Judy Shaughnessy’s horrible sin
NOT all mothers deserve to be one. Motherhood is one of the most complex and challenging roles a woman could ever choose. After the painful process of childbirth comes the lifetime role of a nurturer, comforter, value-shaper, teacher and model of how life should be lived and led. She has to be the cornucopia of love and security for her offspring—and that role does not have a deadline.
Judy Shaughnessy had no regard for any of that. The mother of three daughters was negligent, irresponsible, physically abusive and an alcoholic. It didn’t help that they were living in poverty. The children’s stepfather made it worse by violence and sexual abuse.
When the eldest daughter, Diane, was eight, she was placed in foster care because of parental neglect. Judy was left with Lisa, who was four then, and her baby sister, Patty.
One would think that Judy would have felt remorse for losing a child and mend her ways. She didn’t, and continued to condone the physical violence perpetrated by her husband, including duct-taping Lisa’s mouth when they didn’t want to hear her speak and strapping her in a high chair for hours when she didn’t finish her food.
The stepfather of the children, Jack Kleiner, “would grab Lisa by her long hair and slam her head against the concrete driveway repeatedly when she was just six or seven years old.” And then, he began raping Lisa when she was in eighth grade. While Judy found out about the sexual abuse, she did nothing to stop it.
Judy even found a way to benefit from her daughter’s suffering. She offered sex with her daughter as payment for repairers working in their house. She prostituted Lisa for menial tasks. In an article published about Lisa, Judy was said to have told her, “You have to earn your keep” being in the house.
It didn’t stop there. The stepfather’s friends gang-raped her and would beat her if they felt she wasn’t up to it.
There was only so much a young adult could take. Lisa’s escape? She got married at 18. For all the trauma that she endured as a child up to her adolescence and the bad example around her, Lisa could not make the right decisions for herself.
She married her stepbrother, Carl Boman, who was also abusive and with whom she had four children in the first four years of their marriage. Her mother, Judy, and Carl convinced her to have tubal ligation, and she did – but the effects were catastrophic for Lisa in terms of immense emotional trauma that led to delusions. Lisa claimed she was pregnant several times, even after the sterilization.
She divorced Carl and married Kevin Montgomery, but the former threatened to file for custody of her two minor children and to expose her sham pregnancies to her new husband, who was unaware of her sterilization. She had to stop it, so she convinced her new husband that she was expecting a child. The year was 2004.
This is the backdrop of extreme child abuse suffered by Lisa at the hands of her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, and her stepfather, Jack Kleiner. Her harrowing ordeal could have led anyone to severe mental disorder.
She was diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, brain damage and dissociation—an altered state of consciousness that includes confusion and disengagement from reality.”
What happened next in Lisa’s life is one of the most gruesome murders ever perpetrated by a woman. On December 16, 2004, Lisa went to the Missouri house of a pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett, strangled her, cut open her belly using a kitchen knife, removed the 8-month fetus and returned home to her family in Kansas with the baby.
She was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death on April 4, 2008 for the murder of Stinnett. Lisa was executed on January 13, 2021 through lethal injection at the age of 52. Lisa escaped the life of violence and abuse that she has known since childhood through a death sentence.
This is not just the story of Lisa Montgomery’s tragic life. This is also about Judy Shaughnessy—the abusive mother who committed a horrible sin against her daughter.