JUST IN: Lisa Montgomery Executed, Killed Pregnant Woman and Stole Her Baby. FIRST WOMAN in 67yrs

JUST IN: Lisa Montgomery Executed, Killed Pregnant Woman and Stole Her Baby. FIRST WOMAN in 67yrs

New this morning, authorities in Terre Haute have executed a female murderer early this morning. It is the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government has put a female inmate to death. Fifty-two-year-old Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection. She was convicted of strangling an expectant mother in Missouri and trying to pass the baby off as her own. Montgomery is the 11th prisoner to be executed in Terre Haute since July.

On the morning of January 13th, 2021, Lisa Montgomery lay strapped to a gurney inside the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. At exactly 1:31 a.m., the federal government carried out her execution by lethal injection. She was 52 years old, making her the first woman executed by the federal system in 68 years. Her crime had shocked the nation 17 years earlier.

On December 16th, 2004, Montgomery drove from Kansas to Missouri, where she strangled a pregnant woman named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, and cut her unborn baby from her womb. The infant survived. The mother did not. Montgomery then tried to pass the child off as her own newborn daughter.

At first, the crime seemed like the act of a cold-blooded killer—a calculated murder driven by an inexplicable desire to steal someone else’s baby. But as investigators dug deeper, they uncovered something far more complex. This wasn’t just murder. The search for answers would reveal one of the most disturbing cases of abuse ever documented in American legal history.

Her trial, her years on death row, and her final hours would divide the nation. Her execution wasn’t just controversial; it was unprecedented. What she chose for her last meal and the words she spoke before her death were not just routine—they were revealing. You’ll hear them, and when you do, they will mean something far deeper.

But to understand why the federal government pursued this woman so relentlessly, why they insisted on the ultimate punishment despite overwhelming evidence of her psychological destruction, we have to go back. Back to a trailer in Oklahoma where unspeakable horrors occurred daily. Back to a little girl whose first words were, “Don’t spank me, it hurts.” Back to the very beginning of Lisa Marie Montgomery.

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Lisa Marie Montgomery was born on February 27th, 1968, in Pierce County, Washington. Her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, was 20 years old when Lisa was born. Throughout the pregnancy, Judy drank heavily. The alcohol disrupted the development of the brain forming inside her, damaging neural pathways that would never fully form. Lisa was born with organic brain damage, permanent and irreversible. Nobody gave it a name. Nobody arranged help. Life moved on around her as though nothing had gone wrong.

Her father, John Patterson, was 25 years old, a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War, and an alcoholic. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, a girl named Diane, four years older than Lisa, who lived in the same household. Patterson left the family when Lisa was three years old and took almost nothing with him.

Judy Shaughnessy beat her daughters with brooms, belts, electrical cords, and wire hangers. She punished them with ice-cold showers. She covered Lisa’s mouth with duct tape for extended periods. Lisa learned not to cry while the tape was on because it made it hard to breathe. The first full sentence Lisa spoke as a young girl was, “Don’t spank me. It hurts.”

The family moved constantly: Washington, Kansas, Colorado, back to Kansas. There was no fixed address, no stable community, and no single school that observed Lisa long enough to ask serious questions. In those early years, Diane absorbed the worst of the physical violence. She was four years older and put herself between Lisa and their mother whenever she could. She dressed Lisa up, invented games, and tried to create warmth inside a home that had none. The two girls held on to each other the way people hold on to the only safe thing they have.

Judy left the girls regularly in the evenings while she went to a local bar. She left them with babysitters—older men. One of those men came into the bedroom Diane and Lisa shared and began assaulting Diane regularly. Lisa lay in the bed next to her sister each time it happened. She did not understand what she was witnessing, but she understood that something was being done to the person she loved most.

Around the same time, John Patterson and Judy Shaughnessy divorced. Patterson walked away entirely. That divorce had a legal consequence. Because Diane was Patterson’s daughter from a previous relationship and not Judy’s biological child, the divorce left Judy with no legal right to keep her. In 1972, Child Protective Services removed Diane from Shaughnessy’s mobile home in Ogden, Riley County, Kansas. Diane was eight years old; Lisa was four.

On her way out the door, Judy told Diane it was her own fault she was being taken away. Diane looked back at Lisa as she was taken. She saw terror in her eyes. Lisa was left behind. Without Diane, Lisa was alone with Judy and whoever Judy brought into the house. Relationships came and went in bursts of noise and violence. Some nights the house was chaos, and Lisa stayed in her room because it was the safest place available to her.

Not long after Diane was removed, Judy married again. Her new husband was a man named Jack Kleiner, a heavy drinker, aggressive, and present in the house at all hours. The family moved to an isolated property in Osage County, Oklahoma. There were no neighbors close enough to notice anything. There was no community watching.

Lisa was still attending school during this period. Her clothes were often dirty. Her grades dropped. Her attendance was irregular. Teachers noted that something seemed wrong at home. Social services had contact with the family on multiple occasions. A social worker described the Shaughnessy household as one of the most dysfunctional she had encountered across 200 families. Nothing changed.

On that isolated property, Jack Kleiner built a separate structure attached to the back of the family trailer. It had its own entrance, accessible from outside, away from the main living area of the home. Anyone could come and go through it without passing through the front door, without being seen from the road, without anyone inside the house needing to acknowledge what was happening. Kleiner constructed it himself.

Lisa was 11 years old the first time Kleiner came into her room at night and assaulted her. He told her that if she resisted, he would do the same thing to her younger sibling. She had already spent years learning not to cry, learning to be still, learning to endure. Those habits served him.

Over the months and years that followed, the abuse expanded. Kleiner began bringing other men to the room he had built. They came regularly. The sessions lasted for hours, multiple men at a time. They beat her if she was not cooperating. When they were finished, they urinated on her and left.

Judy Shaughnessy knew what was happening. She walked in on Kleiner during one of the assaults. She saw what was in front of her. She did not call the police. She did not remove Lisa from the house. She did not stop it. Instead, she found a way to make it work for her financially. She began offering Lisa to repairmen who came to the property—plumbers, electricians, roofers—as payment for work done. This went on for years.

Lisa began drinking alcohol. It dulled the edges of what was happening to her and got her through days she had no other way to survive. When Judy discovered the drinking, she picked up a gun and threatened her with it.

Lisa told people what was being done to her. She reached out to a cousin named David Kidwell, who worked as a deputy sheriff. She described what Kleiner and the other men were doing—the beatings, the assaults, the humiliation. She was specific. Kidwell listened. Then he drove her home and left her there. She went to the police directly on at least one occasion to report that she was being gang-assaulted. The officers took her back to her mother.

At school, her clothes were dirty. Her grades had collapsed. She flinched at sudden movement and struggled to focus. She had been moved into special education classes. Teachers and administrators saw the deterioration and suspected something was deeply wrong at home. A social worker assigned to investigate the household referred the case to local prosecutors. The prosecutors did not follow up.

In 1984, Judy Shaughnessy divorced Jack Kleiner. During the divorce proceedings, Lisa, 16 years old, was placed on the witness stand and asked to describe what Kleiner had done to her. She testified. Judy testified as well, telling the court she had walked in on Kleiner assaulting her daughter. The judge called Judy’s failure to report the abuse inexcusable.

Kleiner took the stand and denied everything. He said he could not remember. When shown a transcript where he had previously acknowledged some physical abuse, he said his memory was poor. Neither Kleiner nor Judy was charged with anything. No prosecution followed. The divorce was finalized, and the court moved on.

At the urging of Judy’s attorney, Lisa was connected briefly with a therapist. The therapist noted that Judy appeared to have no empathy for her daughter and that Lisa had been left with the clear impression that everything that had happened to her was her own fault. The sessions did not continue. Lisa was 16 years old, and the divorce had changed who lived in the house. Everything else remained exactly as it was.

In 1985, Judy Shaughnessy married again. Her new husband was a man named Richard Bowman. He had a son from a previous relationship, a 25-year-old man named Carl Bowman. Carl became Lisa’s stepbrother through this marriage. At her mother’s urging, Lisa became engaged to Carl when she was 17. They married in 1986 when she was 18.

Carl Bowman physically and sexually abused Lisa throughout their marriage. He raped her. He beat her repeatedly and severely. He recorded himself assaulting her on video. Lisa’s half-brother, Teddy Kleiner, the son of Judy Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, saw the video. He said it looked like something out of a horror film. He said he saw his sister in pain and crying, and that he felt sick and did not know what to do.

Between 1987 and 1990, Lisa gave birth to four babies in four years. The family lived in severe poverty. The home had missing walls, missing sections of floor, no running water, no furniture, and no beds. The four young children slept on the floor.

In 1990, after the fourth birth, Lisa underwent a tubal ligation. The fourth baby had arrived more than two months premature, and the delivering doctor recommended the procedure on medical grounds. But the pressure that came from inside the house was harder to resist than any medical recommendation. Both Judy and Carl pushed her toward it.

Lisa was 22 years old. She had given birth four times in four years. She was living without running water or furniture, and she had no financial independence, no support, and no one in her corner. She signed for the procedure. A tubal ligation works by cutting, tying, or blocking the fallopian tubes, the pathways through which eggs travel from the ovaries to the uterus. Once those pathways are closed, pregnancy becomes biologically impossible. The procedure Lisa underwent was confirmed through medical testing as complete and irreversible. There was no reversal available to her. What had been done could not be undone.

For Lisa, the surgery did not feel like a medical procedure. It felt like the removal of the only thing she had ever been told she was good for. She had said those words herself—that having babies was the only thing she was good for. Every message her life had sent her, from her mother’s exploitation of her body to the men who had treated her as an object, had pointed to the same conclusion: her value was reproductive. The surgery erased that value in a single appointment. She was 22 years old when it happened, and she had no language yet for what it had taken from her.

After the surgery, Lisa’s mental state shifted. She began telling people she was pregnant. She exhibited physical symptoms that accompanied the belief—symptoms that had no biological basis. A condition called pseudocyesis described what the doctors observed: a state in which a person genuinely believes they are pregnant and begins showing physical signs of it despite carrying no baby.

Lisa had been told throughout her entire life that her value was tied to her ability to produce babies. The surgery had removed that ability. Her mind did not accept it. She claimed a pregnancy in 1994 while briefly separated from Carl. She and Carl later reconciled, and the claim faded. She claimed another around 2000, just before she and Kevin Montgomery were married. She told Kevin she was pregnant and intended to have an abortion. Kevin gave her $40. The pregnancy was never mentioned again.

Carl Bowman knew each claim was false. He had been present for the sterilization. Lisa and Carl separated, reconciled, then divorced for good in New Mexico in 1998. The four children remained in the middle of the legal proceedings that followed. Shortly after the divorce, Lisa met Kevin Montgomery.

Kevin was from Melvern, Kansas, a town of about 400 people in east-central Kansas, sitting on flat land between Topeka and Emporia. He had three children of his own from a previous 16-year marriage. He worked as an electrician and drove to Kansas City every day for work, a round trip of 170 miles. He was a practical, steady man who had built a quiet life in a small town.

They married in 2000. Lisa moved her four children into Kevin’s farmhouse on the edge of Melvern. Kevin had no idea that his wife had been sterilized in 1990. Lisa had not told him. She had told him she could have babies, and he had believed her.

In 2002, Lisa told Kevin she was pregnant again. She told her relatives. She told her neighbors. She told people at the church she and Kevin attended, the First Church of God in Melvern, a small congregation where the pastor was Reverend Mike Wheatley, a man who had known the Montgomery family for years and counted them among his regular members.

She wore maternity clothes. She bought items for the baby. She printed ultrasound images from the internet and carried them around as proof of the pregnancy. Kevin told Reverend Wheatley that he had felt the baby kick inside Lisa.

Wheatley was not entirely convinced. He saw Lisa regularly at church services and observed that she was a small, thin woman who never appeared to gain any weight despite claiming to be months along. In October, about a month before the supposed due date, he pulled her aside and asked her directly where this pregnancy was coming from. She did not look anywhere close to delivery. Lisa did not give him a satisfactory answer. Wheatley kept his doubts within himself. He had known the family for years; he did not press further.

Kevin asked to come with Lisa to her prenatal appointments. She told him no. He had his own explanation for why he had not noticed the absence of a visible pregnancy: he drove to Kansas City every day for work, a round trip of 170 miles. He was gone before the house woke up and back after it had settled. He and Lisa did not see each other for long stretches of the day. Reverend Wheatley later reflected that this was probably how Kevin had fallen for it. They simply did not spend enough time together for the absence of a growing belly to become undeniable.

Lisa’s doctor confirmed he had treated her only for ankle pain and a cold during that period. He had provided no prenatal care of any kind. When the due date passed, Lisa told Kevin the baby had died. She said she had donated the body to science. Kevin grieved. He had no reason to question the story.

There was one more detail that emerged around this period. Lisa’s sisters, Patty and Jerry, and their mother, Judy Shaughnessy, knew about the tubal ligation. In December 2003, Patty went to the Montgomery home and told Kevin directly that his wife could not be pregnant because she had the procedure done in 1990. About a week later, Jerry and Judy went to the home of Kevin’s parents, Roger and Joy Montgomery, and told them the same thing. They warned the family that Lisa was fooling everyone.

Kevin did not confront Lisa. He did not change his belief that his wife was capable of having babies. He held on to what he had been told by the woman he had married. Life in Melvern went on.

Kevin drove to Kansas City and back every day. Lisa managed the house, raised the children, and involved herself in the Rat Terrier breeding community—the dog shows, the online forums, the world of breeders she had found and joined. She bred Rat Terriers, entered them in competitions, and spent time on Ratter Chatter, an online forum where breeders from across the country gathered to talk about the dogs.

In the spring of 2004, Lisa told the Ratter Chatter community she was pregnant again, this time with twins. She said she lost one twin, but the other survived. Fellow breeders who had seen her at shows noted she never gained an ounce. One breeder said openly that she could not understand how Lisa was fooling her family and community. But the conversation moved on, as online conversations do.

In Melvern, the community largely accepted what Lisa told them. Kevin believed her. Reverend Wheatley had his doubts and kept them to himself. Lisa’s sisters had gone to Kevin and his parents and warned them. None of it produced a confrontation that changed anything.

Lisa’s daughter, Kayla Bowman, spent time away from home in the fall of 2004, staying with a family friend in Alabama learning about dog breeding. The house in Melvern was quieter than usual.

Carl Bowman was in Oklahoma. Carl was Lisa’s first husband—the stepbrother she had married at 18, the man who had fathered her four children between 1987 and 1990, and the man who had been present when she underwent the tubal ligation in 1990. He knew the sterilization was permanent. He knew every pregnancy claim Lisa had made in the 14 years since then was false.

In December 2004, Carl decided to use that knowledge. He filed a formal motion in Osage County District Court in Kansas seeking custody of two of the children he shared with Lisa, the two who were still minors and living in the Melvern house with Lisa and Kevin. The motion stated that the two, who were 15 and 16 years old, had expressed a desire to live with their father and were having difficulty living with their mother. A third child was 14 and had not indicated a preference either way. The oldest was turning 18 in January 2005 and would soon be able to make her own legal decisions.

Carl had a new wife. Together, they sent communications directly to Lisa telling her they intended to expose her fabricated pregnancy in court. They planned to present the fake pregnancy as evidence that Lisa was an unstable and unfit mother and use it to support Carl’s argument for custody. The threat to Lisa was plain. The lie she had been maintaining for months was about to be pulled apart in front of a judge. The custody hearing was set for January 25th, 2005.

Lisa called Carl on December 15th, 2004. She told him she was going to prove him wrong. She had no biological way to do that. The sterilization was permanent and irreversible. But Lisa had been spending months on her computer, browsing Rat Terrier forums, reading about pregnancy, researching cesarean sections, and studying the photographs posted online by a woman she had met on the dog show circuit.

That woman lived in Skidmore, Missouri, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, about 175 miles from Melvern. She was eight months pregnant with her first baby. She posted photographs of her growing belly on her breeding website. She talked about the pregnancy openly on Ratter Chatter, the same online forum where Lisa spent her days.

Lisa had researched how a cesarean section was performed. She had looked up what happened to a baby at eight months of gestation, whether it could survive outside the womb. She had already concluded that it could. She had been planning for months. That woman’s name was Bobbie Jo Stinnett.

Bobbie Jo Stinnett was born on December 4th, 1981, in Nodaway County in the northwest corner of Missouri. She grew up in Skidmore, a town of fewer than 300 people, set in flat farming country where the roads ran straight and everyone knew who their neighbors were. People showed up for each other without being asked. Doors were left unlocked. A stranger in town was noticed within the hour. It was the kind of place where most people who grew up there stayed because leaving meant giving up something that was hard to replace.

Bobbie Jo was one of those people who stayed. She was quiet and warm. She was not the kind of person who sought attention or made herself the center of a room. But the people around her consistently described her the same way: genuine, reliable, and kind in a way that was not performed. She did not make a show of caring about people; she simply did. One of her high school friends said she was one of the sweetest people you would ever meet. Another said she was shy until you got to know her, and then she was someone you wanted to keep close.

She attended Nodaway-Holt High School in Graham, Missouri, and graduated in 2000. She had known Zeb Stinnett for years before anything between them became deliberate—the way people in small towns know each other, present at the edges of each other’s lives through school and community and shared spaces until one day the proximity becomes something more. Zeb was her high school sweetheart.

They married in the spring of 2003 at the Skidmore Christian Church. The Reverend Harold Hayman performed the ceremony. The church was filled with people who had watched both of them grow up in that community, and Hayman spoke about the life they were beginning together.

After the wedding, Bobbie Jo and Zeb settled into Skidmore and built something steady. Zeb worked at a meat processing plant nearby. Bobbie Jo took a job at the Kawasaki Motors engine factory in Maryville, 12 miles away, a reliable position at one of the area’s larger employers. She showed up on time, did her work well, and came home.

But her real passion was the dogs. She had grown up around animals and developed a deep knowledge of Rat Terriers—small, alert, loyal dogs with strong working instincts that had been bred for farm work and companionship. She began breeding them seriously, studying the genetics of the breed with the same care she brought to everything else she did.

She and Zeb ran the breeding operation out of their home under the name Happy Haven Rat Terriers. They entered their dogs in United Kennel Club competitions across the region and built a reputation in that community as careful, knowledgeable breeders. Bobbie Jo maintained a website for the business where she posted photographs of her dogs, litter announcements, and show results. She was active on Ratter Chatter. She answered questions from other breeders, shared what she knew about bloodlines and health, and was known in that community as someone who gave her time generously and without expectation.

When disputes arose in the forum, she was the kind of person who looked for the charitable explanation first. That quality—the instinct to extend trust, to assume the best, to give people another chance—ran through everything she did. It was not naivety; it was who she was.

By the fall of 2003, Bobbie Jo and Zeb were expecting their first baby. The pregnancy was confirmed, and Bobbie Jo was openly, uncomplicatedly happy about it. She talked about the baby at work, in the neighborhood, and online. She discussed names, the nursery, and what kind of mother she was going to be. She and Zeb had already decided on a name for the baby girl they were expecting. They were going to call her Victoria.

By early 2004, the pregnancy was progressing well. The due date was set for January 2005. Bobbie Jo kept working at Kawasaki, kept running the breeding operation from the house, and kept showing her dogs at competitions throughout the year alongside Zeb.

In April 2004, they traveled together to a United Kennel Club show in Abilene, Kansas. It was an ordinary event on the show calendar—breeders from across the region gathering to compete and talk about their dogs. Bobbie Jo stood in a group photograph at that show alongside six other people, including Zeb. One of the other people in that photograph was a woman from Melvern, Kansas, named Lisa Montgomery, who also bred and showed Rat Terriers. One of Lisa’s daughters was there as well.

Bobbie Jo was warm toward Lisa the way she was warm toward most people. They had the breed in common, the show circuit in common, and the Ratter Chatter forum in common. Later that year, a dispute arose in the Ratter Chatter community. Other breeders accused Lisa of misrepresenting the pedigrees of her dogs and passing off photographs taken by others as her own. In the tight-knit world of Rat Terrier breeding, where reputation mattered and the community was small enough that everyone knew everyone else’s business, this was a serious accusation.

Bobbie Jo spoke up for Lisa. She told the group it was probably just a misunderstanding and encouraged everyone to give her another chance. The community listened to Bobbie Jo. They gave Lisa another chance. Bobbie Jo thought nothing more of it. She went home from Abilene that spring with her purple ribbon, her husband, and her growing pregnancy, and she returned to the life she was building: the house in Skidmore, the dogs in the kennel out back, the baby coming in January, and Zeb beside her at the end of every day.

By December 2004, Bobbie Jo was eight months along. The baby was due in January 2005, just weeks away. She and Zeb had already chosen the name Victoria for their daughter, and the nursery was ready and waiting. Bobbie Jo was still working her shifts at the Kawasaki Motors factory in Maryville, still managing the dogs at the house, still posting litter updates on the Happy Haven website, and still active on Ratter Chatter.

She was nine days from Christmas, weeks from becoming a mother for the first time, and completely settled in the life she and Zeb had built together in Skidmore. She had no reason to feel anything other than what she felt: anticipation, warmth, and the ordinary readiness of a woman who had prepared carefully for something she had been looking forward to for over a year. She had a new litter of puppies available and had listed them for sale on the Happy Haven website. Among the people browsing that listing was a woman on Ratter Chatter who called herself Darlene Fisher.

Darlene Fisher did not exist. The name belonged to Lisa Montgomery. She had created the alias months earlier, giving it a location in Fairfax, Missouri, a small town about 20 miles from Skidmore, so that any arrangement she made with Bobbie Jo would appear local and unremarkable. She had been communicating with Bobbie Jo through Ratter Chatter under that name for weeks, chatting about the dogs, about pregnancy, and about the puppies Bobbie Jo had available.

Bobbie Jo had no reason to be suspicious. She knew Lisa Montgomery from the show circuit and from the forum, but she did not know that Darlene Fisher and Lisa Montgomery were the same person. On the evening of December 15th, 2004, Lisa sent Bobbie Jo a message as Darlene Fisher expressing interest in purchasing one of the puppies from the new litter.

Bobbie Jo replied that same evening. Her message was relaxed and friendly. She confirmed that the woman from Fairfax was going to come by the following afternoon to look at the dogs. She told Zeb about the visit. She also mentioned it to her mother, Becky Harper, who lived nearby. A woman was coming to look at the puppies the next day. There was nothing unusual about it; people came to the house regularly for the dogs.

That same evening in Melvern, Lisa loaded her car. Throughout the fall of 2004, Lisa had been building the fiction carefully. She had printed ultrasound images from the internet and carried them around as evidence of her pregnancy. She had bought a bassinet and set up a space in the house for the baby. Kevin had told Reverend Wheatley at the First Church of God that he had felt his wife’s belly move. The whole of Melvern was waiting for this baby to arrive.

None of it was real. But Lisa needed it to become real before January 25th, the date Carl Bowman’s custody hearing was scheduled. She had told Carl on December 15th that she was going to prove him wrong. She had 12 hours to begin doing exactly that.

Into the trunk of her red Toyota Corolla, she placed a car seat, cord clamps, a home birthing kit, and a packet of baby wipes. Into the pocket of her jacket, she placed a kitchen knife and a length of white rope. She borrowed one of her daughter’s mobile phones to make calls during the drive. She did not want them traced back to her own number. The day before, she had driven to Maryville, the town closest to Skidmore, and bought gas at a station there. She had already been on that road once.

Kevin came home from work that evening and went about the ordinary business of an ordinary night. He believed his wife was about to give birth to their baby girl. He had felt the baby kick. He had no reason to believe anything other than what he had been told.

The following morning was December 16th, 2004. Lisa dressed, picked up her jacket with the knife and rope in the pocket, and walked out to the red Toyota Corolla parked outside the farmhouse. She put her daughter’s mobile phone on the seat beside her. She had Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s address written on a piece of paper. She drove out of Melvern, heading east toward Missouri.

The drive from Melvern to Skidmore took approximately two and a half hours. The borrowed phone pinged off cell towers that moved progressively closer to Skidmore as the morning advanced east through Kansas, across the state line into the flat northwest corner of Missouri.

Lisa Montgomery arrived at Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s house in Skidmore at approximately 12:30 in the afternoon. She parked the red Toyota Corolla and went to the door. Bobbie Jo opened it. The face on the other side was not a stranger named Darlene Fisher from Fairfax. It was Lisa Montgomery—the woman from the dog shows, the woman from Ratter Chatter. The name in the messages had been different, but the face was familiar.

Bobbie Jo had met Lisa at the Abilene show in April. She had defended her in the forum dispute. She knew this woman. She let her in.

Bobbie Jo brought the puppies out. The two women went outside with them, playing with the dogs, handling them, doing what two Rat Terrier breeders would naturally do when one was considering buying from the other. For those first two hours, nothing appeared wrong. Two women who both raised Rat Terriers, both apparently expecting babies on an ordinary Thursday.