Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 34

Kevin Montgomery arrived home from work at 5:15 P.M. He had already arranged to take off the following day, a Friday. “Kevin had taken that day off from work so he could go to the hospital with Lisa,” a family member later confirmed. “Lisa had told him she was going to have her baby on that Thursday or Friday, so he put in for the day off.” Kevin was becoming a bit unnerved by the entire situation. Too many times Lisa had taken him with her en route to a doctor’s appointment, only to come up with an excuse along the way and send him back home. Every prenatal appointment Kevin and Lisa had planned on going to together failed to happen. Lisa would always instigate a fight so she could blow off the appointment at Kevin’s expense. Kevin wasn’t going to let that happen on Friday, he had said earlier in the week. He had gotten the day off and told Lisa there was no way she could stop him from going with her.

Kevin had short brown hair dusted with a tinge of gray, a thick goatee he kept well-groomed, and brown eyes. Kevin had been a self-proclaimed electrician his entire adult life, one source claimed. He and Lisa were married during the spring of 2000, about a year and a half after Lisa divorced Carl Boman for a second time. Kevin, too, had been divorced, and, like Lisa, had brought children from his first marriage into the new union. “Kevin was the type of guy whose mother, right up until the time he left high school,” said someone who knew Lisa and Kevin for years, “still laid all his clothes out every morning.”

The house Kevin and Lisa lived in on South Adams Road in Melvern, Kansas, was a modest farmhouse, big in structure and space, like many a Midwestern prairie home. Kevin and Lisa, many said, were attracted to the 1800s-era lifestyle made famous by the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Mike Wheatley, Kevin and Lisa’s pastor, said Kevin’s parents had been members of the church for over thirty years. So Kevin had strong, firmly planted roots in the Christian community of Melvern. With fewer than 450 people in the town, everyone knew Kevin, and no one had a bad word to say about him.

When Kevin got home on the evening of December 16, he wasn’t shocked to find Lisa was still out. Although she didn’t leave the house much, she had explained to him the previous night that she was getting up early that day to go shopping in Topeka for baby clothes and a Christmas present for Kayla. Kevin thought the trip out of the house would do her some good.

Around 5:30 P.M., Lisa called. She was in the parking lot, she said, of the Long John Silver’s restaurant in downtown Topeka. It just so happened the restaurant was across the street from the Birth and Women’s Center on SW Sixth Avenue.

“My water broke and I went into labor and had the baby,” Lisa said.

“What?”

“I delivered the baby. I’m on my way home right now.”

“Where are you?”

“Long John Silver’s in Topeka.”

“I’m coming to get you,” Kevin said.

“No, I’ll drive home. I’m okay.”

“No,” Kevin said. “Me and the kids will come and get you. Don’t go anywhere.”

Lisa’s fifteen-year-old son, Ryan^*, was home at the time with Kevin. Soon after Lisa called, Rebecca walked through the door.

“Damn it,” Kevin said to the kids after hanging up.

“He was a bit mad,” Ryan recalled, “that Mom had the baby.”

Grabbing the two children, Kevin hopped into his pickup truck and hit the road en route to meet Lisa and his daughter in Topeka.

It was time to celebrate. After all the talk of Lisa’s being pregnant and having one miscarriage after another, year after year, it seemed she had finally given birth to a child.