The crime for which Lisa Montgomery was executed …

With a lethal injection, the state of Indiana on Wednesday executed Lisa Montgomery, the only woman sentenced to death in the United States and the first to be executed in more than six decades.

Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 for kill in 2004 a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and extract her baby, which was then recovered unharmed.

During the court process, his lawyers argued that suffered from mental illness due to sexual abuse as a child. “Our Constitution prohibits the execution of a person who cannot rationally understand this execution (…). The current administration knows it. And they killed her anyway”, they denounced.

Montgomery received the fatal injection at the Terre Haute prison complex, after the Supreme Court lifted the suspension that a federal court had ordered hours earlier.

The act for which she was convicted occurred in 2004, when Montgomery was 36 years old. During his childhood, researchers reconstructed, was raped by her stepfather, who repeated the abuse for several years. At the age of 14, her mother discovered the abuse but blamed and even threatened her and pointed a gun at her. Years later, the young woman would have fallen into alcoholism.

Montgomery ended up fleeing home at 18 to marry Carl Bowman. They had 4 children and, in 1990, on medical advice, decided tie your tubes so as not to have any more children. After a temporary separation in 1993, Bowman decided in 1998 to end the couple. Two years later, Lisa married electrician Kevin Montgomery, who had 3 children.

The couple moved in with Kevin’s 7 children and parents. Six days before the crime, Lisa’s first husband had asked the court for custody of 2 of the 4 children they had together. At that point, the woman had been faking another pregnancy from Kevin for some time.

Lisa Montgomery met Bobbie Jo, the 23-year-old who later murdered, in 2004, in a conversation with dogs of the breed the two – supposedly – bred: Rat Terrier. There, they began a virtual friendship, a context in which Bobbie Jo told her she was pregnant.

Lisa later told her that she had been pregnant with twins, but that one had died and that she hoped to give birth to the one who survived in December. In April of this year, the girls found themselves at a Rat Terrier show in Abilene, Kansas, with their “pregnancies” just beginning.

Towards the end of the same year, Jason Dawson – Bobbie Jo’s friend, breeder and also participant in the Rat Cat Twandering – he got an email from a woman named Darlene Fischer he didn’t know. Darlene asked Dawson if he knew of anyone who wanted to put puppies up for adoption because they wanted to buy one for their children. Dawson, who knew Bobbie Jo had several, passed on her name and website to her. Darlene contacted Bobbie Jo and Ratter Chatter via email.

This time his forum user was fischer4kids, and he informed group members that he lived in Fairfax, Missouri, a 25-minute drive from Bobbie Jo’s house.

What no one knew was that the caller who identified herself as Darlene Fischer was actually Lisa Montgomery from Kansas. After exchanging a few messages with Bobbie Jo, Lisa agreed to meet the young woman to see the dogs on Thursday, December 16, 2004 at 2:30 p.m.

According to investigators, Bobbie Jo had little time to recognize Lisa, whom she had seen earlier when meeting Abilene. After opening the door for you, Lisa hung her with a rope until she passed out – the Saint-Louis County Coroner maintains that he regained consciousness later and attempted to defend himself – after which grabbed a kitchen knife to slit her abdomen and extract the baby. After cutting the umbilical cord, he wrapped the newborn baby in a blanket, ran to his red Toyota Corolla and drove off.

Bobbie Jo had spoken with her mother 15 minutes before Lisa arrived and had arranged to pick her up from work. As the young woman did not show up, her mother went to the house to pick her up and before the dramatic scene, she contacted 911. Paramedics arrived immediately, but were unable to revive her. . Bobbie Jo was pronounced dead at 4:27 p.m. upon arrival at St. Francis Hospital in Maryville.

Police quickly opened an investigation to find the baby’s whereabouts. It was another North Carolina Rat Terrier breeder, Dyanne Siktar, who recognized the murdered young woman on the news and helped resolve the case.

Looking at the posts on the Dogs website, she discovered a few messages between Bobbie Jo and Darlene Fischer from the day before the crime where their mail and home addresses had been exchanged.

Finally, the The FBI successfully traced the IP address from which the emails to the alleged dog buyer came from.

The next day, Detectives Fritz and Strong were sent to the Montgomery country house in Melvern. There they found the woman with her husband and daughter. According to Lisa’s account, the baby was hers and she had given birth to him the day before. However, the police contacted the health center and found that no babies were born there on the day the woman indicated. The couple were taken to the anti-narcotics office for questioning and Lisa confessed, to her husband’s surprise, who said he believed his wife was pregnant.

During the preliminary hearings, a neuroscientist presented by the defense, Vilayanur Ramachandran, said Lisa had suffered numerous blows to the head from her parents and husband. As he explained, these The physical violence could have damaged his brain in the region that controls the attacks.

Lisa’s lawyers, for their part, argued that their client suffered from pseudocyesis (psychological pregnancy), a mental condition that can cause a woman to show symptoms of pregnancy and mistakenly believe that she is carrying a baby. Defense medics also said Lisa was suffering from depression, personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Finally, on October 22, 2007, the jury found her guilty of murder and on October 26, he recommended capital punishment for her. April 4 2008, Judge Gary A. Fenner on officially sentenced to death. On March 19, 2012, the United States Supreme Court dismissed his petition for clemency.