The couple had four children in five years, but the relationship was not the escape from violence that Montgomery might have hoped it would be. I couldn't believe how good it felt to be part of a loving family. The five investigators who went to Montgomery's home that day recently began communicating with oneanother again, said Strong, who is now sheriff ofNodaway County, which includes Maryville and Skidmore. That was ultimately dropped in favour of an insanity defence, but Henry believes the damage to Montgomery's credibility was already done. I'm bruised, but I'm not broken. Montgomery, her sister said, was repeatedly failed: by the deputy sheriff who was told of her abuse; by the judge who was aware she was being molested; by her trial. Part of HuffPost Crime. In the cases where women are sentenced to death, prosecutors often use gender stereotypes against the defendants, she said, characterizing them as transgressive or not normal in some way. Other inmates tended to keep Montgomery at arm's length because of the brutality of what she had done, Dorr said, but she liked Montgomery's quiet nature. Other friends of Kleiner, including a plumber and an electrician, raped her in that shed, Montgomery says, as a way of collecting payment for work done around the house. When Montgomery was in her mid-teens,she was sexually assaulted by Kleiner and three or four of his friends, according to court records. DNA testing later showed they were Stinnett's. Skidmore has suffered lasting effects as a result of Stinnett's murder, said Strong, the investigator who helped prodMontgomery to confess. In asking for mercy, her family members and attorneys say the untreated trauma she experienced as a child exacerbated her brain damage and hergenetic disposition to severe mental illness, leading her to kill Stinnett during a psychotic episode a dissociative state similar to sleepwalking. She told Lisa she had to "earn her keep." Judy later. For Diane Mattingly, there is one moment from her childhood for which she feels both enormous gratitude and guilt. In Trumps final days in office, Lisa Montgomery a mentally ill victim of sex trafficking is set to be the first woman the U.S. executes in 70 years. Today, residents are tired of Melvernbeing connected with Lisa Montgomery, said current Mayor Lyndon Weddle, who describesMelvern asafriendlyrural community where people wave when they pass each other. Recently, there has been a virus outbreak on death row at the institution, and previous executions have been linked to outbreaks among the execution team and prison staff. President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end death penalty proceedings, although he hasn't said when. Her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, beat and tormented all of her children, proudly telling an investigator that her daughter's first sentence was "Don't spank me, it hurts." Montgomery's first stepfather . Lisa Montgomery, who endured years of sexual and physical abuse, murdered an expectant mother and took the baby. Mattingly's biggest regret, she said, is that she didnt tell her foster family about being beaten and raped, because she feared they wouldn't want her any more if she did. A newspaper article quoted him as saying he had been convinced his wife was pregnant and had given birth. "When I squeezed her hand, she looked at me and smiled," she said. Lisa Montgomery strangle one pregnant woman for Missouri before cutting and kidnapping her baby in 2004. . Mattingly was 8 years old and Montgomery was 4 when Mattingly was removed in 1972 from Shaughnessy's mobile home at Ogden, a community of about 1,960 people in Riley County. Shaughnessy forced Montgomery to have sex with men in exchange for money and services, and also punished her children by killing the family dog in front of them,smashing its head with a shovel, the attorneys said. The views expressed in this article are the author's own. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, Diane, who was four years older than Montgomery. Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. Henrysaid she was surprised to see Montgomery scheduled for execution so soon, considering 30 other inmates on federal death row were sentencedbefore her. When Mattingly attendedMontgomery's sentencing hearing in 2007, which was the first time she had seen her sister in about 35 years, she said Montgomery's face bore the same look of fear it had when they were separated. Montgomery was left behind with her mother. "My sister was crying and in pain. The judge reached no conclusion aboutwhether sexual activity occurred but said he considered it "inexcusable" that Shaughnessy didn't report the situation to authorities and get counseling for Montgomery. She faked pregnancies several times during her marriages to Carl Boman and Kevin Montgomery, court records say. Her daughter remembered her acting like a young child in public, twirling and skipping with her arms swinging with abandon. In late December, Montgomery's legal team submitted a petition to President Donald Trump that makes the case that after a lifetime of abuse - which they characterise as torture - she is too mentally ill to be executed and deserves mercy. And though there's been much recent debate over the fairness of Montgomery's sentence in courthouses and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times, a similar debate does not exist here. Ive always said that I am bruised, but not broken, Mattingly said, her voice choked with tears. Stinnett wasn't breathing and was cold. Lisa Montgomery tried to get counseling the year before she killed Stinnettbut wasn'tconnected to a quality provider, her attorneys said. Ramachandran said women who sufferchildhood sexual abuse and whose minds revolve around babies and pregnancy are predisposed to suffering pseudocyesis, a condition in which they show physical symptoms of pregnancy, including enlargement of the breasts and stomach, morning sickness and cravings for certain foods. The crime itself shows that Lisa had lost all touch with reality. Stinnett bled to death. He recalled that Montgomery begged him not to tell anyone, for fear that Kleiner would kill her. Montgomery suffers from severe mental illness. And nowhere is that support more palpably felt in this case than in Skidmore. She has exhausted all legal options. She is not the "worst of the worst" for whom the death penalty was intended. It would be 34 years before the half-sisters would see each other again. As Fritz patted Montgomery on the back of her hand, Strong said he noticed dried blood and tissue embedded beneath her fingernails. All the while, Lisa's mother was being paid to let strange men rape Lisa. Her lawyers say that as she lost touch with reality, she fantasised about being pregnant. "There were so many opportunities where people could have intervened and prevented this," says Henry. In December 2004, Montgomery drove 281.5 km (175 miles) from her home in Kansas to Skidmore, where she had an appointment to look at some puppies owned by Stinnett. A survivor of incest and sex trafficking, she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and cerebellar dysfunction, said Amy Harwell, a federal public defender in Tennessee who is working on Montgomerys case. "While my path to healing was very hard, the difference between Lisa and me is that no one ever intervened to rescue Lisa from a lifetime of abuse.". At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. In the other cases, she said, prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty or juries did not impose it because it was obvious the women were suffering from profound mental illnesses. Montgomery was already vulnerable to serious mental illness, she added. Family members have claimed that Shaughnessy blamed Montgomery for the abuse and the divorce. I felt sick watching the video. "Being loved unconditionally helped me heal, find a caring husband and raise two children who have hearts of gold," Mattingly wrote. These days, she requires a regimen of psychotropic drugs to function. She was born into a family rife with mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. One of those men started coming into their bedroom and raping Mattingly regularly, Mattingly said. A few years after Mattingly was removed from the home, when Montgomery was in kindergarten, her mother remarried a man named Jack Kleiner. Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was meeting witha parole officerat the time of the killing, Strong said. The infant found later that day to weigh 5 pounds, 11 ounces was "very still" and didn't cry, which concerned Strong. "There was so much pressure on her at that point," says Henry. When she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. My sister is on death row, Kleiner wrote in the lawsuit petition. "Oh, they're here, I've got to go," she said. Montgomery was sentenced for the murder of a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. She has writtenopinion piecespublished in Elle and Newsweek. Theyre saying that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is more than sufficient punishment for someone who has endured what she did.. He threatened to rape our little sister if Lisa resisted and said he would kill her whole family if she told anyone. She faulted Montgomerys defense team at the time of the initial trial for failing to connect the dots between Montgomerys childhood trauma and her later behavior. Montgomery told Stinnett that she was also expecting, and the pair shared pregnancy stories. But Fischer was a name that Montgomery had been using when she separately began messaging Stinnett from a different email address inquiring about buying one of her puppies. Until July 2020, there had been no federal executions for 17 years. Kleiner built a makeshift shed on the side of the trailer for Montgomery, where he began molesting, and then raping, her. A home videoshowsCarl Boman raping and beating Montgomery, said her half-brother, Teddy Kleiner, who gave a sworn statementsaying he had seen it. My heart goes out to the family of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and the loss that they have felt and are still feeling. When Lisa was a small child, Judy allowed men to rape her for money, including allowing her to be gang raped on multiple occasions. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. Lisa Montgomery has been held at theCarswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, for 12 years. Bobbie Jo's mother and husband have have not spoken publicly in many years. I was thinking, shes still back there. Montgomery is scheduled to be put to death by a lethal injection of pentobarbital at Terre Haute prison in Indiana. "I looked to my right and there was Lisa Montgomery on the sofa, holding the baby," he said. Theyre saying that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is more than sufficient punishment for someone who has endured what she did.. Who was the last woman executed by the US government? Mattingly said Patterson was often away, and Shaughnessy became increasingly abusive toward them, at times forcing Mattingly to eat raw onions as punishment and go outdoors into the cold naked. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, Diane, who was four years older than Montgomery. If that disconnection is brought about with enough frequency and intensity, it can become more of a steady state of being, she added. The baby, who was uninjured, was returned to her father. When Montgomery was 15, Shaughnessy and Kleiner separated. It turns out that it only takes a few people to save a child's life: being loved by my foster parents saved mine. As the oldest, I was the protector of Lisa and our baby sister. Lisa Montgomery and her half-sister Diane Mattingly as children, Judy Shaughnessy, Lisa Montgomery's mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett's home lies empty today, Protest against federal executions of death row inmates - outside the US Justice Department, Washington DC, December 2020. Lisa Montgomery - the only female inmate on federal death row in the US - has been executed for murder in the state of Indiana. He continued the cycle of abuse, rapes and beatings, which he sadistically videotaped. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological . And I am just asking for somebody - once - not to fail her.". According to an interview with her father, Montgomery's mother Judy Shaughnessy drank heavily throughout her pregnancy, and their daughter was born with foetal alcohol syndrome. In a letterin late November written with a black crayon, Montgomery told Dorr that other inmates at Carswell took it "really hard" when her execution date was set. They introduced her as their daughter, Abigail, and made multiple other stops. She was broken by people who were supposed to be her caregivers. As Strongand other investigators were about to pull into the driveway of Montgomery's house, he said, he learned via a phone callthat the last email Stinnett received had come from that home. The historic reports of her at the time are consistent with the idea that she was a completely impaired mentally ill nonfunctional person who was operating within the symptoms of her mental illness, Porterfield said. In December 2004, Montgomery, who was 36 at the time, strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett before cutting the baby out of her womb and kidnapping it. "The people that are defending [Montgomery], I wish I could take them back in time, and put them in that room," he says. View the profiles of people named Judy Shaughnessy. After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. It has been the subject of two books, multiple true crime television shows, documentaries and countless podcast episodes. Fourteen of those offenders are serving long prison sentences, while the twoothers died by suicide in custody, according to a list Henry provided. Montgomery wasn't allowed eyeglasses, though she is far-sighted and near-sighted, or a CPAP machine, which has been prescribed since 2015 for her sleep apnea, Henry said. Montgomery, 39, is accused of killing Bobbie Joe Stinnett, 23, and cutting the baby from her womb on Dec. 16, 2004, at Stinnett's home in Skidmore. Teddy Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was 45 years old when he was fatally shot in 2019 in North Topeka. In her opinion, Montgomerys extreme childhood trauma created the conditions for her to grow into an adult with a disconnected sense of her emotions, a tenuous hold on reality, a completely warped view of human relationships, and a split and damaged sense of herself and of her body, according to expert testimony she provided for the defense. She was quiet and kind, they say. 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