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

Use your time right now. New this morning, authorities in Terre Haute have executed a female murderer early this morning. It’s the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government has put a female inmate to death. 52-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 Zette, 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 just routine, they were revealing.

You’ll hear them, and when you do, they’ll 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. If you’re drawn to stories of justice, betrayal, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out. This is where true crime meets truth.

 Real cases, real consequences, and the darkest corners of human decision. Hit the like button, tap the notification bell, and stay with us as we uncover the twisted path that led Lisa Marie Montgomery to death row. 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, 4 years older than Lisa, who lived in the same household. Patterson left the family when Lisa was 3 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 4 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 8 years old. Lisa was 4. 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, no beds.

 The four young ones 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 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 young ones 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 young ones 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 young ones 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 tick 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 was this pregnancy 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 Malvern went on.

Kevin drove to Kansas City and back every day. Lisa managed the house, raised the young ones, 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, the 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 Malvern, the community largely accepted what Lisa told them. Kevin believed her. Reverend Weekly 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 Malvern 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 young ones 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 young ones he shared with Lisa, the two who were still minors and living in the Malvern 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 of their young ones was 14 and had not indicated a preference either way. The oldest was turning 18 in January 2025 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 The to Lisa was plain.

 The lie she’d 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 8 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 8 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 their 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, Bobby Jo and Zeb settled into Skidmore and built something steady. Zeb worked at a meat processing plant nearby. Bobby 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. Bobby 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, an online forum where Rat Terrier enthusiasts from across the country gathered to discuss the breed. 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, Bobby Jo and Zeb were expecting their first baby.

 The pregnancy was confirmed and Bobby Jo was openly, uncomplicatedly happy about it. She talked about the baby at work, in the neighborhood, and online. She discussed names, the nursery, 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. Bobby 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. Bobby 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 Melbourne, Kansas named Lisa Montgomery who also bred and showed rat terriers.

One of Lisa’s daughters was there as well. Bobby 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. Bobby 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 Bobby Jo. They gave Lisa another chance. Bobby 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, Bobby Jo was 8 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. Bobby 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 9 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. There is one clear error. The passage about Bobbie Jo telling Zeb and Becky Harper appears twice. Also, the ultrasound and bassinet details should come earlier in the chapter before the car loading, not after.

Here’s the clean corrected version. 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. Bobby 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 Melbourne, 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 Melbourne 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 Boman’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 2 and 1/2 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 2 hours, nothing appeared wrong. Two women who both raised rat terriers, both apparently expecting babies on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in December. They talked. Bobbie Jo was warm with people she knew, and she knew Lisa. She talked about the dogs, about the puppies, about the pregnancy. Lisa talked about her own supposed pregnancy.

They had been chatting about their pregnancies for weeks on Ratter Chatter. In person, the conversation continued naturally. Bobby Jo had no reason to feel anything other than comfortable. The visit was going exactly as she had expected it to go. At 2:30 in the afternoon, Bobby Jo’s phone rang.

 It was her mother, Becky Harper, calling from work to confirm that Bobby Jo would pick her up at 3:30. Bobby Jo confirmed she would be there. The call ended. She was still standing when she turned back to Lisa. Lisa Montgomery produced the rope from her jacket pocket. She looped it around Bobby Jo’s neck from behind and pulled.

 Bobby Jo fought immediately. She was 23 years old and strong, and she had every reason in the world to fight. She grabbed at the rope. She struggled with everything she had. Blood later found between her toes told investigators she had been on her feet when the attack began. Standing, fighting, trying to pull free. Lisa held on and pulled tighter.

The sustained pressure on Bobby Jo’s throat eventually cut off the blood supply to her brain. She lost consciousness and dropped to the floor. Lisa retrieved the kitchen knife from her jacket. She cut into Bobby Jo’s abdomen. The pain brought Bobby Jo back to consciousness. She came away and fought again.

 Even now, even in this condition, she fought. Lisa used the rope a second time. This time, Bobby Jo Stinnett did not wake up. Lisa completed what she had driven 175 miles to do. She cut the umbilical cord. She left Bobby Jo on the dining room floor in a pool of blood with a jagged wound across her abdomen. The medical examiner would later determine that the cause of death was not the strangulation.

 Bobby Jo bled to death from the wound. Lisa walked out of the house with the baby who was alive. She drove a short distance down the road and stopped the car. She clamped the cord. She cleared the newborn’s airway with a suction device from the birthing kit. The baby cried. There was a small cut above one eye. Otherwise, she was uninjured and breathing.

Lisa cleaned the baby with wipes, retrieved the car seat from the trunk, buckled the newborn in, and drove toward Kansas. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Becky Harper’s call to Bobby Jo went unanswered. Harper waited. Then she walked the two blocks from the road to her daughter’s house herself. The front door was open.

 She stepped inside and called for Bobby Jo. She found her in the dining room. She called 911. She told the dispatcher that her daughter was 8 months pregnant and that it looked like her stomach had exploded. Emergency services arrived within minutes. Paramedics worked on Bobby Jo at the scene and transported her by ambulance to Saint Francis Hospital in Maryville, 20 miles away.

 She was pronounced dead on arrival. The baby was gone. Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong was among the first law enforcement on scene. He described what he found in that dining room as the most disturbing crime scene of his career. A jagged gash across Bobby Jo’s abdomen had exposed internal organs. She had been strangled and surgically cut open with a kitchen knife.

 The baby had been removed and taken. Law enforcement had a homicide, a missing newborn, and no suspect in custody. After leaving Skidmore, Lisa drove a short distance down the road and stopped. She clamped the umbilical cord, cleared the newborn’s airway, and cleaned the baby with wipes from the birthing kit. The baby was alive.

 Other than a small cut above one eye, she was uninjured. Lisa placed her in the car seat she had stored in the trunk and drove west toward Kansas. The drive from Skidmore to Topeka took approximately 2 and 1/2 hours. Lisa arrived in Topeka in the early evening. At 5:15 in the afternoon, she called Kevin from her phone.

 Kevin was at home in Melvern, back from his daily drive to Kansas City. Lisa told him she had gone into labor while out Christmas shopping in Topeka and had delivered at a birthing center there. She asked him to come and get her. Kevin did not question it. He got into his vehicle with his two teenage sons and drove the 40 miles north from Melvern to Topeka.

He met Lisa in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s restaurant near the supposed birthing center. She was sitting in her red Toyota Corolla with the newborn in her arms. Kevin looked at the baby. He believed she was his daughter. The five of them, Kevin, Lisa, the two sons, and the baby, drove back to Melvern together that evening.

That night, Lisa and Kevin called friends and relatives to announce the birth. They named the baby Abigail, a name Lisa said she had chosen because it was from the Bible. They set up the bassinet in the living room and slept beside it. The following morning, December 17th, 2004, Lisa, Kevin, and the two sons went to the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern for breakfast.

The owner, Kathy Sage, watched as Lisa moved through the room showing the baby off to everyone. The infant was dressed in a pink bonnet. Lisa introduced her as Abigail and told anyone who asked that she had delivered the day before. After breakfast, the family went to church. After church, they ran errands around town.

When they returned home to the farmhouse on South Adams Road, they had no way of knowing that FBI agents were already parked outside waiting for them. The investigation had been running since the previous afternoon. The first track was the crime scene itself. Forensic technicians processed Bobby Jo’s home. Blood evidence, the physical layout of the attack, fingerprints.

 The medical examiner determined the cause and mechanism of death. Investigators established the killing had occurred between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon based on Becky Harper’s phone call and her arrival at the house. The second track was digital. Bobby Jo’s computer was retrieved and examined by Detective Sergeant Curtis Howard of the Electronic Crimes Unit at the Saint Joseph Police Department.

Howard worked through the digital evidence methodically. He found a record of correspondence between Bobby Jo and a woman who called herself Darlene Fisher with a listed address in Fairfax, Missouri. The messages covered puppies, a planned visit, and a shared pregnancy. Howard traced the Darlene Fisher account back through its digital origin.

The IP address connected to a dial-up internet connection registered to a household in Melvern, Kansas. The account holder was not Darlene Fisher. The account was registered to Kevin Montgomery. At the same time the digital trace was running, a tip arrived from a woman in another part of the country. She had seen early news coverage of the murder and the missing baby.

 She knew a woman named Lisa Montgomery who raised rat terriers. Lisa Montgomery had shown up at a dog show recently with what she claimed was a brand new baby. The two leads pointed to the same address, 32419 South Adams Road, Melvern, Kansas. FBI agents and local investigators moved toward Melvern and established surveillance on the Montgomery property.

Parked in the driveway when they arrived was a dirty red Toyota Corolla, matching the description of a vehicle witnesses reported seeing outside Bobby Jo’s house the previous day. Cell tower records from the borrowed mobile phone Lisa had used on December 16th showed calls bouncing off towers that moved progressively closer to Skidmore through the morning hours and then back northwest toward Kansas in the afternoon.

Around 1:00 in the afternoon on December 17th, the Montgomery’s pulled into the driveway in the red Toyota Corolla, returning from their morning errands around Melvern. Lisa was holding the baby. The agents watched them go inside. Then they walked up to the house. Kevin answered the door and let them in. The investigators presented themselves as following up on an Amber Alert, asking about recent births in the area.

Inside the house they found Lisa on the couch holding the newborn and watching television. She told them she had gone into labor the previous day while Christmas shopping in Topeka and had delivered at the Birth and Women’s Center there. She asked Kevin to retrieve her discharge paperwork from his truck.

 Kevin went to look. There was no paperwork. An investigator called the Birth and Women’s Center in Topeka directly. No births had been recorded at that facility on December 16th, 2004. Sergeant Investigator Randy Strong asked to speak with Lisa outside the house. Lisa agreed. She allowed an officer to hold the baby and walked outside with Strong.

 Strong asked her directly about her pregnancy and the birth. Lisa maintained her story. Then she added a detail. She said she had actually given birth at home because the family was having financial difficulties with friends available by phone in case there were complications. When Strong asked for the names of those friends, Lisa said they had not been present at the house, but were on standby by phone.

The stories were shifting. Strong moved the conversation to the sheriff’s office. At the sheriff’s office, Lisa confessed. She admitted she had driven to Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s home in Skidmore. She admitted she had strangled Bobbie Jo and removed the baby. She said she could not fully explain what had happened or why.

A search of the red Toyota Corolla produced a bloody kitchen knife, a length of rope with hair still caught in the knots, and a folded piece of paper with Bobbie Jo’s home address written on it. A search of Lisa’s home computer confirmed what the digital forensics had already indicated. The browser history showed extensive research on cesarean sections, home delivery procedures, and hormones that assist in delivery.

 Lisa had tracked Bobbie Jo’s pregnancy through photographs on the Happy Haven website over a period of months. The evidence was unambiguous. This had been planned. The baby, 4 weeks ahead of her due date with a small cut above one eye and no other injuries, was taken into protective custody. She was alive and healthy.

DNA testing was ordered. The results confirmed what investigators already knew. She was Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s daughter. Lisa Montgomery was charged with kidnapping resulting in death. A federal offense because the baby had been transported across state lines from Missouri to Kansas, established under the federal kidnapping act Act of 1932.

The charge carried the death penalty as a possible sentence. Kevin Montgomery told reporters outside the courthouse that he had no idea what his wife had done. He said he had believed the baby was theirs. He said his heart went out to the Stinnett family. The baby spent a weekend in the neonatal intensive care unit at Stormont Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka, Kansas.

She had been 4 weeks premature when she came into the world under the worst possible circumstances, but the medical staff described her condition as remarkably good. She was small. She was alive. She was breathing on her own. On Monday afternoon, December 20th, 2004, she was released from the hospital. Zeb Stinnett was there to take her home.

He had been at work at the meat processing plant on the afternoon of December 16th when his wife was killed. He had come home to a world that had been destroyed in the span of a single afternoon. His wife was dead. His baby was missing. Within 24 hours, his daughter was returned to him.

 He named her Victoria Jo Stinnett. It was the name he and Bobby Jo had chosen together before any of this happened. A hospital spokeswoman described Victoria Jo as a beautiful baby girl. Zeb took her home to Skidmore, to the house where Bobby Jo had died, and began the impossible work of raising a baby while grieving the woman who was supposed to raise her beside him.

In Osage County, Kansas, a judge granted Carl Bowman emergency custody of Lisa’s four young ones following her arrest. The motion Carl had filed on December 10th, the one that had set the whole timeline in motion, was now resolved in the most extreme way imaginable. The judge cited Lisa’s arrest in his ruling.

All four of the young ones remained in Melvern with Kevin Montgomery while the legal proceedings sorted themselves out. Carl Bowman told reporters his heart went out to the Stinnett family and that he wished someone could have done something to prevent what happened. Kevin Montgomery had sent flowers to Bobby Jo Stinnett’s funeral.

 He told reporters he had believed the baby was his. He said the situation was as hard on the Stinnett family as it was on him. And that he hoped they were getting as much support from their community as he was receiving from his. He had not been charged. Investigators were satisfied he had no prior knowledge of what his wife had done.

 In Skidmore, the town processed what had happened in the way that small towns process catastrophic things. Slowly, privately, in conversations between people who had known Bobby Jo all their lives. Everyone there knew her. Everyone knew the Stinnetts. People went to Zeb’s house. They brought food. They sat with him.

 They did not say much because there was nothing adequate to say. They showed up because that was what the people of Skidmore did. The national media arrived fast. Television crews set up along the highway. Reporters knocked on doors. Camera crews filmed the outside of the small white house on the quiet street where Bobby Jo had lived and died. For a community that had already experienced more than its share of unwanted national attention over the years, Skidmore had its own difficult history that predated this by decades.

The arrival of cameras was its own kind of intrusion on top of an already unbearable week. Most people declined to speak on record. The grief was theirs and they kept it. On December 21st, 2004, 5 days after Bobby Jo died, her funeral was held at the Price Funeral Home in Maryville, Missouri. Hundreds of people came.

The sanctuary filled completely, and the overflow crowd stood in the entrance and in the cold outside, taking turns moving forward so they could hear the service. One man who had driven both Bobby Jo and Zeb to school on his bus when they were students said he had known her since she was born and that she had grown into a beautiful person.

Another neighbor said there were not enough words to describe how good of people the Stinnetts were. The Reverend Harold Hayman spoke at the service. He was the same man who had married Bobbie Jo and Zeb at the Skidmore Christian Church 18 months earlier. He had stood at the front of that church to celebrate the beginning of their life together.

Now he stood at the front of her funeral home to mark its violent end. He had written his Sunday sermon that week about the birth of Jesus. It was titled A Baby Changed Everything before the full details of Bobbie Jo’s death had reached him. When they did, the title took on a weight he had not intended. The pallbearers carried a gold coffin out of the Price Funeral Home and into a hearse.

The procession drove to Hillcrest Cemetery on the edge of Skidmore. Bobbie Jo was buried there among the people of the town she had grown up in and never left. Her headstone was inscribed with the words her family chose, beloved wife and mother of Victoria. She was 23 years old. Her birthday had been December 4th, 12 days before she died.

 She had just turned 23. Victoria’s due date had been January 2005. The nursery was ready. The name was chosen. Everything was in place. Back in Kansas, Lisa Montgomery sat in federal custody at the Wyandotte County Detention Center. She had confessed, she had been charged, the federal system now had jurisdiction, and the machinery of that system, prosecutors, courts, a judge, a trial date somewhere in the future, was beginning to move.

Kevin Montgomery remained in Melvern with Lisa’s children. The farmhouse on South Adams Road was now the subject of a federal investigation. The red Toyota Corolla had been seized as evidence. The computer had been taken. The community around him was shaken. People who had believed Lisa was pregnant, who had held the baby at the Wisl Top Cafe and congratulated her, who had sat in church beside her and heard Kevin talk about feeling the baby kick.

The pastor, Reverend Weekly, told reporters he knew enough about Lisa’s troubled background to feel some degree of sympathy. He said the church was throwing its arms around the Montgomery family and also around the Stinnetts, even though they were far away. A community fund was set up at the Lyndon State Bank for the family of Bobbie Jo Stinnett.

Victoria Jo Stinnett was home with her father. She was healthy. She was 4 weeks premature and she had come into the world through violence and she had survived. She had cried in a parked car on the side of a Missouri road and she had kept breathing. Her mother had not survived to hold her. Lisa Montgomery was in federal custody.

The confession was on record. The evidence was secured. The only question the legal system now had to answer was what would be done with her. The answer began taking shape in the final days of December 2004. The federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri.

The charge fell under title 18 of the United States Code established by the Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932. Because the baby had been transported across state lines from Missouri to Kansas, federal jurisdiction applied. That jurisdictional detail was significant. It meant the case would be prosecuted by the federal government, not the state of Missouri.

And it meant the full weight of the federal criminal system would determine what happened next. The charge carried the death penalty as a possible sentence. Lisa Montgomery made her first appearance in federal court in Kansas City in late December 2004. She walked into the courtroom wearing a navy jumpsuit and slippers.

 She did not speak. Her public defender at that initial hearing was a man named Charles Dedman, who declined to comment after the proceedings. Outside the courthouse, Kevin Montgomery told reporters he had no idea what his wife had done. He said he held that baby proudly. He said his heart went out to the Stinnett family. She was assigned a court-appointed lead defense attorney, a local lawyer named Dave Owen, who worked in the federal public defender system.

 Owen had experience with criminal defense, but had never tried a capital case. The federal capital system was a specialized legal environment with its own procedures, its own standards, and its own demands on defense attorneys. A capital case, one in which the government was seeking the death penalty, required a level of preparation, investigation, and specialized knowledge that ordinary criminal defense work did not.

Recognizing the weight of the case, and aware of the gap in his own capital experience, Owen reached out to Judy Clark, one of the most accomplished capital defense attorneys in the country. Clark had spent her career representing defendants in the most high-profile and complex capital cases the federal system produced.

 She understood how to build a defense around trauma history, mental illness, and the kind of mitigation work that could give a jury a reason to choose life over death. Clark agreed to join the defense team. She traveled to Kansas to meet with Lisa. She began building a relationship with her client and started assembling the team of investigators, psychologists, and social workers that a case of discomplexity required.

 She was, by every account of those who observed it, doing exactly what the situation demanded. But then Owen had her removed from the case. According to multiple attorneys who worked in the same office at the time, Owen found it difficult to work under Clark’s direction. She was experienced, she was authoritative, and she made clear what the defense strategy should be.

Owen, who those same attorneys described as resistant to being directed by a woman, went to the presiding judge without informing Clark and had her excluded from the defense team. On April 20th, 2006, Judy Clark arrived at the facility to visit Lisa and was refused entry. Owen then brought in Frederick Duchardt, a Kansas City defense attorney.

Duchardt had tried more than a dozen capital cases. His record was not what it appeared. A later investigation revealed that Duchardt had more federal clients on death row than any other trial attorney in the country. Four of the seven men on federal death row from Missouri had been represented by him at trial.

Duchardt visited Lisa Montgomery in jail three times before trial. The trial was set for the Western District of Missouri. The judge assigned to the case was US District Judge Gary Fenner. As the defense team prepared its approach, a significant problem arose. In early 2007, Lisa told Duchardt and others that her stepbrother Tommy Kleiner had been with her at Bobby Joe’s house on December 16th.

This was a claim that opened a potential defense avenue, the idea that Lisa had not acted alone or had been coerced. Investigators pursued it. Tommy Kleiner had an alibi. The claim collapsed. The defense was now less than a week from trial with no viable theory. Duchardt pivoted to a new argument, pseudocyesis.

 He would argue that Lisa Montgomery had been in the grip of a genuine psychiatric delusion, so total and consuming, a false pregnancy so real to her that she had not understood the nature of what she was doing. She had believed Bobby Jo’s baby was her own. The act had not been premeditated murder. It had been the behavior of a woman disconnected from reality.

The theory had some grounding. Lisa’s history of false pregnancies was documented. Her mental health was genuinely compromised. But pseudocyesis, as a stand-alone defense in a capital case, was an extraordinarily difficult argument to sustain before a jury. And the full scope of what had actually shaped Lisa Montgomery, the trafficking, the years of assault, the brain damage, the documented psychiatric diagnoses, was not going to be presented.

The trial opened in October 2007. The trial of Lisa Montgomery began on October 2nd, 2007, in the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri in Kansas City. Judge Gary Fenner presided. Federal prosecutor Rose Ann Ketchmark led the government’s case. Frederick Du Charme led the defense. From the opening statements, the two sides presented the jury with two fundamentally different versions of what had happened and why.

The prosecution’s argument was methodical and built on the physical evidence. Ketchmark walked the jury through the planning. The months of internet research on cesarean sections and home delivery, the tracking of Bobby Jo’s pregnancy through photographs, the Darlene Fisher alias, the coordinated approach to the victim under the cover of a puppy purchase, the tools Lisa brought in her jacket and in the trunk of her car.

She presented the digital forensics that traced the Darlene Fisher emails back to Lisa’s household computer. She presented the cell tower records showing Lisa’s borrowed phone moving progressively closer to Skidmore on the morning of the killing. She presented the gas station receipt from Maryville the day before.

 The prosecution argued that this was not the behavior of a woman in a dissociative state. This was careful, extended planning. Lisa Montgomery had researched the procedure, prepared the equipment, created a false identity, built a relationship with the victim under false pretenses, and driven 175 miles to carry out what she had what she had already decided to do.

 The defense’s pseudocyesis argument struggled from the beginning. Two expert witnesses, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Dr. William Logan, testified that Lisa suffered from pseudocyesis, a dissociative disorder, depression, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr.

 Ramachandran testified that Lisa had been in a dissociative state at the time of the crime and had genuinely believed she was delivering her own baby. The government psychiatric expert was Dr. Park Dietz. He agreed that Lisa suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. He did not find evidence that pseudocyesis or a dissociative state explained her actions on December 16th.

He testified that her behavior, the planning, the preparation, the execution, the flight, was consistent with someone who understood what she was doing. The jury heard both arguments. They also heard about Lisa’s childhood through the testimony of Diane Mattingly, her half-sister. Diane had spent 33 years separated from Lisa and had only recently been found by the defense team.

She took the stand prepared to describe the abuse they had both endured, ready to give the jury the full picture of what had shaped her sister. Duchart asked her one question about how their mother punished them. Diane described beatings. She had so much more to say. Duchart did not ask her anything further. He moved on.

 Diane was taken to a side room after her testimony. She broke down in tears. She said she knew the story had not come out. She had been on that witness stand ready to give the jury everything and she had been given one question. The prosecution addressed the jury in closing with an argument about premeditation and wickedness. They told the jury that the abuse history that had been mentioned was an excuse.

That it was being used to avoid accountability. They noted that many people who suffer severe abuse do not go on to commit murder. They told the jury that Lisa had a filthy home, that she did not cook, that she did not clean. They said she was wicked and evil. On October 22nd, 2007, the jury deliberated for less than 5 hours.

 They returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of kidnapping resulting in death. They rejected the insanity defense. Four days later, on October 26th, the same jury deliberated the sentence. Duchart asked them to spare Lisa’s life telling them that the emotional and sexual abuse she had suffered had destroyed something inside her.

The prosecution told the jury that Bobby Jo Stinnett’s killing was exactly the kind of crime for which capital punishment existed. The jury deliberated for just over 5 hours and recommended the death penalty. Judge Gary Fenner formally sentenced Lisa Montgomery to death on April 4th, 2008. Outside the courthouse, Bobby Jo’s mother, Becky Harper, stood with Zeb Stinnett and Bobby Jo’s brother, Tyler.

Harper told reporters that the case had come to a close, but that they would never stop missing Bobby Jo. She said her daughter was a sweet and loving wife, daughter, and sister, and would have been a wonderful mother. Then she declined further questions. Lisa Montgomery was transferred to the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas.

 The federal facility that handled women in the federal system with significant medical and psychiatric needs. As the only woman on federal death row, she was its sole death row inmate. At Carswell, for the first time in her life, Lisa received consistent psychiatric treatment. Prison doctors prescribed a regimen of medications that addressed her bipolar disorder and managed the worst of her psychosis.

 The hallucinations that had moved through her life untreated began to stabilize. The dissociative episodes became less frequent. She could hold conversations. She could maintain relationships. The improvement was documented in January. Not a cure, but a management of symptoms that had never been managed before. She maintained contact with her four young ones.

 She expressed remorse for what she had done to Bobby Jo Stinnett. She asked repeatedly about Victoria Jo. Even medicated, the trauma was not gone. She still panicked if left alone in a room with a man she did not know. She still broke out in hives in situations that triggered the fear her body had spent decades learning. The medications managed her symptoms.

They did not erase what had been done to her. In March 2012, the US Supreme Court denied her petition for certiorari, her request that the court review the lower court’s rejection of her appeal. The conviction and death sentence stood. In December 2015, Judge Fenner granted an evidentiary hearing on several grounds raised in Lisa’s habeas corpus petition.

The legal challenge filed by her new post-conviction team, now led by attorney Kelly Henry, a public defender who had specialized in capital cases for two decades, the hearing took place in 2016. What the post-conviction team presented at that hearing was a documented account of Lisa’s life that had not appeared before any jury.

They had conducted interviews with nearly 450 people, family members, neighbors, teachers, social workers, former classmates, anyone who had been adjacent to Lisa’s life at any point. They had hired a mitigation specialist. They had employed psychologists, social workers, and medical experts who spent significant time with Lisa and reviewed her complete history.

What they assembled was the following, confirmed across multiple independent sources. The sexual abuse by Jack Kleiner had not begun at 13, as the defense had suggested at trial. It had begun when Lisa was 11. He had threatened to harm her younger sibling if she resisted. The room he built had served its intended purpose for years.

He brought multiple men there regularly. They beat her if she did not comply. They urinated on her when they were finished. Judy Schwan had not merely failed to protect her daughter. She had actively sold access to her. Repairman paid Judy for work on the property by having sex with Lisa.

 This was confirmed by multiple independent sources. Lisa had reported the assault to a law enforcement officer, her cousin David Kidwell, a deputy sheriff, and had described the abuse in specific detail. Kidwell had done nothing. Lisa had run to the police directly on at least one occasion to report the gang assaults. The officers returned her to her mother.

At school, the signs of abuse were visible to teachers and administrators who suspected what was happening but never followed through. Carl Bowman had recorded himself assaulting Lisa on video. Lisa’s half-brother Teddy Kleiner gave a sworn statement saying he had seen the tape and described it as something out of a horror film.

 Medical examination confirmed Lisa had sustained a traumatic brain injury as a result of the physical beatings she had endured. This was documented, not asserted. The full psychiatric picture included bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, a dissociative disorder, psychosis, and the underlying organic brain damage she had been born with due to her mother’s drinking during pregnancy.

All of this existed. All of this was verifiable. None of it had been placed before the jury that sentenced Lisa Montgomery to death. Judge Fenner, reviewing the full record, ordered Frederick De Chary to appear and be cross-examined about his representation. De Chary appeared in November 2016.

 He defended every decision he had made. He rejected all criticism. He said he stood by his work. In March 2017, Fenner denied the habeas petition. His ruling found that while the information about Lisa’s background was significant, De Chary’s decision to pursue the pseudocyesis defense was, under the legal standard, a reasoned strategic choice.

Even if it was ultimately unsuccessful, and even if a different strategy might have produced a different outcome. The death sentence remained. In July 2019, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would resume executions after a hiatus of nearly two decades. The last federal execution before the hiatus had been in 2001.

Through the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and into the Trump years, the federal death penalty had sat unused. No change in law had suspended it. The pause was practical and political, not legislative. But it had lasted long enough that its resumption was treated as a major shift. Attorney General William Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for several federal death row inmates.

 Lisa Montgomery was among them. Her execution was initially set for December 8th, 2020. Kelly Henry and her co-counsel were in the middle of preparing a clemency petition when they traveled to Fort Worth in November 2020 to meet with Lisa. During that trip, both attorneys contracted COVID-19. They became seriously ill.

 Debilitating fatigue, neurological impairments, symptoms that made sustained legal work impossible. A federal judge ruled that the execution could not proceed while Lisa’s attorneys were unable to complete the clemency petition. The execution date was postponed. Henry and her team filed the clemency petition on December 24th, 2020.

It was a comprehensive document, hundreds of pages incorporating the full mitigation investigation the post-conviction team had built over years. Supporting it were letters from 41 current and former prosecutors, 800 organizations and individuals working to combat violence against women, 100 organizations focused on human trafficking and its survivors, 40 child advocacy organizations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, United Nations human rights experts, and over 140,000 individuals who signed a petition.

The petition asked President Trump for one thing, commute Lisa Montgomery’s sentence to life without the possibility of parole. The petition also documented a fact that stood outside Lisa’s own case. Of the 16 women in in United States who had committed similar crimes. Attacking a pregnant woman with the intent of taking the baby, resulting in the death of the mother, the baby, or both.

 Every single one, except Lisa Montgomery, had received a sentence other than death. 13 received lesser sentences. Two died before conviction. One received a commutation. Lisa Montgomery alone sat on death row. The White House issued no response. The Department of Justice rescheduled the execution 8 days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who had stated publicly that he would end the federal death penalty.

Kevin Montgomery, who remained married to Lisa, issued a statement through her attorneys expressing support for her clemency request. He noted that he and his parents were sick with COVID and asked the media to respect their need for privacy. Diane Mattingly, Lisa’s half-sister, who had spent 33 years separated from her before the post-conviction team tracked her down, had been speaking publicly for years.

She had written opinion pieces in national publications. She said she wanted people to understand what had happened to her sister. That Bobby Joe’s family had her deepest sympathy, and that breaking the cycle of violence required understanding where it began. Teddy Kleiner, Lisa’s half-brother, the son of Judy Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, who had given a sworn statement about the video he had seen of Carl Bowman assaulting Lisa, had been fatally shot in North Topeka in 2019.

He did not live to see the outcome of his sister’s case. The execution date of January 12th, 2021 stood. Lisa Montgomery was in her cell at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth. She had a calendar on the wall. She had been marking off the days to January 20th, the inauguration date, and counting down toward a survival she was moving toward one day at a time.

The Department of Justice was moving faster than her calendar. On Monday, January 11th, 2021, federal authorities transferred Lisa Montgomery from the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas to the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility where all federal executions were carried out.

The transfer was a logistical step in the machinery of a scheduled execution. Lisa was moved quietly by transport one day before the date the government had set for her death. Bobby Jo Stinnett’s family also traveled to Terre Haute. They had requested to be present as witnesses. What followed over the next 48 hours was one of the most compressed sequences of capital litigation in the history of the American federal court system.

Stays were granted and then vacated within hours. Different courts in different circuits reached conflicting conclusions on the same day. Lisa’s attorneys worked through the night across multiple simultaneous legal proceedings. The first major ruling came on the morning of January 12th. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted Lisa a stay of execution finding that she had raised a significant unresolved question about the Federal Death Penalty Act.

The Act required that federal death sentences be implemented in the manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed. Lisa’s attorneys argued this had procedural implications for how her execution could be scheduled. The DC Circuit agreed the question was serious enough to warrant a pause.

 The government filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. In a brief unsigned order, the Supreme Court lifted the DC Circuit’s stay. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan noted that they would have left the stay in place. The second proceeding involved the original 2008 sentencing judgment, which Lisa’s attorneys argued contained a stay provision that had never been formally lifted.

The Eighth Circuit initially agreed and issued a stay. The government appealed. The Supreme Court reversed the Eighth Circuit and lifted that stay as well. The third and most significant proceeding involved Lisa’s mental competency. The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the execution of a person who cannot rationally understand the reason for their own death.

Lisa’s attorneys had presented evidence that her current mental state, despite the medications she had been taking for years, left her unable to rationally comprehend what the government was doing and why. District Judge Patrick Hamlin in Indiana reviewed the evidence and agreed that Lisa had made a substantial showing on this point.

He found she was likely to succeed in demonstrating that she was too mentally ill to be executed under the constitutional standard. He granted a stay on Monday. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit lifted that stay within hours. Lisa’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the Indiana judge’s stay.

The Supreme Court declined. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan stated they would have granted the stay and allowed the competency hearing to proceed. The fourth proceeding concerned whether the Department of Justice had followed federal regulations when rescheduling the execution after the COVID-related delay.

Lisa’s attorneys argued the rescheduling violated 28 CFR 26.381. That argument also reached the Supreme Court and was also rejected. In the space of one day and one night, 12 judges across multiple federal courts ruled in favor of Lisa Montgomery on various grounds. None of those rulings held.

 By midnight on January 12th, moving into the early hours of January 13th, the Supreme Court had issued its final orders. All stays were vacated. All requests for reinstatement were denied. The Bureau of Prisons was cleared to proceed. Kelly Henry issued a statement. She said the government had stopped at nothing in its effort to execute Lisa Montgomery.

She said the Constitution forbade the execution of a person unable to rationally understand their own death. She said what was happening was not justice. In the execution chamber at Terre Haute, the preparations moved forward. At approximately 1:15 in the morning on January 13th, 2021, Lisa Montgomery was escorted into the execution chamber.

 The chamber was pale green, institutional. A gurney sat in the center of the room. Lisa was strapped to it. She wore her glasses. Her grayish-brown hair spilled over a green medical pillow. A heart-shaped tattoo was visible on her thumb. Beyond a thick glass window, witnesses sat in silence. Journalists, federal observers, and members of Bobby Jo Stinnett’s family, who had traveled to Terre Haute to be present.

The curtain was raised. The witnesses became visible through the glass. Lisa Montgomery looked at them. A reporter present described her expression as bewildered. Not defiant, not composed, not resigned, bewildered. Her attorney said she was in a dissociative state, that the woman strapped to that gurney was not fully present in the moment.

 A woman standing at her shoulder leaned close, gently removed Lisa’s face mask, and asked if she had any last words. Lisa said, “No.” The word came out quiet and muffled. She said nothing else. She tapped her fingers nervously for several seconds, then she closed her eyes. The lethal injection protocol began. At 1:30 in the morning, an official in black gloves entered the room carrying a stethoscope.

 He listened to her heart and chest. He walked out. At 1:31 in the morning, Lisa Marie Montgomery was pronounced dead. She was 52 years old. She had been born in Pierce County, Washington in 1968 to a mother who drank throughout her pregnancy and a father who left before she could form a memory of him.

 She had been beaten, trafficked, and assaulted throughout a life in which every institution designed to protect her had looked away. She had been tried by a jury that never heard most of her story. She had spent the final months of her life in a suicide cell, in a rubber smock, hearing a dead woman’s voice. None of that is Bobby Joe’s in its story.

Bobby Joe was 23 years old, eight months pregnant, and she opened her front door to someone she recognized and trusted. She died on her own dining room floor on December 16th, 2004. Her daughter survived. Her husband buried her at Hillcrest Cemetery in Skidmore, in the ground of the town where she had grown up.

Both of these things were true. They lived in the same case file and could not be separated from each other. Lisa Montgomery was the first woman executed by the United States federal government since Bonnie Brown Heady was put to death in December 1953. She was the first person executed in the United States in 2021.

She was the 11th person executed by the Trump administration since it resumed federal executions in July 2020. The most executions carried out by any single jurisdiction in a comparable period in over 130 years. In the chamber, her body was removed. The curtain was lowered. The Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a brief statement confirming the execution had been carried out.

Outside the facility in the January cold, a small group of protesters stood holding signs. They had come to Terre Haute for multiple executions over the preceding months. Inside the witness room, members of Bobby Joe Stinnett’s family had watched. Kelly Henry issued her statement within minutes.

 She said the craven determination of the outgoing administration had been on full display. She said everyone who participated in what had happened should feel shame. She said Lisa Montgomery’s execution was far from justice. The Bureau of Prisons confirmed the execution and closed the file. Thank you for watching No Way Out.

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