lisa, he became close to all of Judy’s kids, simply because he was always around the house. By this point, Carl lived in Cleveland, just outside Sperry; and after he got off work with his dad at the prison, he ended up spending much of his free time at the house. The one thing that bothered Carl most early on, as he got to know Judy and the kids, was the obvious “absence of love” in their lives.

  He and Richard had shown affection for each other as any father and son might. The Boman family, as a whole, had always expressed a certain amount of love. Not to see the same in Lisa’s family struck Carl as unusual.

  Richard always seemed to be working, often taking on overtime. “It wasn’t like there were screaming matches between Lisa, Judy, and the other kids, nothing like that,” Carl recalled. “It was just that there was no hugging, talking to one another, no ‘I love you.’ It was very cold being around them.

  “Judy was so judgmental of everyone and all the kids, that it rubbed off on them,” Carl said. “You cannot walk into a room and not feel Judy’s presence.”

  Carl had just come out of a period when depression had dominated his life. Now he had a career, his own apartment. He was working with his dad. The cool atmosphere of Judy’s home began to weigh on him.

  During the winter of 1985, Lisa turned seventeen. She was “looking for someone to love,” someone to care for her. Carl believed she’d never had it.

  “Part of her problem was Judy never acknowledged the sexual abuse,” Carl claimed, “and Lisa told me time and again, Judy had even said it was Lisa’s fault.”

  Judy Shaughnessy later denied this.

  During the time Carl spent at Richard and Judy’s house, Lisa would stay in her room and rarely come out. “She would spend twenty hours, literally, if she didn’t have to go to school, in her room just reading.”

  Carl started to notice Lisa, he said, shortly after she turned seventeen. By then, she had changed from an unpretentious teenager who cared little for her looks into a budding young woman who presented herself more attractively. She started combing her hair and wearing it up. She showered regularly, wore makeup and decent clothes. “She started looking good,” Carl said. “At least in my eyes back then.”

  In 1985, Lisa was at a turning point in her life. When she and Carl started getting close, having long talks about life and the future, their connection was instantaneous, and the relationship blossomed into intimacy quickly.

  As Carl soon learned, however, it was hard to communicate with Lisa.

  “You don’t talk to Lisa. You listen to Lis
a.”

  Lisa talked at length about the years she spent with Judy and her stepfather Howard. For the most part, Lisa hated Judy, and despised the life her mother had given her. She felt as if her childhood had been stolen by her own mother.

  At this point in her life, Lisa was just starting to deal with the alleged abuse by her stepfather. It had damaged her soul and made her feel irrelevant, unwanted.

  “This poor girl,” Carl said, “needed some help, and I was glad to be there for her.”

  86

  During the first half of 1985, as Carl stayed busy working at the prison and watching Judy’s kids, he had his own small studio apartment in Cleveland. Life, in effect, was going exactly the way his dad had framed it. The dark cloud he had been under the past few years was finally shifting away.

  “I felt good about myself for the first time in a long while,” remarked Carl. “It was a great proving ground for what was to come in the next year…a life change I would have never expected.”

  On February 27, 1986, Lisa turned eighteen. Carl had been seeing her for almost a year. During the past six months, they had spent as much time as they could together. Through an emotional bond they believed existed between them, sexual intimacy came easy. “We fell in love,” Carl recalled.

  Every chance she had, Lisa begged Carl to let her move into his apartment. Because she was a minor and still in high school, Carl never considered it. If she felt that way after school, and the relationship was still going strong, he promised he’d give it a shot.

  The day before Lisa’s eighteenth birthday, Carl found himself sitting in his car outside the front of his father’s house holding Lisa in his arms as she cried. Over the past few weeks, she had really poured it on regarding moving into Carl’s apartment. It was time to be together, she demanded. “I want to be with you all the time.” They had even discussed marriage by then. But Carl was apprehensive, not because of her age, but “she was still in school.”

  “No,” Carl had said when Lisa asked. “Wait until you’re eighteen. I love you,” he added, “and do want to marry you. But everything is moving way too fast.”

  Carl didn’t want to go through the entire process of living with a woman to “see if it would work out.” Five years before he met Lisa, he had been involved with a woman he deeply loved. They’d had a child together (who would later die in an automobile accident). Because he was young and immature, he allowed the relationship to implode, and, he said, “I did a lot of things I wasn’t proud of.”

  Although intimacy wasn’t new to him, Carl “wanted true love, you know…. I wanted the whole thing. I was just coming out of a crisis in my life and had found myself, I guess you could say. I didn’t know that Lisa and I would work out. It scared me.”

  “Come on, Carl, let’s just give it a try?” Lisa pleaded.

  Carl stared out the window, shaking his head. “I don’t know, Lisa.”

  “Let’s just try it.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving in.

  The next day, on her birthday, Lisa packed her things and moved into Carl’s apartment.

  Carl was working nights at the prison, and Lisa was trying to finish her senior year in high school. Because they never saw each other, the relationship started out “rocky.”

  Lisa didn’t have much incentive after graduation to do anything with her life, Carl said. Reports would later claim Lisa was academically focused on going to college because she was so “smart.” But that wasn’t the case at all, Carl insisted.

  “Lisa never had plans of going to college after high school. She took the SATs, and did very well, but she wasn’t interested in school.”

  Lisa had talked about joining the U.S. Air Force, but the idea, like others, came and went. She wasn’t cut out for the strict schedule of daily life in the military, and she knew it.

  Carl and Lisa talked a lot about what she wanted to do with her life—vocationally speaking. Carl had a solid job he somewhat liked. He was making good money. But Lisa had no direction. Some nights she would stare at Carl and say the same thing over and over: “I want to be a mother, Carl. That’s my calling. To mother your children.”

  “Well, that’s a noble thing to want,” said Carl. “What is it, where is this coming from?”

  Lisa began weeping. “I want to correct the mistakes that were made in my life by my mother.”

  When school ended in June, Lisa went down and took the physical for the air force to see if it would take her. A week later, she was called into the recruiting office.

  “Even if you wanted to join, ma’am,” the recruiter told her, “there was no chance we could allow you in at this time.”

  “Why?” she asked. “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, ma’am…you’re pregnant.”

  87

  The first public photograph of Victoria Jo Stinnett was released a few days before Christmas. MSNBC was airing a shot of Victoria Jo that it had sliced from a video clip it captured of Zeb Stinnett holding her. The child appeared to be healthy, and had no visible signs of her violent delivery. The scratches on her face, clear in the photographs taken by Lisa’s children, along with the bruises on her chin and right eyelid, had healed. Victoria Jo looked happy, peaceful, and quite spirited. Her cheeks were a rosy red, the color you’d expect to see on any healthy newborn. In another photograph, published later by the New York Post, Zeb was smiling, if only slightly. Given the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth, it was a lovely snapshot of a newborn and her proud father: two people ready to take on the world together. Here was Zeb, cradling his little bundle, taking delight in her.

  Zeb told Post reporters, “It’s been rough. But I just look at Victoria Jo, pick her up, and that usually does it.”

  Zeb said he was changing diapers, filling bottles with formula, getting up at all hours of the night, feeding and caring for “Tori Jo,” while on paternity leave from Kawasaki Motors. It was clear he was determined to give the child as much care as Bobbie Jo would have.

  88

  When Lisa returned from the recruiting office and told Carl she was pregnant, Carl figured out the next juncture of his life rather easily.

  “Let’s get married,” he said. He was overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a father.

  Lisa smiled. “I’m so happy, Carl,” she said, running up and hugging him.

  The wedding wasn’t elaborate, but it was a celebration with family and friends of the love Carl and Lisa shared and the triumph of bringing a new life into the world. Lisa wore white and made a beautiful bride, while Carl donned the traditional black tuxedo.

  Next, with the apartment closing in on them, Carl began looking for a a bigger home. Within a few months, they moved to Hominy, Oklahoma, into a house Carl purchased from a colleague. Hominy was even closer to the prison. The house had three bedrooms. It seemed like the ideal situation.

  “Lisa was elated at being pregnant and wore the weight well,” remembered Carl. She had no morning sickness. No back pain. No complications whatsoever.

  More significantly, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, as Lisa began gaining weight and showing, that she was pregnant. Her appearance during pregnancy would become a major issue later—after she married Kevin Montgomery and claimed to be pregnant several times.

  “Like every pregnant woman, Lisa always had a glow,” said Carl. “There was never any doubt. It was always obvious.” (This comment contradicted a photograph taken of Lisa about four weeks before the government claimed she murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett and kidnapped her child, when Lisa was telling people in Melvern she was eight months pregnant. In that photograph, taken by one of her children, Lisa wore a sweatshirt, had her hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail, but showed no obvious signs of being pregnant. One would expect a woman eight months pregnant to have a large bulge in her midsection, but it wasn’t there. Moreover, any “glow” Lisa displayed during every other actual pregnancy was missing. Her face was oval and emaciated.)

  As the months moved
forward in 1986, Lisa’s impatience about her due date wore on Carl. She mentioned she was interested in drinking castor oil, which, according to an old wives’ tale, would hasten the birthing process.

  “You’re not doing that, Lisa,” Carl told her.

  “I will, Carl Boman,” she said, smiling coyly, raising her eyebrows, “if I want to.”

  Rebecca, an energetic, healthy baby, quite small, was born on January 11, 1987. Carl and Lisa were beside themselves with pride (“She’s gorgeous…look at her…”). It was as if Lisa had been put on the earth, just as she’d said, to be a mother. She did everything by the book: cleaned the house, kept up with the laundry, made dinner, and always made sure Rebecca was fed properly and had clean diapers. Carl was working nights and days at the prison then, so he depended on Lisa to take care of the home.

  “I couldn’t have asked for a better wife or caretaker for my daughter.”

  Perhaps even more important to Lisa’s life later on, during those early pregnancies, Lisa was adamant about going to the doctor, taking prenatal vitamins, encouraging Carl to touch her stomach when the baby moved, and allowing him to be involved in every aspect of the nine months she spent carrying the child.

  About nine months after Rebecca was born, Lisa went to Carl and told him to sit down at the kitchen table.

  “What is it?”

  She smiled.

  “Spit it out.”

  “I’m pregnant, honey.” She put Carl’s hand on her stomach. “We’re going to have another baby.”

  Lisa had never been more attractive. She had freckles and long brown hair that held a shine. She rarely wore glasses and had no trouble dropping the extra weight she put on while pregnant. On some days, Carl would arrive home and she would be waiting for him, all dolled up.