This morning Lisa Montgomery became the fourth woman in the nation’s history to be executed by the federal government, the first in 67 years. Here’s how that happened.
The number one cause of death associated with pregnancy is murder.
If left to obstetric issues, or conditions related physiologically to pregnancy itself, it would be heart disease. But studies have shown that homicide kills more pregnant women than the leading obstetric causes, and that pregnant women are twice as likely to be murdered as non-pregnant women.
This is usually related to domestic violence, or intimate partner violence, often for the specific purpose of preventing an unwanted birth. But in the twenty years since studies first indicated this disturbing trend, more than a dozen American pregnant women have been murdered by other women, who’ve attempted in desperation to pass off the babies as their own. The term for this supposedly unthinkable crime is fetal abduction, and it’s now (inevitably) the subject of a true crime podcast.
Lisa Montgomery, who murdered 23-year-old first-time mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett in Missouri in 2004, was the only woman ever sentenced to death for this crime. Montgomery lived in Kansas at the time, and traveled to Missouri posing as a buyer for a puppy. Mental health issues are obvious in any woman who could commit such a heinous crime, and for the other women convicted for committing it, defense attorneys were successful in drawing that line. Lisa Montgomery was no different from these women, except maybe for the severity of her mental illness, and possibly the fact that she had four children of her own. She suffered fetal-alcohol-related brain damage, endured a horrific childhood full of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and torture, and inherited a pack of mental health disorders as well, all of which took over any chance she had at a healthy adulthood, long before she crossed paths with Bobbie Jo Stinnett. It’s likely her sixteen years in prison were the most peaceful of her life. But in her case, defense attorneys just became the last people in her life to let her down.
Lisa Montgomery was the only woman sentenced to death for fetal abduction.
Montgomery, who died by lethal injection at 1:30 this morning, was executed under other improbabilities as well. Only two percent of state executions in the United States have been those of women–fifty-five of them, across the nation, since 1900. Montgomery, a federal inmate, was only the fourth female executed by the federal government, and the first in nearly seventy years. Two women were federally executed in 1953: one by gas, with her lover, for kidnapping and murdering the child of a multi-millionaire, also in Missouri, and the other electrocuted, with her husband, for espionage. The first woman executed by the federal government was hanged in 1865, for her part in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
Also, federal executions were suspended for nearly twenty years, until the outgoing President reinstated them over the summer, resulting in more federal executions in six months than the previous fifty years. Lisa Montgomery, the only female, as of today is the most recent. President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office next week, is Catholic and anti-death penalty.
So despite the last-minute fight to save Lisa Montgomery’s life, a girl who was born into the wringer, who endured all of the worst things anyone could do to a child, who bore four children (and had twelve grandchildren) and went to the darkest imaginable place to find another one, has basically gone out the same way she came in, having taken another woman with her. That life is now a dark piece of American history.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s baby, who survived in 2004 and would be sixteen today, was also a girl.
-Maude
January 13, 2021