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From San Diego, Carl, Lisa, and the four kids moved to El Cajon, just northeast of Lemon Grove, maybe twenty miles north of San Diego. When Lisa asked Carl to “please try” for the sake of the kids, Carl thought about it and decided, against his better judgment perhaps, to give Lisa one more chance. (“Actually, things were going a lot better.”) It was now well into the spring of 1991. (“Our relationship was working…. We started talking again, communicating better.”)
According to Carl, he and Lisa “cleared the air” one night about a lot of things and “opened up to each other” for what was the first time in years.
Looking back, Carl said he had to, at times, “allow Lisa to get things off her chest” while he was there “to listen to her.” He had never done that before they moved to El Cajon. “I needed to start allowing her to justify her actions,” he added. “It was like a game we played.”
Lisa often used guilt as her weapon, and started to blame him for things.
“Okay, okay, okay, Lisa. It’s my fault.”
Carl said, “It got better when we moved because I allowed it to. Not that I let Lisa run over me and stomp on me. But I let her vent and be ‘Lisa.’”
Lisa and Carl had different ways of showing affection toward each other. Lisa liked to hold hands and cuddle. Carl didn’t. Lisa enjoyed dinner for the two of them alone while the kids slept. Carl didn’t. Lisa wanted someone to hold her at night and tell her everything was going to be okay. Carl rarely was willing to do that. To him, working two jobs and taking care of his family financially showed the love he felt.
After they settled in El Cajon, Carl cut back his hours. He took walks with Lisa, while she hung on his shoulder. (“I had never done that before.”)
El Cajon didn’t turn out to be the best place to fix the marriage. After a few months, as the relationship seemed to stay afloat, they decided it was time to head back to the Midwest—back to Bartlesville.
“The reason we moved back to Oklahoma at that time,” Carl said, “was because of Judy. A lot of these things were because of Judy and my father. We moved out to San Diego because my dad wanted us to. During this whole relationship Lisa and I had—and I don’t want to sound like I am blaming her for anything—Judy was involved in every way she possibly could. Sometimes, with me in the wrong, I took up Judy’s side against Lisa, which caused a conflict.”
Carl said at that time he trusted Judy more than Lisa.
As soon as they got settled back in Bartlesville, Carl left his job as an operations manager at Wells Fargo (he had transferred from San Diego) and went to work for a refining company. Although he had cut back on his hours to help in mending the marriage, he and Lisa decided “together” that Carl would once again start working “a lot of overtime in order to purchase a house” of their own. They wanted a two-story Colonial, with big rooms for their large family.
At this point, Lisa neglected her duties as a mother and allowed the kids to live in filth, some later said. She rarely washed dishes, or kept clean clothes on the children. Carl couldn’t do much about it because he was always working.
Lisa, Carl would later tell the press, soon met a local Bartlesville man, who was also married, and started an “affair.” Carl found out when the guy’s wife showed up at the house one day and “kicked Lisa’s ass right there on the front lawn.”
After the fight, Carl decided he’d seen enough. He moved out and into his sister’s house across town. With the marriage over, Carl gathered the paperwork for what he described as a “quickie” divorce. He and Lisa agreed on the terms, filled out the paperwork together, and submitted it. While they waited for it to go through, Carl took the four kids, transferred back to Wells Fargo in San Diego, and moved in with his father and Judy, who were still living together.
On the divorce papers he and Lisa filled out, Carl sought sole custody of the children. But while he was in California with the kids, he decided to return to Oklahoma alone to look for a place to rent so the children could be closer to Lisa.
With the kids in California with Judy and his dad, Carl took off for Bartlesville. But as soon as Lisa got word of his return, she took off for San Diego. Part of the divorce filing they had agreed upon stipulated that the kids were not to move out of the state where either parent was living. If a parent moved and took the kids, the divorce would be nullified before it even went through.
Although Carl said he was “on vacation” in San Diego, just putting some space between him and Lisa while they figured out how to make the divorce legal, he claimed Judy enrolled one of the kids in school out there behind his back, thus violating the quickie divorce they were seeking.
Lisa, while out in California with her new boyfriend, decided she was going to take the kids back to Oklahoma with her.
“She literally tried taking Alicia right out from Judy’s daughter’s hands,” Carl said. “At this time, you have to understand, no one in Lisa’s family would have anything to do with her.”
Judy was in church when Lisa showed up. Ryan was sitting with Judy, Kayla in the church nursery, while the other two girls were in Sunday school, in the basement of the church.
“I was told Lisa was in town trying to get the kids, so I grabbed Ryan and gave him to my other daughter’s husband,” Judy recalled. Judy then ran outside, where she spied Lisa coming up the church steps with her boyfriend.
“Stay out of my way,” Lisa said, heading toward Judy in a rush.
Just then, Judy’s son came out of nowhere and, according to Judy, jumped on Lisa’s back and struggled with her.
While Lisa was fighting with her brother, Judy ran and gathered the kids together and put them in the car. (“I took them and hid them where Richard was working.”)
After handing off the kids, Judy switched cars, drove to the town house where they were all staying, grabbed some of their clothes, and called Carl. “Meet me at my sister’s house in Texas.”
“I’ll be there, Judy.”
Lisa had a legal right to get her kids and bring them home. She believed Carl and Judy conspired to hide the children in California while Carl worked at getting legal custody back in Oklahoma. Seemingly, Lisa figured it out and wanted her children back.
As Judy took off to her sister’s house, Lisa went to the police.
En route, Judy called home. Her pastor, who had become involved, answered the phone.
“Judy, if you don’t bring the children back, they are going to arrest Richard.”
“Pastor,” Judy said, “what should I do?”
“Keep going. I’ll take care of Richard.”
Later, Judy said, “I was told they had a warrant out for me for kidnapping. Oh, well. Lisa should have known better than to come to the church with another man and try to take the kids. She failed.”
From California, Judy drove to San Antonio, where she and Carl agreed to meet.
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September 2005 came and went without the government filing its “Notice of Intention to Seek the Death Penalty.” A month later, the case against Lisa Montgomery became major news again after one of the top death penalty lawyers in the country filed paperwork to join Lisa’s defense team.
Born in 1953, fifty-two-year-old Judy Clarke grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, “where she dreamt of becoming Perry Mason or the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” her bio states.
Clarke had worked on a few of the most high-profile death penalty cases throughout the past few decades. In April 2005, she represented Eric Rudolph, a devoted follower of antiabortion, antigay, and anti-Semitic white supremacist groups, who eluded capture for nearly six years while hiding in the Appalachian Mountains. In 2003, Rudolph was caught in Murphy, North Carolina, and charged with “carrying out a string of bombings that killed several people and wounded over one hundred.” Covering the case, the Associated Press called Clarke an “expert at cutting deals.” Before saving Rudolph’s life, she negotiated a plea for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski that took the death penalty off th
e table. She had worked on the defense of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only defendant charged in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, before she joined Eric Rudolph’s team.
With her short brown hair and tomboyish looks, Clarke has always been open about her core belief that there is no room for the death penalty in American court. She was described as a “one-woman Dream Team” by an associate who helped her defend Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who avoided a death sentence after being convicted of drowning her two children. Married for twenty-plus years to Speedy Rice, an attorney and teacher at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, Clarke has developed a reputation over the years for being able to empathize with her clients in a way that convinces them to believe in her.
After successfully sparing Susan Smith’s life, Clarke donated her $83,000 fee “to a group that defends the poor in capital cases.” Moreover, when she heard that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s alleged co-conspirator, were going to be tried separately, Clarke, who rarely spoke to the press, said, “At a time when Congress and the presidential contenders appear willing to do or say anything to seem ‘tough on crime,’ Judge Matsch’s ruling should be commended by all Americans who believe in the United States Constitution. The Constitution says both of these men are innocent until proven guilty, and each of them is to be judged separately and fairly. That way, all, including the victims and survivors of the bombing, can be more certain of the ultimate outcome.”
Lisa Montgomery couldn’t have asked for a more experienced death penalty lawyer to come forward.
“She is the patron saint of defense lawyers,” Gerald Goldstein, the former head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told a reporter in 1996. “Her specialty is impossible tasks that require untold amounts of labor and imagination. There is not anybody I’d rather have at my back in my courtroom.”
Many believed that with Judy Clarke now in Lisa’s corner, Lisa had a good chance of being able to cut some sort of deal. However, Todd Graves had made it clear the government wasn’t interested in cutting a deal that would allow Lisa to escape the death penalty. Sure, she could plead her case out, but insiders said Graves would not waiver on the death penalty—that is, he would accept a plea, but only if Lisa faced a jury on the issue of sentencing.
Statistically speaking, Lisa’s chances at getting life in prison were good. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2004, 125 inmates were in prison facing a death sentence, adding to a total number of state and federal death row inmates somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,200. Throughout the past two years leading up to 2004, however, death row admissions declined. Since the latter 1990s, in fact, the actual number of death sentences decreased by nearly 50 percent. Part of the recent change in jurors’ minds, some experts claim, is that over the past three decades, “120 innocent people” have been emancipated from death row, many because of DNA evidence and the technological advancements made in science overall.
The question became: would Lisa Montgomery want to gamble with her life?
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Judy was in San Antonio with the kids when Carl arrived. He wanted them back. A deal was a deal. Lisa was in love with another man now. She was talking about getting married again. It hurt. But Carl felt he could manage. Lisa had agreed, according to Carl, to allow him to raise the kids. If she wanted to end the marriage, that was her decision—but he was getting the kids.
Lisa had apparently changed her mind. But instead of heading to San Antonio herself, Lisa made a beeline for Oklahoma, to a court of law, where she filed paperwork to take the children back legally and, at the same time, divorce the man who had, in her view, kidnapped his own children.
After spending the night in San Antonio, Carl woke up to find out he was being ordered to court later that same morning. “They subsequently awarded Lisa with custody of my kids…,” Carl recounted.
The court found Carl had not “gone on vacation” to San Diego, but had taken the children and was planning on staying out there.
The divorce went through and Lisa was awarded custody and child support. But as time moved forward, she started showing up at Carl’s house more and more, complaining about her relationship with her new boyfriend. Things weren’t going as planned, and Lisa was having second thoughts.
“She actually spent more time with me than she did with him.”
Carl sensed that Lisa’s visits had little to do with the children and more with her wanting to spend time alone with her new boyfriend. Carl became, essentially, her babysitter. He claimed she used his love and devotion to the kids to open up leisure time with her boyfriend.
With Lisa living with her new beau right down the street, Carl ended up having the children more than if he had gotten custody of them himself. Lisa would drop them off and take off for days at a time without word of where she was going or when she’d be back.
But when the boyfriend figured out he had to pay an exorbitant amount of child support to his wife and he was also going to be responsible for Lisa’s four children, he left.
By herself now once again, Lisa did what she had always done when faced with living life on her own: she ran back into the arms of Carl Boman.
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As her trial date neared, Lisa sat in prison working on drawings and sending letters to her children. Soon she would have to decide whether to fight for her freedom at a full-fledged, high-profile trial, or see what type of plea deal Judy Clarke could cut for her. In either case, it didn’t look good for Lisa.
Rebecca, who had moved in with Kevin’s parents after Lisa was arrested, was focusing on work and school. She was a firm supporter of her mother, one of only a few left. Every Tuesday, she drove from Melvern up to Leavenworth to sit and talk with her mom. Rebecca had mixed feelings toward Carl. As she saw it, she could overlook the many times her dad promised to visit but failed to show up, or that, in her view, he had faked having cancer. Yet there was one instance, even when she spoke about it later, she couldn’t seem to shake.
“The worst was, my dad and his wife moved like two miles from where we lived with Kevin and my mom.” Indeed, Carl and Vanessa, shortly after they married, rented a house maybe a mile-and-a-half down the road from Kevin and Lisa’s farmhouse. It was, for a while, the perfect situation: the kids would ride their bikes over to the house and visit their dad whenever they wanted. Lisa could drop them off if she and Kevin wanted some time alone, or Carl could even pop in and just say hello to them.
One day, after school, the kids rode their bikes over to the house and sat with their dad for a while just talking.
Everything seemed fine.
After an hour or so, Rebecca recalled, “We had to go home to do a few chores.”
When they were finished, they rode back.
“They were completely gone,” Rebecca said later, her voice cracking. “They just up and left without saying a word.”
According to Rebecca, for years afterward, the kids would only see or hear from Carl and Vanessa sporadically.
Carl viewed the situation differently.
“Lisa was at the house all the time. Lisa and Vanessa fought. It was not a good atmosphere for the kids, or our relationship. Vanessa didn’t understand what Lisa was like at that time, but she soon learned. It was my decision to leave and not tell the kids. It was wrong, I know. It has been thrown in my face. I just couldn’t face them with this disappointment: I moved up there just to move out again. But to me it was an unbearable situation with Vanessa and Lisa. I took the coward’s way out, and it has haunted me and hurt the kids and my relationship, especially with Rebecca.
“And believe me, Lisa played it for all it was worth.”
Rebecca was quick to say later, “I love my dad to death…. I love all of my family.” But part of her, still, feels torn between a mother in prison, awaiting trial for murder and kidnapping, and a dad who, she said, hasn’t been there for her. She started college in the fall of 2005. No one helped her. She bough
t all her own books, paid for tuition, and worked two jobs in order to keep up with a mountain of bills. Even her high-school graduation was marred by disappointment when she had to pay for her own cap and gown.
“It’s really hard,” she said. “I live here in Kansas, and they [my dad and sisters and brother] live in Oklahoma. They never call me. I have to call them. They never come see me. I go see them. It takes two, you know. I tell them: ‘You guys have to make the effort, too.’”
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After Lisa split up with her boyfriend, she was left with a house full of kids and no one to take care of her.
Lisa went back to what she knew—and started working on Carl. Thus, in early 1995, despite everything they had been through, Carl was faced with the notion of taking Lisa back. “I decided to hear her out.”
One might wonder why Carl Boman kept reuniting with a woman he knew was eventually going to let him down. How could he allow Lisa back into his life after she routinely disappointed him? Did he expect her to change?
“Why would a woman being abused by her husband keep going back?” asked Carl later, comparing his motives to those of a battered spouse. “My family included Lisa at that time. She had nowhere to go. We didn’t jump right back into it in an instant as if nothing happened. We talked about how we could start fresh and see if there was any way to work it out. We didn’t sleep in the same room. I worked ten-hour days, six days a week while Lisa took care of the kids. We grew back together naturally…. You have to realize my desire to keep my family together. I grew up without my dad. We connected later, but he was gone for a major part of my life. I always longed for my own family. I love my children as much as any father. I guess I had one last try in me.”
In the end, Carl said, “I did it for the kids.”
Throughout the early 1990s, several large food corporations had built up a presence in Springdale, Arkansas. When Lisa and Carl moved back in together, most were advertising in Tulsa and Bartlesville newspapers, looking for workers. Carl had just gotten laid off from a job he enjoyed at a local food warehouse. Although he and Lisa were now officially divorced, they were talking regularly and trying to work out their differences.
Murder in the Heartland Page 29