JUST IN: Lisa Montgomery Executed — Killed Pregnant Woman and Stole Her Baby.
After spending more than 13 years on federal death row, Lisa Marie Montgomery was executed by lethal injection in the early hours of January 13th, 2021. In this video, we are going to cover her crimes, her last words, and her last meal. But to understand why the federal government had to put a 52-year-old woman to death, the first woman executed by the United States government in 67 years, we have to go back.
We have to go all the way back to the beginning. Because this story does not start with a strangled woman and a stolen baby in a small Missouri town. This story starts before Lisa Montgomery was even born. It starts in her mother’s womb. And what happened inside that womb set the stage for one of the most disturbing, most heartbreaking, most complicated cases this country has ever produced.
Stay with me until the end because this one is going to challenge everything you think you know about monsters. Drop a comment when we get there. I want to know where you stand. Lisa Marie Montgomery came into the world already broken. Her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, drank heavily throughout her entire pregnancy.
Not occasionally, not on weekends, consistently, persistently, throughout the months that Lisa was forming inside her. By the time Lisa was born on February 27th, 1968 in Pierce County, Washington, the damage was already done. Doctors would later confirm what MRI scans showed clearly, organic brain damage present from birth, the direct result of her mother’s drinking.
Fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that affects impulse control, emotional regulation, the ability to connect cause and effect, the ability to fully understand consequences. Lisa entered this world with a broken brain. Through no fault of her own. Before she had drawn a single breath on her own, the world had already failed her.
Her father was severely mentally ill and abandoned the family when Lisa was still small. What he left behind was Judy, and Judy was not a woman equipped to mother anyone. She beat her children. She punished Lisa and her sister by holding them under cold water in the shower. She taped Lisa’s mouth shut with duct tape when she didn’t want to hear her speak, leaving her like that for hours.
Lisa learned very quickly not to cry when the tape was on her mouth. She learned it because a stuffed nose and a taped mouth meant she couldn’t breathe. A toddler who has already learned that crying might kill her. According to court testimony, Lisa Montgomery’s first words, the very first sentence she ever formed, were don’t spank me.
Let that land for a moment. Not mama, not dada, don’t spank me. Those were the first words of a child who had already been conditioned by pain before she could form language. Judy killed the family dog in front of the children by smashing its head with a shovel as punishment. She forced Lisa to beat her own younger sister with a board until the girl bled because Judy told her to.
And there were consequences for refusing. Lisa watched her older half-sister Diane get raped by one of her mother’s boyfriends while they shared a bed. Diane later said she would lay completely still trying not to make a sound, reaching out in the dark to hold Lisa’s hand because if Lisa woke up, the man would do it to her, too. This was childhood for Lisa Montgomery.
This was normal. This was the weather she grew up in. When Lisa was in kindergarten, Judy remarried. His name was Jack Kleiner. He was described by people who knew him as an erratic, violent drunk. He beat the children regularly. He stripped them naked before he hit them. He was the kind of man who radiated danger, the kind of man that every adult in a child’s life is supposed to protect them from.
Instead, he moved into Lisa’s home and became the most powerful person in her world. When Lisa was around 11 years old, Jack Kleiner came into her room for the first time. He raped her. And then he came back, and he came back again. Once or twice a week, according to court records.
He threatened her, told her if she resisted, he would do the same thing to her younger sister. So, Lisa endured it. She held still. She learned to survive by disappearing inside herself, to go somewhere else in her mind while her body was violated. Psychologists would later identify this as the beginning of her dissociation, a survival mechanism that her shattered brain developed to cope with what no human being should have to cope with.
Jack Kleiner eventually built a separate room attached to the back of their trailer. It was described in court documents and by attorneys as a room built specifically for what he intended to do in it, a place where no one could hear. He brought his friends there. Multiple men. Sometimes three at once, for hours at a time.
They beat her when she didn’t comply the way they wanted. They degraded her in ways I will not detail, but that are documented in sworn testimony. Her body was not her own. It had been taken from her before she was old enough to understand what ownership meant. And then her mother got involved in a different way. Judy Shaughnessy began prostituting her own daughter to repairmen, electricians, plumbers, handymen, men who came to the house for work and left having paid not in cash, but in the body of a teenage girl.
Her mother accepted these arrangements. She facilitated them. She was not protecting Lisa from monsters. She was inviting them in and showing them where her daughter slept. Lisa told a cousin who worked in law enforcement. He listened and did nothing. She came to school dirty, in torn clothing, visibly neglected. School administrators suspected something was deeply wrong at home.
They did nothing. Social workers came through the family’s life. They filed reports. The reports documented a home with no running water, missing walls and floors, loose wires, children sleeping on the floor. They did nothing that mattered. Every adult whose job it was to see Lisa, to actually see her, looked away.
In 1984, Judy witnessed Jack Kleiner raping Lisa with her own eyes. She finally divorced him. But she did not call the police. She took Lisa to a doctor who did not report the crime because he trusted the mother to do it. The divorce court judge reviewing the case called Judy’s failure to report the rape to police inexcusable.
At 16 years old, Lisa testified in those divorce proceedings about some of what had happened to her. Neither Jack Kleiner nor Judy Shaughnessy was ever prosecuted. Both have since died. Neither spent a single day in a jail cell for what they did to that child. When Lisa turned 17, her mother arranged her engagement to Carl Boman.
Carl Boman was 25 years old. He was also her stepbrother. Judy engineered the marriage. When Lisa was 18, they wed. And the abuse that had defined her entire existence simply changed hands and continued without interruption. Carl beat her. Carl raped her. He recorded what he did to her on video.
When Lisa’s brother accidentally discovered the tape, he said it was like something out of a horror movie. But still, no one came. No one intervened. No one broke down the door and pulled Lisa Montgomery out of the life she had been trapped in since the day she was born. She had four children in four years. Four children born into poverty and chaos, and a mother who by this point had been so thoroughly broken that she could barely function.
Court documents describe the family’s living conditions as catastrophic. Missing floors, no running water, no furniture, children sleeping on the ground. Her own children would later tell investigators that their mother sat in her room for hours at a time, lost in a world they couldn’t reach. At one point, she had head lice for 5 years and was completely unaware of it.
That is not neglect in the ordinary sense. That is a woman who had lost her grip on reality. After the fourth child was born prematurely, Judy and Carl pressured Lisa into a tubal ligation, sterilization. She later said she believed she would lose one of her children if she refused. She was told her body, once again, was not hers to decide about.
And so at 22 years old, Lisa Montgomery’s ability to have more children was surgically removed from her without her full and free consent. The only thing she had ever been told she was good for, the only identity she had ever been allowed to claim in a life that had stripped everything else from her, was being a mother.
And now that too was gone. But her mind couldn’t accept it. Over the years that followed, Lisa claimed to be pregnant multiple times, twice with Carl. Three times with her second husband, Kevin Montgomery, whom she married after divorcing Carl. She bought cribs, she wore maternity clothes, she told everyone around her she was expecting.
Doctors called it a delusional version of herself. A mind so fractured, so desperate to hold on to the one role that felt like identity, that it manufactured a reality that didn’t exist. Her ex-husband Carl Bowman knew the truth. He knew she had been sterilized. And in the spring of 2004, he decided to use that knowledge as a weapon.
Carl was fighting Lisa for custody of two of their minor children. A court date was set for January 25th, 2005. And Carl knew something that Lisa’s second husband, Kevin, did not. That Lisa’s pregnancy, the one she had been announcing to everyone around her, the one she had been building toward for months, was a lie. He threatened to expose her.
He told her he was going to walk into that courtroom and tell the judge everything. He was going to take her children. He was going to destroy the last thing she had left. On December 10th, 2004, 6 days before the murder, Carl Bowman filed a motion for change of custody. On December 15th, 2004, Lisa called him.
She told him she was going to prove him wrong. That same evening, using the online alias Darlene Fischer, she logged into a rat terrier chat room called ratter chatter and sent a message to a young woman in Skidmore, Missouri named Bobbie Jo Stinnett. She expressed interest in buying one of Bobbie Jo’s puppies.
They agreed to meet the next day. And now I need to talk about Bobbie Jo. Because Bobbie Jo Stinnett deserves to be known as more than a victim. She deserves to be seen. Bobbie Jo was 23 years old. She had been born on December 4th, 1981. The kind of girl who grew up knowing where she belonged and finding peace in it. She and her husband, Zeb, ran a rat terrier breeding business from their home in Skidmore, a small, tight-knit Missouri town where everyone knew everyone.
Where the streets were quiet and the days moved at a gentle pace. She loved her dogs. She loved her community. She was 8 months pregnant with her first child, a daughter, and by every account, she was glowing with it. She had been posting pictures of her pregnancy on her dog breeding website, sharing the journey with anyone who followed along.
She was weeks away from becoming a mother. The night before she died, she told her husband, Zeb, and her mother, Becky, that a woman from Fairfax Missouri was coming by the next afternoon to look at the puppies. She went to sleep that night in her own home, in her own bed, with her baby safe inside her, and her whole life arranged exactly as it should be.
She had no reason to be afraid. She had done nothing wrong. She was exactly where she was supposed to be. On December 16th, 2004, Lisa Montgomery rose early in Melvern, Kansas. She dressed. She packed her jacket. Inside that jacket were two items, a rope and a kitchen knife. This was not an impulse. She had researched how to perform a cesarean section on the internet.
She had planned this. She drove 170 miles across state lines from Kansas into Missouri and arrived at Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s home at approximately 12:30 in the afternoon. Bobbie Jo let her in. Why wouldn’t she? She was expecting this woman. She had spoken with her online. She brought up the puppies. Lisa played with them, cooed over them, performed the role of interested buyer.
And then at some point during that ordinary afternoon visit, everything changed. Lisa Montgomery took out the rope. She wrapped it around Bobbie Jo’s throat and began to strangle her. Bobbie Jo fought. She was 8 months pregnant and she fought. But Lisa was relentless. She tightened the rope until Bobbie Jo’s body went limp and she lost consciousness.
And then Lisa took out the kitchen knife. She cut into Bobbie Jo’s abdomen. The pain of the cutting caused Bobbie Jo to regain consciousness. She came back to awareness in the middle of the worst moment imaginable. A struggle broke out and Lisa strangled her again. This time she did not stop until Bobbie Jo Stinnett was dead.
She then removed the baby from the womb. The baby was alive. 8 months along, delivered by the crude hands of a woman who had watched a YouTube video about cesarean sections, and she was alive. Lisa wrapped her up, left Bobby Jo’s body on the floor of her own home, and walked out the door. She got in her car.
She drove back to Kansas with a dead woman’s daughter in her arms, naming her Abigail, already rehearsing the story she would tell. At approximately 2:30 that afternoon, Bobby Jo had called her mother Becky to confirm she would pick her up from work in an hour. When Becky couldn’t reach her daughter, she went to the house herself.
What she found inside she would describe in court. She said it looked like her daughter’s stomach had exploded. Becky Harper called emergency services. Bobby Jo was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead. An Amber Alert went out immediately. The baby was missing. Investigators moved fast.
They traced Bobby Jo’s online communications. The chat logs led them to an IP address in Melvern, Kansas, to a woman named Lisa Montgomery. Investigators drove to 324119 South Adams Road. When they knocked on the door, Kevin Montgomery opened it. Inside, they found Lisa sitting on the couch holding a newborn infant watching television. She was calm.
She told the officers she’d given birth at a women’s clinic in Topeka. She asked Kevin to get the discharge papers from his truck. Kevin searched the truck. There were no papers. Officers asked Lisa to step outside, and the story began to collapse. She said she had given birth in her kitchen. Then she said it was a clinic.
Then she said she couldn’t remember. Within an hour of questioning at the sheriff’s office, she confessed to everything. To the drive to Skidmore, to Bobby Jo, to the rope and the knife and the baby. DNA testing confirmed what everyone already knew. The infant was Victoria Jo Stinnett, daughter of Bobby Jo and Zeb. She was returned to her father.
She was alive. She had survived. Victoria Jo Stinnett grew up in Skidmore without her mother. She shares her birthday with the anniversary of the day Bobbie Jo was murdered. She has never spoken publicly. The family has asked for their privacy and they have earned it completely. Lisa Montgomery was charged with federal kidnapping resulting in death, a capital offense under federal law due to the interstate nature of the crime.
In 2007, she stood trial in federal court in the Western District of Missouri. And this is where the story takes another devastating turn. Because what happened at that trial, or more precisely, what didn’t happen, would haunt this case for the rest of Lisa’s life and into the night of her execution. The defense team was led by a Kansas City lawyer named Fred Duchardt.
Duchardt had never tried a capital case, never once. He had been appointed to lead a team defending a woman whose life depended on the jury understanding the full depth of what had been done to her from childhood. And he was not equipped for it. For years leading up to trial, Duchardt had been developing a defense theory that the murder was committed by Lisa’s brother, Tommy.
Tommy had a solid alibi. The defense collapsed a week before trial and Duchardt pivoted overnight to an insanity argument centered on pseudocyesis, a rare condition causing a woman to falsely believe she is pregnant. It was a long shot, poorly prepared and sprung on the jury without the supporting foundation that a theory like that requires.
Judy Clark had been brought in to help, one of the most celebrated capital defense attorneys in America, the woman who had represented Ted Kaczynski and Jared Loughner and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a lawyer renowned for her ability to humanize the most difficult clients in the most difficult cases. She had built a genuine relationship with Lisa.
She understood what needed to be done. But Deshark controlled the money and refused to let her lead. Witnesses who were prepared to testify about Lisa’s childhood abuse, the rape room, the gang rapes, the prostitution by her own mother, were put on the stand without adequate preparation. Their testimony landed flat.
The jury didn’t feel it the way they should have. Prosecutors were merciless. They called Lisa’s history of abuse the abuse excuse. They told the jury she was wicked and evil. They told the jury she kept a filthy home, that she didn’t cook, that she didn’t clean, that she didn’t attend her children’s events. They reduced a woman whose brain had been damaged before birth, who had been tortured throughout her entire childhood, who had been prostituted by her own mother, and raped by the man who was supposed to protect her, to a bad housekeeper. The jury
deliberated and recommended death. On October 22nd, 2007, Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to die. She was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. She became the only woman on federal death row in the United States, the only one. And in that cell, something extraordinary began to happen.
For the first time in her life, possibly the first time since before she was born, Lisa Montgomery began to receive consistent, appropriate mental health treatment, real treatment. Medications that addressed the psychosis, the PTSD, the dissociation, a stable environment, people whose job it was to see her and not look away.
She reconnected with her daughter Kayla Bowman. Their relationship had been shattered by the crime. Kayla hadn’t spoken to her for 2 years after the conviction. But eventually, Kayla came to visit, and Lisa was present in a way she had never managed to be as a mother outside those walls. Kayla would later write to the court, “My mother realized right then what she had really missed out on with her kids and what was lost between us all.
” Lisa began crocheting blankets for Kayla’s children, her grandchildren. She left specific instructions for what should be done with each one after her death. A twin-sized handmade blanket for Kayla’s 10-year-old daughter that would, she said, last her as she grows. She accepted full responsibility for what she had done to Bobbie Jo Stinnett.
She expressed remorse that her attorneys described as genuine and deep. She understood what she had taken. She understood that no explanation, no history of suffering undoes the fact that a 23-year-old woman died on her kitchen floor while her baby was cut from her body. Her appeals team, the new attorneys, Amy Harwell and Kelley Henry, spent years doing what Duchart had failed to do.
They interviewed nearly 450 people, family members, neighbors, teachers, social workers, former partners, anyone who had been present in Lisa’s life. What emerged from those interviews was a picture so complete and so horrifying that experts said it met the United Nations definition of torture. The things done to Lisa Montgomery as a child qualified under international standards as the kind of abuse inflicted on prisoners of war.
They filed a 7,000-page clemency petition to President Donald Trump. Over a thousand advocates signed letters. 41 former prosecutors, anti-trafficking organizations, mental health experts, anti-violence advocates, all of them saying the same thing, that this woman had been a victim before she was ever a perpetrator and that executing her would be an act of profound moral failure.
In October 2020, Trump’s Justice Department scheduled Lisa Montgomery’s execution for December 8th, 4 days after what would have been Bobby Jo Stinnett’s 39th birthday. Her attorneys contracted COVID-19 and the execution was postponed. It was rescheduled for January 12th, 2021. Lisa was placed on suicide watch after receiving the warrant.
Her mental state deteriorated. She began experiencing hallucinations, hearing her mother’s voice. Nightmares of the sexual assault she had endured as a child flooded back. A federal judge reviewed her condition and found that she was likely mentally incompetent. That she could not rationally understand why she was about to die.
He granted a stay. The stay lasted hours. An appeals court reversed it. Then the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court. One by one through the night of January 12th into the early morning of January 13th, every legal barrier was dismantled. Biden’s inauguration was 1 week away. He was known to oppose federal executions.
The Trump administration was not going to wait. Lisa was transferred from Texas to the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. Just after midnight on January 13th, 2021, the curtain in the death chamber was raised. Lisa Montgomery lay on the gurney. Her hair was graying and brown spilling over a green medical pillow.
Her glasses were on. IVs had been placed in both arms. She looked up as the curtain rose and glanced at the journalists behind the glass with an expression that witnesses described as momentarily bewildered. Like a woman who wasn’t entirely sure where she was or what was happening to her. A woman leaned over her, removed her face mask gently, asked if she had any last words.
Lisa Montgomery looked up and said quietly, “No.” She said nothing else. She tapped her fingers against the gurney nervously, slowly. 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.
She gasped briefly once as the drug moved through her body. Her midsection rose and fell once 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.
She wrote, “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 kill this damaged and delusional woman. Lisa Montgomery’s execution was far from justice. Bobby Jo Stinnett was 23 years old.
She was 8 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. Bobby Jo deserved every year she didn’t get to live, every birthday she didn’t get to celebrate, every moment of her daughter growing up that she never witnessed. She was innocent.
She was sweet. She was loved. And she deserved better than the morning of December 16th, 2004. 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, who committed an act of violence so extreme that it is almost impossible to understand, and then 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 crime, the same crime, a 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. And the difference, according to her attorneys, was the quality of her defense at trial.
The one variable, the one 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. And this country executed one of them without ever fully reckoning with the other.
The heart-shaped tattoo on her thumb. I keep coming back to that. A woman who had been violated by hands her entire life, who had spent 52 years having her body treated as something that belonged to everyone but her, had tattooed a heart on her own thumb. The smallest possible declaration that something inside her 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. Drop a comment and tell me what you think. Was justice served when they executed Lisa Montgomery? Or did the United States government 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? I genuinely want to know where you stand.
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