So my letters are important.. I never molested her in any way, shape or form, said Kleiner, who died in 2009. More recently, the states that have been carrying out executions, such as Texas and Tennessee, have halted and delayed executions because of the pandemic. Only around 2% of inmates on death row are women. The following day, the police arrested Montgomery at her home. It turns out that it only takes a few people to save a child's life: being loved by my foster parents saved mine. Montgomery was psychotic at the time of the crime, Harwell said. Montgomery has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping resulting in death. Recibi una inyeccin letal en una prisin de Terre Haute,. She had this ability to find what hurt you the most and use that against you, Mattingly said. One theory her lawyers put forward regarding the chain of events that led to the murder, is that Montgomery feared her ex-husband would expose her lies about being pregnant and use it against her as he sought custody of their children. "It was pretty awful.". When Stinnett answered the door, Montgomery overpowered the pregnant woman, strangled her with a piece of rope, and cut the baby out of her womb. 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. Montgomery's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, who was 20 at the time of her birth in 1968, drank heavily while pregnant with her daughter. Her attorneys say that while Montgomery feels deep remorse for her crimes, her understanding of her situation waxes and wanes. Bobbie Jo's mother and husband have have not spoken publicly in many years. Many there believe the final moments of Bobbie Jo Stinnett were so horrific, the death sentence is warranted. Im not a psychiatrist, so I cant go any further than that.. She was broken by people who were supposed to be her caregivers. Why the fate of the only woman on federal death row hinges on these Tennessee attorneys and their health, Lisa Montgomery's execution, delayed by attorneys' COVID-19 cases, rescheduled for Jan. 12, Only woman on federal death row asks President Trump to be a 'hero,' commute her sentence, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. For one thing, the wider world won't let them forget. Jack also raped Lisa for years. I cant understand why they have to kill this woman, knowing her background and everything that happened, he said. Likewise, that jury wasn't directed to consider whether Montgomery was severely mentally ill, which Montgomery's attorneys are asking the president to take into account. Montgomery told Stinnett that she was also expecting, and the pair shared pregnancy stories. And, in fact, blaming her for it.. 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. One of those men started coming into their bedroom and raping Mattingly regularly, Mattingly said. He was pumping her, Shaughnessy testified. A home videoshowsCarl Boman raping and beating Montgomery, said her half-brother, Teddy Kleiner, who gave a sworn statementsaying he had seen it. But it was not a pet that she was to retrieve that day. 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. But the cousin, a sheriff's deputy, confessed to Montgomery's current legal team that he did nothing. Maybe you should focus your efforts on the fact that Lisa's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, was granted custody of a grandson the year prior to Lisa's crime. Montgomery used the fake name of "Darlene Fischer" and the chilling email address of fischer4kids@hotmail.com as she set up a meeting with Stinnett, according to the charging affidavit in thecase. He was being held in the Shawnee County Jail in 2018 when he filed a federal lawsuit contending the county was violating his constitutional rights by preventing him from sending letters to Montgomery. It is hard to know if Montgomery understands that she is close to being executed; her mental state does not allow for much lucidity. "There was a lot of talk both ways on it," he said when contacted by phone at his new home in Texas. For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it began before she was born. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological and sexual abuse Lisa. Montgomery's second husband Kevin Montgomery, who lives near Melvern and remains married to her voiced support for her bid for clemency in a statement releasedthrough his wife's attorneys. Her mouth was covered with duct tape so frequently that she learned not to cry. In what Mattingly described as the most lucky thing to ever happen to her, she was placed with a loving foster family who showered her with affection. A sworn statement from David Kidwell Sr. identified as being Montgomery's cousin and a deputy sheriff said shecried as she told him Kleiner and his friends on more than one occasion had raped her for hours, then "urinated on her like trash. "Let's say I didn't stay clean very long," she says. Montgomery then said she had given birth at home with help from two female friends and, later, that she had given birth alone. Montgomery was left behind with her mother. But it wasn't Montgomery that Stinnett was expecting, it was a woman who went by the name of Darlene Fischer. After playing with the dogs in the backyard that day, Montgomery strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, who was pregnant, and cut open her abdomen to remove her 8-month-old fetus. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, Dorr said she wants the world to know about Lisa Montgomery the person. "She seemed like a real personI could connect with and build a relationship with inside prison," Dorr said. But my hope is President Trump will stop Lisa's execution and commute her sentence to life in prison. During divorce proceedings, Shaughnessy admitted to the court that she had walked in on her husband raping Montgomery. Fourteen of those offenders are serving long prison sentences, while the twoothers died by suicide in custody, according to a list Henry provided. She needs someone for once in her life to be on her side., Provided by attorneys for Lisa Montgomery, "Biopsychosocial History of Lisa Marie Montgomery," by Jan Vogelsang. Authorities also questioned Kevin Montgomery but concluded he wasn't involved. At the same time, she blames it for the fate of her younger half-sister, Lisa Montgomery. Her case is one of the most extreme of all the cases that Ive looked at, in terms of the severity and repetition of the violence that she experienced, she said. She enjoyed torturing the people around her," says Mattingly. Another case with Missouri ties. And it's never about what my friend went through," she adds. Montgomery claimed to live in northwest Missouri. She helped him escape in a dog crate and went to prison after a vehicle chase 12 days later ended with their capture. As long as she was given cigarettes, Montgomery continued to talk, Strong said. 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. 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. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, Diane, who was four years older than Montgomery. "I felt sick watching the video. "I looked to my right and there was Lisa Montgomery on the sofa, holding the baby," he said. Montgomery gave birth to three daughters and a son from1987 to1990, court records say. If you or someone you know needs support for issues about emotional distress, these organisations may be able to help. Montgomery became the first female federal prisoner executed in 67 years, the first woman executed in the United States since Kelly Gissendaner in 2015, and the first person executed in the United States in 2021. The views expressed in this article are the author's own. Montgomery contacted Stinnett, 23, after meeting her at a dog show earlier that year at Abilene, in north-central Kansas, where they posed with others in a photo. By multiple accounts, Kleiner was an erratic, violent man who beat the kids and his wife regularly. More: Why the fate of the only woman on federal death row hinges on these Tennessee attorneys and their health, "Lisas trauma was so severe that it compromised her neurological functioning and development," they said in a written statement. As one family story goes, Montgomerys first words as a toddler were, dont spank me.. President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end death penalty proceedings, although he hasn't said when. After she gave birth to four children, Judy pressured Lisa into an involuntary sterilization. Until July 2020, there had been no federal executions for 17 years. Lisa Montgomery and Bobbie Jo Stinnett got to know each other online through a shared love of dogs. At 1:31 AM on Wednesday, Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead. Judy Shaughnessy had already raised two convicted felons at the time. Lisa Montgomery's current legal team has conducted some 450 interviews with family members, friends, case workers, doctors and social workers. The murder 16 years ago is never far from the minds of the town's residents. They believe that at the time of the crime, Montgomery was psychotic and out of touch with reality. Mattingly said she and Montgomery share the same father, John Patterson, a decorated Vietnam War veteran whonever married Mattingly's mother. Zella Gwin survives. "Maybe she could have been saved, too. That is exactly what Lisa Montgomery developed into, which is a person who had profound disconnection from her body, from her mind, from her experience, Porterfield said. Court records describe her as a quiet loner who spent a lot of time reading books. These days, she requires a regimen of psychotropic drugs to function. Judy later married a man named Jack who punched, kicked and choked his children, including Lisa. It was clear that she was traumatized, that she was somewhere else, he said. She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. In addition to Strong and Fritz, those investigators were FBI Special Agents Mike Miller and Scott Gentine and Topeka police officer Tom Glor. Lisa's and my father was also mentally ill. She has writtenopinion piecespublished in Elle and Newsweek. Montgomery first claimed to have had the baby at a Topeka birthing center but began changing her story after investigatorsseparated her from her husband and the infant, Strong said. I was put in foster care with a wonderful family. Since they began, the federal government has executed seven people. The baby girl survived, andMontgomery took her home and briefly passed her off as her own until investigators arrested her the next day. "She was really the first one to have a decent marriage, you know, and I guess looking at Bobbie Jo was like, what your dreams were when you were younger.". Montgomery was represented briefly after her arrest by Ron Wurtz, a now-retired attorney who has represented dozens of capital case defendants. Lisa Montgomery tried to get counseling the year before she killed Stinnettbut wasn'tconnected to a quality provider, her attorneys said. She was born into a family rife with mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. When Montgomery was in her mid-teens,she was sexually assaulted by Kleiner and three or four of his friends, according to court records. A few years after Mattingly was removed from the home, when Montgomery was in kindergarten, her mother remarried a man named Jack Kleiner. The crime itself shows that Lisa had lost all touch with reality. When they came to take me, I thought they were coming to take all of us. Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis. Montgomerys father, John Patterson, a 25-year-old in the military, was also an alcoholic. She had catfished Stinnett online under a fake name. Montgomery, 52, the only woman on federal death row,is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Jan. 12 in the U.S. Penitentiary at TerreHaute, Ind. According to her lawyers and witnesses, Montgomery suffered years of childhood abuse so severe it was akin to torture. She said Montgomery's crimes have affected the way Melvern is perceived in the same manner anti-gay picketing by Westboro Baptist Church has influenced perceptions about Topeka. Emotions ran high in 2007 as Montgomery was tried in federal court for kidnapping resulting in death. Prosecutors shared records showing Montgomery had visited a website featuring a video of a live C-section birth, described as lasting from first cut to last stitch, and had made a practice run by driving the roughly 350 miles from Melvern to Skidmore and back the day before the killing. According to Gallup, while support for the death penalty in the US is at its lowest level in more than 50 years, 55% of Americans still believe it is an appropriate punishment for murder. At least five times after she was sterilized, she told people that she was pregnant. Part of HuffPost Crime. "There were so many opportunities where people could have intervened and prevented this," says Henry. At the time, Lisa had told her new husband that she was pregnant, which her former husband knew wasn't possible because of the forced sterilization. In Montgomerys early teen years, Kleiner moved the family to an isolated trailer at the end of a dead-end road outside of Sperry, Oklahoma, a severely impoverished area north of Tulsa. She got into multiple car accidents, struggled to keep a job, moved around constantly, drank heavily, engaged in sex work and neglected her children. "I'm asking him to have compassion on her as a person that has been failed over and over and over again. She lives near Kansas City, Mo. 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. This story was first published on 11 January - before Lisa Montgomery's execution on 13 January. When issuing his original stay of execution, the district. And nowhere is that support more palpably felt in this case than in Skidmore. Lisa Montgomery had little if any chance in life. When I was eight and Lisa was four, social services came and rescued me from Judy, leaving Lisa and our other sister behind. Dorr met Montgomery after being imprisoned for helping an inmate escape in 2006 as Dorrran a dog training program for inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility in northeast Kansas. He threatened to expose the imagined pregnancy and use it against her in the custody battle. Ramachandran said Montgomery told him she didn't remember killing Stinnett or cutting the baby out of her body. Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery's mother, testified Friday she found then-husband Jack Kleiner having sex with Montgomery in 1984, when Montgomery would have been about 16. Her daughter remembered her acting like a young child in public, twirling and skipping with her arms swinging with abandon. I felt sick watching the video. Victims of severe childhood sexual abuse can overcome their trauma with certain factors, Porterfield said, such as the presence of a nurturing adult who provides love and connects them to resources to promote healing. Let it be done: Bobbie Jo Stinnetts hometown waits as killers execution date nears. I couldn't believe how good it felt to be part of a loving family. President Donald Trump can "break the chain of evil" experienced by Montgomery and other members of her family by granting clemency and commuting her sentence to life imprisonment, Mattingly said. Warnersaid the killinghad left Melvern residents stunned.. Montgomery was repeatedly molested by her stepdad Jack Kleiner, starting at . She was often spaced out, appearing disconnected from reality. "I was like, 'Oh, she was not.' In the end, it was in prisonwhere she spent years on death row after committing a horrific crimethat she began to recover from a lifetime of nightmarish abuse. After their biological father left the home, Mattingly says they were left alone with Shaughnessy's boyfriends, at least one of whom started raping Mattingly. - Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Montgomery, who confessed, was later sentenced to death for the , The Trump administration announced it was. However, the executions ordered by President Trump are continuing. "They made this a priority at the risk of the health and lives of corrections officials, of the prisoners on death row, and the communities that all of those Bureau of Prisons officials who flew in from across the country were returning to," says Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of research and special projects at the Death Penalty Information Center. Stitched together, they form a tapestry of family dysfunction, abuse, neglect, professional negligence, substance abuse and untreated mental illness. JUDY SHAUGHNESSY OBITUARY Judy K. Shaughnessy Judy K. Shaughnessy, 66, Topeka, formerly of Lyndon, entered into the kingdom of heaven Saturday, November 2, 2013 at Midland Hospice House. Stinnett came to, grabbing at Montgomery's knife and pulling out somehair before Montgomery strangledher to death. On the ride home, she clamped the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby girl with wipes. On December 8, the federal government plans to execute her for a crime she committed in the grip of severe mental illness after a lifetime of living hell. "She tried to throw her own brother under the bus for a crime that she committed.". Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. Mattingly says looking back to the moment life changed for her as an eight-year-old, she feels guilty that when the social workers came for her, she didn't tell them what was going on in that house. And to not fail her.". She began prostituting Lisa to older men when Lisa was in her early teens. "Being loved unconditionally helped me heal, find a caring husband and raise two children who have hearts of gold," Mattingly wrote. Montgomery's lawyers want her sentence commuted to a life sentence, which would allow her to remain under psychiatric care in prison for the rest of her days. At least five of the 12 jurors and three alternate jurorswiped away tears. "Last year, we got flowers, and gave her a $100-plus gift card and then paid her water bill," says Jena Baumli. Thats happened since Montgomery's childhood, when theterror she experienced while being raped forced her to retreat emotionally into an imaginary house,where everything is fine, Henry said. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in . Montgomery's alcoholic mother, Judy Shaughnessy, knew about the assaults but blamed Montgomery for bringing them upon herself. Because of Stinnett's easy-going reputation, Morrow remembers instantly dismissing the initial reports of her murder. As Strong crossed the threshold, hesaw a TV set airing an Amber Alert about the abduction of Stinnett's baby. The clemency process enables convicted criminals to request mercy and ask the nation's executive branch to step in, Henry said. Mattingly said she shielded her half-sister from random baby-sitters, often older men, whom their mother left with them during her near-nightly outings to a local bar. If her execution goes forward, she will be the first federal female inmate to be executed in almost 70 years. "She was completely detached from reality.". And then there is the life that Montgomery and her siblings inhabited, one of domestic violence, dysfunction, humiliation, fear and pain. The case was ruled a homicide and remains unsolved. There were always different men around the house. The threat of losing her children, combined with the years of untreated trauma and severe mental illness, pushed Lisa over the edge. Lisa Montgomery's friend, Toby Dorr, provided this photo she took of a letter Montgomery wrote to her in November using black crayon. "God, no, please," she said. Montgomery was also prone to delusional thinking. Dorr has since been released from prison and remarried. Mattingly and Montgomery were best friends. She also told one of her stepbrothers about the sexual abuse around that time. They slept in twin beds in a small bedroomand fell asleep most nights holding hands, Mattingly said. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in Miami, Okla. Patterson was the second of six husbands Shaughnessy would have during her life, which ended in 2013.
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