Crime

After 70 years, see first woman to be executed by US for murder

Published

6 years ago

October 19, 2020

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced date for the federal execution of an inmate who was convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting the baby from her stomach.

The inmate, Lisa Montgomery of Melvern, Kan., will be the first woman to be federally executed in nearly 70 years. Her death, by lethal injection, will take place on Tuesday, December 8, 2020, at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

According to court documents, Ms. Montgomery told her friends and family in 2004 that she was pregnant, despite having undergone a sterilization procedure years earlier.

In December of that year, she reached out to her victim Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was 23 and eight months pregnant, under the pretense of buying a puppy that she had advertised online, court records show.

Ms. Montgomery, who was 36 at the time, reportedly drove from Kansas to Ms. Stinnett’s home in northwestern Missouri, where she strangled her to death and cut the baby girl from her abdomen, who she attempted to pass off as her own.

The infant girl was recovered in good condition at Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center in Topeka.The girl’s father was reunited with her on December 24, 2004, authorities said. She was the couple’s first child.

Montgomery later confessed to murdering Stinnett and abducting her child and was convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in October 2007 for federal kidnapping resulting in death, ABC News reported.

The jury unanimously recommended a death sentence for the crime, which the court imposed.

When Ms. Montgomery is executed, her death will be the first federal execution of a woman since 1953, when Bonnie Heady was killed in a gas chamber for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Kansas City, Mo.