I didn't know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it.". All the while, Lisa's mother was being paid to let strange men rape Lisa. In her interviews with Montgomery, Porterfield said, the woman showed symptoms of dissociation, including confused thinking, major gaps in memory, and an inability to recognize the reality of certain events. She lived at 61 addresses in the 36 years before she went to prison, court documents show. Randy Strong, who investigated the case,is unhappy that some people are asking thatMontgomerys life be spared. Montgomery, who confessed, was later sentenced to death for the especially heinous murder as decided by a jury who heard her trial. The nature and circumstances of Montgomerys crime show she had lost touch with reality, says her half-sister, Diane Mattingly. "She got joy out of it.". Is it ethical to execute a woman for actions that cannot be meaningfully separated from her mental illness and ugly history of abuse? Shaughnessy knew that Mattingly was sensitive about abandonment due to her severed relationship with her birth mother, and so she would strip Mattingly naked and push her outside the front door, pretending that she was kicked out. Many there believe the final moments of Bobbie Jo Stinnett were so horrific, the death sentence is warranted. Bobbie's family deserves her," says Meagan Morrow, a high school classmate of Stinnett's. She has been let down over and over and over again by people in authority, people who were supposed to be caretakers for her, Mattingly said. Patterson and Shaughnessy divorced in 1971, and Shaughnessy took custody of the girls. "But one of the things that the president can do is say - to women who have been trafficked, and who have been sexually abused - 'Your abuse matters'.". Mattingly said she and Montgomery share the same father, John Patterson, a decorated Vietnam War veteran whonever married Mattingly's mother. The clemency process enables convicted criminals to request mercy and ask the nation's executive branch to step in, Henry said. Montgomery suffered from pseudocyesis, the false belief she was pregnant, jurors heard from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center of Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego. In addition to Strong and Fritz, those investigators were FBI Special Agents Mike Miller and Scott Gentine and Topeka police officer Tom Glor. Judy was an alcoholic with mental illness who married six times over the course of her life. Lisa Montgomery is no different. Lisa Montgomery had little if any chance in life. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who. For Diane Mattingly, there is one moment from her childhood for which she feels both enormous gratitude and guilt. 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. Bobbie Jo Stinnetts hometown waits as killers execution date nears. 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. She credits this moment for her "fairly normal" life - a house on eight peaceful acres, a loving relationship with her children, nearly two decades at a job working for the state of Kentucky. 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. Judy later married a man named Jack who punched, kicked and choked his children, including Lisa. Many of the residents of Skidmore cite the details of the crime, and the amount of planning that went into it, as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer. He testified that Montgomery had been in a dissociative state, or "mental fog," at the time. Jurors heard an audiotape of Harper, Stinnett's mother, calling 911 after finding her body. She struggles to maintain her own hygiene, loses focus during conversations with others and has trouble planning simple tasks.". "This was a very coordinated and determined plan to ensure that as many people could be executed on federal death row as possible before the end of this administration term.". Since 2008, Montgomery has been held in a federal prison in Texas for female inmates with special medical and psychological needs, where she has been receiving psychiatric care. And, in fact, blaming her for it.. 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. "She tried to throw her own brother under the bus for a crime that she committed.". The question is, should she be put to death for it? 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.. The U.S. has not executed a woman in 67 years. Mattingly has enjoyed a "blessed life," she said. Montgomerys father, John Patterson, a 25-year-old in the military, was also an alcoholic. The girls' biological father left the home, and after a while, Mattingly was whisked away to foster care. "Today the death penalty has a face of my friend and I just can't be quiet about it," she said. When Judy, Lisa's mother and my stepmother, came to beat us, I stood between her and the younger girls and took the beating, whether it was belts, cords or hangers. In 1986, when Montgomery was 18, she married her stepbrother, Carl Boman. Montgomerys mother, Judy Shaughnessy, who was 20 at the time of her birth in 1968, drank heavily while pregnant with her daughter. Nationwide, only 54 women have been executed since 1900. It has been the subject of two books, multiple true crime television shows, documentaries and countless podcast episodes. Lisa's and my father was also mentally ill. Tommy Kleiner and Montgomery have stayed in touch. During divorce proceedings, Shaughnessy admitted to the court that she had walked in on her husband raping Montgomery. Her lawyers say that as she lost touch with reality, she fantasised about being pregnant. She was quiet and kind, they say. "I get these images in my head of [Bobbie Jo's mother] finding her daughter that way.". She lives in Lebanon, Ky., is married with two adult children and has worked the past 19 years for the state of Kentucky. Join Facebook to connect with Judy Shaughnessy and others you may know. "If I did speak up, maybe Zella and Floyd would have gone back for Lisa," she wrote. Lisa Montgomery's current legal team has conducted some 450 interviews with family members, friends, case workers, doctors and social workers. "They put her on suicide watch to keep her from killing herself, so that they can execute her," she said. Henry said Montgomery seemed out of touch with reality when Henry and Harwell, who work in Tennessee, traveled by plane to visit her in October and early November at Fort Worth. 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. "My sister was crying and in pain. She is the most broken of the broken. I was put in foster care with a wonderful family. Even at the age of 8, Mattingly recalled being worried about what would happen to Montgomery without her there. For one thing, the wider world won't let them forget. In the haze of her mental illness, she went to the home of a pregnant woman, killed her, and removed the baby. 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. Montgomery often read her Bible or did things with her hands, including writing, quilting, and making placemats and bookmarks, Dorr said. Mattingly said she saw terror in her half-sister's bright green eyes. Back home, the couple announced the birth of their daughter to their friends and relatives. 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 is permitted Sudoku puzzles and coloring pages andone book at a time. There was plenty of food, our clothes were clean, and the kids did our homework together. 2023 BBC. 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. She said it was over and over, one man right after the other, and went on for hours, her cousin said in a sworn statement. Patterson made a mistake by abandoning them to "that crazy lady," he said at Montgomery's sentencing hearing in 2007. 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. However, in the tiny town of Skidmore, Missouri, where the crime was committed, there is little sympathy for that argument. Stinnett's husband was at work, andStinnett was on the phone with her mother, Becky Harper, when Montgomery's dirty red Toyota pulled upon the afternoon of Dec. 16. Her terror was well-founded, said Montgomery's attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. They slept in twin beds in a small bedroomand fell asleep most nights holding hands, Mattingly said. Read about our approach to external linking. "The other sister stayed in that situation, and it got worse and worse and worse. It was a terrifying household, she says, where physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery's mother, and her boyfriends was routine. By multiple accounts, Kleiner was an erratic, violent man who beat the kids and his wife regularly. 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. "The whole story is tragic," says Kelley Henry, one of Montgomery's federal defence lawyers. Authorities also questioned Kevin Montgomery but concluded he wasn't involved. My sister, Lisa Montgomery, is broken. The infant found later that day to weigh 5 pounds, 11 ounces was "very still" and didn't cry, which concerned Strong. "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.". He threatened to rape our little sister if Lisa resisted and said he would kill her whole family if she told anyone. The couple had three children in rapid succession. It is hard to know if Montgomery understands that she is close to being executed; her mental state does not allow for much lucidity. Her lawyers are pursuing an insanity defense. She had brain damage, likely caused by exposure to alcohol when she was a. According to her lawyers and witnesses, Montgomery suffered years of childhood abuse so severe it was akin to torture. Montgomery's family moved from place to place during her adult years, continuing the pattern she hadknown as a child. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis. She was broken by people who were supposed to be her caregivers. After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. However, the executions ordered by President Trump are continuing. He was in her. Let it be done: Bobbie Jo Stinnetts hometown waits as killers execution date nears. "There were so many opportunities where people could have intervened and prevented this," says Henry. When Floyd Gwin died last July at age 81, Mattingly was listed among the survivors in his obituary. "The Lisa I knew was a good person who cared about the other women in the pod and was quiet and generous and kind," Dorr said. One of those men started coming into their bedroom and raping Mattingly regularly, Mattingly said. She has writtenopinion piecespublished in Elle and Newsweek. However, calls for Trump to be merciful are hardly unanimous. As her attorneys fight for her life, Montgomery has at times seemed out of touch with reality,Henry said:Hermental illness causesher to disconnectwhen life becomes too terrible to endure. More: Lisa Montgomery's execution, delayed by attorneys' COVID-19 cases, rescheduled for Jan. 12. 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. In response to traumatic events, children may dissociate from their feelings and their bodies to protect themselves from experiencing what is happening. He was pumping her, Shaughnessy testified. Lisa Montgomery, a federal prisoner, is now slated to be executed on Jan. 12. She testified as. And nowhere is that support more palpably felt in this case than in Skidmore. Montgomery's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, who was 20 at the time of her birth in 1968, drank heavily while pregnant with her daughter. Lisa Montgomery, who endured years of sexual and physical abuse, murdered an expectant mother and took the baby. And I am just asking for somebody - once - not to fail her.". She had bought supplies, including a home birth kit, and searched online for how to perform a caesarean section. The tiny farming town of Skidmore sits in the far northwest corner of Missouri. Warnersaid the killinghad left Melvern residents stunned.. The family moved from place to place dozens of times, but it was in a trailer in Sperry, Oklahoma, where her lawyers say the abuse turned into something more akin to torture. Prosecutors said Montgomery was faking mental illness, notingthat many people are sexually abused, but few go on to kill. They would beat and slap her if she was doing it wrong. When they were done, they urinated on her like she was trash.. Every year. 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. "It was pretty awful.". 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. The threat of losing her children, combined with the years of untreated trauma and severe mental illness, pushed Lisa over the edge. "I think that in a lot of the opinion pieces that are being posted, in a lot of things that people are sharing, Bobbie Jo and her daughter, and her mother and her husband and other friends and family, are kind of being forgotten," says Tiffany Kirkland, another member of the class of 2000. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, Diane, who was four years older than Montgomery. 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. Lisa Montgomery lived a tortured life, from the day she was born in a small Washington town till the day she became the first woman in 67 years to be executed by the U.S. government. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who. Kevin Montgomery let investigators inside. Those records say questions were raised about her ability to function as an effective parent afterher house was found to be "filthy," her children were seen running naked in her yard and one of her daughters, then 2years old,ingested a bottle of Tylenol in 1993. 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. If you or someone you know needs support for issues about emotional distress, these organisations may be able to help. Montgomery has exhausted all attempts to appeal her conviction and death sentence although her attorneys are exploring possible litigation. Porterfield compared the chronic abuse to pouring lighter fluid onto a spark. Teddy Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was 45 years old when he was fatally shot in 2019 in North Topeka. Her mouth was covered with duct tape so frequently that she learned not to cry. As a teenager, Montgomery confided in a cousin, telling him the men would tie her up, beat her and even urinate on her afterwards. But none of those other victims responded by killing a woman and cutting her baby out of her stomach, hesaid. 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. People confuse punishment with culpability, she went on. As the oldest, I was the protector of Lisa and our baby sister. She says it's not as if all the other people of Skidmore lead idyllic lives free from abuse, poverty and other destructive tragedies. "She is the most broken of the broken," Mattingly said. Lawyer Kelley Henry says one of the things that disturbs her most is that adults in positions of authority were told about what was going on but did nothing. "There's so many people that failed her throughout her whole life. Babies born naturally tend to have misshapen heads initially because of the pressure experienced as they go through the birth canal, he said. I felt sick watching the video. My sister is on death row, Kleiner wrote in the lawsuit petition. 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. Two other inmates are scheduled to die at Terre Haute prison before Mr Trump's presidency ends. 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. Montgomery graduated in 1986 from high school at Cleveland, Okla., with hopes of joining the Air Force to earn money for college. Montgomery strangled Stinnett into unconsciousness, then sliced into her stomach with the steak knife, Strong said. Another case with Missouri ties. "And Lisa deserves to pay.". "The people that are defending [Montgomery], I wish I could take them back in time, and put them in that room," he says. Mattingly said she was fortunate to have been moved to a lovinghome of high school history teacher and coach Floyd Gwin;his wife, Zella Gwin;and their three biological children. 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. Because of Stinnett's easy-going reputation, Morrow remembers instantly dismissing the initial reports of her murder. Dorr said she and Montgomery were in the same pod,in which inmates may gather outside their cells,in 2006 and 2007 at Leavenworth Detention Center, a for-profit federal facility in northeast Kansas. Melvern residents want that perception to end, she said. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in . He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in Miami, Okla. Patterson was the second of six husbands Shaughnessy . Montgomery and Carl Boman divorced, remarried and divorced again in 1998. Her children even came up with a nickname to pull her out of her trances when she was unresponsive: They called her Martha instead of mom to get her attention. 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. View the profiles of people named Judy Shaughnessy. 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.. A former paramedic who had watched the births of all three of his children, Strong also considered the baby's head to be unusually round. 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. "There was a lot of talk both ways on it," he said when contacted by phone at his new home in Texas. When I was around eight years old, and Lisa was about four, one of Judy's male friends began coming into our room at night and regularly raping me, with Lisa in the next bedclose enough we could reach for each other and touch fingers. "I fell in love immediately.". Lisa's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, abused her "in extreme and sadistic ways," according to interviews with nearly 450 family members, neighbors, lawyers, social workers, and teachers. Montgomerys family tree, on both her mother and fathers side, is filled with psychiatric and neurologic impairment, including mood disorders, intellectual disability, PTSD and schizophrenia. They married in 1986. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. She began prostituting Lisa to older men when Lisa was in her early teens. If they all go ahead, the federal government will have executed more people than any administration in nearly 100 years. After she gave birth to four children, Judy pressured Lisa into an involuntary sterilization. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie until backed into a corner. But what happened at the modest clapboard house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation. Ms. Montgomery has bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, traumatic brain injury and most likely fetal alcohol syndrome. When children grow up in a chronic state of fear and terror, their brains adapt to survive, explained Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist at the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, who has evaluated Montgomery in prison. She also told one of her stepbrothers about the sexual abuse around that time. "That's how evil this woman is," Strong said. The baby, who was uninjured, was returned to her father. "I don't think people understand how bad this was," Strong said. Residents there tend to think her execution would bring an appropriate end to a painful chapter in their city's history, he said. Montgomery achieved considerable emotional growth once she was put in a stable environment where she felt safe and was receiving psychiatric medications for the first time, Dorrsaid. When Shaughnessy eventually split from her second husband, she and Montgomery testified in divorce proceedings about the sexual assaults. My heart goes out to the family of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and the loss that they have felt and are still feeling. The next morning, Lisa and Kevin Montgomery showed off a newborn girl dressed in a pink bonnet as they ate breakfast at the Whistle Stop Cafe in downtown Melvern. Facebook gives people the. Montgomery lamented that she couldn't be present to console them because she was in solitary confinement, said Dorr, Montgomery's friend since they met in a federal prison in 2006. "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. President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end death penalty proceedings, although he hasn't said when. "She was hyperventilating," Henry said. At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. The family moved often. She was often spaced out, appearing disconnected from reality. Her lawyers at the time also presented an alternative theory of the crime, which was that Montgomery's brother had actually committed the murder, even though he had an alibi. "It was violent and like a scene out of a horror movie," he said. I never molested her in any way, shape or form, said Kleiner, who died in 2009. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological and sexual abuse Lisa. Dorr's marriage was failing when she fell in love with John Manard, a convicted murderer 21 years her junior. "Judy was manipulative and - I hate to use this word, but - evil. Shaughnessy drank excessively during her pregnancy, causing brain damage to Montgomery, according to court records. She learned Oct. 16 that she had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on Dec. 8. After she strangled Stinnett, Montgomery is alleged to have cut her open and stolen her unborn child Victoria, who survived the attack and is now living with her father. Protecting her half-sister became her "sole purpose in life, she said. 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. If her execution goes forward, she will be the first federal female inmate to be executed in almost 70 years. Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong says that the scene that he and his four colleagues found that day was so bloody, they are still traumatised by it. DNA testing later showed they were Stinnett's. In fact, he drove her back home and dropped her off in the hands of her abusers. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis. At 18, Judy pressured Lisa to marry her stepbrother. U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner upheld the jury's recommendation the following April. She got into multiple car accidents, struggled to keep a job, moved around constantly, drank heavily, engaged in sex work and neglected her children. Montgomery was sentenced for the murder of a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. The family treated Mattingly as one of their own, and gave her a sense of belonging and self-worth, she said.
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