Lisa Montgomery's friend, Toby Dorr, provided this photo she took of a letter Montgomery wrote to her in November using black crayon. As the car drove further and further away, Mattingly began to vomit. "I cried," says Strong. Some nights, she said, Shaughnessy would leave them in the house with a male babysitter. Residents there tend to think her execution would bring an appropriate end to a painful chapter in their city's history, he said. She told Lisa she had to "earn her keep." Judy later. Other inmates tended to keep Montgomery at arm's length because of the brutality of what she had done, Dorr said, but she liked Montgomery's quiet nature. According to her lawyers and witnesses, Montgomery suffered years of childhood abuse so severe it was akin to torture. Montgomery, 52, the only woman on federal death row,is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Jan. 12 in the U.S. Penitentiary at TerreHaute, Ind. "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. She credits this moment for her "fairly normal" life - a house on eight peaceful acres, a loving relationship with her children, nearly two decades at a job working for the state of Kentucky. Every year. Montgomery's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, told The . The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. "And then go, 'Look at this body'. Diane Mattingly is the sister of Lisa Montgomery, who is scheduled for execution by the federal government on December 8, 2020. 2023 BBC. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who deserved mercy. They gave me unconditional love, they taught me my self-worth, she said. He said he was "reduced to tears" when Zeb Stinnett sent him a message last month on the 16th anniversary of Montgomery's arrest for the murder of his wife. Lisa Montgomery be di 11th prisoner to receive di lethal injection since July when President Donald Trump, resume federal executions. It turns out that it only takes a few people to save a child's life: being loved by my foster parents saved mine. Montgomery lived during her childhood in Washington, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, California and Texas. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, Dorr said she wants the world to know about Lisa Montgomery the person. He thanked the sheriff for recovering his daughter and allowing him to be the parent that his wife couldn't be. "She was completely detached from reality.". Montgomery's second husband Kevin Montgomery, who lives near Melvern and remains married to her voiced support for her bid for clemency in a statement releasedthrough his wife's attorneys. One was the presence of substantial planning and premeditation. But what happened at the modest clapboard house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation. Montgomery wasn't allowed eyeglasses, though she is far-sighted and near-sighted, or a CPAP machine, which has been prescribed since 2015 for her sleep apnea, Henry said. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological . She was beaten, repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends and sexually trafficked by her mother. Patterson made a mistake by abandoning them to "that crazy lady," he said at Montgomery's sentencing hearing in 2007. Mattingly said she shielded her half-sister from random baby-sitters, often older men, whom their mother left with them during her near-nightly outings to a local bar. A federal judge in November postponed Montgomery's execution from Dec. 8 until Jan. 12 to give her attorneys more time to file her clemency petition, after concluding that their COVID-19 symptoms limited their ability to file thepetition. If they all go ahead, the federal government will have executed more people than any administration in nearly 100 years. 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. I thought they knew what was going on, she said. "I don't think people understand how bad this was," Strong said. . If her execution goes forward, she will be the first federal female inmate to be executed in almost 70 years. However, in the tiny town of Skidmore, Missouri, where the crime was committed, there is little sympathy for that argument. The threat of losing her children, combined with the years of untreated trauma and severe mental illness, pushed Lisa over the edge. "But one of the things that the president can do is say - to women who have been trafficked, and who have been sexually abused - 'Your abuse matters'.". 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. When Lisa was a small child, Judy allowed men to rape her for money, including allowing her to be gang raped on multiple occasions. "I get these images in my head of [Bobbie Jo's mother] finding her daughter that way.". 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. Im not a psychiatrist, so I cant go any further than that.. A lifetime of sexual torture causes her to lose touch with reality. "This was the act of a monster," he said. Kleiner and Shaughnessy divorced in 1985, with Shaughnessy contending she once walked in on Kleiner and Montgomery having sex. "She is the most broken of the broken," Mattingly said. All the while, Lisa's mother was being paid to let strange men rape Lisa. Judy Shaughnessy had already raised two convicted felons at the time. They were also physically violent. Kleiner told a reporter in 2005 that Shaughnessy's allegation was made up to support her divorce case and he was never found guilty of anything. In late December, Montgomery's legal team submitted a petition to President Donald Trump that makes the case that after a lifetime of abuse - which they characterise as torture - she is too mentally ill to be executed and deserves mercy. "She was really the first one to have a decent marriage, you know, and I guess looking at Bobbie Jo was like, what your dreams were when you were younger.". She married her stepbrother at 18 and gave birth to four children in less than five years, before having a sterilization procedure. For Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it began before she was born. "It was pretty awful.". Montgomery, her sister said, was repeatedly failed: by the deputy sheriff who was told of her abuse; by the judge who was aware she was being molested; by her trial. The question is, should she be put to death for it. She faulted Montgomerys defense team at the time of the initial trial for failing to connect the dots between Montgomerys childhood trauma and her later behavior. In the cases where women are sentenced to death, prosecutors often use gender stereotypes against the defendants, she said, characterizing them as transgressive or not normal in some way. Montgomery also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and major depression, jurors were told. She struggles to maintain her own hygiene, loses focus during conversations with others and has trouble planning simple tasks.". . Dorr said she and Montgomery were in the same pod,in which inmates may gather outside their cells,in 2006 and 2007 at Leavenworth Detention Center, a for-profit federal facility in northeast Kansas. Henry said Montgomery seemed out of touch with reality when Henry and Harwell, who work in Tennessee, traveled by plane to visit her in October and early November at Fort Worth. Meanwhile, her mother in 1985 had married Richard Boman, whose son Montgomery's stepbrother, Carl Boman got Montgomery pregnant. A home videoshowsCarl Boman raping and beating Montgomery, said her half-brother, Teddy Kleiner, who gave a sworn statementsaying he had seen it. Montgomerys case is not about whether she is responsible for the crime; she is. Montgomery was repeatedly molested by her stepdad Jack Kleiner, starting at . Montgomery used the fake name of "Darlene Fischer" and the chilling email address of fischer4kids@hotmail.com as she set up a meeting with Stinnett, according to the charging affidavit in thecase. The murder 16 years ago is never far from the minds of the town's residents. Shaughnessy in 1974 married her third husband, Jack Kleiner, a divorced father of five. Her daughter remembered her acting like a young child in public, twirling and skipping with her arms swinging with abandon. Jack also raped Lisa for years. Lisa Montgomery - the only female inmate on federal death row in the US - has been executed for murder in the state of Indiana. When she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. After their biological father left the home, Mattingly says they were left alone with Shaughnessy's boyfriends, at least one of whom started raping Mattingly. Patterson was transferred after Montgomerys birth to Fort Riley inKansas, where their family lived when another daughter was born in 1970. She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. Lisa then took the baby home and cared for her as though she was her own. President-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end death penalty proceedings, although he hasn't said when. Another case with Missouri ties. After Mattingly was removed from the home by social services, Montgomery fell prey to her mother's new husband, who according to statements from his other children, was a violent alcoholic who began sexually abusing Montgomery when she was a pre-teen. Maybe you should focus your efforts on the fact that Lisa's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, was granted custody of a grandson the year prior to Lisa's crime. And I am just asking for somebody - once - not to fail her.". Montgomery claimed to live in northwest Missouri. At the same time, she blames it for the fate of her younger half-sister, Lisa Montgomery. A few years after Mattingly was removed from the home, when Montgomery was in kindergarten, her mother remarried a man named Jack Kleiner. Prosecutors shared records showing Montgomery had visited a website featuring a video of a live C-section birth, described as lasting from first cut to last stitch, and had made a practice run by driving the roughly 350 miles from Melvern to Skidmore and back the day before the killing. My sister, Lisa Montgomery, is broken. Shaughnessy forced Montgomery to have sex with men in exchange for money and services, and also punished her children by killing the family dog in front of them,smashing its head with a shovel, the attorneys said. She became involved with Kevin Montgomery, a divorced electrician with children of his own, and theymarried the following year. Read about our approach to external linking. She would tell me I had to leave and I couldnt take anything with me because she bought everything, she recalled. Her children were disturbed by it. She was the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years. But they were what we come to understand as neuro-physiological adaptations to survive being constantly under assault.. Prosecutors said Montgomery was faking mental illness, notingthat many people are sexually abused, but few go on to kill. ", "I live with regret for not speaking up about what happened to Lisa," Kidwell said, adding that he just didnt know what to do.. At the time, Lisa had told her new husband that she was pregnant, which her former husband knew wasn't possible because of the forced sterilization. In asking for mercy, her family members and attorneys say the untreated trauma she experienced as a child exacerbated her brain damage and hergenetic disposition to severe mental illness, leading her to kill Stinnett during a psychotic episode a dissociative state similar to sleepwalking. As Strongand other investigators were about to pull into the driveway of Montgomery's house, he said, he learned via a phone callthat the last email Stinnett received had come from that home. Many of the residents of Skidmore cite the details of the crime, and the amount of planning that went into it, as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer. That was ultimately dropped in favour of an insanity defence, but Henry believes the damage to Montgomery's credibility was already done. The judge in the case scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse - but did not report the abuse himself. "Let's say I didn't stay clean very long," she says. 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. Likewise, that jury wasn't directed to consider whether Montgomery was severely mentally ill, which Montgomery's attorneys are asking the president to take into account. She needs someone for once in her life to be on her side., Provided by attorneys for Lisa Montgomery, "Biopsychosocial History of Lisa Marie Montgomery," by Jan Vogelsang. 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. Defense attorney Fred Duchardt told jurors that sexual abuse during her childhood had caused Montgomeryto become mentally ill and killed her soul. He was being held in the Shawnee County Jail in 2018 when he filed a federal lawsuit contending the county was violating his constitutional rights by preventing him from sending letters to Montgomery. 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. Montgomery became the first female federal prisoner executed in 67 years, the first woman executed in the United States since Kelly Gissendaner in 2015, and the first person executed in the United States in 2021. At the time of her murder, she was newly married and pregnant with her first child. Mattingly and Montgomery lived together until Mattingly was eight and her half-sister was four. After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. Please, honey.". At least five times after she was sterilized, she told people that she was pregnant. Montgomery is "evil personified," he said. Lisa Montgomery strangle one pregnant woman for Missouri before cutting and kidnapping her baby in 2004. . "The other sister stayed in that situation, and it got worse and worse and worse. It is the only federal prison with an active death chamber. Ms. Montgomery has bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, traumatic brain injury and most likely fetal alcohol syndrome. I am begging that somebody will finally stand up for her and say, shes been punished enough.. Two days before the crime, her former husband (and stepbrother) sought custody of two of her children. Mattingly and Montgomery were best friends. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie until backed into a corner. For example, she said, the jury that recommended Montgomery be executed wasn't asked to consider the impact that would have on her four children and 12 grandchildren. We cant travel to talk to witnesses or to prepare experts at this point, Harwell, Montgomerys lawyer, said. Ramachandran said women who sufferchildhood sexual abuse and whose minds revolve around babies and pregnancy are predisposed to suffering pseudocyesis, a condition in which they show physical symptoms of pregnancy, including enlargement of the breasts and stomach, morning sickness and cravings for certain foods. Mattingly, Montgomerys sister, is planning on visiting her next week. 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. Though capital case defendants tend to be confused and stunned, those emotions were heightened with Montgomery, who had trouble responding to questions, Wurtz said. She testified as. By multiple accounts, Kleiner was an erratic, violent man who beat the kids and his wife regularly. "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.". Montgomery described feeling that she was unsure whether her environment was real, and confided that she used a strategy to ground herself in reality: She would look at a tree out the window and tell herself that the tree was real if she could see it. Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was meeting witha parole officerat the time of the killing, Strong said. "There was a lot of talk both ways on it," he said when contacted by phone at his new home in Texas. The father was a teacher. Mattingly said her heart sank when she realized Montgomery wasn't coming with her. 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