MISSION, Kan. (AP) – A judge has granted a stay in what according to the U.S. government’s first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades – a Kansas woman who killed an expectant mother in Missouri, the baby cut off from her womb and transferred the newborn as her own.
Judge Patrick Hanlon granted the stay late Monday, citing the need to determine Montgomery’s mental capacity, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported.. Lisa Montgomery was executed Tuesday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, just eight days before President Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, took office.
Montgomery drove about 273.59 miles from her farmhouse Melvern, Kansas, to the northern city of Skidmore, Missouri under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder. She strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a crude caesarean section and fleeing with the baby.
She was arrested the next day after showing off her premature baby, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and has yet to speak publicly about the tragedy.
“When we walked over the threshold, we were flipping through Amber Alert on TV at that moment,” recalls Randy Strong, who was part of the Northwest Missouri group at the time.
He looked to the right and saw Montgomery holding the newborn baby and was overwhelmed with relief as she handed her over to law enforcement. The preceding hours were a blur in which he took Stinnett’s body and spent a sleepless night searching for clues – unsure if the baby was dead or alive and no idea what she looked like there.
But then tips started coming in about Montgomery, who had a history of fake pregnancies and suddenly had a baby. Strong, now the sheriff of Nodaway County, where the murder took place, jumped into an unmarked car with another officer. He learned along the way that the email address [email protected] used to set up the deadly meeting with Stinnett was sent from a dial-up connection at Montgomery’s home.
“I absolutely knew I was entering the killer’s house,” Strong recalled, saying rat terriers were running around his feet as he approached her house. Like Stinnett, Montgomery also raised rat terriers.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s mother, Becky Harper, sobbed when she told a Missouri delivery woman that she had stumbled over her daughter in a pool of blood, her uterus was cut open and the child she was carrying is missing.
“It’s like she’s exploded or something,” Harper told the dispatcher on December 16, 2004, during the desperate but futile attempt to get help for her daughter.
Prosecutors said her motive was that Stinnett’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a tube tie that made her sterile and planned to reveal that she was lying about being pregnant in an attempt to supervise two of their four to get children. Montgomery, who needs a baby before a fast-approaching court date, turned her attention to Stinnett, whom she met at dog shows.
However, Montgomery’s lawyers argued that sexual abuse during Montgomery’s childhood led to mental illness. Attorney Kelley Henry said in favor of the ruling Monday and said in a statement to the Capital-Journal that ‘Mrs. Montgomery has brain damage and severe mental illness exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered under supervisors. ”
Her stepfather denied the sexual abuse in video evidence, saying he did not have a good memory when confronted with a transcript of a divorce process in which he admitted physical abuse. Her mother testified that she never filed a complaint with the police because he threatened her and her children.
But the jurors who heard the case, some crying through the gruesome testimony, disregarded the defense by finding her guilty of kidnapping that resulted in death.
Prosecutors allege Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the little girl out of her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, and told her she had given birth to the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birthplace.
She eventually confessed, and the rope and bloody knife that killed Stinnett were found in her car. According to a search on her computer, she used it to examine caesarean section and order a stall.
Stinnett’s husband, Zeb, told jurors that his world “came to an end” when he learned his wife was dead. He said he had not returned to the couple’s home in Skidmore for months, a small farming community that had gained notoriety after the death of 1981, city bully Ken Rex McElroy, in front of a crowd of people who refused to kill him. or to involve murderer. The crime is contained in a book “In Broad Daylight”, as well as a TV movie, the movie “Without Mercy” and the miniseries “Nobody Saw Anything.”
Recently, on Victoria Jo’s birthday, he sent Strong, the sheriff, a message through Facebook Messenger in which he thanked him.
“I was just crying,” Strong recalled. ‘He will be constantly reminded of this, whether in his nightmares or someone is going to call and want to interview him. The family does not want to be interviewed. They want to be left alone. The community of Skidmore has had a troubling past and history. They did not want it. They did not deserve it. ”
Originally, Montgomery was to be killed on December 8th. But the execution was temporarily blocked after her lawyers contracted the coronavirus that visited her in prison.
The resumption of federal executions after a 17-year hiatus began on July 14. Anti-death penalty groups have said President Donald Trump is campaigning for executions before the November election in a cynical attempt to gain a reputation as a law-and-order leader. .
U.S. officials portrayed the executions as justice that has long delayed victims and their families.