MISSION, Kan. (AP) – A judge granted a suspension on what was planned to be the US government’s first execution of a prisoner in nearly seven decades – a Kansas woman who killed a future mother in Missouri, cut her baby uterus and passed the baby on. newborn as yours.
Judge Patrick Hanlon granted the suspension on Monday, citing the need to determine Montgomery’s mental competence, reported Topeka Capital-Journal. Lisa Montgomery faced execution on Tuesday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, just eight days before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, took office.
Montgomery drove about 170 miles (273.59 kilometers) from his farmhouse in Melvern, Kansas, to the city of Skidmore, in northwest Missouri, under the guise of adopting a Bob Terrier rat terrier puppy Jo Stinnett, a breeder of 23 year old dogs. She strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a gross caesarean section and running away with the baby.
She was arrested the next day after showing the premature child, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 and has not spoken publicly about the tragedy.
“As we were crossing the threshold, our Amber Alert was on TV right now,” recalled Randy Strong, who was part of the main squadron in northwest Missouri at the time.
He looked to the right and saw Montgomery holding the baby and was relieved when she handed it over to the authorities. The previous hours were a blur in which he photographed Stinnett’s body and spent a sleepless night looking for clues – not knowing whether the baby was alive or dead and having no idea what she looked like.
But then hints about Montgomery began to arrive, who had a history of false pregnancy and suddenly had a baby. Strong, now sheriff of Nodaway County, where the murder took place, got into a car without identification with another officer. He learned on the way that the email address [email protected] that was used to set up the deadly meeting with Stinnett was sent over a dial-up connection at Montgomery’s house.
“I knew for sure that I was entering the killer’s house,” Strong recalled, saying that rat terriers ran around his feet when he approached her house. Like Stinnett, Montgomery also created rat terriers.
Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s mother, Becky Harper, sobbed as she told a dispatcher in Missouri about stumbling over her daughter in a pool of blood, her uterus open and the missing child she was carrying.
“It’s like she blew up or something,” Harper told the dispatcher on December 16, 2004, during a desperate but futile attempt to get help for his daughter.
Prosecutors said her reason was that Stinnett’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a sterilization that made her sterile and planned to reveal that she was lying about being pregnant in an effort to obtain custody of two of her four children. . Needing a baby before the rapidly approaching trial date, Montgomery turned his attention to Stinnett, whom she met at dog shows.
Montgomery’s lawyers, however, argued that sexual abuse during Montgomery’s childhood led to mental illness. Lawyer Kelley Henry spoke in favor of Monday’s decision, saying in a statement to Capital-Journal that “Ms. Montgomery has brain damage and serious mental illness that was exacerbated by the sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caregivers ”.
His stepfather denied sexual abuse in a videotaped testimony and said he had no good memory when faced with transcribing a divorce case in which he admitted physical abuse. Her mother testified that she never filed a police complaint because he had threatened her and her children.
But the jurors who heard the case, some crying because of the horrible testimony, disregarded the defense by condemning her for kidnapping that resulted in death.
Prosecutors argued that Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend himself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the girl out of her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up at the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, saying she had given birth to the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birth center.
She finally confessed, and the bloody knife and rope used to kill Stinnett were found in her car. Research on her computer showed that she used it to search for caesarean sections and order a birth kit.
Stinnett’s husband, Zeb, told jurors that his world “collapsed” when he learned that his wife was dead. He said he had not returned for months to the couple’s home in Skidmore, a small farming community that gained notoriety after the murder of city bully Ken Rex McElroy in 1981 in front of a crowd that refused to implicate the killer or the killers. This crime was reported in a book, “In Broad Daylight”, as well as in a TV movie, the movie “Without Mercy” and the miniseries “No One Saw a Thing”.
Recently, on Victoria Jo’s birthday, he sent Strong, the sheriff, a message via Facebook Messenger thanking him.
“I just cried,” recalled Strong. “He will be constantly reminded of this, whether in his nightmares or if someone calls and wants to interview him. The family does not want to be interviewed. They want to be left alone. The Skidmore community has had a worrying past and history. They didn’t want that. They did not deserve this. “
Montgomery was scheduled to be sentenced to death on December 8. But the execution was temporarily blocked after her lawyers contracted the coronavirus by visiting her in prison.
The resumption of federal executions after a 17-year break began on July 14. Anti-death penalty groups said President Donald Trump was pushing for executions ahead of the November elections in a cynical attempt to polish his reputation as a leader of law and order.
US officials described the executions as a lengthy process of justice for victims and their families.