MISSION, Canada (AP) – A judge has granted a stay in what was to be the first U.S. government execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades: a Kansas woman who killed a future mother in Missouri, she cut off the baby from her womb and let the baby pass as her own.
Judge Patrick Hanlon granted the stay Monday afternoon and cited the need to determine Montgomery’s mental competence, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported.. Lisa Montgomery faced execution Tuesday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, just eight days before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, takes office.
Montgomery drove approximately 273.59 miles from his farmhouse in Melvern, Kansas, to the city of Skidmore, northwest Missouri, under the guise of adopting a Bobbie Jo Stinnett rat terrier puppy, a 23 year old dog breeder. He strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a raw cesarean section and running away with the baby.
She was arrested the next day after showing the premature infant, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 and has not spoken publicly about the tragedy.
“As we crossed the threshold, our Amber Alert was scrolling through the TV at that very moment,” recalled Randy Strong, who at the time was part of the Northwest Missouri case case staff.
She looked to her right and saw Montgomery holding the newborn and felt relieved when he handed her over to law enforcement. The previous hours had been a blur in which he photographed Stinnett’s body and spent a sleepless night looking for clues – he wasn’t sure if the baby was dead or alive and no idea what it was like.
But then advice began to arrive on Montgomery, who had a history of falsifying pregnancies and suddenly had a baby. Strong, now the sheriff of Nodaway County, where the murder occurred, jumped into an unmarked car with another officer. During the trip, he learned that the email address [email protected] that was used to set up the deadly meeting with Stinnett had been sent from a telephone connection to Montgomery’s home.
“He absolutely knew he was going to the killer’s house,” Strong recalled, saying the rat terriers were running around his feet as he approached his home. Like Stinnett, Montgomery also raised rat terriers.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s mother, Becky Harper, cried when she told a Missouri office she stumbled upon her daughter in a pool of blood, that her belly had opened and the child she was carrying had disappeared.
“It’s like exploding or something,” Harper told the dispatcher on Dec. 16, 2004, during a desperate but futile attempt to get help for his daughter.
Prosecutors said her reason was that Stinnett’s ex-husband knew she had been subjected to a tubal ligation that made her infertile and planned to reveal that she lied about the pregnancy in an effort to get custody of two of her four. children. Needing a baby before a fast-approaching court date, Montgomery turned his attention to Stinnett, whom he had met at dog shows.
Montgomery’s lawyers, however, have argued that sexual abuse during Montgomery’s childhood caused mental illness. Attorney Kelley Henry spoke in favor of Monday’s decision and said in a statement to the Capital Journal that “Ms. Montgomery has brain damage and serious mental illness that was aggravated throughout her life by sexual torture. which he suffered at the hands of the watchmen. “
Her stepfather denied sexual abuse in videotaped statements and said she did not have a good memory when faced with the transcript of a divorce process in which she admitted some physical abuse. Her mother stated that she never filed a police complaint because she had threatened her and her children.
But the jury members who heard the case, some crying over the terrible witness, ignored the defense in convicting her of kidnapping that caused her death.
Prosecutors argued that Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend himself, as Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the girl from her belly. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, telling him she had given birth to the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birth center.
Finally, he confessed and in his car were found the rope and the bloody knife they were using to kill Stinnett. A search on her computer showed that she used it to investigate cesarean sections and order a birth kit.
Stinnett’s husband, Zeb, told jurors that his world “crashed to the end” when he learned his wife was dead. He said he did not return for months to the couple’s home in Skidmore, a small farming community that previously gained notoriety after the 1981 murder of Ken Rex McElroy, a murderer, in front of a crowd of people who were leaving. refuse to implicate the killer or killers. This crime was explained in a book “In broad daylight”, as well as in a film for television, the film “Without mercy” and the miniseries “Nobody saw a thing”.
Recently, on Victoria Jo’s birthday, she sent Strong, the sheriff, a message via Facebook Messenger thanking him.
“I just cried,” Strong recalled. “He will be constantly reminded, whether in his nightmares or if someone calls him and wants to interview him. The family doesn’t want to be interviewed. They want to be left alone. The Skidmore community has had a troubling past and history. They didn’t want to. that. They didn’t deserve that. “
Montgomery was originally scheduled to die on December 8. But the execution was temporarily blocked after her lawyers hired the coronavirus to visit her in prison.
On July 14, the resumption of federal executions began after a 17-year hiatus. Anti-death penalty groups said President Donald Trump was pushing for executions ahead of the November election in a cynical bid to burn the reputation of leader of law and order. .
U.S. officials have portrayed executions that bring back justice to the victims and their families.