Woman found guilty of killing pregnant woman
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A woman whose attorneys claimed she was suffering from delusions when she killed an expectant mother and cut the baby from her womb was convicted Monday.
Lisa Montgomery, 39, was convicted of kidnapping resulting in death in the 2004 attack on 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. Jurors deliberated for about four hours before rejecting Montgomery's insanity defense.
Prosecutors said they plan to seek the death penalty.
Montgomery's lawyers said she was suffering from pseudocyesis, which causes a woman to falsely believe she is pregnant and exhibit signs of pregnancy.
Prosecutor Roseann Ketchmark told jurors that Montgomery was driven by fear because she believed her ex-husband, Carl Boman, would expose that she was lying about being pregnant. Montgomery was cold and calculated and plotted up until the slaying of Bobbie Jo Stinnett on Dec. 16, 2004, in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore, Ketchmark said.
“It’s not pseudocyesis or post traumatic stress disorder,” Ketchmark said. “And even if you wrap them up and put delusions around them, it’s not insanity.”
Prosecutors said Stinnett, 23, was conscious and trying to defend herself as a kitchen knife was used to crudely cut the baby from her womb.
Mental health experts testifying for the defense said threats to Montgomery’s delusion about being pregnant caused her to enter a dreamlike, dissociative state when the slaying took place. Montgomery was arrested the day after the killing; prosecutors say she had spent the morning showing off Stinnett’s baby as her own.
“Obviously she’s believing she was pregnant or might be, because physical changes were manifesting,” defense lawyer John O’Connor said in his closing statement. “There were physical manifestations. That’s the key.”
O’Connor spent much of his closing argument recounting stories about Montgomery’s troubled childhood, filled with mental, physical and sexual abuse.
Montgomery had undergone a tubal ligation in 1990 after the birth of her fourth child. But soon after, she began claiming to be pregnant again, according to testimony.
Boman had become suspicious of her latest pregnancy claim and threatened to use it against her as he sought custody of two of the couple’s four children. A custody hearing had been set for January 2005.
Montgomery’s mother and sister also had been telling her husband, Kevin Montgomery, and his parents that it was impossible for Montgomery to carry a child.
As Montgomery’s purported Dec. 13, 2004, due date approached, she began conducting searches on the Internet about Stinnett and researching different aspects of child birth. The defense views those efforts as evidence that she believed she was pregnant. The prosecution views them as proof of premeditation.