Mattingly believes that by living with loving adults who nurtured her, she was able to process the trauma of her childhood and become a well-adjusted adult. When she called her attorneys that day, she could hardly speak. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in . One of those men started coming into their bedroom and raping Mattingly regularly, Mattingly said. And, in fact, blaming her for it.. 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. Facebook gives people the. I never molested her in any way, shape or form, said Kleiner, who died in 2009. "She needs to be put to death.". Even at the age of 8, Mattingly recalled being worried about what would happen to Montgomery without her there. 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. For example, she said, the jury that recommended Montgomery be executed wasn't asked to consider the impact that would have on her four children and 12 grandchildren. Skidmore has suffered lasting effects as a result of Stinnett's murder, said Strong, the investigator who helped prodMontgomery to confess. Henry says Montgomery's original legal defence after she was arrested and charged with murder was woefully inadequate, and presented few of the details about her abuse, trauma and mental illness. Montgomery's execution, scheduled less than 60 days, will be the first of three federal executions in January before Trump leaves office. The father was a teacher. Mattingly said she saw terror in her half-sister's bright green eyes. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie until backed into a corner. You know, like, that doesn't happen to Bobbie," Morrow says. But what happened at the modest clapboard house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation. A herd of rat terriers greeted them. All the while, Lisa's mother was being paid to let strange men rape Lisa. Her victim's community said otherwise. 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. 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. Melvern residents want that perception to end, 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. The divorce left Shaughnessy no longer entitled to be Mattingly's legal guardian. Residents of Melvern, where Montgomery lived, have beendivided about whether she shouldpay for her crimes with her life, said Joe Warner, who was mayor of Melvern at the time of the murder. When they came to take me, I thought they were coming to take all of us. "Bobbie deserves to be here today. Montgomerys entire life was marked by people who failed to protect her, Babcock said. Eventually, Montgomery admitted she had acted alone in killing Stinnett and taking her baby. 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. Mattingly and Montgomery lived together until Mattingly was eight and her half-sister was four. Now, she called him to tell him that shed gone into labor while shopping and had given birth at a clinic. 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. ", More: Only woman on federal death row asks President Trump to be a 'hero,' commute her sentence. He continued the cycle of abuse, rapes and beatings, which he sadistically videotaped. He thanked the sheriff for recovering his daughter and allowing him to be the parent that his wife couldn't be. But they were what we come to understand as neuro-physiological adaptations to survive being constantly under assault.. But those who believe she should be put to death say her lifetime of horrorscan't excuse what came next: OnDec. 16, 2004, she loaded a steak knife, umbilical cord clamps and part of a clothesline into her car anddrove 175 miles from her home in east-central Kansas to the northwest Missouri home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, an expectant mother she had met at a dog show. Im not a psychiatrist, so I cant go any further than that.. Mattingly said her heart sank when she realized Montgomery wasn't coming with her. Montgomery and Carl Boman divorced, remarried and divorced again in 1998. Lisa Montgomery's friend, Toby Dorr, provided this photo she took of a letter Montgomery wrote to her in November using black crayon. The baby girl survived, andMontgomery took her home and briefly passed her off as her own until investigators arrested her the next day. For the rest of her life.. The idea that that evidence of her bad mothering is part of what the jury could rely upon as a reason to sentence her to death its something you would never find in a case of a man.. [N]ot only was it bizarre behavior, but it was very embarrassing for me as her daughter, she said. 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. Montgomery is scheduled to be put to death by a lethal injection of pentobarbital at Terre Haute prison in Indiana. "She tried to throw her own brother under the bus for a crime that she committed.". Her daughter remembered her acting like a young child in public, twirling and skipping with her arms swinging with abandon. 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. According to sworn statements from her family, her mental health declined rapidly after that. Residents there tend to think her execution would bring an appropriate end to a painful chapter in their city's history, he said. The infant found later that day to weigh 5 pounds, 11 ounces was "very still" and didn't cry, which concerned Strong. Lisa then took the baby home and cared for her as though she was her own. "One sister got taken out and got put into a loving home and was nurtured and had time to heal," says Mattingly. She is permitted Sudoku puzzles and coloring pages andone book at a time. Jurors heard an audiotape of Harper, Stinnett's mother, calling 911 after finding her body. On the trip home, she stopped in Topeka and called her husband to say she had gone into labor while Christmas shopping and had given birth at a Topeka birthing center. "Oh, they're here, I've got to go," she said. Her terror was well-founded, said Montgomery's attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell. Dorr's marriage was failing when she fell in love with John Manard, a convicted murderer 21 years her junior. 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. 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. In fact, he drove her back home and dropped her off in the hands of her abusers. She did not see her again until Montgomerys trial 34 years later. 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. 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. She is the only woman on federal death row. More: Lisa Montgomery's execution, delayed by attorneys' COVID-19 cases, rescheduled for Jan. 12. Judy drank throughout her pregnancy with Lisa and caused her to be born with brain damage. 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. But it is something that she carries with her and that she mourns not only for the effect on her life and that of her family, but for the terrible effect on Mrs. Stinnett, who was killed, and also her family who was left behind.. 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. They have been joined by a chorus of supportive voices from the legal field, including 41 former and current prosecutors, as well as human rights entities like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 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. Her mouth was covered with duct tape so frequently that she learned not to cry. Lisa Montgomery has been charged in the December 16 death of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant at the time. She was quiet and kind, they say. The girls' biological father left the home, and after a while, Mattingly was whisked away to foster care. The murder 16 years ago is never far from the minds of the town's residents. He was pumping her, Shaughnessy testified. Montgomery was sentenced for the murder of a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Every time she has a birthday, it will also be the anniversary of the slaughter of her mother, Whitworth said. Patterson made a mistake by abandoning them to "that crazy lady," he said at Montgomery's sentencing hearing in 2007. "It was violent and like a scene out of a horror movie," he said. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. When she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. "There was a lot of talk both ways on it," he said when contacted by phone at his new home in Texas. Often the woman, now 52 and a grandmother of 12, is knitting or doing needlepoint. 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. Dorr has since been released from prison and remarried. Because of Stinnett's easy-going reputation, Morrow remembers instantly dismissing the initial reports of her murder. Around this time, Shaughnessy and Patterson separated, and Mattingly was removed from the house by child protective services an act which she credits for saving her life. As long as she was given cigarettes, Montgomery continued to talk, Strong said. She married her stepbrother at 18 and gave birth to four children in less than five years, before having a sterilization procedure. In Montgomerys early childhood, her older sister, Diane, suffered the worst of the violence. She had this ability to find what hurt you the most and use that against you, Mattingly said. . They would beat and slap her if she was doing it wrong. When they were done, they urinated on her like she was trash.. "Last year, we got flowers, and gave her a $100-plus gift card and then paid her water bill," says Jena Baumli. Nobody has said that Lisa should never have been punished. If that disconnection is brought about with enough frequency and intensity, it can become more of a steady state of being, she added. That could change in Terre Haute. When Mattingly and Montgomery were young, Shaughnessy beat them and doled out cruel forms of punishment, like taping Montgomery's mouth shut, or pushing Mattingly out into the snow, naked. At least five of the 12 jurors and three alternate jurorswiped away tears. Stitched together, they form a tapestry of family dysfunction, abuse, neglect, professional negligence, substance abuse and untreated mental illness. On the ride home, she clamped the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby girl with wipes. Shaughnessy was cruel and violent to both girls, according to a sworn statement from Patterson, who reported feeling ashamed that he did not step in to stop the abuse. Montgomery was psychotic at the time of the crime, Harwell said. She was broken by people who were supposed to be her caregivers. In the haze of her mental illness, she went to the home of a pregnant woman, killed her, and removed the baby. She faked pregnancies several times during her marriages to Carl Boman and Kevin Montgomery, court records say. Henrysaid she was surprised to see Montgomery scheduled for execution so soon, considering 30 other inmates on federal death row were sentencedbefore her. As Fritz patted Montgomery on the back of her hand, Strong said he noticed dried blood and tissue embedded beneath her fingernails. "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.". Prosecutors, in their closing argument, said that she had a filthy home, that she didnt cook and that she didnt clean, Babcock said. Please, honey.". A federal judge in November postponed Montgomery's execution from Dec. 8 until Jan. 12 to give her attorneys more time to file her clemency petition, after concluding that their COVID-19 symptoms limited their ability to file thepetition. Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery ' s mother, raised Lisa in poverty and chaos, with multiple stepfathers and in dozens of different homes, according to scores of interviews and documents cited. 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. Judy Shaughnessy, drank during pregnancy. 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 recommended a sentence of death. About a week before Christmas in 2004, Lisa Montgomery, a 36-year-old mother of four, drove from her home in Kansas to Missouri, ostensibly to buy a rat terrier puppy from a woman shed met at a dog show earlier that year. "It was pretty awful.". Though capital case defendants tend to be confused and stunned, those emotions were heightened with Montgomery, who had trouble responding to questions, Wurtz said. He said he was "reduced to tears" when Zeb Stinnett sent him a message last month on the 16th anniversary of Montgomery's arrest for the murder of his wife. 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. The crime itself shows that Lisa had lost all touch with reality. But my hope is President Trump will stop Lisa's execution and commute her sentence to life in prison. Montgomery was represented briefly after her arrest by Ron Wurtz, a now-retired attorney who has represented dozens of capital case defendants. For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it began before she was born. My sister is on death row, Kleiner wrote in the lawsuit petition. According to her lawyers and witnesses, Montgomery suffered years of childhood abuse so severe it was akin to torture. "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 described feeling that she was unsure whether her environment was real, and confided that she used a strategy to ground herself in reality: She would look at a tree out the window and tell herself that the tree was real if she could see it. She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. 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. The following day, the police arrested Montgomery at her home. It is the only federal prison with an active death chamber. Montgomery strangled Stinnett into unconsciousness, then sliced into her stomach with the steak knife, Strong said. At 1:31 AM on Wednesday, Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead. In response to traumatic events, children may dissociate from their feelings and their bodies to protect themselves from experiencing what is happening. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in Miami, Okla. Patterson was the second of six husbands Shaughnessy . The question is, should she be put to death for it? "I fell in love immediately.". At 18, Judy pressured Lisa to marry her stepbrother. 2023 BBC. Moving often was the norm to Montgomery; by the time she was a teenager, she had moved approximately 16 times. Shaughnessy has since died. Mattingly, 57, recalled the day her half-sister was brought home in a pink bundle after being born Feb. 27, 1968, in Pierce County, Washington. Since receiving her execution date, she's been placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell. Strong said he and Fritz questioned Montgomery using a"good cop/bad cop" approach. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who. When issuing his original stay of execution, the district. 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. In addition to Strong and Fritz, those investigators were FBI Special Agents Mike Miller and Scott Gentine and Topeka police officer Tom Glor. 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. 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. She needs to be born with brain damage was broken by people who were supposed to be a 'hero '. Their bodies to protect themselves from experiencing what is happening initial reports of her,... 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