Good evening everyone. Montgomery will die for killing a pregnant woman and kidnapping her baby. Montgomery’s eyes were downcast and she cried quietly as the judge read the decision. Death for Lisa Montgomery and a lifetime of pain for her victim’s family.
“This case has finally come to a close, but we will never stop missing Bobby Joe.”
“She was a sweet and loving wife, daughter, and sister, and would have been a wonderful mother.”
Becky Harper is the mom of 23-year-old Bobby Joe Stinett, the grandmother of Victoria Joe. Becky found Bobby Joe’s bloody and battered body in her Skidmore, Missouri home on December 16th, 2004. Victoria Joe was recovered the next day at the Melvin, Kansas home of Lisa Montgomery.
3:30 in the afternoon, December 16th, 2004, Skidmore, Missouri. Population 437. Becky Harper stops by her daughter’s house on Elm Street, the same street she has driven down a 100 times. The front door is unlocked. She walks in. Her daughter, 23-year-old Bobby Joe Stinette, is on the dining room floor, 8 months pregnant. The baby is gone.
Within 18 hours, the FBI will have a name. Within 24, they will find the child alive, and the woman responsible will spend the next 13 years as the only female on federal death row in the United States. Her name is Lisa Montgomery. This is her full story.
Bobby Joe Stinette was born on December 4th, 1981 in Nawway County, Missouri, a quiet stretch of the American Midwest where most people knew their neighbors by name and life moved at its own pace.
She grew up in that world and never really left it. She attended Nawaway Halt High School in Graham, Missouri, graduating in the year 2000. She was known there as warm, genuine, and easy to be around. A high school friend later described her simply as one of the sweetest people you would ever meet.
In 2003, she married her high school sweetheart, Zeb Stinette. From their home at 410 Elm Street in Skidmore, they ran a small dog breeding business called Happy Haven Farms, raising rat Terriers, a sharp, athletic breed with a devoted following across the country. Bobby Joe also worked part-time at the Kawasaki Motors manufacturing plant in Mville, 12 miles away.
She worked hard, she loved her dogs, and she was deeply connected to the people around her. In the spring of 2004, Bobby Joe found out she was pregnant. Her first child. She already knew it was a girl. She shared the news with family, with friends, and with the online breeding community she had become part of through a forum called Rder Chatter.
She updated the Happy Haven Farms website with photographs. She posted about her pregnancy openly and without hesitation. She had just turned 23 on December 4th, 2004, 12 days before her life ended. She had no reason to be guarded. She had no reason to be afraid. To understand what happened on December 16th, 2004, you have to go back much further than that day.
You have to go back to the beginning of Lisa Montgomery’s life because what the federal courts documented about that life is not background noise. It is central to everything that followed. Lisa Marie Montgomery was born in 1968. Before she ever had a chance at a stable life, it was already being shaped against her.
Her mother, Judy Shaunessi, consumed alcohol throughout the pregnancy. Neurological assessments later filed in federal court confirmed that this caused permanent organic brain damage. Lisa was not starting from a level foundation. The home she grew up in was violent and unstable. Multiple family members gave sworn testimony in federal court about the conditions inside that household.
When her stepfather, Jack Kleiner, became part of her life, court documents confirmed a pattern of serious mistreatment directed at Lisa that went on for years. She reported what was happening. She told people, including a cousin who worked in law enforcement. No investigation was opened. No one stepped in. School records from that period show she arrived in worn, torn clothing.
Teachers took note. Nothing changed. At 17 years old, at her own mother’s direction, Lisa became engaged to her step-brother Carl Bowman. She married him when she turned 18. The difficult conditions she had known for years did not improve inside that marriage. She had four children in 4 years.
After the birth of her fourth child in 1990, Lisa underwent a procedure called a tubal fuluration, a permanent surgical sterilization. Court filings state she was pressured into it. She was in her early 20s. The decision was not entirely her own. After her marriage to Carl Bowman ended, Lisa married a man named Kevin Montgomery. And this is where the case turns on something most people have never encountered.
A documented medical condition called pseudocyis. Pseudocyis is not a lie. It is a recognized psychiatric condition in which a woman’s deeply held false belief that she is pregnant causes her body to respond as though it were true. hormonal shifts, physical changes, the outward appearance of pregnancy. It is documented in medical literature and accepted in clinical settings.
According to defense experts, Lisa Montgomery suffered from a severe form of it. She told Kevin she was pregnant. She told her neighbors, her community, her online connections. She wore maternity clothing. Kevin believed her. Her children believed her. After her 1990 sterilization, she had reported multiple false pregnancies over more than a decade, a pattern that prosecution expert Dr. Park Deetsz later documented at trial. She was not pregnant. She could not get pregnant. Then two things happened at the same time. Her former husband, Carl Bowman, filed a custody motion for two of their children and threatened to expose the fake pregnancy in court proceedings scheduled for January 2005. And December 16th, 2004, the date Lisa had been telling people was her due date was 3 days away.
She had committed publicly to that date. She had built an entire reality around it. Prosecutors later confirmed that in the months leading up to December 16th, Lisa had been searching the internet for detailed information on surgical delivery procedures and home births. This was documented by prosecution expert witnesses at trial.
What came next was not a sudden break from reality. It was the conclusion of a plan. Her postconviction legal team filed documented diagnoses that included bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex PTSD, dissociative disorder, psychosis, and traumatic brain injury. All reviewed and accepted by independent medical experts.
The prosecution’s position never wavered. Whatever her history, whatever her diagnosis, what she did next was deliberate. On December 15th, 2004, Lisa Montgomery sat down at a computer and made a calculated decision. She logged onto Rder Chatter, the online Rat Terrier forum where she and Bobby Joe both had accounts, and created a false identity.
The name she used was Darlene Fiser. The hometown she gave was Fairfax, Missouri, a small town roughly 20 m from Skidmore. To anyone reading that profile, Darlene Fischer looked like a local woman from the same part of the state. Not a stranger, not a threat. Using that identity, she sent Bobby Joe a direct message.
“Please get in touch with me soon as we are considering the purchase of one of your puppies.”
Bobby Joe had puppies listed for sale on her website. At that time, the message was ordinary. A woman from a nearby town connected through the same online community interested in buying a dog.
Bobby Joe had no reason to question it. She replied, and the two arranged for Darlene Fischer to visit the following afternoon. That evening, Bobby Joe mentioned the visit to both her husband, Zeb, and her mother, Becky Harper. A woman from Fairfax was coming the next day to look at the dogs. Both of them knew. There was nothing unusual about it.
Visits like this were a normal part of running a breeding business. The following morning, Lisa left her home in Melbourne, Kansas. Before she got in her car, she had already prepared and concealed two items on her person. Items she had deliberately gathered in advance for what she was planning to do. Then she began the 170 m drive east towards Skidmore, Missouri.
Lisa arrived at 410 Elm Street in Skidmore at approximately 12:30 in the afternoon. Bobby Joe opened the door and let her in. There was no sign of anything wrong. No forced entry, no confrontation at the door, just a woman who had driven from a nearby town to look at dogs. Bobby Joe brought the puppies out. The two women talked.
They spent time with the dogs the way any potential buyer and seller would. To Bobby Joe, this was an ordinary afternoon visit with someone from the same breeding community she had been part of for years. At some point during that visit, Bobby Joe received a phone call from her mother, Becky Harper. The time was approximately 12:30 p.m. Bobby Joe confirmed during that call that she would give her mother a ride home from work at 3:30 that afternoon. It was a brief routine conversation between a mother and daughter. Neither of them had any reason to think it would be the last time they spoke. That phone call later became a critical piece of the investigation.
It confirmed to investigators that Bobby Joe was alive and well at 12:30 p.m. and that her mother was expecting to see her by 3:30. That established the time frame during which the events occurred, sometime between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon. By the time Becky Harper arrived at that house later that day, Bobby Joe was gone, and so was the baby she had been carrying.
When Lisa left Skidmore, she called her husband Kevin from the road. She told him she had gone into early labor and had delivered at the birth and women’s center in Topeka, Kansas. Kevin drove to meet her at a parking lot near the clinic. He found her there with a newborn baby in a car seat. He had no knowledge of what had actually taken place.
They drove home to Melvin together. Lisa had already given the baby a name. She called her Abigail. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Becky Harper arrived at her daughter’s house on Elm Street to collect the ride. Bobby Joe had promised her during their earlier phone call. The door was open. She walked in. What she found inside sent her straight to the phone.
She called 911. Her words to the dispatcher were recorded and later entered into evidence. She told them her daughter appeared to have suffered a severe abdominal injury. The baby was not there. Not County Sheriff Randy Strong arrived within the hour. He later stated it was among the most serious crime scenes he had responded to in his entire career.
An Amber Alert was issued immediately for the missing infant. The FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol were brought in within hours. At the scene, investigators established several facts quickly. There was no forced entry, which confirmed Bobby Joe had let her visit her in willingly. A neighbor reported seeing an unfamiliar small red vehicle parked near the house earlier that day.
A formal affidavit also documented physical evidence suggesting Bobby Joe had not gone without a fight. Then the digital side of the investigation moved fast. FBI forensic analysts pulled the IP address records from Rder Chatter. The account belonging to Darlene Fischer, the last person to contact Bobby Joe, was traced to a computer registered in the name of Kevin Montgomery in Melvin, Kansas.
At the same time, a member of the Rat Terrier online community contacted investigators with something they had noticed. A woman named Lisa Montgomery had posted on the forum that same day stating she had just given birth to a baby girl. Two separate threats, one name. Sheriff Randy Strong later said his team drove toward Melvin at over 120 mph with live updates coming in by phone the entire way.
By the time they arrived, the FBI field office in Topeka had already positioned agents outside the Montgomery home. The red car in the driveway matched what the neighbor had described. Kevin Montgomery answered the door. Investigators told him they were following up on an Amber Alert and checking recent births in the area.
He was cooperative. He let them in. Inside, Lisa was seated on the couch holding a newborn baby. She told investigators she had delivered at the Birth and Women’s Center in Topeka on December 16th. Investigators called the center on the spot. The center confirmed no babies had been born there that day.
DNA testing confirmed the infant was Bobby Joe Stinette’s daughter. The baby was alive and healthy. She was returned to Zeb Stanette on the morning of December 17th. While law enforcement was actively working the case, Lisa had been taking the baby around her neighborhood in Melvin, introducing her to neighbors as her own newborn daughter.
Lisa Montgomery was placed under arrest. She subsequently confessed. Lisa Montgomery was formally charged on December 20th, 2004, 4 days after the crime with federal kidnapping resulting in death under title 18 USC section 1201. The charge was federal because the crime had crossed state lines from Missouri to Kansas.
Her trial opened in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri before Judge Gary A. Fenner. Jury selection ran for 3 days and was closed to the public. The prosecution was led by federal prosecutor Roseanne Ketchmark. Her case rested on three things. The digital trail through Rder Chatter, Lisa’s own confession, and a documented pattern of permeditation.
To strengthen that argument, the government called one of the most recognized forensic psychiatrists in the country, Dr. Park Deetsz. His prior work included some of the most high-profile criminal cases in American legal history. among them Andrea Yates, Jeffrey Dmer, Ted Kachinsky, and Susan Smith. At trial, Dr. Deetsz presented evidence that Lisa had spent months conducting internet research related to medical birth procedures before December 16th. His conclusion was that the evidence pointed to someone who had thought through what she intended to do long before she did it. The prosecution also played recorded phone calls from prison.
In those calls, Lisa and her husband Kevin could be heard discussing ways to undermine the psychological evaluation being conducted as part of her defense. Those recordings carried significant weight with the jury. In her closing argument, Catchmark addressed the central claim of the defense directly. She called it “voodoo science.”
She told the jury that what the evidence showed was not a woman in the grip of delusion. It was, she argued, strategic manipulation and deceit driven by the fear of being found out. The defense was led by trial attorney Fred Dutert. His strategy was built around sudois and the argument that Lisa had entered a dissociative state at the time of the crime.
To support that position, the defense called Dr. Villiano Ramachandran, director of the center for brain and cognition at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Ramachandran testified that Lisa had been in a mental state during the crime comparable to sleepwalking, triggered by a direct threat to her deeply held belief that she was pregnant.
However, the defense had made a serious error before the trial even reached that point. In the early stages, the defense team had attempted to redirect suspicion toward Lisa’s brother, Tommy Montgomery, suggesting he was responsible. Tommy Montgomery had a verified alibi. He had been with his probation officer at the time.
The strategy collapsed and the consequences were lasting. Lisa’s own family, angered by the attempt, refused to testify on her behalf. That decision meant the jury never heard the full account of Lisa’s personal history or her documented medical background. The psychiatric record that her postconviction team would later spend years assembling never reached that courtroom.
After approximately 4 hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. Guilty of federal kidnapping resulting in death. The insanity defense was rejected in full. When the verdict was read, Lisa Montgomery wiped her eyes. One of her attorneys placed a hand on her back. Across the room, Zeb Stinette and Kevin Montgomery sat separately.
Neither showed any visible reaction. The penalty phase followed. Becky Harper testified. Members of Bobby Joe’s family delivered impact statements. The jury returned a unanimous recommendation. Death. Judge Gary A. Fenner imposed the sentence. Lisa Montgomery became the only woman on federal death row in the United States. For 13 years after her sentencing, Lisa Montgomery was held at the Federal Medical Center for Women in Fort Worth, Texas, known as FMC Carwell.
It is a federal facility equipped to house inmates with serious medical and psychiatric needs. For Lisa, it became the place where for the first time in her life, she received consistent mental health treatment. A new postconviction legal team took over her case. Led attorney Kelly Henry and co-consel Amy Harwell, both assistant federal public defenders based in Nashville, began building a record that the original trial had never produced.
They were joined by Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Together, they spent years assembling medical records, psychiatric evaluations, and documented personal history that had never reached a jury. What that record showed was significant. Lisa required structured psychiatric medication simply to maintain a stable connection to reality.
In prison, she engaged with her treatment. She acknowledged what she had done to Bobby Joinette. Her attorneys stated she expressed genuine remorse. When her execution date was formally announced, Lisa was placed in a suicide watch cell. Her attorneys documented a serious decline in her mental state during that period, details they submitted directly as part of the mental competency filings to the courts.
It was also during her years at FMC Carwell that Lisa reconnected with John Francisco. He had been her Sunday school bus driver when she was a child. His mother had been her teacher. He carried a photograph of her in his wallet. Lisa at 7 years old, second grade. He had kept it for decades. He had not forgotten her.
And with an execution date now set, he was not going to leave her to face it alone. In October 2020, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice announced an execution date for Lisa Montgomery. December 8th, 2020, led attorneys Kelly Henry and Amy Harwell flew from Nashville to Fort Worth, Texas to visit Lisa at FMC Carwell.
The visit was essential. They needed to work directly with her on her clemency petition, a formal legal request for the sentence to be reconsidered. Shortly after returning to Nashville, both attorneys tested positive for COVID 19. Both were seriously ill and unable to continue their work on the case. Co-consel Sandra Babcock went to court immediately. Her argument was clear.
Under the Federal Death Penalty Act, a person facing execution has the right to qualified legal counsel prepared to submit a clemency petition. Without Henry and Harwell, that right could not be fulfilled. On December 8th, 2020, US District Judge Randph Moss in Washington, DC agreed and issued a halt. The Department of Justice responded the same day.
A new date was set, January 12th, 2021, 8 days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Biden had publicly committed to suspending all federal executions upon taking office. The window was closing fast. Both sides knew exactly what that meant. Lisa Montgomery arrived at the Federal Correctional Complex under guard, transferred from FMC Carwell in Texas.
Her attorneys described her condition that day as severely deteriorated, disconnected from reality, and barely able to engage with the people around her. The legal team had one procedural argument left. The Federal Death Penalty Act requires a mandatory 90-day notice before any execution can be carried out. Lisa’s team had received just 35 days.
Let attorney Kelly Henry filed immediately. The Court of Appeals agreed. A temporary stay was issued. At the same time, District Judge James Patrick Hanland stepped in on separate grounds. A long-standing Supreme Court ruling had established that carrying out a sentence on someone who cannot understand what is happening to them or why is unconstitutional.
Henry argued Lisa’s mental state had deteriorated to exactly that point. Judge Hanlin issued a temporary halt pending a competency hearing. Two courts, two separate stays. The execution was on hold. The Department of Justice pushed back on every front simultaneously, arguing the mental competency claim was a deliberate tactic to delay a lawfully imposed sentence.
By late morning, the US Supreme Court weighed in. It overturned the Court of Appeals stay. The shortened notice period, while irregular, was ruled insufficient to stop the process. One stay gone. Then at 4:00 in the afternoon, 1 hour before the scheduled 5:00 p.m. execution, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals raised a new concern.
The government may have violated the original sentencing order by skipping required procedural steps. Another stay was entered. 5:00 came and went. Nothing moved. Every minute passing now worked against the government. At midnight, President Trump’s legal authority over federal executions would expire. President-elect Biden had committed to suspending all federal executions upon taking office.
Co-consel Sandra Babcock described the situation as legally without precedent. Nearly a dozen federal judges appointed by both parties had at some point entered a stay for Lisa Montgomery. The government had cleared every single one. With 30 minutes left in the window, Warden TJ Watson received the final word from the United States Supreme Court.
Every remaining appeal denied. The Bureau of Prisons issued a new execution notice past midnight, legally tied to the original January 12th warrant. The process moved forward. In her final hours, Lisa Montgomery spent time with her attorney, Amy Harwell, and her spiritual adviser, John Francisco. Jon had made her a promise, and he intended to keep it.
He had come prepared to stand beside her and sing the song she had known since she was a child. “Jesus loves me.” “Amazing grace.” At midnight, Lisa was escorted into the execution chamber. She was secured to the gurnie. Heart monitors were attached. Her glasses remained on. Then came the moment her attorneys would later describe as a needless indignity.
John Francisco was turned away at the door. A staff member told him it was too late. She was already secured. No further access would be permitted. The man who had carried her photograph in his wallet for 30 years, a second grade photo she had given him as a little girl, stood outside a closed door and was not allowed in.
Attorney Amy Harwell later stated publicly that the decision was unnecessary and showed a disregard for basic human dignity at the most final moment of a person’s life. The curtain opened. The official witnesses saw Lisa Montgomery for the first time. She turned her head slightly toward the glass. An Associated Press reporter present described her as appearing momentarily disoriented.
Warden TJ Watson stepped forward and asked if she had any final words. She said, “no.” She closed her eyes. Her fingers moved quietly against the gurnie straps. A small heart-shaped tattoo near her thumb shifted with each movement. The procedure was carried out. At 1:31 in the morning on January 13th, 2021, the Bureau of Prisons officially pronounced Lisa Montgomery dead.
She was the 11th person put to death under the Trump administration in 6 months. More significantly, she was only the fourth woman in all of federal American history to be executed, following Mary Surat in 1865 and both Ethel Rosenberg and Bonnie Hedi in 1953. Nearly seven decades had passed between that last case and this one.
Among the official witnesses that night were Bobby Joe Stinette’s mother, Becky Harper, and her husband, Zeb Stinette. They had waited nearly two decades. Bobby Joe was 23 years old. She never got to meet her daughter. That daughter, Victoria Joe Stinette, is now in her early 20s. named by her father on the morning she was recovered.
She has never spoken publicly and has chosen to live privately. Led attorney Kelly Henry issued a statement saying the night’s events reflected the priorities of a departing administration. Co-consel Sandra Babcock stated that nearly a dozen judges from both parties across four separate courts had entered stays of execution for Lisa Montgomery.
The government proceeded anyway. The legal questions surrounding this case have never fully closed. They continue in academic and legal circles to this day. This case does not leave behind simple answers, and that is exactly what makes it stay with you. The jury that sentenced Lisa Montgomery to death never heard her complete psychiatric record.
Her own family refused to testify because of a failed legal strategy that was not of her making. A different jury with a complete picture of the evidence may have reached a different conclusion. Does that change how you see this case? And what about Victoria Joe Stinette? Now a young woman in her 20s, living quietly, shaped entirely by events she had no hand in. What is justice look like for her?
