Kansas Woman Said to Show Off Stolen Baby (Woah...) Stolen Baby Reunited with Father

Kan. Woman Said to Show Off Stolen Baby
24 minutes ago
By JOHN MILBURN, Associated Press Writer

MELVERN, Kan. - A woman charged with killing an expectant mother and cutting the baby from her womb was showing the child off to people at a cafe and to her pastor hours before she was arrested, residents said Saturday.

Lisa M. Montgomery, 36, was charged Friday with kidnapping resulting in murder and was expected to appear in federal court Monday. The baby, whose mother had been eight months pregnant, was in good condition.

Hours before her arrest, Montgomery and her husband showed off a newborn girl at a restaurant, said Kathy Sage, owner of the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern, a small eastern Kansas town.

Many customers were surprised to hear the infant was only a day old, Sage said. She knew an Amber Alert had been issued for a baby missing from Missouri but did not realize the infant the Montgomerys carried was connected until hearing from a reporter on Friday.

"You read about this stuff," she said. "It blows you away when it's here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles."

Montgomery was arrested later in the death of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was found Thursday in a pool of blood inside her small white home in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore.

Authorities said Lisa Montgomery contacted Stinnett through an online message board, and investigators zeroed in on her using computer forensics. Montgomery was seeking to buy a dog from Stinnett, who raised rat terriers.

While Montgomerys ate breakfast, another customer showed the baby off around the cafe. After eating, they took the girl to visit their pastor.

Wheatley and his wife commented that the baby, whom the couple called Abigail, did not look like a newborn because her head was not misshapen from passing through the birth canal, a common result of childbirth that soon goes away. The only marks she had were a small scratch on her head and a slight bruise on her hand.

The pastor had not seen the couple since October, and everyone in the congregation expected her to give birth around Dec. 12.

U.S. Attorney Todd Graves said Lisa Montgomery contacted Stinnett through an online message board after seeing a Web site about the rat terriers Stinnett bred and raised. The site included a picture of Stinnett, showing she was pregnant.

Investigators searched Stinnett's computer and found the victim had been communicating through the message board with someone claiming to be a Darlene Fischer who lived north of Fairfax, Mo.

Authorities, helped by a North Carolina dog breeder who was familiar with the message board, determined the communication from Fischer actually came from Montgomery's house.

The Montgomerys were taken in for questioning Friday, and Lisa Montgomery was charged. Investigators said she confessed to the crimes.

Officials said Montgomery had not hired an attorney. Messages left by The Associated Press at the home of Kevin Montgomery's parents went unreturned Saturday.

Jeff Lanza, an FBI spokesman in Kansas City, Mo., declined to discuss motives and said the investigation was ongoing.

He would say only that Montgomery was being held in Kansas and was expected to make her first appearance in federal court Monday, though authorities did not know whether it would be in Missouri or Kansas.

The baby's father and several other family members saw the infant, named Victoria Jo, for the first time Friday night at Stormont-Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka.

The infant was in an intensive care unit. Hospital officials said she was responding normally for a baby taken from the womb one month premature.

The family was not speaking to reporters, but Victoria Jo's father, Zeb Stinnett, issued a brief statement calling her "a miracle."

"I want to thank family, friends, Amber Alert and law enforcement officials for their support during this time," he said.

Montgomery is the mother of two high-school-age children. Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Espey said Saturday that Montgomery had told people she was pregnant with twins, though investigators were still trying to determine if that was true.

"She told people she was pregnant and had a miscarriage and lost one of the twins," Espey said. "We're thinking she never was pregnant."

According to court documents, Montgomery traveled to Topeka, about 30 miles north of Melvern, on Thursday to go shopping. She called her husband from there, saying she had gone into labor and given birth.

Kevin Montgomery and the couple's two children met Lisa and the newborn in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Topeka and drove home, according to an affidavit.

The arrest stunned many townspeople who apparently had believed for months that Lisa Montgomery was pregnant.

How "could you not know that your wife's not pregnant?" said Gary Deskins, owner of a convenience store in Melvern, a community of about 420 residents. "There's something missing."

here's some more of her postings:

From: Kelimont (Original Message) Sent: 5/14/2004 11:49 AM
My 14-year old son called me at work today, crying so hard. He had let Mia out to go to the bathroom (so he could sweep and mop kitchen floor for me) and when he went back out to get her, Lucky had ahold of her by the neck shaking her.
He got Lucky loose, brought Mia in the house, called the vet and told him he was home by himself and could the vet please come as soon as possible as she wasn't moving.
He then called me at work, told me Mia had been attacked by something and that the vet was on his way.
I called for a replacement and then told him I would meet him at vets. When I got there, Mia was attempting to sit up, they had already started an I.V. on her and done X-rays. Nothing broken, but had got shaken really bad.
When I arrived back to the house, my son explaining amidst tears the whole way home, I found that Angel has numerous bites on her too. My son said that Angel tried to protect Mia.
So while I don't know what prompted Lucky to do that, it can't be tolerated here. I am sure, as is the vet, that being he is still in pain from being hit several months ago, that Mia nipped at him in play and he turned on her.
We are headed back to vets after lunch today, taking Angel in to be checked and to have Lucky put to sleep.
Please keep my children in your prayers tonight as Lucky was their very special boy and about the only thing their father has ever given them.

Lisa Montgomery

From: Kelimont Sent: 5/14/2004 4:56 PM
After being hit in the head by a car about two years ago, his personality changed alot. And this last time when his back legs got hit, he was in constant pain from the muscle and ligament damage.
We think Mia just wanted to play and he was not in the playing mood. But when Angel stepped in to protect Mia, he went after her too. So the decision was made. We miss him so much already. The only dog I know that could purr like a cat when he was happy and content.

Lisa Montgomery

Ex-hubby speaks out.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/10517491.htm
(subscription)

(not the entire article)
Lisa M. Montgomery was strangely obsessed with making people believe she was pregnant, said Carl Boman, her former husband.
“I never would have thought she was capable of this.”
Carl Boman has had 20 years to figure out Lisa Montgomery, his ex-wife and the mother of his four teenage children.
He said he knew her as untruthful and strangely obsessed with making people believe she was pregnant.

But when Lisa M. Montgomery was accused Dec. 17 of strangling another woman to death and stealing her eight-month fetus, Boman saw her in a chilling new light.

“We can paint any picture we want. She is a chronic liar, very selfish and her self-esteem is very low. She is very critical of others. She is not the kind of person you would want to be friends with. But I'm still shocked.”

Six days before the Dec. 16 killing of Stinnett, Boman had filed for custody of two of the four children he had with Montgomery, court records show. She had had custody.

On Monday, Boman, in his first extended interview since the crime, speculated that his ex-wife was desperate to avoid having to admit she wasn't pregnant.

“She was faced with the fact she would have had to admit in court she was not pregnant,” Boman said from the cluttered porch of his two-bedroom Bartlesville home.

“That is what we were going to use against her for her mental state.”

Boman, 43, said Montgomery had “got to the point where she did not want to be proven wrong because she would have been proven wrong in front of her husband and his family and the whole community. She did this to protect her own self.”

In the months before Stinnett's murder, Montgomery had told her current husband, Kevin Montgomery, her children and people who knew her in Melvern that she was pregnant.

Boman believes that his ex-wife saw pregnancy as a way of getting attention, but he said he never knew her to be violent.

Twice in the 1990s, when the Boman family lived in Arkansas and later in New Mexico, Montgomery pretended to be pregnant, even though she had had her tubes tied after a difficult pregnancy with her last child in 1990, Boman said.

The relationship begins

Boman met his future wife when she was in high school. He was seven years older and just out of the Navy. When they began dating, Boman's father and Montgomery's mother also were dating, Boman said. Both had had previous marriages.

Montgomery, then Lisa Hedberg, graduated from high school in Cleveland, Okla., in 1986. Three months later, she and Boman married. By that time, his father and her mother also had married, Boman said.

Lisa and Carl Boman had three girls and one boy in less than four years. Doctors advised against having more children, and Lisa Boman did not express any particular remorse over the years about the tubal ligation decision, Boman said.

The family moved frequently, living in several towns in Oklahoma as well as in San Diego, New Mexico and Arkansas.

“We went through a lot of different problems in our marriage,” Boman said, referring to her untruthfulness as just one of the issues.

“When I put my foot down, a lot of the lies would stop,” he said.

Boman said his wife was unfaithful. Court records show he filed for divorce in 1993 in Oklahoma. He then moved to Arkansas, but she moved there, too, because taking care of the children alone was too much to handle, Boman said.

In Arkansas, the couple grew closer again and became active in the Mormon Church.

“We started going to church and we remarried,” Boman said of their reconciliation in 1994. “We made a real effort to work it out. At the time, I think there was still love between us.”

After the remarriage, the family moved to New Mexico, where Boman's father lived. She worked in the circulation department of The Deming Headlight, the daily paper in Deming, N.M., and he worked at a restaurant.

But problems in the marriage resurfaced, and this time, in 1998, Montgomery filed for the divorce without stating a reason in her petition, court records show. After the divorce, he moved back to Oklahoma, and she moved to the Topeka area, Boman said.

Life often was a financial struggle for the Bomans.

He has worked at various jobs, mostly building construction, but is on disability because of an elbow injury. In recent years, Montgomery has worked at fast-food outlets and a convenience store, Boman said.

The couple has had periodic disputes over child support. Boman fell behind on child support payments more than once, according to Kansas court records.

Lisa Boman married Kevin Montgomery in 2000. The couple lived in a house near Melvern with her children. His children from a previous marriage live with their mother.

Kevin Montgomery has not been implicated in his wife's alleged plot to abduct Stinnett's baby. He has said he thought she was pregnant.

Boman said neither he nor the children have been in contact with Lisa Montgomery since her arrest. She is being held at the Leavenworth Detention Center.

Boman hopes the children can resume a normal life. He plans to seek counseling for the family.

“We're going to get out of this, and we're going to be better for it,” Boman said. “The Stinnett family is where our hearts are. It's a great loss on our side. It's a great loss on that side. Those are the ones we feel for.”

**Life isn't hard, just get a job and don't kill anybody.** richandfamous

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