Lisa Montgomery: the cruel story behind the first woman executed by the US government in 67 years

Lisa Montgomery the cruel story behind the first woman executed by the US government in 67 years

Lisa Montgomery: the cruel story behind the first woman executed by the US government in 67 years

Lisa Montgomery the cruel story behind the first woman executed by the US government in 67 years
Lisa Montgomery the cruel story behind the first woman executed by the US government in 67 years
Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row in the United States, was executed Wednesday for murder.
He received a lethal injection in a Terre Haute, Indiana, prison after the United States Supreme Court lifted a last-minute suspension issued that same day by Judge James Hanlon.
“Ms. Montgomery’s current state of mind is so detached from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government’s motive for executing her,” Judge Hanlon wrote.
“Stay of execution is granted to allow the court to hold a hearing to determine Ms. Montgomery’s ability to be executed,” he added.
Her lawyers had argued that she suffered from mental illness and was severely abused as a child.According to witnesses, a woman standing next to Montgomery during the execution process removed the inmate’s mask and asked if she had any last words. Montgomery answered “No” and said nothing more.
She was declared dead at 01:31 (06:31 GMT). Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, said that everyone involved in the execution “should be ashamed.”
“The government stopped at nothing in its efforts to kill this wounded and delusional woman,” he said in a statement. “The execution of Lisa Montgomery was far from justice.”
Montgomery, 52, was executed for the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, when she was eight months pregnant.In December 2004, Montgomery, then 36, strangled her, then removed the baby from her womb and abducted him. The mother bled to death.
Her lawyers and activists opposed to the death penalty argue that the woman was a mentally ill victim of abuse, who deserved mercy. But many others think otherwise.For Diane Mattingly, there is a moment in her childhood for which she feels enormous gratitude, but also guilt.
He attributes that moment to his “fairly normal” life in a quiet home on 3.2 acres, a loving relationship with his children, and nearly two decades at a job in Kentucky, central America.
At the same time, he blames himself for the fate of his younger half-sister, Lisa Montgomery.
Mattingly and Montgomery lived together until they were 8 and 4 years old, respectively. They were in a terrifying home, Mattingly says, where physical, psychological and sexual abuse was routine by Montgomery’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, and her boyfriends.
The biological father of the girls left the house, and after a while Mattingly was transferred to a foster home. Montgomery stayed with his mother.
Lisa Montgomery and her half sister Diane Mattingly.
Lisa Montgomery and her half sister Diane Mattingly.
34 years passed before the half-sisters met again. And that would be in a courtroom, where federal prosecutors persuaded a jury to sentence Montgomery to death.
“They took a sister out and put her in a loving home and raised her and had time to heal,” says Mattingly. “The other sister was left in that situation, and it went from bad to worse. And then, in the end, she was devastated.”
In late December, the woman’s lawyers presented a petition to the president arguing that after a lifetime of abuse, torture, she was too mentally ill to be executed, that she deserved mercy.
However, in the small town of Skidmore, Missouri, where the crime was committed, there is little sympathy for her. Many believe that Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s final moments were so horrific that the death sentence is justified.
Lisa Montgomery and Bobbie Jo Stinnett met online for their love of dogs. They kept in touch for weeks on a forum for rat terrier breeders and enthusiasts. Montgomery told Stinnett that she was pregnant too and the couple shared pregnancy stories.
In December 2004, Montgomery drove about 280 km from his home in Kansas to Skidmore, where he had an appointment to see some puppies owned by Stinnett.
But it wasn’t Montgomery Stinnett was expecting, it was a woman named Darlene Fischer.
Fischer was a name Montgomery used when he began texting Stinnett from a different email address, asking for one of her puppies.
When Stinnett opened the door, Montgomery restrained the pregnant woman, strangled her with a piece of rope, and took the baby from her womb
Bobbie Jo Stinnett.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett.
Investigators quickly realized that “Darlene Fischer” did not exist and tracked down Montgomery the next day using her email and the IP address of her computer. They found her taking care of a newborn girl, she said she gave birth the day before. His story quickly fell apart and he confessed to the murder.
Since 2008, Montgomery has been held in a federal prison for inmates with special medical and psychological needs in Texas, where she has received psychiatric care. He was on suicide watch in an isolated cell.
Montgomery’s attorneys argue that due to a combination of years of horrific abuse and a series of psychological problems, he should never have received the death penalty. They believe that at the time of the crime, Montgomery was in a psychotic state and out of touch with reality.
In his defense, a chorus of supportive voices from the legal field was added, including 41 current and former prosecutors, as well as human rights entities such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
However, calls for President Donald Trump to be merciful were not unanimous. According to Gallup, while support for the death penalty in the United States is at its lowest level in more than 50 years, 55% of Americans still believe it is an appropriate punishment for murder. And nowhere is that support felt more palpably in this case than at Skidmore.
“Bobbie deserves to be here today. Bobbie’s family deserves it,” says Meagan Morrow, a Stinnett high school classmate. “And Lisa deserves to pay.”
Lisa Montgomery’s current legal team has conducted some 450 interviews with family, friends, doctors, and social workers. Together they have exposed family dysfunction, abuse, neglect, drugs and untreated mental illness around the convict.
“The whole story is tragic,” says Kelley Henry, one of the attorneys. “But one of the things the president can say to trafficked and sexually abused women, ‘Your abuse matters.’
For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it started before she was born. According to an interview with her father, Montgomery’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, drank heavily during her pregnancy and her daughter was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Multiple medical experts have given statements that match that diagnosis.
When Mattingly and Montgomery were young, Shaughnessy beat them and used cruel forms of punishment, such as covering Montgomery’s mouth or throwing Mattingly naked into the snow. After her biological father left the house, Mattingly says they were left alone with Shaughnessy’s boyfriends, at least one of whom began raping Mattingly.
Judy Shaughnessy Lisa Montgomery's mother
Judy Shaughnessy Lisa Montgomery’s mother
“Judy was manipulative and, I hate to use that word, but evil. She enjoyed torturing the people around her,” says Mattingly. “She was glad of that.”
After social services removed Mattingly from the home, Montgomery fell victim to her mother’s new husband, who according to statements from her other children, was a violent alcoholic who began sexually abusing Montgomery before his teens.
The family moved house dozens of times, but it was in Sperry, Oklahoma, where his lawyers say the abuse turned into something more like torture.
According to interviews with her half-siblings and others who spent time with the family, Montgomery’s stepfather built a shed in which he, and eventually his friends, raped and beat her.
Her mother also began trafficking in her, allowing workers such as electricians and plumbers to sexually abuse Montgomery in exchange for repairs.
As a teenager, Montgomery told her cousin that, telling him that men tied her up, beat her, and even urinated on her.
But the cousin, a sheriff’s deputy, confessed that he did nothing. In fact, he took her back home and left her in the hands of her abusers.
“They did nothing”
Attorney Kelley Henry says one of the things that irritates her the most is that adults in positions of authority were informed about what was happening, but did nothing.
When Shaughnessy finally separated from her second husband, she and Montgomery testified in the divorce proceedings about the sexual assaults. The judge scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse, but did nothing about it.
“There were so many opportunities that people could have stepped in and prevented this,” says Henry.
Judy Shaughnessy Lisa Montgomery's mother
Judy Shaughnessy Lisa Montgomery’s mother
Montgomery’s cousin says he lives with “regret for not talking about what happened to Lisa.”
When he was 18 years old, Montgomery married his stepbrother. The couple had four children in five years, but the relationship was not the end of the violence that Montgomery had hoped for. At one point, one of Montgomery’s brothers found a home movie showing Montgomery’s husband raping and beating her.
“It was violent, like a scene from a horror movie,” he said. “I felt sick watching the video. I didn’t know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it.”
Friends and family began to notice Montgomery’s tendency to retreat into “a world of his own.” His children were upset. Henry says this was an early sign of his mental illnesses, which include bipolar disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, and traumatic brain injury.
Montgomery eventually divorced her first husband and married Kevin. In that period, she repeatedly said that she was pregnant, although she was sterilized after the birth of her fourth baby.
One theory her lawyers put forward regarding the chain of events leading up to the murder is that Montgomery feared her ex-husband would expose her lies about the pregnancy and use them against her as she sought custody of her children.
“There was a lot of pressure on her at the time,” says Henry, who describes Montgomery’s ex-husband as cruel and harassing. “She was completely cut off from reality.”
Her lawyers say that when she lost that status, she was taken over, fantasized about being pregnant.
Henry says Montgomery’s first defense, when she was arrested and charged with murder, was woefully inadequate and has since shown some of the details about her abuse, trauma, and mental illness.
His attorneys at the time also put forward an alternative theory of the crime, which was that Montgomery’s brother had committed the murder, even though he had an alibi. That was eventually ruled out in favor of an insanity defense, but Henry believes the damage to Montgomery’s credibility had already been done.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. The next day, she was sentenced to death.
Diane Mattingly spoke publicly for the first time now.
Diane Mattingly spoke publicly for the first time now.
Diane Mattingly has been speaking publicly for the first time in the hopes that she can make a difference.
“I would say to him: ‘President Trump, I want you to look at the life that Lisa had led, I want you to see all the people who have failed her, I want you to look at the rape, the torture, the mental abuse, the physical abuse that this woman suffered. ‘”, He says.
“I ask you to have compassion on her as a person who has been failed over and over and over again. And not let her down.”
“Quiet and friendly”
The small farming town of Skidmore is located in the far northwest of Missouri. Long ago it was the kind of place where you could “cut your hair, see a show, buy rabbit food and have dinner”, but those da
When she was murdered, she was newly married and pregnant with her first child.
Although the alumni have scattered somewhat, in recent years, the Nodaway-Holt RVII High School Class of 2000, which had only 22 students, has a tradition of commemorating the anniversary of their classmate’s death.
They raise funds and try to do something good for Stinnett’s mother: “Last year, we gave her flowers, we gave her a gift card worth over $ 100, and then we paid the water bill,” says Jena Baumli.
The murder of 16 years ago has never been forgotten by the inhabitants of the city.
On the one hand, from the outside they have not been allowed to forget. It has been the subject of two books, multiple crime TV shows, documentaries, and countless podcast episodes.
And while there has been much recent debate about the fairness of Montgomery’s sentence in the courts and in newspapers like The New York Times, the case is not up for debate.
“I think in many of the op-ed pieces that are published, in many things that people share, Bobbie Jo and her daughter, and her mother, her husband, and other friends and family, are being forgotten,” says Tiffany Kirkland, a of his former colleagues.
“She always wanted to be a mom,” Baumli explains. “She was really the first to have a decent marriage, you know, and I guess looking at Bobbie Jo was like seeing what your dreams were when you were younger.”
The murder of 16 years ago has never been forgotten by the inhabitants of the city.
Due to his reputation for being tolerant, Morrow remembers instantly rejecting the first news of Stinnett’s murder.
“I was like, ‘Oh, not her.’ You know, that doesn’t happen to Bobbie,” Morrow says.
But what happened in the modest log house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation.
Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong says the scene he and his four colleagues found that day was so bloody that they are still traumatized. It infuriates him even more that it was Stinnett’s mother who found her that way.
“The people who defend her… I wish I could take them back in time and put them in that room,” he says. “And then say, ‘Look at this body.’ And then, ‘Stay there and listen to the 911 call [from Stinnett’s mother]. This is a nightmare thing.”
Many of Skidmore residents cite the details of the crime and the amount of planning that went into it as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer.
Randy Strong, the Nodaway County Sheriff.
He had met Stinnett online under a false name. She had bought a home birth kit and searched online for how to perform a cesarean. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie to the end.
But Dr. Katherine Portfield, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Montgomery and spent about 18 hours with her, says psychosis doesn’t always look the way people expect.
“Being psychotic does not mean that you are not intelligent, or that you cannot act in a planned way,” he says.
“We have seen crimes for years and years in our country where people exert terrible violence that arises from a psychotic set of beliefs or thought processes. Lisa Montgomery is no different. She generated this from the clutches of a very broken mind. “.
The baby was returned to his father, after he was found with Montgomery.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s house is abandoned.
Bobbie Jo’s mother and husband have not spoken publicly. But Strong says this is the first year she’s heard directly from Stinnett’s husband. He thanked the bailiff for getting his daughter back and allowing him to be the father his wife couldn’t see.
“I cried,” Strong says. “The whole community is traumatized by this.”
Baumli, a friend from school, says she has read about Montgomery’s abuse, but it only makes her upset, believing that it is not as if all the other people in Skidmore lead idyllic lives free from abuse, poverty and other destructive tragedies.
When Stinnett was murdered, Baumli was in rehab for drug addiction. She missed the funeral for that, exemplifies: “Let’s say I wasn’t clean for a long time,” she says.
“I’m sick of hearing about Lisa Montgomery and what happened. And you never talk about what my friend went through,” she adds. “I have these images in my head of [Bobbie Jo’s mother] finding her daughter that way.”
A protest against federal executions of prisoners in front of the Justice Department in December.
As of July 2020, there had been no federal executions in 17 years. At the state level, the number of convictions and executions continues to decline to historic levels. In 2020, only 18 death sentences were handed down and the number of executions carried out reached a 30-year low.
President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end the death penalty proceedings, although he has not said when.
More recently, states that have carried out executions, such as Texas and Tennessee, have stopped and delayed executions due to the pand