"This was a very coordinated and determined plan to ensure that as many people could be executed on federal death row as possible before the end of this administration term.". Montgomery also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and major depression, jurors were told. The next morning, Lisa and Kevin Montgomery showed off a newborn girl dressed in a pink bonnet as they ate breakfast at the Whistle Stop Cafe in downtown Melvern. ", Strong said he arranged for that message to be shared with the four others, "because we were all a part of that.". Only around 2% of inmates on death row are women. Read about our approach to external linking. Two days before the crime, her former husband (and stepbrother) sought custody of two of her children. Patterson and Shaughnessy divorced in 1971, and Shaughnessy took custody of the girls. As the car drove further and further away, Mattingly began to vomit. But Fischer was a name that Montgomery had been using when she separately began messaging Stinnett from a different email address inquiring about buying one of her puppies. She was forced to sit in a high chair for hours if she did not finish her food. School friend Baumli says she's read the descriptions of Montgomery's abuse, but it mostly just makes her angry. And then go, 'Stand there and listen to the 911 call of [Stinnett's mother]. Many of the residents of Skidmore cite the details of the crime, and the amount of planning that went into it, as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological and sexual abuse Lisa. "That sent a chill up my spine," Strong said. Teddy Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was 45 years old when he was fatally shot in 2019 in North Topeka. Montgomery claimed to live in northwest Missouri. Mattingly says looking back to the moment life changed for her as an eight-year-old, she feels guilty that when the social workers came for her, she didn't tell them what was going on in that house. "I fell in love immediately.". In Montgomerys early childhood, her older sister, Diane, suffered the worst of the violence. Montgomery was put on suicide watch as soon as her execution date was set, Henry said, adding thatMontgomery had previously attempted suicide but not since 2012. Montgomery lived during her childhood in Washington, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, California and Texas. Skidmore has suffered lasting effects as a result of Stinnett's murder, said Strong, the investigator who helped prodMontgomery to confess. Residents of Melvern, where Montgomery lived, have beendivided about whether she shouldpay for her crimes with her life, said Joe Warner, who was mayor of Melvern at the time of the murder. A survivor of incest and sex trafficking, she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and cerebellar dysfunction, said Amy Harwell, a federal public defender in Tennessee who is working on Montgomerys case. She faked pregnancies several times during her marriages to Carl Boman and Kevin Montgomery, court records say. Lisa Montgomery's current legal team has conducted some 450 interviews with family members, friends, case workers, doctors and social workers. That could change in Terre Haute. Her mother and father, teachers at school who suspected abuse, and the courts who learned of her victimization when she was a teen and did nothing. "I was like, 'Oh, she was not.' "The other sister stayed in that situation, and it got worse and worse and worse. Montgomery was left behind with her mother. Her children were disturbed by it. The judge in the case scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse - but did not report the abuse himself. Shaughnessy drank excessively during her pregnancy, causing brain damage to Montgomery, according to court records. They have been joined by a chorus of supportive voices from the legal field, including 41 former and current prosecutors, as well as human rights entities like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Other friends of Kleiner, including a plumber and an electrician, raped her in that shed, Montgomery says, as a way of collecting payment for work done around the house. Stinnett's husband was at work, andStinnett was on the phone with her mother, Becky Harper, when Montgomery's dirty red Toyota pulled upon the afternoon of Dec. 16. And though there's been much recent debate over the fairness of Montgomery's sentence in courthouses and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times, a similar debate does not exist here. Investigators quickly realised that "Darlene Fischer" did not exist, and tracked Montgomery down the next day using her emails and computer IP address. Lisa Montgomery and her half-sister Diane Mattingly as children, Judy Shaughnessy, Lisa Montgomery's mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett's home lies empty today, Protest against federal executions of death row inmates - outside the US Justice Department, Washington DC, December 2020. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis. According to sworn statements from her family, her mental health declined rapidly after that. Two other inmates are scheduled to die at Terre Haute prison before Mr Trump's presidency ends. Judy Shaughnessy had already raised two convicted felons at the time. Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. To help keep her mind occupied, Henry said, Montgomery was initially given one crayon and one piece of paper, but nothing else. "They made this a priority at the risk of the health and lives of corrections officials, of the prisoners on death row, and the communities that all of those Bureau of Prisons officials who flew in from across the country were returning to," says Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of research and special projects at the Death Penalty Information Center. If you or someone you know needs support for issues about emotional distress, these organisations may be able to help. Montgomery is scheduled to be put to death by a lethal injection of pentobarbital at Terre Haute prison in Indiana. The crime itself shows that Lisa had lost all touch with reality. Other times, her behavior could be erratic and inappropriate. For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it began before she was born. It was clear that she was traumatized, that she was somewhere else, he said. She also told one of her stepbrothers about the sexual abuse around that time. Stinnett bled to death. "She got joy out of it.". What you need to know about Montgomery and her victim, Bobbie Jo Stinnett. And then at the end, she was broken.". Lisa Montgomery is no different. Lisa Montgomery and Bobbie Jo Stinnett got to know each other online through a shared love of dogs. It has been the subject of two books, multiple true crime television shows, documentaries and countless podcast episodes. It is extremely rare for women to be sentenced to death, said Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and an expert on women and the death penalty. Henry said there is no question that Montgomery has severe mental illness, noting that federal authorities have administered her antipsychotic medications since her arrest in 2004. When Montgomery was 15, Shaughnessy and Kleiner separated. When Mattingly and Montgomery were young, Shaughnessy beat them and doled out cruel forms of punishment, like taping Montgomery's mouth shut, or pushing Mattingly out into the snow, naked. If that disconnection is brought about with enough frequency and intensity, it can become more of a steady state of being, she added. Her terror was well-founded, said Montgomery's attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell. In December 2004, Montgomery, who was 36 at the time, strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett before cutting the baby out of her womb and kidnapping it. At least five times after she was sterilized, she told people that she was pregnant. I felt sick watching the video. In addition to Strong and Fritz, those investigators were FBI Special Agents Mike Miller and Scott Gentine and Topeka police officer Tom Glor. Montgomery told Stinnett that she was also expecting, and the pair shared pregnancy stories. she says. "She is the most broken of the broken," Mattingly said. For example, she said, the jury that recommended Montgomery be executed wasn't asked to consider the impact that would have on her four children and 12 grandchildren. Montgomery often read her Bible or did things with her hands, including writing, quilting, and making placemats and bookmarks, Dorr said. He thanked the sheriff for recovering his daughter and allowing him to be the parent that his wife couldn't be. She lives near Kansas City, Mo. A former paramedic who had watched the births of all three of his children, Strong also considered the baby's head to be unusually round. She says it's not as if all the other people of Skidmore lead idyllic lives free from abuse, poverty and other destructive tragedies. Lisa Montgomery's friend, Toby Dorr, provided this photo she took of a letter Montgomery wrote to her in November using black crayon. They gave me unconditional love, they taught me my self-worth, she said. Henry stressed that no one faces a death sentence linked to the 16 other U.S. cases from 1987 to2015 in which a woman has attacked a pregnant woman and her unborn child in an effort to take the childand ended up killing one or both. Montgomery suffers from severe mental illness. Montgomery suffered from pseudocyesis, the false belief she was pregnant, jurors heard from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center of Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego. Montgomery's family moved from place to place during her adult years, continuing the pattern she hadknown as a child. More: Who was the last woman executed by the US government? Montgomery lamented that she couldn't be present to console them because she was in solitary confinement, said Dorr, Montgomery's friend since they met in a federal prison in 2006. Dr Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Montgomery and spent about 18 hours with her, says that psychosis does not always look the way people expect it to. Lisa Montgomery's half-sister Diane Mattingly, who was separated from her in 1972 has taken a more high-profile role in trying to save her life. One of those men started coming into their bedroom and raping Mattingly regularly, Mattingly said. She married her stepbrother at 18 and gave birth to four children in less than five years, before having a sterilization procedure. "We've seen crime for years and years in our country in which people enact terrible violence coming out of a psychotic set of beliefs or thought process. When Shaughnessy eventually split from her second husband, she and Montgomery testified in divorce proceedings about the sexual assaults. Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery ' s mother, raised Lisa in poverty and chaos, with multiple stepfathers and in dozens of different homes, according to scores of interviews and documents cited. And nowhere is that support more palpably felt in this case than in Skidmore. I am begging that somebody will finally stand up for her and say, shes been punished enough.. A home videoshowsCarl Boman raping and beating Montgomery, said her half-brother, Teddy Kleiner, who gave a sworn statementsaying he had seen it. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who deserved mercy. But Lisa was broken. "And then go, 'Look at this body'. Jack also raped Lisa for years. At state level, the number of sentences and executions continues a historic decline. She enjoyed torturing the people around her," says Mattingly. "Oh, they're here, I've got to go," she said. Lisa Montgomery, a Kansas native scheduled within days to become the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years, lived a childhood so abusive her attorneys call it akin to torture. "I felt sick watching the video. I didn't know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it.". Recently, there has been a virus outbreak on death row at the institution, and previous executions have been linked to outbreaks among the execution team and prison staff. "Let's say I didn't stay clean very long," she says. Montgomery became the first female federal prisoner executed in 67 years, the first woman executed in the United States since Kelly Gissendaner in 2015, and the first person executed in the United States in 2021. "I cried," says Strong. Montgomery, 52, the only woman on federal death row, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Jan. 12 in the U.S. Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind. Mattingly's biggest regret, she said, is that she didnt tell her foster family about being beaten and raped, because she feared they wouldn't want her any more if she did. When Lisa was a small child, Judy allowed men to rape her for money, including allowing her to be gang raped on multiple occasions. As Montgomery grew up, court records say, observersnoticed that she increasingly appeared to be "spaced out," "not emotionally present" or in "her own little world.". She lived with her children in poverty, without running water and other basic necessities, while her mental health deteriorated. And then there is the life that Montgomery and her siblings inhabited, one of domestic violence, dysfunction, humiliation, fear and pain. Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. Friends and family began noticing Montgomery's tendency to slip into "a world of her own". There are certain crimes that are universally abhorred by the public, ones that evoke a primal response of disgust and revenge from those who hear about it. Montgomerys family tree, on both her mother and fathers side, is filled with psychiatric and neurologic impairment, including mood disorders, intellectual disability, PTSD and schizophrenia. He continued the cycle of abuse, rapes and beatings, which he sadistically videotaped. At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. Around age 8, she said, a man began raping her in the bedroom she shared with Montgomery, then 4, who lay in bed right next to her. Defense attorney Fred Duchardt told jurors that sexual abuse during her childhood had caused Montgomeryto become mentally ill and killed her soul. Mattingly said she shielded her half-sister from random baby-sitters, often older men, whom their mother left with them during her near-nightly outings to a local bar. In Trumps final days in office, Lisa Montgomery a mentally ill victim of sex trafficking is set to be the first woman the U.S. executes in 70 years. "The Lisa I knew was a good person who cared about the other women in the pod and was quiet and generous and kind," Dorr said. Randy Strong, one of the investigators who would later get Montgomery to confess, said she apparently used part of a clotheslineto create a garrote, slipping it over Stinnett's head from behind, probably as she was on her knees putting a puppy into a dog carrier. As her big sister, Diane feels immense guilt about leaving Montgomery behind in that broken home, so many years ago. In recommending execution, the jury spelled out six aggravating factors supporting capital punishment. Her case is one of the most extreme of all the cases that Ive looked at, in terms of the severity and repetition of the violence that she experienced, she said. President Donald Trump can "break the chain of evil" experienced by Montgomery and other members of her family by granting clemency and commuting her sentence to life imprisonment, Mattingly said. In the cases where women are sentenced to death, prosecutors often use gender stereotypes against the defendants, she said, characterizing them as transgressive or not normal in some way. Lisa Montgomery, who endured years of sexual and physical abuse, murdered an expectant mother and took the baby. Around this time, she repeatedly claimed to be pregnant again, although she had undergone sterilisation after her fourth baby was born. In response to traumatic events, children may dissociate from their feelings and their bodies to protect themselves from experiencing what is happening. Montgomery was sentenced for the murder of a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery smelled like a sour ashtray and body sweat" as Don Fritz and Randy Strong interrogated her on Dec. 17, 2004, Strong recalled. Dorr met Montgomery after being imprisoned for helping an inmate escape in 2006 as Dorrran a dog training program for inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility in northeast Kansas. The baby girl survived, andMontgomery took her home and briefly passed her off as her own until investigators arrested her the next day. Montgomery and Carl Boman divorced, remarried and divorced again in 1998. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who. She struggles to maintain her own hygiene, loses focus during conversations with others and has trouble planning simple tasks.". Randy Strong, who investigated the case,is unhappy that some people are asking thatMontgomerys life be spared. Mattingly and Montgomery lived together until Mattingly was eight and her half-sister was four. And it's never about what my friend went through," she adds. She is the most broken of the broken. She had four children in less than four years before being sterilized. "There's so many people that failed her throughout her whole life. I'm bruised, but I'm not broken. Lisa Montgomery lived a tortured life, from the day she was born in a small Washington town till the day she became the first woman in 67 years to be executed by the U.S. government. People confuse punishment with culpability, she went on. Every time she has a birthday, it will also be the anniversary of the slaughter of her mother, Whitworth said. Though capital case defendants tend to be confused and stunned, those emotions were heightened with Montgomery, who had trouble responding to questions, Wurtz said. The Trump administration announced it was reinstating executions last summer after an almost 20-year hiatus.
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