Murder In The Heartland. M. William Phelps
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.
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By approximately 3:18 P.M., Becky Harper was getting worried about her daughter. She hadn’t heard back from Bobbie Jo after their last conversation, which Harper believed was interrupted by a customer who wanted to purchase one of Bobbie Jo’s rat terriers. A law enforcement official later said Bobbie Jo had even told Harper the person’s name.
“Darlene Fischer.”
Harper needed a ride to the garage to pick up her truck. But where was Bobbie Jo? What was taking her so long? Why wasn’t she answering her phone?
Something was wrong.
According to law enforcement, at around the same time, Lisa Montgomery, posing as Darlene Fischer, was inside the house with Bobbie Jo. They were in the den, a room off to the left after you walked in, talking about several rat terriers Bobbie Jo had for sale. What wasn’t clear later would be how Bobbie Jo reacted to meeting up with Lisa on that day, rather than with a woman named Darlene Fischer, whom she thought she had never met.
“It seems clear to me, but we don’t know for certain,” that same law enforcement official said, “that Lisa Montgomery likely knocked on the door and just introduced herself as herself, maybe playing like she was ‘in the neighborhood.’”
If that were the case, Bobbie Jo would not have felt threatened in any way. She and Lisa had met and talked fairly regularly online. Bobbie Jo was under the impression Lisa was pregnant, too; and Lisa knew, of course, Bobbie Jo was expecting in a matter of weeks. Perhaps Lisa told Bobbie Jo she was just stopping by to say hello and wanted to swap stories as expectant mothers often do.
She was born Bobbie Jo Potter on December 4, 1981. That same year, Skidmore was on the verge of moral collapse. Not because the town’s soybean or corn crop had dried up from the little bit of rain the region somehow endured, or the pig farmers had lost herds to disease. No. If that were the case, those problems could be dealt with agriculturally, or even governmentally, with funding and grants.
Instead, Skidmore’s biggest problem was an event that would set an eerie precedent for some twenty years to come.
In 1981, a man had been running through Skidmore causing chaos and havoc. Ken Rex McElroy, a bull of a man with a beefy chest, tough jawline, and “I-don’t-care-about-anybody-but-myself” attitude, had bullied his way through life in the same fashion an obnoxious senior in high school might torment a few chosen freshmen. The only difference was, McElroy beleaguered an entire town.
In fact, McElroy had terrorized not only Skidmore, but much of western Missouri for years. Locals had complained about his taking what he wanted, abusing the women in his life, drinking, fighting, shooting people, burning down houses, intimidating witnesses called to testify against him, and seemingly always finding a way to escape the mighty sword of the law, simply because people—judges and prosecutors included—feared his fury.
No one, it seemed, could catch McElroy committing a crime; thus he continually found a way to evade prosecution, having been arrested seventeen times without spending a night in jail.
On July 10, 1981, McElroy’s violent run finally ended. Several townspeople, in an act of congregated and choreographed vigilantism, unloaded round after round of ammunition into his head and chest, killing him almost instantly, as he sat in his pickup truck alongside his wife, Trena, in downtown.
The brutal crime, immortalized in the bestselling book and movie In Broad Daylight, gave Skidmore a bit of unfortunate, violent notoriety that contradicted the true soul of the town.
McElroy pushed his luck. The breaking point for townsfolk came after he beat a reported twenty-two criminal counts in court, but was convicted of an assault for shooting a helpless, seventy-one-year-old town grocer whom he had intimidated and threatened for months.
Law enforcement had seen enough; the judge ultimately sentenced McElroy to two years in prison.
Shortly before he was murdered, Skidmore residents were astonished to learn that instead of going directly to prison, McElroy showed up in town hours after he was convicted. Apparently, he had been “freed on bail during a twenty-one-day appeal” process.
People were dazed. They couldn’t believe it. After all he had done, everyone he had hurt, here was Ken McElroy, at last being sentenced, yet escaping justice one more time.
On the afternoon he was murdered, McElroy walked into the D&G Tavern downtown, as he had many times before, proudly displaying what was said to be “an assault weapon.” After purchasing “a six-pack of beer, cigarettes” and a package of acid relievers, McElroy and his wife walked out the door and sat in his Silverado truck.
McElroy seemed to be patronizing an entire town by showing up after being sentenced. He was gloating, once again intimidating the people who had wanted him to pay for his crimes.
Locals who had heard McElroy was back in town gathered at the local Legion Hall a few blocks from the D&G.
Dan Estes, the local Nodaway County sheriff, was at the meeting, too, he later said on a radio program, trying to get a handle on what had become a mob mentality. But when he left, reports claimed, thirty or more angry residents, all armed, walked down to the D&G.
As the mob came around the back of the storefront, McElroy’s wife, just getting into his truck, asked, “What are they doing?”
McElroy was at a loss for