The ‘womb raider’ killer on Trump’s last-minute death list
First woman federal inmate to be executed in 68yrs... & maybe last
AMERICA is due to execute its first female federal inmate in almost 70 years today – unless there is an unprecedented last-minute act of clemency by Donald Trump.
Lisa Montgomery, dubbed the “Womb Raider”, will be given a lethal injection at US Penitentiary Terre Haute in Indiana for strangling a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby.
Unless the president grants 52-yearold Montgomery a reprieve, she could make history as the last women executed by the US as new President Joe Biden hopes to abolish the death penalty.
Despite her guilt never being in question, tens of thousands of Americans feel to kill Montgomery will be an injustice on top of an injustice after she was systemically failed by the government, her family and society.
And while it in no way excuses her heinous crime, few could imagine the upbringing she endured during which she was sadistically treated, repeatedly raped, and forced into child prostitution. Montgomery’s post-conviction legal team have petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claiming her trial “fell far short of minimum standards of fairness”.
They argue it violated international law, and that the US government bears some blame given its abject failure throughout her life to protect her from severe child abuse and sexual violence.
Montgomery has “bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex posttraumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, traumatic brain injury” and was most likely born with fetal alcohol syndrome, they say.
She was raised in a family rife with mental illness and her father left when she was a toddler.
But tonight, unless Trump has a change of heart, she will be one of three more inmates sent to the death chamber in his last days in the White House.
He hopes to have executed six since between his November election loss and next week’s inauguration.
Last year, for the first time in US history, the Government executed more people than all 50 states. The number of
federal prisoners put to death in 2020 was 10 – the highest since president Grover Cleveland’s second term in office in 1885.
Before Trump leaves office in eight days, Montgomery, Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs will be added to the list.
The last federal executions of women, in 1953, were of Bonnie Heady, killed in a gas chamber in Missouri for the kidnap and murder of a child, and Ethel Rosenberg, who was convicted of spying. Montgomery will be only the fifth woman put to death in a federal execution in history if she is not reprieved. Her only hope is for a temporary stay pushing her execution beyond Biden’s swearing in.
Montgomery ended up on death row following the events of December 16, 2004, when she drove from Kansas to the home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in Skidmore, Missouri, purportedly to purchase a puppy. “Once inside the residence, Montgomery strangled Stinnett – who was eight months pregnant – until the victim lost consciousness,” the Department of Justice says. “Using a kitchen knife, Montgomery then cut into Stinnett’s abdomen, causing her to regain consciousness.
“A struggle ensued, and Montgomery strangled Stinnett to death. Montgomery then removed the baby from Stinnett’s body, took the baby with her, and attempted to pass it off as her own.”
The baby was returned to her father Zeb after being recovered from Montgomery. Baby Victoria Jo was released from hospital the night before her mum was to be buried.
Zeb has raised her with support from his and Bobbie Jo’s families. They appear to have gone to great lengths to protect her from the media glare.
According to court documents and mitigation investigations with nearly 450 family members, neighbours, lawyers, social workers and teachers, Montgomery was abused by her mother Judy Shaughnessy in sadistic ways. She was forced to sit for hours in a highchair if she did not finish her food while her mouth was so regularly covered with duct tape to keep her quiet, she learned not to cry. Shaughnessy, who is now dead, told an investigator her daughter’s first words were: “Don’t spank me. It hurts.”
Her stepfather, Jack Kleiner, began to sexually assault her when she was about 13. He built a shed-like room with its own entrance on the side of the family’s trailer outside Tulsa, Oklahoma and kept her there.
Her post-conviction team learned alcoholic Kleiner would bring friends over to rape her. Shaughnessy began to prostitute her daughter to cover the bills for plumbing and electric work.
Before he died in 2009, Kleiner video-taped a statement denying the abuse, but his employer testified he had admitted to raping Montgomery.
However, in her 2007 trial, her legal team tried to frame her half-brother despite him having a solid alibi.
Now, with her appeals exhausted Montgomery’s attorney has pleaded with Trump to agree to her clemency petition and save her life. So far, he has refused to grant anyone compassion.
Even before his presidency, in 1989, he spent the equivalent of £135,000 taking out newspaper ads demanding the death penalty for the “Central Park Five”. Although no DNA evidence connected the black and Latino boys, aged 14 to 16, to the rape of white jogger Trisha Meili, it did not stop him calling for their executions.
“Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police,” read the ads, which Trump accompanied with a firstperson article that read: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.
“I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
The teenagers were exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the actual perpetrator in 2002.
To this day, Trump refuses to say he was wrong. Instead, he has pursued the use of the death penalty while in office as others have backed away.
In November, public support for the death chamber hit its lowest mark in half a century as 60 per cent prefer a life sentence to capital punishment.
Trump shows no signs of leaving the other 40 per cent behind.
I want to hate these murderers and I always will DONALD TRUMP WORDS IN AD ON DEATH PENALTY