Murder in the Heartland (4 page)

B
obbie Jo Stinnett was under the impression she and Darlene Fischer had just met. But Darlene had met Bobbie Jo back in April 2004 at a dog show in Abilene, Kansas. Since that day, they had spoken online a number of times. Yet, she hadn’t introduced herself as Darlene Fischer—instead, she went by her real name.

Lisa Montgomery.

The use of two names seemed to fit into what some later claimed was a “split personality” Lisa Montgomery had developed during the six months before she showed up at Bobbie Jo’s house in Skidmore. “Lisa lied so much,” recalled one family member, “she believed her own lies. This is why I feel she has a split personality: her other ‘self’—or ‘others’—took over at some point.”

After the dog show in Abilene, Bobbie Jo had become friends with Lisa’s youngest daughter, Kayla. Bobbie Jo and Kayla corresponded online through e-mail and instant messaging quite frequently. Kayla admired Bobbie Jo. Even loved her, she said.

“The last time I talked to Bobbie Jo,” recalled Kayla, “…she was ecstatic about having her baby. She had a name picked out for quite some time…. She was telling me how [the baby] would sleep in their room (as they had a small house) until they could find a bigger house. I
know
Bobbie Jo would have been one awesome mother to that sweet little baby.”

So why was Lisa Montgomery disguising herself as Darlene Fischer? Why hide behind a false identity? Wouldn’t Bobbie Jo recognize Darlene as Lisa as soon as she answered the door? Wouldn’t it put Lisa in an awkward position?

It was indeed an odd circumstance that Lisa Montgomery put herself in: one more piece of the puzzle that wouldn’t make sense later when people learned of the unfathomable horror that was about to take place inside Bobbie Jo’s little farmhouse.

The corn and soybean fields stretch along Highway 113 far beyond where any of Skidmore’s 342 residents can see. In some areas, the vast flatness of the land runs adjacent to roadways made of gravel, cement, and blacktop, while rolling hills disappear into the horizon. Skidmore is a picturesque parcel of untarnished landscape, tucked in the corner of a state most locals feel blessed to call home.

“Skidmore ain’t dun changed in, I dunno, a hundred years,” said one local. “Same ol’ town here’a.”

The town is full of kind and generous people. Among the tumbleweeds, farmhouses, clapboard ranches, windmills, and one water tower, crime generally involves the theft of a John Deere tractor or a few kids popping out streetlights after lifting their daddy’s shotgun. When the lights go out and the moon settles over the rolling meadows bordering the town, beyond the subtle hum of a chorus of crickets, the only sound coming from town might be the echo of a dog’s lonesome bark or the drunken laughter of a local sippin’ whiskey, swinging on a porch hammock, having a grand ol’ time all by himself.

In the enormity of the Midwest, Skidmore is a flyover town many don’t know exists. People in town like it that way, and they respect the privacy the region offers. The beauty of the landscape is a constant reminder that every part of life—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—is rooted in the rich black soil that breeds it. Traditions thrive in Skidmore: in the one Christian church, the one café, the pinewood rocking chairs on just about every porch, and the souls of the men and women who work the land. One would think here, in this serene hush of a community, violence and murder would be unthought-of, if not for television crime shows piped into homes via satellite dishes.

But that has not been the case.

A
s Lisa Montgomery, posing as Darlene Fischer, made her way up to the Stinnetts’ front door, Bobby Jo was inside the house talking on the phone to her mother, forty-four-year-old Becky Harper, who lived nearby and worked at the Sumy Oil Company, two blocks east of where Bobbie Jo lived.

“Can you pick me up from work?” asked Harper. Becky had a son, too, ten-year-old Tyler, Bobbie Jo’s little brother.

“I’m expecting someone to come and look at a few dogs,” responded Bobbie Jo.

“My truck is getting some work done. I need a ride to the garage.”

There was a brief silence. Then, as Becky Harper was about to say something, Bobbie Jo must have been either startled by the slam of Lisa’s car door or heard the creak of the porch steps as Lisa approached. Because next, Bobbie Jo said, “Oh, they’re here, Mother. I’ve gotta go.”

After a few more words between mother and daughter, Bobbie Jo ended the conversation.

It would be the last time Becky Harper ever spoke to her daughter.

Bobbie Jo Stinnett graduated from Nodaway-Holt Jr.-Senior High School. Located in nearby Graham, one of Skidmore’s neighboring towns, the building itself was no larger than an elementary-sized school in most cities. In any given year, no more than 150 students are enrolled in the school.

Well-liked, Bobbie Jo was a cheerleader, involved in the 4-H Club, and worked on the school newspaper and yearbook. Her childhood friendship with Zeb blossomed into a high school romance (and, later, a dream marriage). Her academic work ethic made her not only an honor student, but one of the smarter kids in school. After graduation, one could easily assume, Bobbie Jo might have run away from Skidmore to find her place in a bigger city with more promise and a brighter future.

But that wasn’t what Bobbie Jo wanted. She was content with what life had given her in Skidmore.

“She kind of blossomed in high school,” a former teacher told reporters later. “She started to come out of her shell and [get] active in things [as she] gained popularity and friends.”

Just out of high school, during the fall of 2000, Bobbie Jo went to work in Maryville at the Earl May Garden Center, which specialized in pets. There she turned what was a love she’d had as a child for animals into a passion for breeding and raising her own dogs.

Her ex-boss said she was “exceptionally sweet,” adding, “She never had a bad thing to say about anyone.”

“Bright” and “cheerful” were common adjectives attached to descriptions of Bobbie Jo. She loved all animals and, one coworker said, had a “knack for them.”

“She loved horses, loved dogs; she adopted everything with a fuzzy face,” said a friend of the family.

After Bobbie Jo quit her job at Earl May’s, she started along one of her first career paths. Not because she didn’t like the work at Earl May’s, or the people. Instead, she felt the need to “earn more money” and be closer to her beau. She took a job at the Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corporation in Maryville, where Zeb, like hundreds of others in the region, sought employment after graduation. The Kawasaki plant opened in 1989 and focused on the production of general-purpose engines. Covering over 700,000 square feet on 113.7 acres of land, nearly the size of Skidmore itself, the factory employed well over six hundred people, many of whom lived in the immediate region.

“The pay is better,” Bobbie Jo told one of her coworkers at Earl May’s shortly before she quit. “Zeb and I are getting married soon. I need to make more money.”

People who knew Zeb and Bobbie Jo admired how comfortable they seemed around each other. Essentially, they were kids. Many high-school sweethearts who took the next step into marriage faltered later when they realized perhaps an important part of their lives had passed them by, and they had missed the chance to “sow some wild oats.”

The Stinnetts were different. Friends and family saw them celebrating fifty years of marriage, grandkids laughing and playing all around them. “They were perfect for each other,” recalled one friend.

Part of the bond they shared was knowing each other so well.

“[Zeb] is focused [on] car stereos and cars,” Bobbie Jo wrote on her Web site. “I am focused mostly on rat terriers.”

It was a loving jab, typical of Bobbie Jo’s gentle sense of humor, directed at a man who had been berated by Bobbie Jo’s aunt once for pulling up to her house with his stereo blaring so loud the porch windows rattled.

Bobbie Jo and Zeb lived their romance—that is, true romance—during a time when it seemed to exist only in Hollywood movies. Their relationship, some friends and family insisted, had been built on respect, companionship, friendship, and a storybook nuance missing in society today. It was evident in the way Zeb looked at Bobbie Jo and she at him. They could speak through a glance, a smile, or maybe just a hug.

In recent years, Bobbie Jo had been telling friends and fellow rat-terrier breeders on the Internet message board she frequented that she was planning on becoming a “Rat Terrier Breed Inspector.”

“I want to be a licensed judge for the NKC [National Kennel Club] and…press secretary for a UKC [United Kennel Club],” she said one day. Obviously, Bobbie Jo had dreams and goals. Working in a manufacturing plant was a stepping-stone toward something bigger, something better.

Breeders and owners register dogs with both the NKC and the UKC. Bobbie Jo wanted to know everything she could about the business end of breeding. She wanted to be involved on every level in order to benefit her customers and dogs.

Bobbie Jo was serious about breeding. She wanted her customers to get exactly what they were paying for and took pride in the way she ran her business.

“We follow the…Breeder Code of Ethics,” she wrote on her Happy Haven Farms Web site. “We are not a puppy mill and do not support puppy mills.”

The same couldn’t be said for Lisa Montgomery, who herself had been breeding rat terriers. Some had questioned the pedigree of Lisa’s dogs, saying she had misrepresented her bloodline. One woman had even written a letter to Lisa’s ex-husband, demanding access to any records he might have regarding one of Lisa’s dogs, Lucky. The AKC, the woman wrote, “require a three-generation pedigree.” As far as the woman knew, the terrier she purchased, Lucky’s grandson, was only a “two-generation” dog. She felt duped and was rather upset because she felt she didn’t get what she had paid for.

No one ever questioned Bobbie Jo or the pedigree of her dogs. She did things the right way—always. For example, when she showed her dogs, like the time in Abilene, back in April 2004, when she met Lisa Montgomery and Kayla Boman in person for the first time, she registered with the UKC because it was a UKC show.

“It’s just the way she was: Bobbie Jo lived by the book. She was glowing and seemed really happy.”

Soon after Bobbie Jo turned twenty-two, she and Zeb married. It was April 26, 2003, a peaceful, gorgeous spring afternoon at the Skidmore Christian Church, located about one hundred yards north of where Bobbie Jo and Zeb lived on West Elm. The Reverend Harold Hamon presided over the service. Friends and family, along with a “full-house church,” one attendee said, watched as Bobbie Jo walked down the aisle on her grandfather’s arm while Zeb waited at the foot of the altar for his bride-to-be. As Reverend Hamon recalled later, “And I asked, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ And the grandfather said, ‘I do.’ She was a beautiful bride.”

“They were kids in the neighborhood,” added the reverend, “nice young kids. She was just a real nice girl, real pretty, quiet and reserved.”

The wedding was a simple ceremony for two people who really didn’t need, or expect, much out of life—the love they had for each other was enough.

With his buzz-cut brown hair and quiet demeanor, the groom, Zebulon James Stinnett, had grown into a pleasant young man with a broad smile and round, open face. Zeb, one friend said, was “quiet and private; doesn’t say much of anything.”

Maybe that was one of the reasons why Bobbie Jo felt so close to Zeb: they were alike in so many ways.

After a small ceremony, which, it seemed, everyone in Skidmore attended, Bobbie Jo and Zeb rented that little place on West Elm, where they lived on the day Darlene Fischer/Lisa Montgomery walked into their lives. The white paint on the wood siding was flaking off; the roof, along with a few of the windows and doors, needed maintenance, but it was home. Zeb and Bobbie Jo were grateful for what God had given them. They had plans to buy their own place one day. They were young. Time was on their side.

“That was Bobbie’s Jo’s dream,” a family member later told reporters, “to own her own home.”

T
hrough the bumpy backcountry roads of Skidmore, the Kawasaki Motors plant in Maryville, where Zeb and Bobbie Jo worked, was a good twenty-minute drive from their home on West Elm Street. On the morning of December 16, Zeb grabbed his lunch bucket, kissed Bobbie Jo good-bye on the way out the door, and headed off to work. Bobbie Jo was going to be home, as she had been the past few weeks, on maternity leave from Kawasaki. She had a lot to do. In a matter of weeks, she and Zeb would welcome a new addition to their family and begin making plans to purchase a home of their own and maybe even have another child.

Life was sweet.

A strong guy, physically and mentally, Zeb was a few inches taller than Bobbie Jo, who stood five feet six inches. Zeb had broad shoulders and radiated a country toughness that spoke of his roots in town. There was one photograph of Zeb standing next to Bobbie Jo at a dog show. Lisa Montgomery and her daughter Kayla were in the same photograph, standing to Zeb and Bobbie Jo’s right side. Bobbie Jo was smiling, while Zeb held the ribbon she had won earlier with one of her prized rat terriers. With one arm around Bobbie and the other proudly displaying the purple ribbon, Zeb beamed with happiness.

Near the end of 2003, Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s Happy Haven Farms breeding business took flight. Their main business was breeding rat terriers. “Our dogs are all Type A’s…,” Bobbie Jo pointed out on her Web site. “We offer our puppies to GREAT homes only, as we’d rather keep ’em here, but realize we have to share.”

By most standards, the business was small, which was what Bobbie Jo liked. She and Zeb bred, on average, about one to two litters per year, but they had three litters between the summer of 2003 and late fall 2004. Bobbie Jo adored the small canines, especially her own terriers, Belle, Tipsy, and Fonzi; along with her Dalmatian, Maddy. Several photographs of her at various dog shows depict a young woman glowing with joy, showing her prized dogs, and just loving the life she and Zeb had built.

Near the end of March, beginning of April, Bobbie Jo officially announced she was pregnant with her first child. Within a few months, she and Zeb found out it was going to be a girl.

So Bobbie Jo picked a name.

Victoria Jo.

“Tori Jo,” she told Zeb one day, “will be the child’s nickname.”

Zeb didn’t like it all that much, but he wasn’t about to argue with his wife, who could be, some said, rather strong-willed and stubborn, but only when it pertained to good things.

Thus, Tori Jo she would be.

Soon after Bobbie Jo found out she was pregnant, she registered at the local Maryville Wal-Mart for things any first-time mother might desire: “newborn onesies, pink and yellow blankets, pink burp clothes, and a diaper bag.” She wanted common baby essentials that would help raise her daughter. What she could give the child more than any amount of money could buy was love—and she and Zeb, along with the Stinnett family and Bobbie Jo’s mother, Becky Harper, were fully prepared to shower little Victoria Jo with all the love she could handle.

With a due date of January 19, 2005, Bobbie Jo was resigned to quit her job at Kawasaki near the end of her pregnancy and concentrate on readying the house for the baby and breeding rat terriers. Like millions of proud expecting parents, Zeb and Bobbie Jo were enjoying life’s bliss in a trouble-free, uncomplicated way, just counting the days until their baby was born.

Life, indeed, should have gone on without a hitch.