Bobbie Jo Stinnett (December 4, 1981 – December 16, 2004) was a 23-year-old pregnant American woman who was murdered in Skidmore, Missouri, in December 2004. The perpetrator, Lisa Marie Montgomery, then aged 36, strangled Stinnett to death and cut her unborn child (eight months into gestation) from her womb. Her motive was to produce a baby, as she had been faking a pregnancy. Montgomery was arrested in Kansas the next day and charged with kidnapping resulting in death – a federal crime due to the interstate nature of the offense. Stinnett's baby, who had survived the crude caesarean section, was safely recovered by authorities and returned to the father.

Montgomery was tried and found guilty in 2007. She was executed by lethal injection shortly after midnight on January 13, 2021, having exhausted the appeals process. Montgomery became the first female federal inmate since 1953 to be executed by the United States federal government, and the fourth overall. At the time of her execution, she was the only woman on federal death row.

Background

Bobbie Jo Stinnett was born on December 4, 1981, and graduated from Nodaway-Holt High School in Graham, Missouri, in 2000. Stinnett and her husband ran a dog-breeding business from their residence in Skidmore.

Stinnett and Montgomery had met through dog show events and had ongoing interactions in an online Rat Terrier chatroom called Ratter Chatter. In these emails, Montgomery used the alias 'Darlene Fischer." Montgomery told Stinnett that she was pregnant too, leading to the two women chatting online and exchanging e-mails about their pregnancies. Using this alias, Montgomery contacted Stinnett on December 15, 2004, via instant message. Stinnett had a litter of puppies for sale, and Montgomery expressed interest in purchasing one. The women agreed to meet the next day. Although Montgomery lived in Melvern, Kansas, she told Stinnett that she was from Fairfax, Missouri, a town near Skidmore. That night, Stinnett told her husband and her mother, Becky Harper, that a woman from Fairfax was going to stop by and look at the puppies.

Murder

On December 16, Montgomery drove from Melvern to Skidmore and arrived at Stinnett's home around 12:30 p.m. Montgomery carried a sharp kitchen knife and a white cord in her jacket pocket. Stinnett brought the puppies outside and played with them with Montgomery. At 12:30 p.m., Stinnett received a phone call from Becky Harper, her mother, and confirmed that she would give Harper a ride home from work at 3:30 p.m. Harper immediately called authorities and described the wounds inflicted upon her daughter as appearing as if her "stomach had exploded." Paramedics were unsuccessful in attempts to revive Stinnett, and she was pronounced dead at St. Francis Hospital in Maryville.

Montgomery called her husband, Kevin, that same day around 5:15 p.m. saying that, on a Christmas shopping trip in Topeka, she had gone into labor and given birth. It was initially seen as unusual that she delivered a baby and then drove herself home right after. She said she delivered at the Birth And Womans Center in Topeka, although there were no reported births there on the day she described.

The following day, December 17, police arrested Montgomery at her farmhouse in Melvern, Kansas. A witness would later report that on the morning before her arrest, Montgomery took the infant, her husband, and two teenage sons to a restaurant for breakfast. Kathy Sage, owner of the Whistle Top Cafe in Melvern, Kansas, said she was showing the baby off as her own. She also reportedly took the child to church and said she named the child "Abigail" since it was from the Bible. When they arrived, they found a car matching the description of the one at the crime scene. After ringing the doorbell, Kevin let the officers into the home where they found Montgomery inside, holding the infant and watching television.

DNA testing was used to confirm the infant's identity, and prove that Montgomery didn't deliver the child.

Perpetrator

thumb|Lisa Montgomery

Lisa Marie Montgomery (February 27, 1968 – January 13, 2021) was born in Pierce County, Washington, and resided in Melvern, Kansas, at the time of the murder. Montgomery's father was a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War, She was raised in a physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive home from the age of 11.

Her stepfather built a room off his trailer, accessible only outside of it. He would force Lisa to live in this room, isolating her from her sisters as much as possible. In this room, Jack told Lisa that he was teaching her how to be a good wife. He would rape and sodomize her until she bled. Montgomery was very close to Mattingly, and was crushed when she learned she couldn't go with her. She sought escape through alcohol. When Montgomery was 14, her mother discovered the abuse and reacted by threatening her at gunpoint.

Montgomery, in order to escape the abusive home situation, married her stepbrother Carl Boman in August 1986. She had just turned 18. She had her first child in January 1987, with three more following before she underwent a tubal ligation in 1990. Montgomery claimed that she was forced to undergo the procedure by her husband/step-brother, as well as her mother. During her trial in federal court, her defense attorneys, led by Frederick Duchardt, asserted that she had pseudocyesis, a mental condition that causes a woman to falsely believe she is pregnant and exhibit outward signs of pregnancy. According to The Guardian, Duchardt attempted to follow this line of defense only one week before the trial began after being forced to abandon a contradictory argument that Stinnett was murdered by Montgomery's brother Tommy, who had an alibi. As a result, Montgomery's family refused to co-operate with Duchardt and described her background to the jury. Ramachandran testified that Montgomery's stories about her actions fluctuated because of her delusional state; thus she was unable to describe the nature and quality of her acts. Both federal prosecutor Roseann Ketchmark and the opposing expert witness forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz disagreed strongly with the diagnosis of pseudocyesis.

On October 22, 2007, jurors found Montgomery guilty, rejecting the defense claim that Montgomery was delusional. Judge Gary A. Fenner formally sentenced Montgomery to death on April 4, 2008.

Duchardt's pseudocyesis defense, Montgomery's past trauma and her separate diagnosis of mental illness were not fully revealed until after her conviction. This led critics including Guardian journalist David Rose to argue that Duchardt provided an incompetent legal defense for Montgomery. Montgomery, who was registered for the Federal Bureau of Prisons under number 11072-031, was incarcerated at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she remained until she was transferred to the site of her execution. For the duration of her time there, she was the only woman on federal death row.

During her appeals, Montgomery's lawyers argued that she technically did not commit the crime of kidnapping resulting in death, claiming that the baby was not considered a person until she was removed from her mother's womb. Accordingly, since Bobbi had died beforehand, the crime was instead a "death resulting in kidnapping." That claim was dismissed, with the courts saying the felony murder rule nullified this and that Montgomery needed to kill Bobbi regardless in order to complete the kidnapping.

Execution

Montgomery was scheduled for execution on December 8, 2020, by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, but this was delayed following her attorneys contracting COVID-19. On December 23, 2020, Montgomery was given a new execution date of January 12, 2021. U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss found that "the director's order setting a new execution date while the Court's stay was in effect was 'not in accordance with law'", prohibiting the rescheduling of the execution before January 1, 2021. On that date, U.S. District Judge Patrick Hanlon granted a stay of her execution on the grounds that her mental competence must first be tested as it could be argued she did not understand the grounds for her execution, per the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The stay was then vacated by the Supreme Court via a 6–3 vote. The execution was ordered to be carried out immediately. She arrived in Terre Haute's death row on January 12.

Montgomery was eventually executed by lethal injection on January 13, 2021, at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. When asked if she had any last words, she replied: "No." She was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. EST. Montgomery's execution was followed a day later by Corey Johnson, and three days later by Dustin Higgs. All three were carried out by the United States federal government, each being controversial for a variety of reasons.

In her final days, Montgomery had kept a calendar marked with Joe Biden's inauguration date. Joe Biden had promised to enact a moratorium on capital punishment at the federal level. True to his promise, Biden enacted the moratorium on July 1, 2021.

In 2023, one of Montgomery's attorneys admitted that Montgomery's legal team had briefly considered taking her off the medications she was on to stabilize her mental health. The intent was for Montgomery to "go absolutely psychotic" in her team's attempt to postpone her execution by "proving mental fragility exacerbated by sexual abuse in childhood." The attorney stated, "Ultimately, we weren't going to do that to her."

In literature

The case was described in author Diane Fanning's Baby Be Mine, and M. William Phelps's Murder in the Heartland.

The case featured in an episode of the true crime series Deadly Women titled "Fatal Obsession"; in an episode of the true crime series Solved titled "Life and Death"; and in the fifth episode of the documentary series No One Saw a Thing that aired on the Sundance Channel on August 29, 2019.

See also

  • Capital punishment by the United States federal government
  • List of people executed by the United States federal government
  • List of people executed in the United States in 2021
  • List of women executed in the United States since 1976
  • Branson Perry, Stinnett's cousin who disappeared about three years before her murder

References

  • United States of America vs. Lisa M. Montgomery
  • U.S. v. Lisa Montgomery – F.B.I. Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint
  • USA v. Lisa Montgomery Department of Justice Information
  • Picture of Stinnett from www.uniontribune.net

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