Lisa Marie Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, was executed by lethal injection in the early hours of January 13, 2021, at the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was pronounced dead at 1:31 a. m.
, ending a 13-year legal battle that ๐ฎ๐๐น๐ธ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ญ a life of unimaginable trauma and a crime of unspeakable violence. The execution marked the first time the United States government had put a woman to death in 67 years.
Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 for the kidnapping and murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old pregnant woman from Skidmore, Missouri. On December 16, 2004, Montgomery strangled Stinnett in her own home, cut the eight-month-old fetus from her womb, and fled with the baby. The infant, Victoria Jo Stinnett, survived and was returned to her father.
The crime shocked the nation and became a landmark case in federal capital punishment.
But the story of Lisa Montgomery does not begin with that December afternoon. It begins decades earlier, in a womb saturated with alcohol. Her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, drank heavily throughout her pregnancy, causing organic brain damage from fetal alcohol syndrome.
Montgomery entered the world already broken, with a brain that would struggle with impulse control, emotional regulation, and understanding consequences for the rest of her life.
Her father abandoned the family when she was small, leaving her in the care of a mother who beat her, taped her mouth shut with duct tape, and forced her to beat her own sister with a board until she bled. By the time Montgomery could form her first words, she had already learned that crying could ๐๐พ๐๐ her. Her first sentence was not “mama” or “dada” but “don’t spank me.”
When Montgomery was around 11 years old, her stepfather, Jack Kleiner, began raping her. He built a separate room attached to their trailer specifically for the ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ, and brought in other menโsometimes three at onceโfor hours at a time. Her mother not only knew but facilitated the ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ, prostituting her daughter to repairmen and handymen who came to the house.
Every adult who should have protected her looked away.
At 16, Montgomery testified about the ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ in divorce proceedings. Neither Kleiner nor her mother was ever prosecuted. Both died without spending a day in jail.
At 17, her mother arranged her marriage to her stepbrother, Carl Boman, who was 25. The ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ continued without interruption. He beat her, raped her, and recorded it.
She had four children in four years, living in catastrophic poverty with missing floors and no running water.
After her fourth child was born prematurely, Montgomery was pressured into a tubal ligation. She was 22 years old. The only identity she had ever knownโbeing a motherโwas surgically removed from her without full consent.
Her mind could not accept it. Over the years, she claimed to be pregnant multiple times, buying cribs and wearing maternity clothes. Doctors called it a delusional disorder, a mind so fractured it manufactured a reality that did not exist.
In the spring of 2004, Carl Boman was fighting Montgomery for custody of two of their children. He knew she had been sterilized and threatened to expose her lie in court on January 25, 2005. He told her he would take her children.
On December 10, 2004, he filed a motion for change of custody. Six days later, Montgomery drove 170 miles to Skidmore, Missouri, with a rope and a kitchen knife in her jacket.
She had researched how to perform a cesarean section online. She had planned this. She met Bobbie Jo Stinnett under the pretense of buying a rat terrier puppy.
Bobbie Jo was eight months pregnant, glowing with anticipation, and had no reason to fear the woman who had chatted with her online. Montgomery strangled her, cut the baby from her womb, and drove home with the infant, naming her Abigail.
Bobbie Jo’s mother found her body. The Amber Alert led investigators to Montgomery’s home in Melvern, Kansas, within hours. She was sitting on the couch holding the baby, watching television.
She claimed she had given birth at a clinic, but the story collapsed. She confessed to everything. The baby, Victoria Jo, was returned to her father.
She survived. She grew up in Skidmore without her mother, sharing her birthday with the anniversary of the murder.
Montgomery was charged with federal kidnapping resulting in death. At trial in 2007, her defense was led by Fred Duchardt, a Kansas City lawyer who had never tried a capital case. He had been developing a theory that the murder was committed by her brother, but that collapsed a week before trial.
He pivoted to an insanity argument centered on pseudocyesis, a rare condition causing false belief of pregnancy. It was poorly prepared and landed flat.
Judy Clark, one of the most celebrated capital defense attorneys in America, had been brought in to help. She had built a genuine relationship with Montgomery and understood the depth of the childhood ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ. But Duchardt controlled the money and refused to let her lead.
Witnesses who could have testified about the rape room, the gang rapes, the prostitution by her own mother were put on the stand without adequate preparation. Their testimony did not land.
Prosecutors called Montgomery’s history of ๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ the “๐ช๐ซ๐พ๐ผ๐ฎ excuse.” They told the jury she was wicked and evil. They pointed to her filthy home, her failure to cook or clean, her absence from her children’s events.
A woman whose brain had been damaged before birth, who had been tortured throughout childhood, was reduced to a bad housekeeper. The jury deliberated and recommended death. On October 22, 2007, she was sentenced to die.
Montgomery was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, the only woman on federal death row. There, for the first time in her life, she received consistent mental health treatment. Medications addressed her psychosis, PTSD, and dissociation.
She reconnected with her daughter Kayla Bowman, who had not spoken to her for two years after the conviction. Kayla later wrote to the court that her mother realized what she had missed and expressed genuine remorse.
Montgomery began crocheting blankets for her grandchildren. She accepted full responsibility for killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett. She understood that no explanation undoes the fact that a 23-year-old woman died on her kitchen floor while her baby was cut from her body.
Her new attorneys, Amy Harwell and Kelley Henry, spent years building a clemency case. They interviewed nearly 450 people and filed a 7,000-page petition to President Donald Trump.
Over a thousand advocates signed letters. Forty-one former prosecutors, anti-trafficking organizations, mental health experts, and anti-violence advocates all said the same thing: Montgomery had been a victim before she was ever a perpetrator, and executing her would be a profound moral failure. In October 2020, the Trump administration scheduled her execution for December 8, four days after what would have been Bobbie Jo’s 39th birthday.
Her attorneys contracted COVID-19, and the execution was postponed to January 12, 2021. Montgomery was placed on suicide watch. Her mental state deteriorated.
She began hallucinating her mother’s voice and experiencing nightmares of childhood sexual assault. A federal judge found she was likely mentally incompetent and granted a stay. The stay lasted hours.
An appeals court reversed it. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court. One by one, every legal barrier was dismantled.
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration was one week away. He was known to oppose federal executions. The Trump administration was not going to wait.
Montgomery was transferred to Terre Haute, Indiana. Just after midnight on January 13, the curtain in the death chamber was raised. She lay on the gurney with graying brown hair spilling over a green medical pillow, her glasses still on.
IVs had been placed in both arms.
She looked up with a momentarily bewildered expression. A woman leaned over, removed her face mask, and asked if she had any last words. Montgomery said quietly, “No.”
She said nothing else. She tapped her fingers nervously against the gurney. On her thumb, a small heart-shaped tattoo caught the light.
She closed her eyes. The pentobarbital entered through both IVs simultaneously. She licked her lips, gasped briefly once, and then her midsection rose and fell in a slow, heavy pulse.
Then it stopped.
At 1:31 a. m. , an official in black gloves walked in with a stethoscope, listened to her chest, and walked back out.
Lisa Marie Montgomery was pronounced dead. Her attorney, Kelley Henry, released a statement within minutes: “The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight. Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame.
The government stopped at nothing in its zeal to ๐๐พ๐๐ this damaged and delusional woman.”
Bobbie Jo Stinnett was 23 years old. She was eight months pregnant. She let a stranger into her home because the stranger said she wanted to buy a puppy.
She did nothing wrong. She trusted the world, and the world failed her in the most savage way imaginable. Her mother found her body.
Her daughter grew up without her. Her husband raised Victoria Jo alone. Bobbie Jo deserved every year she did not get to live, every birthday she did not get to celebrate, every moment of her daughter’s life she never witnessed.
Lisa Montgomery was a child born with brain damage into a home built on violence. She was beaten before she could form sentences. She was raped before she understood what was being done to her.
She was prostituted by her own mother. She was trafficked inside her own home. Every adult whose job it was to protect her chose not to.
Every system that was supposed to catch children like her let her fall. She grew into a woman whose mind had been shattered beyond what most of us can comprehend.
She committed an act of violence so extreme that it is almost impossible to understand. And then she was executed before most of the country knew the full story of how she got there. More than a dozen other women across the United States have committed the same crimeโa wound theft murder, a stolen baby, a dead mother.
Not one of them is on death row. Not one of them was executed. Only Lisa.
The difference, according to her attorneys, was the quality of her defense at trial.
The one variable was a lawyer who controlled the money and refused to let the right person do the job. Bobbie Jo Stinnett did not deserve to die. Lisa Montgomery did not deserve the life she was given.
And somehow, both of those things are true at the same time. This country executed one of them without ever fully reckoning with the other. The heart-shaped tattoo on her thumb remains a haunting symbol of a woman who had been violated by hands her entire life, yet still believed in something gentle.
They put a needle in her arm at 1:31 in the morning, and that was the end of her. The debate over whether justice was served will continue. Was it justice to execute a woman who had been a victim her entire life, whose crime was the product of every failure this country allowed to happen to her?
Or was the death penalty the only appropriate response to the brutal murder of an innocent young mother and her unborn child? The answers are as complex as the case itself.
For now, the federal government has carried out its sentence. Lisa Montgomery is gone. Bobbie Jo Stinnett remains a memory in a small Missouri town.
Victoria Jo Stinnett, now 16 years old, has never spoken publicly. Her family has asked for privacy, and they have earned it completely. The execution has closed a chapter, but the questions it raises about trauma, justice, and the limits of punishment will linger far longer than the lethal injection that ended one woman’s life.