10. Bethany and Alisa Gore
Bethany and Alisa are the daughters of Betty and Allan Gore. Bethany was present at the home during the incident.
Alisa and Bethany Gore were just children when their mother, Betty Gore, was killed by Candy Montgomery in June 1980. Alisa, about five, had spent the night at the Montgomerys’ home. Bethany, still a baby, was alone in her crib for hours before her mother’s body was found in the utility room. After the trial, their father, Allan Gore, lost custody, and the girls went to live with their maternal grandparents, Bertha and Bob Pomeroy, in Norwich, Kansas.
Life in Kansas gave them a measure of stability far from the media glare that followed the case in Texas. Their grandparents kept them shielded from the ongoing coverage and the public anger over Candy’s acquittal, but the loss and the story surrounding it never disappeared completely. Family members often spoke of their frustration with the verdict, and the girls grew up under the quiet weight of that absence.
Alisa, who now goes by Lisa Harder, graduated from Norwich High School in 1992 and later earned an accounting degree from Kansas State University. She works as a business controller at Koch Engineered Solutions and lives in rural Kansas with her husband, Jonn, and their two sons, Sam and Jacob. Away from the office, she helps run the family’s small farm and raises pigs, occasionally sharing wry, affectionate posts about her mother on social media.
Bethany followed a different but equally steady path. A graduate of Wichita State University, she became an educator and now serves as an assistant principal at Coral Academy of Science in Las Vegas. She is married to Chad Mickey and has three children: Josie, Henry, and a daughter named Betty, in honor of the mother she lost.
Both sisters have spoken about the difficulty of growing up in the shadow of violence and the long process of learning to make peace with it. In an interview years later, Bethany said she believed their mother would be proud of the lives they built. Though their relationship with Allan was strained after they moved to Kansas, they now stay in touch with him through social media.
