While the court admonished her for not reporting it to authorities, they did not report it either. After she strangled Stinnett, Montgomery is alleged to have cut her open and stolen her unborn child Victoria, who survived the attack and is now living with her father. Montgomery's number of crayons and pieces of paper hassince been increased to 10 each. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis. "She tried to throw her own brother under the bus for a crime that she committed.". When Lisa was a small child, Judy allowed men to rape her for money, including allowing her to be gang raped on multiple occasions. Kleiner built a makeshift shed on the side of the trailer for Montgomery, where he began molesting, and then raping, her. Read about our approach to external linking. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. "The whole story is tragic," says Kelley Henry, one of Montgomery's federal defence lawyers. Lisa told me that when these men raped her, she would go away in her mind and try not to be present, the brother said in a court declaration. The baby was returned to her father, after being recovered from Montgomery. "I fell in love immediately.". Friends and family began noticing Montgomery's tendency to slip into "a world of her own". My sister, Lisa Montgomery, is broken. The family moved from place to place dozens of times, but it was in a trailer in Sperry, Oklahoma, where her lawyers say the abuse turned into something more akin to torture. At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. That is exactly what Lisa Montgomery developed into, which is a person who had profound disconnection from her body, from her mind, from her experience, Porterfield said. More: Who was the last woman executed by the US government? In the other cases, she said, prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty or juries did not impose it because it was obvious the women were suffering from profound mental illnesses. In Montgomerys early teen years, Kleiner moved the family to an isolated trailer at the end of a dead-end road outside of Sperry, Oklahoma, a severely impoverished area north of Tulsa. Now, she called him to tell him that shed gone into labor while shopping and had given birth at a clinic. It is the only federal prison with an active death chamber. Her terror was well-founded, said Montgomery's attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell. But none of those other victims responded by killing a woman and cutting her baby out of her stomach, hesaid. The six-man, six-woman jury in October 2007 found Montgomery guilty and recommended she be executed. She is the most broken of the broken. At least five times after she was sterilized, she told people that she was pregnant. Montgomerys father, John Patterson, a 25-year-old in the military, was also an alcoholic. Montgomery smelled like a sour ashtray and body sweat" as Don Fritz and Randy Strong interrogated her on Dec. 17, 2004, Strong recalled. When she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. My sister is on death row, Kleiner wrote in the lawsuit petition. Her attorneys say that while Montgomery feels deep remorse for her crimes, her understanding of her situation waxes and wanes. She was born into a family rife with mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. The family moved often. In her interviews with Montgomery, Porterfield said, the woman showed symptoms of dissociation, including confused thinking, major gaps in memory, and an inability to recognize the reality of certain events. In Montgomerys early childhood, her older sister, Diane, suffered the worst of the violence. "And then go, 'Look at this body'. "It was violent and like a scene out of a horror movie," he said. According to an interview with her father, Montgomery's mother Judy Shaughnessy drank heavily throughout her pregnancy, and their daughter was born with foetal alcohol syndrome. "If I did speak up, maybe Zella and Floyd would have gone back for Lisa," she wrote. Other friends of Kleiner, including a plumber and an electrician, raped her in that shed, Montgomery says, as a way of collecting payment for work done around the house. A survivor of incest and sex trafficking, she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and cerebellar dysfunction, said Amy Harwell, a federal public defender in Tennessee who is working on Montgomerys case. Part of HuffPost Crime. Mattingly believes that by living with loving adults who nurtured her, she was able to process the trauma of her childhood and become a well-adjusted adult. The case was ruled a homicide and remains unsolved. "She always wanted to be a mom," says Baumli. Being loved unconditionally helped me heal, find a caring husband, and raise two children who have hearts of gold. Montgomery eventually divorced her first husband and married Kevin Montgomery. Mattingly said her heart sank when she realized Montgomery wasn't coming with her. Mattingly was 8 years old and Montgomery was 4 when Mattingly was removed in 1972 from Shaughnessy's mobile home at Ogden, a community of about 1,960 people in Riley County. Let it be done: Bobbie Jo Stinnetts hometown waits as killers execution date nears. "Today the death penalty has a face of my friend and I just can't be quiet about it," she said. Prosecutors said Montgomery was faking mental illness, notingthat many people are sexually abused, but few go on to kill. Patterson made a mistake by abandoning them to "that crazy lady," he said at Montgomery's sentencing hearing in 2007. And then there is the life that Montgomery and her siblings inhabited, one of domestic violence, dysfunction, humiliation, fear and pain. Shaughnessy's nephew, David Kidwell, testified that she believed Montgomery "had brought [the abuse] on herself, that she enticed him". "We've seen crime for years and years in our country in which people enact terrible violence coming out of a psychotic set of beliefs or thought process. He also noted that after she confessed to killing Stinnett, she changed her story to contend the murder was committed by her half-brotherTommy Kleiner. In 1986, when Montgomery was 18, she married her stepbrother, Carl Boman. He was pumping her, Shaughnessy testified. Court records say Kleiner drank heavily, beat his wife and children, and made his daughters take off their clothes before he spanked them. In an interview with HuffPost her first ever Diane Mattingly, now 57 and a longtime state government employee living in Kentucky, described what it was like growing up in a home without love or affection. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in . Henry stressed that no one faces a death sentence linked to the 16 other U.S. cases from 1987 to2015 in which a woman has attacked a pregnant woman and her unborn child in an effort to take the childand ended up killing one or both. The question is, should she be put to death for it? Babies born naturally tend to have misshapen heads initially because of the pressure experienced as they go through the birth canal, he said. Lisa Montgomery is no different. Patterson was transferred after Montgomerys birth to Fort Riley inKansas, where their family lived when another daughter was born in 1970. "I would say, 'President Trump, I want you to look at the life that Lisa had led, I want to look at all the people that have failed her, I want you to look at the rape, the torture, the mental abuse, the physical abuse that this woman had endured,'" she says. In response to traumatic events, children may dissociate from their feelings and their bodies to protect themselves from experiencing what is happening. "She got joy out of it.". Lisa was anally, orally, and vaginally raped by several men, one after the other for several hours at a time. Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery ' s mother, raised Lisa in poverty and chaos, with multiple stepfathers and in dozens of different homes, according to scores of interviews and documents cited. She moved in 1999 to Melvern, a town about 40 miles south of Topeka with 375 people today. ", More: Only woman on federal death row asks President Trump to be a 'hero,' commute her sentence. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in Miami, Okla. Patterson was the second of six husbands Shaughnessy . Montgomery told Stinnett that she was also expecting, and the pair shared pregnancy stories. Montgomerys case is not about whether she is responsible for the crime; she is. There was plenty of food, our clothes were clean, and the kids did our homework together. His message contained a "very heartfelt thank you. As a teenager, Montgomery confided in a cousin, telling him the men would tie her up, beat her and even urinate on her afterwards. Shaughnessy also beat the girls with brooms and belts,Mattingly said. Kevin Montgomery let investigators inside. Even at the age of 8, Mattingly recalled being worried about what would happen to Montgomery without her there. A former paramedic who had watched the births of all three of his children, Strong also considered the baby's head to be unusually round. The judge in the case scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse - but did not report the abuse himself. But Strong says this is the first year he's heard directly from Stinnett's husband. The historic reports of her at the time are consistent with the idea that she was a completely impaired mentally ill nonfunctional person who was operating within the symptoms of her mental illness, Porterfield said. Another case with Missouri ties. She was often spaced out, appearing disconnected from reality. Protecting her half-sister became her "sole purpose in life, she said. It has been the subject of two books, multiple true crime television shows, documentaries and countless podcast episodes. Montgomery contacted Stinnett, 23, after meeting her at a dog show earlier that year at Abilene, in north-central Kansas, where they posed with others in a photo. She said Montgomery's crimes have affected the way Melvern is perceived in the same manner anti-gay picketing by Westboro Baptist Church has influenced perceptions about Topeka. This is someone who was deeply remorseful, once she became appropriately medicated and had full contact with reality, although that is a situation that waxes and wanes.. But those who believe she should be put to death say her lifetime of horrorscan't excuse what came next: OnDec. 16, 2004, she loaded a steak knife, umbilical cord clamps and part of a clothesline into her car anddrove 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. On December 8, the federal government plans to execute her for a crime she committed in the grip of severe mental illness after a lifetime of living hell. She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. They introduced her as their daughter, Abigail, and made multiple other stops. The counselor noted that her mother appeared to have a lack of empathy for Montgomery, who was left with the distinct impression that the sexual abuse was her fault. "While my path to healing was very hard, the difference between Lisa and me is that no one ever intervened to rescue Lisa from a lifetime of abuse.". "I have seen a lot of horrible things happen to women and children in my more than 40 years in law enforcement," Strongsaid. Recently, there has been a virus outbreak on death row at the institution, and previous executions have been linked to outbreaks among the execution team and prison staff. Diane Mattingly is the sister of Lisa Montgomery, who is scheduled for execution by the federal government on December 8, 2020. He had a daughter from a previous relationship, Diane, who was four years older than Montgomery. "I cried," says Strong. Shaughnessy drank excessively during her pregnancy, causing brain damage to Montgomery, according to court records. Lisa Montgomery, a Kansas native scheduled within days to become the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years, lived a childhood so abusive her attorneys call it akin to torture. She lived with her children in poverty, without running water and other basic necessities, while her mental health deteriorated. Theyre saying that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is more than sufficient punishment for someone who has endured what she did.. The clemency process enables convicted criminals to request mercy and ask the nation's executive branch to step in, Henry said. She lapsed increasingly into mental illness and repeatedly faked pregnancy. Her daughter remembered her acting like a young child in public, twirling and skipping with her arms swinging with abandon. 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