7:22 pm UTC Jan. 13, 2021
Lisa Montgomery, a longtime Kansan, became the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 67 years early Wednesday. She lived a childhood so abusive her attorneys call it akin to torture.
She was beaten, repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends and sexually trafficked by her mother.
At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. She had four children in less than four years before being sterilized. She lapsed increasingly into mental illness and repeatedly faked pregnancy.
But those who believe she should be put to death say her lifetime of horrors can t excuse what came next: On Dec. 16, 2004, she loaded a steak knife, umbilical cord clamps and part of a clothesline into her car and drove 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.
Diane Mattingly sat on the witness stand in October 2007, prepared to share an account of her life that she had shared with few before. She’d been asked to do so by investigators working on behalf of her half-sister, Lisa Montgomery, who was on trial for capital murder and facing the death penalty. It had been about a year since Mattingly received a call on the landline in her Kentucky home. “Is this Diane?” asked a voice. “I’m part of Lisa’s team.”
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Mattingly was elated her stepmother (Montgomery’s biological mother) had sent her away to foster care when she was 8, and she hadn’t seen her sister in 33 years, though she’d tried to find her. The pair used to be inseparable. Mattingly was four years older than Montgomery and had thought of her as her baby, dressing her up and staging tea parties. “Oh my God, really? I’ve wanted to find her my whole life,” Mattingly excitedly told the woman on the phone, who identified herself as an investigator.
Dec. 18, 2020
This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.
On Jan. 12, Lisa Montgomery is set to become the first woman executed on federal death row in nearly 70 years. The last executions, both in 1953, were of Bonnie Heady, killed in a gas chamber in Missouri, and Ethel Rosenberg. Ms. Montgomery would be only the fifth woman put to death in a federal civilian execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
On Dec. 16, 2004, Ms. Montgomery drove to Skidmore, Mo., where she strangled a pregnant woman named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then sliced open her belly and took the baby to the home she shared with her husband, Kevin, in Kansas. The baby survived.
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