Within hours of being given a lethal injection, a judge has granted a stay of execution to Lisa Montgomery, the only woman in the corridor of the federal death of the United States.
“The current mental state of mrs. Montgomery is so detached from reality that he cannot rationally understand the government’s motive for executing her, ”Judge James Hanlon wrote.
“ Stay of execution is granted for allow the court to hold a hearing to determine the ability of mrs. Montgomery to be executed, ”he added. The date will be set by the court.
Montgomery, from 55 years, she would have been the first federal inmate to be executed in nearly 72 years, if its execution had been carried out as scheduled this 15 January, for the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, of 23 years, when she was eight months pregnant.
In December 2004, Montgomery, then from 37 years, strangled her and then removed the baby from her womb and kidnapped him. The mother bled to death.
His lawyers welcomed the ruling. Both they and activists opposed to the death penalty argue that the woman is a mentally ill victim of abuse, who deserves mercy. But many others think otherwise.
Here we tell you their story.
For Diane Mattingly, there is a moment from her childhood by the one who feels enormous gratitude, but also guilt.
Attributes that moment to his “quite normal” life in a quiet house on 3.2 hectares, a loving relationship with his children , and almost two decades in a job in Kentucky, in the center of the USA.
At the same time, he blames himself for the fate of his younger half-sister, Lisa Montgomery.
Mattingly and Montgomery lived together until they were 8 and 4 years old, respectively. They were in a terrifying home, Mattingly says, where physical, psychological and sexual abuse was routine by Montgomery’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, and her boyfriends.
The biological father of the girls left home, and after a while, Mattingly was transferred to a foster home. Montgomery stayed with his mother.
- USA. will resume the federal execution of women for the first time in 67 years with a convicted person for killing a pregnant woman and take the baby out
They passed 36 years before the half sisters met again . And that would be in a courtroom, where federal prosecutors persuaded a jury to sentence Montgomery to death.
“They took a sister out and put her in a loving home and raised her and had time to heal,” says Mattingly. “The other sister stayed in that situation, and it went from bad to worse. And then, in the end, she was devastated. ”
In late December, the woman’s lawyers presented a petition to the president arguing that after a lifetime of abuse, torture, she is too mentally ill to be executed, she deserves mercy.
However, in the small town of Skidmore, Missouri, where the crime was committed, There is little sympathy for her. Many believe that Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s final moments were so horrifying that the death sentence is justified.
Lisa Montgomery and Bobbie Jo Stinnett met online for their love of dogs. They kept in touch for weeks on a forum for rat terrier breeders and enthusiasts. Montgomery told Stinnett that she was pregnant too and the couple shared pregnancy stories.
In December 2004, Montgomery drove about 450 km from his home in Kansas to Skidmore, where he had an appointment to see some puppies owned by Stinnett.
But It wasn’t Montgomery Stinnett was expecting, it was a woman named Darlene Fischer. But Fischer was a name Montgomery had been using when he started texting Stinnett from a different email address, asking for one of his puppies.
When Stinnett opened the door, Montgomery grabbed hold of the pregnant woman, strangled her with a piece of rope, and took the baby from her womb.
Investigators quickly realized that “Darlene Fischer ”did not exist and Montgomery was tracked down the next day using his email address and the IP address of his computer. They found her taking care of a newborn girl, she said she gave birth the day before. His story quickly fell apart and he confessed to the murder.
Since 2008, Montgomery has been held in a federal prison for inmates with special medical and psychological needs in Texas , where he has received psychiatric care. He is on suicide watch in an isolated cell.
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The Montgomery’s attorneys argue that due to a combination of years of horrific abuse and a host of psychological problems, he should never have received the death penalty. They believe that at the time of the crime, Montgomery was in a psychotic state and out of touch with reality.
A chorus of supportive voices from the legal field has joined in his defense, including 42 current and past prosecutors, as well as human rights entities such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
However, calls for President Donald Trump to be merciful are not unanimous. According to Gallup, although support for the The death penalty in the United States is at its lowest level in more than 52 years, the 55% of Americans still believe that it is an appropriate punishment for murder. And nowhere is that support felt more palpably in this case than at Skidmore.
“Bobbie deserves to be here today. Bobbie’s family deserves it, ”says Meagan Morrow, a Stinnett high school classmate. “And Lisa deserves to pay.”
Lisa Montgomery’s current legal team has done a 450 interviews with family, friends, doctors and social workers. Together they have exposed family dysfunction , abuse, neglect, drugs and untreated mental illnesses around the sentenced person.
“The whole story is tragic,” says Kelley Henry, one of the attorneys. “But one of the things the president can say to women who have been trafficked and sexually abused, ‘their abuse matters.'”
For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it started before she was born. According to an interview with her father, Montgomery’s mother, Judy Shaughnessy, drank heavily during her pregnancy and her daughter was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Multiple medical experts have given statements that match that diagnosis.
When Mattingly and Montgomery were young, Shaughnessy beat them and applied cruel forms of punishment, such as covering Montgomery’s mouth Or throw Mattingly naked into the snow. After her biological father left home, Mattingly says they were left alone with Shaughnessy’s boyfriends, at least one of whom started raping Mattingly.
” Judy was manipulative and, I hate to use that word, but mean. She enjoyed torturing the people around her, ”says Mattingly. “She was glad of that.”
After social services removed Mattingly from the house, Montgomery fell victim to her mother’s new husband, who according to statements by his other children, he was a violent alcoholic who began sexually abusing Montgomery before his teens.
The family moved house dozens of times, but it was in Sperry, Oklahoma, where his lawyers say that the abuse turned into something more like torture.
According to In interviews with her half siblings and other people who spent time with the family, Montgomery’s stepfather built a shed in which he, and eventually his friends, raped and beat her.
Her mother also began trafficking with her, allowing workers like electricians and plumbers to sexually abuse Montgomery in exchange for making repairs.
As a teenager, Montgomery told her that to a cousin, telling him that The men tied her up, beat her and even urinated on her.
But the cousin, a bailiff’s assistant, confessed that he did nothing. In fact, he took her back home and left her in the hands of her abusers.
“They didn’t do anything”
Attorney Kelley Henry says one of the things that most The irritant is that adults in positions of authority were informed about what was happening but did nothing.
When Shaughnessy finally separated from her second husband, she and Montgomery They testified in the divorce proceedings about the sexual assaults. The judge scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse, but did nothing about it.
“There were so many opportunities that people could have stepped in and prevented this”, says Henry.
Montgomery’s cousin says he lives with “regret for not talking about what happened to Lisa.”
When he was 19 years, Montgomery married his stepbrother. The couple had four children in five years, but the relationship was not the end of the violence that Montgomery had hoped for. At one point, one of Montgomery’s brothers found a home movie showing Montgomery’s husband raping and beating her.
“It was violent, like a scene from a movie terror, ”he said. “I felt sick watching the video. I didn’t know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it. ”
Friends and family began to notice Montgomery’s tendency to attract each other. towards “a world of their own” . His children were upset. Henry says this was an early sign of his mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, and traumatic brain injury.
Montgomery eventually divorced from her first husband and married Kevin. In that period, she repeatedly said that she was pregnant, although she was sterilized after the birth of her fourth baby.
A theory that her lawyers proposed regarding the chain of events that led to the murder is that Montgomery feared that That her ex-husband would expose her lies about the pregnancy and use them against her as she sought custody of her children.
“There was a lot of pressure on her at the time,” she says Henry, who describes Montgomery’s ex-husband as cruel and harassing. “She was completely cut off from reality.”
Her lawyers say that when she lost that state she was taken over, she fantasized about being pregnant.
Henry says that Montgomery’s first defense, when she was arrested and charged with murder, was woefully inadequate and has since shown some of the details about her abuse, trauma and mental illness.
His attorneys at the time also put forward an alternative theory of crime, which was that Montgomery’s brother had committed the murder, even though he had an alibi. That was eventually ruled out in favor of an insanity defense, but Henry believes the damage to Montgomery’s credibility was already done.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. The next day, she was sentenced to death.
Diane Mattingly has been speaking publicly for the first time in hopes that she can make a difference.
“I would say to him: ‘President Trump, I want you to look at the life that Lisa had led, I want to see all the people who have failed her, I want you to look at the violation , the torture, the mental abuse, the physical abuse that this woman had suffered ‘”, he says.
“ I ask you to have compassion on her as a person to whom They have failed him over and over and over again. And don’t let her down. ”
“ Quiet and friendly ”
The small farming town of Skidmore is located in the far northwest corner of Missouri. Long ago it was the kind of place where you could “get your hair cut, see a show, buy rabbit food and have dinner,” but those days are long gone. Today there is only one restaurant and few streets are paved.
The population is around 250 and everyone knew Bobbie Jo Stinnett and her family. Friends remember her as a good student who loved horses and dogs. He liked going to the Nodaway River to swim and play Nintendo in his sleepovers. She was quiet and kind, they say.
When she was murdered, she was newly married and pregnant with her first child.
Although alumni have scattered a bit, in recent years, the class of the year 2000 from Nodaway-Holt RVII High School, which only I had 22 students , has a tradition of commemorating the anniversary of the death of his partner.
They raise funds and try to do something good for Stinnett’s mother: “Last year, we gave her flowers, we gave her a gift card of more than US $ 100 and then we pay the water bill ”, says Jena Baumli.
The murder of ago 17 years has never been forgotten by the city’s inhabitants.
On the one hand, from the outside they have not been allowed to forget. It has been the subject of two books, multiple crime TV shows, documentaries, and countless podcast episodes.
And while there has been much recent debate about the fairness of the Montgomery in court and in newspapers such as The New York Times, the case is not up for debate.
“I think that in many of the opinion articles that are published, In many things that people share, Bobbie Jo and her daughter, and her mother, her husband and other friends and family, are being forgotten, ”says Tiffany Kirkland, one of her former colleagues.
“She always wanted to be a mom,” Baumli explains. “She was really the first to have a decent marriage, you know, and I guess looking at Bobbie Jo was like seeing what your dreams were when you were younger.”
Due to her reputation for being tolerant, Morrow recalls instantly dismissing the first news of Stinnett’s murder
“I was like, ‘Oh, not her.’ You know, that doesn’t happen to Bobbie, ”Morrow says.
But what happened in the modest log house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation.
Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong says the scene he and his four colleagues found that day was so bloody that are still traumatized. It infuriates him even more that it was Stinnett’s mother who found her that way.
“The people who defend her… I wish I could take them back in time and put them in that room,” he says. “And then say, ‘Look at this body.’ And then, ‘Stay there and listen to the call to 911 . This is nightmare stuff. ”
Many of Skidmore residents cite the details of the crime and the amount of planning that took place as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer.
He had met Stinnett online under a false name. She had purchased a home birth kit and searched online for how to perform a C-section. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie to the end.
But Dr. Katherine Portfield, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Montgomery and passed a 19 hours with her, she says psychosis doesn’t always look the way people expect.
“Being psychotic does not mean that you are not intelligent, nor that you cannot act in a planned way,” he says.
“We have seen crimes for years and years in our country in which people exert terrible violence that arises from a psychotic set of beliefs or thought processes. Lisa Montgomery is no different. She generated this from the clutches of a very broken mind. ”
The baby was returned to his father, after he was found with Montgomery.
Bobbie Jo’s mother and husband have not spoken publicly. But Strong says this is the first year she’s heard directly from Stinnett’s husband. He thanked the bailiff for getting his daughter back and allowing him to be the father his wife couldn’t see.
“I cried,” Strong says. “The whole community is traumatized by this.”
Baumli, a friend from school, says she has read about Montgomery’s abuse, but it only makes her upset, because believes it is not as if all the other people of Skidmore lead idyllic lives free from abuse, poverty and other destructive tragedies.
When Stinnett was murdered, Baumli was in rehab for drug addiction. She missed the funeral for that, exemplifies: “Let’s say I wasn’t clean for a long time,” she says.
“I’m sick of hearing about Lisa Montgomery and what He passed. And you never talk about what my friend went through, ”she adds. “I have these images in my head of [la madre de Bobbie Jo] finding his daughter that way.”
Until July 2020, no executions had occurred feds at 19 years. At the state level, the number of convictions and executions continues to decline to historic levels. In 2020, only were dictated death sentences and the number of executions carried out reached a minimum at 34 years.
President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end the death penalty proceedings, although he has not said when.
More recently, states that have carried out executions, such as Texas and Tennessee, have stopped and delayed executions due to the pandemic.
No However, the executions ordered by President Trump continue. If they all go ahead, the government will have executed more people in the last six months than any other period.
Montgomery’s attorneys want his sentence commuted to one of life imprisonment, which would allow him to remain under psychiatric care in prison for the rest of his days.
Mattingly, who must attend the execution if sustained, says the Remembering the moment when her life changed at 8 years old, when the social workers took her away and she did not say what was happening in that house, makes her feel guilty.
“If I had, would they also have taken Lisa out of the house?” He wonders. “There are so many people who have failed him throughout his life. And I’m only asking someone, once, not to fail him. ”
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