- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
So Lisa Barlow Did It.
Lisa Barlow confessed this week to killing her Bollinger County boyfriend Michael Strong on July 27, 2007. She initially claimed an intruder committed the crime.
I knew Lisa from work.
Technically, I guess I still know her. But what I don't know is how the perky brunette who assembled the classified pages here at the Southeast Missourian was able to cold-bloodedly kill the man who had apparently opened his home and heart to her.
If she was unhappy with him -- and apparently she was, since it was reported that she was having an affair with her ex-husband at the time of the murder -- then why didn't she just leave? They could have parted as enemies or parted as friends or just parted. She didn't need to kill him.
I often worked on Lisa's computer here at the paper.
At the time of the murder when she was still employed at the Southeast Missourian, we were using QuarkXpress pagination software to build the classified pages. Quark's nick-name in the printing industry -- Quirk -- is accurate. It's especially buggy when you have hundreds of little electronic boxes containing text and images in a document with numerous pages. It makes for a recipe for instability. Lisa's computer was often unstable.
And when you work on a computer multiple times -- as I did with Lisa's -- you notice things about the user. With Lisa it was the photos of her grandson. She was obviously proud of him.
She also had a dozen of these "troll" head pencils and pens at her desk. That's where someone has taken brightly colored fake fur, stuck it on the end of the writing instrument and added those plastic googly-eyes and other accessories. I guess they made her laugh. I never asked why she had so many.
After the murder, the police asked the newspaper's management for a copy of any personal files or emails from her workstation.
I collected them and made a CD for the authorities. I still have a copy of those files on my own computer. I just never got around to throwing them away.
Not that there was anything incriminating within those documents. Lisa didn't get a lot of work emails, or if she did, she deleted them quickly.
Most of her other files consisted of humorous images or photos of her grandson or her ex-husband. I'd met him once or twice at our company Christmas party so I knew what he looked like.
There was nothing that gave any inkling as to what may have motivated her to shoot Michael Strong on the night of July 27, 2007.
The reports I read didn't say why Lisa decided to plead guilty. One would suspect that the case the authorities assembled was too damning for her to face a jury.
Based on the evidence I read about, I can't imagine that ANY jury would have found her not guilty.
Perhaps, the only "peers" that may have found her innocent of this heinous crime are those dozen or so troll pencils that used to decorate her workspace here at the newspaper.
At least they had something in common with her.
Respond to this blog
Posting a comment requires a subscription.