by Mauve Maude
December 1, 2020
Lisa Montgomery was scheduled to be executed by the United States, December 8. Following a delay on account of her lawyers contracting COVID-19, she is now set to die January 12, 2021. If she is executed on that date, she will be the first female federal inmate executed in nearly seventy years, and the 55th woman executed since 1900*. She is also one of only 53 women currently on death row, nationwide. She is the only one serving at the federal level.
Federal executions, incidentally, were resumed earlier this year. Previously, they’d been suspended for almost twenty. Since they resumed, more federal inmates have been executed than in the previous fifty years.
Montgomery, who lived in Kansas, was sentenced to death in 2007, after the 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant. Stinnett and her husband bred rat terriers, and the two women had connected in an online rat terrier chat. Montgomery, who claimed to be pregnant also, became acquainted with Stinnett over a few months, then came to her house a week before Christmas pretending to adopt a puppy. Instead she strangled Stinnett, removed her fetus with a knife, and took the baby girl with her to be passed off as her own. She was found and arrested the next day.
In November, Melissa Jeltsen of The Huffington Post wrote this thorough article on the dark path that led Lisa Montgomery to commit the most heinous imaginable crime. Lisa, genetically prone to mental illness, was thirty-six when she murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett, and could barely remember a time when she wasn’t being abused or neglected by someone. From her own mother and father, to her stepfather and other men he invited to rape her, to family members, and even her mother’s divorce court, plenty of people knew what she was going through and did nothing to help her. Seemingly, the only person in her life who thought about protecting her was an older half-sister who was removed from the home when Lisa was four. After enduring a lifetime of torture, Lisa married her stepbrother at eighteen and had four children. She then had a tubal ligation, but repeatedly told people she knew that she was pregnant, as her mental health spiraled. By the time she set her sights on Bobbie Jo Stinnett, she’d suffered a psychotic break from reality.
Jeltsen also points out that out of the dozen or so women who’ve committed the crime of murdering a pregnant woman for her child in the last twenty years (or in this similar, untried case, a postpartum mother), only Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death, because the line from the other women’s profound mental illnesses to their crimes was successfully illustrated. For Lisa Montgomery, this and so many other things didn’t happen. It’s heartbreaking to imagine how many generations of parents must have suffered unimaginable childhood trauma, in order for a family to produce this woman’s life. But it’s not beyond imagination that somebody might save it.
Montgomery’s lawyers, who’ve recovered from the coronavirus cases they contracted while traveling back and forth to meet with her, have recovered and are racing against time to petition for her clemency. President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office eight days after Montgomery’s scheduled execution, is against the death penalty. Meanwhile, Jeltsen writes, Montgomery may not be aware of the gravity of her situation. Now fifty-two, she takes a cocktail of prescriptions that allow her to simply function, behind bars she is a grandmother of twelve, and she knits.
As her long lost sister opines, it doesn’t seem right to execute a severely, mentally ill person, once a little girl, who’s been let down by every person in her life. Sadly, Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s family already paid the cost of abuse and neglect.
*[Correction: Lisa Montgomery would be the 55th woman executed nationally since 1900, not the 55th female federal inmate. She would be the fourth female federal inmate executed in the nation’s history.]
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