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On December 16, 2004, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett was found dead at her home in Skidmore, Missouri, by her mother. Bobbie Jo Stinnett had been strangled and had her stomach cut, she was eight months pregnant. The mother described it as if the daughter “had her stomach exploded.”
There was no sign of the child.
The bestial murder got big attention and the police launched a mass hunt to catch the perpetrator and find the boy.
The next day, Lisa Montgomery, then 36, was arrested on her farm in Melvern, Kansas. The newborn was also alive there. The girl, Montgomery claimed, was his own daughter. DNA tests showed otherwise and the boy was returned to his biological father.
Photograph of the child from the television company MSNBC.
Photo: MSNBC / AP
Three years later, Montgomery was sentenced to death for kidnapping and kidnapping by a unanimous jury. But the last word was not said and the legal consequences would last for many years.
During the trial, it turned out that Lisa Montgomery had gotten to know Bobbie Jo Stinnett through their common interest in dogs. Stinnett and her husband raised a terrier breed and Montgomery had contacted them on a chat forum. In their ongoing conversation, it emerged that Stinnett was pregnant.
Under psedonymen “Darlene Fisher” Lisa Montgomery stated that she wanted to buy a dog and they booked a visit for the fateful winter’s day. When Montgomery appeared, he attacked and strangled the pregnant woman.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett was murdered at her home in Skidmore, Missouri in 2004.
Photo: Keith Myers / AFP
Lisa Montgomery’s attorneys appealed the death sentence. They believed that she had suffered brain damage when she was abused as a child and suffered from mental illness and therefore should not receive the death penalty. Growing up, Lisa Montgomery had been beaten and sexually abused by her stepfather.
According to a forensic psychiatric examination Lisa Montgomery suffered from depression, personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition, defense experts affirmed the diagnosis: pseudocisis, sham pregnancy.
The diagnosis is questioned by medical expertise. Pseudocytosis occurs when a woman thinks and appears to be pregnant with various physical symptoms, such as an enlarged stomach, sometimes milk production, and in some cases a pregnancy test can also be positive. But there is no child and the woman is not pregnant.
Lisa Montgomery was married twice and has four children. In 1990, she sterilized herself, but still said she was pregnant several times afterward, according to her ex-husbands.
The man she was married to in 2004 said he was completely unaware that the son the wife brought home was not theirs.
The defense strategy was successful. In April 2008, the death penalty was overturned. But now the US Department of Justice has decided that the death penalty will be carried out, writes CNN.
On December 8, Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. She then became the first woman to be executed in the United States in 67 years.
The last woman executed On December 18, 1953, she was Bonnie Brown Heady, a member of the United States government. That same year, Ethel Rosenberg, known for spying with her husband, was also executed, according to CNN.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s attorney, was disappointed by the prosecutor’s decision.
Lisa Montgomery has long assumed full responsibility for her crime and will never get out of jail. His severe mental illness and the devastating effects of his childhood trauma make the execution deeply unfair, Henry says in a statement, writes The Guardian.
Lisa Montgomery is incarcerated at the Terre Haute, Indiana institution. Here is a photo of the arrest in 2004.
Photo: AP
Lisa Montgomery will be the ninth sentenced to death to be executed this year after a long hiatus. A debate over which poisons can be used in lethal injections meant that no federal inmate was executed in 17 years.
The change came after that President Donald Trump called for more severe punishments for violent crimes. Therefore, the Ministry of Justice decided last year to re-execute those sentenced to death for federal crimes.
Most crimes in the United States are tried in multi-state courts, but federal courts try many of the most serious crimes. About half of the states have abolished the death penalty and only a few use it.
In 2019, 22 people were executed in state prisons in the United States. Only three federal executions have been carried out in the United States since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1988.
Read more:
Gunnar Jonsson: The death penalty in the United States has no right to life
“Nelson Mandela of the United States” has saved 142 convicts from the death penalty
United States resumes federal executions
