Montgomery was put on suicide watch as soon as her execution date was set, Henry said, adding thatMontgomery had previously attempted suicide but not since 2012. The family moved from place to place dozens of times, but it was in a trailer in Sperry, Oklahoma, where her lawyers say the abuse turned into something more akin to torture. She believes that if Montgomery had been rescued too, and given what she was given contact with loving, protective adults everything would have been different. Montgomery is worried that her fellow inmates will have trouble coping with her upcoming execution, said her friendToby Dorr. Mattingly and Montgomery were best friends. When she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. I didn't know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it.". 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. "I think that side of Lisa needs to be out there.". Dorr met Montgomery after being imprisoned for helping an inmate escape in 2006 as Dorrran a dog training program for inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility in northeast Kansas. 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. She learned Oct. 16 that she had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on Dec. 8. After five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. In a letterin late November written with a black crayon, Montgomery told Dorr that other inmates at Carswell took it "really hard" when her execution date was set. Authorities also questioned Kevin Montgomery but concluded he wasn't involved. "I don't think people understand how bad this was," Strong said. Judy Shaughnessy, drank during pregnancy. "The whole community over there's traumatised by this.". And though there's been much recent debate over the fairness of Montgomery's sentence in courthouses and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times, a similar debate does not exist here. They introduced her as their daughter, Abigail, and made multiple other stops. Weddle said she moved to Melvern when she retired nine years ago because she wanted peace and quiet after more than 30 years as a Topeka police officer. "I'm asking him to have compassion on her as a person that has been failed over and over and over again. It turns out that it only takes a few people to save a child's life: being loved by my foster parents saved mine. A generation ago, it was the kind of place where you could "get your hair cut, see a show, buy rabbit feed and eat dinner" - but those days are long gone. 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. "Last year, we got flowers, and gave her a $100-plus gift card and then paid her water bill," says Jena Baumli. She faked pregnancies several times during her marriages to Carl Boman and Kevin Montgomery, court records say. Montgomery's cousin told her legal team that he lived with "regret for not speaking up about what happened to Lisa". Tommy Kleiner and Montgomery have stayed in touch. She has been let down over and over and over again by people in authority, people who were supposed to be caretakers for her, Mattingly said. "The whole story is tragic," says Kelley Henry, one of Montgomery's federal defence lawyers. Montgomery's execution, scheduled less than 60 days, will be the first of three federal executions in January before Trump leaves office. Montgomery was also prone to delusional thinking. Residents there tend to think her execution would bring an appropriate end to a painful chapter in their city's history, he said. "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.". But my hope is President Trump will stop Lisa's execution and commute her sentence to life in prison. After she strangled Stinnett, Montgomery is alleged to have cut her open and stolen her unborn child Victoria, who survived the attack and is now living with her father. Lisa Montgomery strangle one pregnant woman for Missouri before cutting and kidnapping her baby in 2004. . The girls' biological father left the home, and after a while, Mattingly was whisked away to foster care. Judy Shaughnessy and her boyfriend physical, psychological and sexual abuse Lisa. She has writtenopinion piecespublished in Elle and Newsweek. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, Dorr said she wants the world to know about Lisa Montgomery the person. She married her stepbrother at 18 and gave birth to four children in less than five years, before having a sterilization procedure. He married Judy Shaughnessy, who would become Montgomery's mother, in 1967 in . I felt sick watching the video. Violent acts against pregnant women and their fetuses fall into that category. The five investigators who went to Montgomery's home that day recently began communicating with oneanother again, said Strong, who is now sheriff ofNodaway County, which includes Maryville and Skidmore. Judy later married a man named Jack who punched, kicked and choked his children, including Lisa. There is a decision that has to be made, separate from guilt, about whether someones behavior is so morally reprehensible that they deserve the death penalty, she said. Mattingly, Montgomerys sister, is planning on visiting her next week. The nature and circumstances of Montgomerys crime show she had lost touch with reality, says her half-sister, Diane Mattingly. "And Lisa deserves to pay.". The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. As Montgomery grew up, court records say, observersnoticed that she increasingly appeared to be "spaced out," "not emotionally present" or in "her own little world.". She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. "Oh, they're here, I've got to go," she said. Nationwide, only 54 women have been executed since 1900. The question is, should she be put to death for it. Her children even came up with a nickname to pull her out of her trances when she was unresponsive: They called her Martha instead of mom to get her attention. She gives herself as an example - when Stinnett was murdered, Baumli was in rehab for a drug addiction. "I looked to my right and there was Lisa Montgomery on the sofa, holding the baby," he said. Montgomery's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, who was 20 at the time of her birth in 1968, drank heavily while pregnant with her daughter. . Though capital case defendants tend to be confused and stunned, those emotions were heightened with Montgomery, who had trouble responding to questions, Wurtz said. ", "I live with regret for not speaking up about what happened to Lisa," Kidwell said, adding that he just didnt know what to do.. DNA testing later showed they were Stinnett's. As a teenager, Montgomery confided in a cousin, telling him the men would tie her up, beat her and even urinate on her afterwards. Randy Strong, who investigated the case,is unhappy that some people are asking thatMontgomerys life be spared. She enacted this in the grip of a very broken mind.". They were also physically violent. 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. At 18, she married her stepbrother, who also beat and raped her. - Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Montgomery, who confessed, was later sentenced to death for the , The Trump administration announced it was. In Montgomerys early teen years, Kleiner moved the family to an isolated trailer at the end of a dead-end road outside of Sperry, Oklahoma, a severely impoverished area north of Tulsa. Stinnett's husband was at work, andStinnett was on the phone with her mother, Becky Harper, when Montgomery's dirty red Toyota pulled upon the afternoon of Dec. 16. "That's how evil this woman is," Strong said. When Stinnett answered the door, Montgomery overpowered the pregnant woman, strangled her with a piece of rope, and cut the baby out of her womb. They had corresponded for weeks on an online forum for rat terrier breeders and enthusiasts called "Ratter Chatter". Montgomery, who confessed, was later sentenced to death for the especially heinous murder as decided by a jury who heard her trial. But Lisa was broken. "I fell in love immediately.". For one thing, the wider world won't let them forget. Let it be done: Bobbie Jo Stinnetts hometown waits as killers execution date nears. A sworn statement from David Kidwell Sr. identified as being Montgomery's cousin and a deputy sheriff said shecried as she told him Kleiner and his friends on more than one occasion had raped her for hours, then "urinated on her like trash. She was broken by people who were supposed to be her caregivers. She is the most broken of the broken. Henry says this was an early sign of her mental illnesses, which include bipolar disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder and traumatic brain injury. The case was ruled a homicide and remains unsolved. Montgomery was psychotic at the time of the crime, Harwell said. Montgomery's mother, Judy Shaughnessy, drank while Montgomery was in utero, leaving her with brain damage, court documents say. If Mattinglycould speak directly to Trump, she said, she would tell him: "Please dont take my sister. Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong says that the scene that he and his four colleagues found that day was so bloody, they are still traumatised by it. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who. School friend Baumli says she's read the descriptions of Montgomery's abuse, but it mostly just makes her angry. Kleiner, the son of Shaughnessy and Jack Kleiner, was meeting witha parole officerat the time of the killing, Strong said. 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