Almost 16 years since she brutally killed a pregnant woman, carving the fetus out of her stomach, Lisa Montgomery was executed by lethal injection – and her last words are still haunting those who witnessed her final moments.
In December 2004, just days before Christmas, Lisa Montgomery traveled from Kansas to Skidmore, Missouri to meet with Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder who was eight months pregnant with her first child.
Montgomery, 36 at the time, had contacted Stinnett under the pretense of purchasing a puppy.
Once the Kansas-born woman was inside the breeder’s home, she attacked the pregnant woman, strangled her until she lost consciousness, and then used a kitchen knife to cut the fetus from Stinnett’s womb – a brutal act carried out with chilling precision.
Stinnet died from her injuries but the baby, miraculously, survived.
Over the next several hours, Montgomery cradled the newborn and began posing as the child’s mother, calling friends and family to announce the birth.
The following day, after Stinnett’s body was discovered, authorities tracked down Montgomery and later reunited the newborn with her father, growing up in the shadow of a crime that horrified the nation, the Guardian reports.
‘She had been tortured’
The case shocked the nation, not only for its brutality but also for its complex psychological backdrop. Montgomery, later diagnosed with severe mental illness rooted in a lifetime of sexual and physical abuse, became the focus of intense legal and public scrutiny. Her actions sparked widespread debate about criminal responsibility, mental health, and the impact of untreated trauma.
During the trial, defense attorneys presented minimal mitigating evidence, citing fragments of Montgomery’s traumatic past, including claims of physical and sexual abuse.
“It’s hard to keep track of all the times she has been let down by people she’s supposed to trust,” Montgomery’s sister, Diane Mattingly, wrote in a column for Elle.
“She hadn’t just suffered – she had been tortured,” Mattingly said of the abusive home that she and her sister were raised.
‘Vicious’ and ‘unlawful’
Medical experts who examined Lisa Montgomery revealed harrowing details about her mental state, testifying that her brain showed structural damage consistent with severe trauma. They diagnosed her with psychosis, auditory hallucinations, and multiple psychiatric disorders – conditions deeply worsened by a lifetime of abuse, including repeated rapes and beatings inflicted by her mother and stepfather.
But their testimonies failed to make an impact.
According to Reuters, Montgomery’s lawyer, Kelley Henry, said the sentencing was “vicious, unlawful, and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power.”
“No one can credibly dispute Mrs. Montgomery’s longstanding debilitating mental disease – diagnosed and treated for the first time by the Bureau of Prisons’ own doctors,” Henry said. “Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution.”
‘Stuff of nightmares’
Unfortunately for accused, prosecutors dismissed the arguments as little more than an “abuse excuse” and delivered a scathing rebuttal that reinforced Montgomery’s culpability.
Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong described the crime scene as one of the most gruesome he and his team had ever encountered – so drenched in blood that the memory still haunts them years later. What haunts him even more is knowing that it was Stinnett’s own mother who made the horrific discovery, walking into a nightmare no parent should ever face.
“The people that are defending [Montgomery], I wish I could take them back in time, and put them in that room,” Strong said, per BBC. “And then go, ‘Look at this body.’ And then go, ‘Stand there and listen to the 911 call of [Stinnett’s mother]. This is the stuff of nightmares.”
Death sentence
On October 26, 2007, the jury – that showed little sympathy – handed down a death sentence, sealing her fate in one of the most disturbing cases in modern American criminal history.
“It didn’t take long for the jury to decide her fate. The next day, Lisa was sentenced to die,” Mattingly wrote. “I screamed until I couldn’t scream any more. Didn’t the jury understand that she is ill?”
Under the Donald Trump administration – that had reinstated federal executions only months before – Montgomery became the first woman to be executed by the U.S. government in nearly seven decades.
Execution delays
Montgomery’s execution was delayed twice – first due to a COVID-19 outbreak, then by a federal judge – before a late-night Supreme Court ruling ultimately cleared the path.
In a dramatic twist just hours before the scheduled execution, a judge in Indiana temporarily halted the lethal injection, citing the need for a mental competency hearing.
Despite the mounting pleas and controversy, the federal government moved forward with the execution.
Final moments
On January 13, 2021, Montgomery, who was 52, died by lethal injection, leaving behind a legacy of a haunting “No.”
“As the execution process began, a female executioner standing over Lisa Montgomery’s shoulder, leaned over, gently removed Montgomery’s face mask and asked her if she had any last words,” tweets AP reporter Michael Tarm. “‘No,’ Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice. She said nothing else.”
Execution history
Before Lisa Montgomery’s execution, the last woman put to death by the U.S. federal government was Bonnie Heady, executed in a Missouri gas chamber in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Federal executions had been halted for 17 years, but resumed in 2020 under President Trump, reigniting national debate and paving the way for Montgomery’s controversial execution.
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