Murder In The Heartland. M. William Phelps
her keys, Darlene opened her car door and walked toward Bobbie Jo’s front porch. Looking in both directions as she made her way up the one step, pushing the nub of her glass frames back up the bridge of her nose, Darlene Fischer didn’t see anyone around.
She and Bobbie Jo would be alone.
5
Brenda Standford* was at her Lyndon, Kansas, home on the previous night, December 15, getting her children ready for bed, when Darlene Fischer—although Brenda knew her by another name—had phoned with some rather remarkable news. According to the time frame Brenda later gave, the phone call was made shortly after Darlene had been in touch with Bobbie Jo Stinnett online and made plans to meet with her the following day in Skidmore.
At one time, Brenda saw Darlene Fischer nearly every day. They were coworkers, even close friends.
Already preparing for bed, Brenda was startled by the phone call, she remembered, because “it was so darn late.”
“Hi, Brenda,” said Darlene. She sounded cheerful, upbeat.
“Darlene? That you?” Brenda was a busy woman: kids, husband, two jobs. “Why you calling me so late?”
“I had the baby,” said Darlene in excitement. “Everyone’s doing fine.”
After a brief pause: “Wow,” replied Brenda, “you’re home from the hospital already?”
Brenda was under the impression Darlene had given birth earlier that morning, but she could tell she was calling her from home. It seemed strange the hospital would allow Darlene to leave so soon after giving birth.
“Yeah. You know, they ship you out of there so quick nowadays,” said Darlene.
Brenda was surprised. She knew insurance companies pushed new mothers out of hospital beds, if they were healthy, as soon as they could. But in under twenty-four hours?
“You and the baby are fine?” asked Brenda.
“Oh, yes. It went smooth.”
“So what’d you have?”
“A girl. Can you believe it?”
“Just what you wanted.”
“Yeah.”
Over the past few months, Brenda had spoken to Darlene almost daily about the baby. She believed, “without a doubt in [her] mind,” Darlene was pregnant. She would wear maternity clothes, or baggy shirts and sweaters, and talk about how excited she and her husband were about having the child.
“She would tell me that her ankles were swollen,” recalled Brenda. “How she was having terrible bouts of morning sickness. ‘My stomach is getting so hard,’ she’d say. And it was…I felt it,” added Brenda, before changing the subject slightly: “Up until the day everything happened, I believed her, because I watched her stomach grow. It was getting bigger, harder. She had me all the way.”
6
Bobbie 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.
7
As 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,