Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 17

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, 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.”