Murder In The Heartland Part 27

106.

Back in January, Kayla Boman's sister Rebecca drove down to Georgia to visit with Kayla. It was time, everyone agreed, for Kayla to return home. She'd been gone since August 2004. Mom was in prison facing trial. Bobbie Jo was dead. Although reporters were still calling the house every once in a while, it was nothing like it had been.

"Do you want to come back home with me?" Rebecca asked as she and Kayla sat and talked about what had happened.

As she had said on the phone several times previously, Kayla repeated, "No, I'm staying here for a while longer."

Georgia offered Kayla what she felt she couldn't get anywhere else: serenity. Back home, she would face reminders everywhere. Staying at Auntie Mary's, she could go about life in surroundings that were still a bit foreign to her. Kids in school didn't bug her to answer questions. She wasn't put on the spot and asked to explain things. Some of her close friends knew what happened, but they didn't push the issue.

So, Rebecca, disappointed, left without her.

Two months later, in March, Kayla was talking on the phone with her brother, Ryan, one night. ("He sounded depressed," Kayla remembered, "and something in his voice just told me that it was time I go home. At first, I was just going to go home for my two weeks of spring break, but then I decided to stay.") In less than one year's time, Kayla had gone from living in a household with her mom to living with a friend of the family, to staying with her dad and his wife, whom Kayla had never lived with before. ("I didn't like my stepmother, so for the first few days we 'clashed,' so to speak, but then finally, at my dad's request, I apologized to her, and we learned how to get along. It was a lot different being with them, but I was glad to be back around family. Going back to school, I was sorta nervous. I hadn't seen most of the kids in my cla.s.s for about ten months.... I didn't want to switch schools again, and I definitely didn't want to have to try and make new friends. I just wanted some sort of normalcy in my life.") A normal life was something Lisa Montgomery had stolen from her children, regardless of whether she was innocent or guilty. For the most part, Kayla hadn't been in contact with Lisa since her arrest. "She killed my friend and took her baby."

In late May, Lisa sent Kayla a card and letter. Kayla's fifteenth birthday was approaching in August. Lisa wanted to give her a bit of advice along with a birthday wish. The heading of it read: G.o.d HAS A MASTER PLAN, AND ALL OF US PLAY A SPECIAL ROLE IN IT. Then, in the body, "Today we celebrate the part where you come in! Happy Birthday!"

Lisa quoted Jesus Christ next, "For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me...." Underneath, she made a box out of X's and hearts. Inside the box, she said she was "so glad" Kayla had been a "part of G.o.d's plan." She was grateful for "Him"..."allowing me to have you."

A one-page, single-s.p.a.ced letter accompanied the card. After talking about one of their rat terriers, Lisa said if she got a chance to "come home," she was thinking about showing dogs again. She wanted a "toy fox terrier," she wrote. It had to be a small dog, because she was planning on getting a "small apartment." She wanted a cat, too. And perhaps even a "toy poodle" she could dress up with "bows" and "paint" its "nails."

"She's living in some fantasy world," Kayla said aloud while reading. "I cannot believe this."

Later in the same letter, Lisa spoke of her discontentment at the notion Kayla might be dating, which she vehemently denounced. Sixteen years old was the age Lisa agreed her daughters could begin dating. If Kayla didn't abide by this rule, she would be "in defiance of me and G.o.d's laws."

"Let me see that," Carl asked when Kayla told him about the letter.

"Here, Daddy, look."

Carl shook his head. "You'd think, by reading this, Lisa had been arrested on a DWI charge."

At the end of the letter, Lisa took a jab at her mother. First, she told Kayla she had "unconditional love" for her and the rest of the kids. Nothing would ever change that. She didn't have to "like" what Kayla did-if, in fact, she was dating-"...but I will still love you." Then she said she would never "turn" her back on Kayla in the same way, she felt, Judy had on her. "I had enough" of her "'conditional' love," Lisa concluded.

107.

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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.

108.

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 a.s.sociated 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 the 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 a.s.sociate 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Const.i.tution. The Const.i.tution 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 a.s.sociation 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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?

109.

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 relations.h.i.+p 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.

110.

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 h.e.l.lo 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 ch.o.r.es."

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.