First woman executed in almost 70 years has haunting goodbye

“As the execution process began, a female executioner standing over Lisa Montgomery’s shoulder leaned in, gently removed her face mask, and asked if she had any last words,” tweeted AP reporter Michael Tarm. “‘No,’ Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice. She said nothing else.”

That single word—uttered softly, yet lingering in the minds of all who bore witness—marked the end of one of the most haunting chapters in modern American criminal history.

On January 13, 2021, after nearly 16 years of legal battles, psychological evaluations, and deeply polarizing debate, Lisa Montgomery was executed by lethal injection. At 52, she became the first woman in nearly seven decades to be put to death by the U.S. federal government.

Montgomery’s crime, committed just days before Christmas in 2004, sent shockwaves across the nation and left an unthinkable scar on an unsuspecting Missouri town.

She had posed as a customer seeking a puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder who was eight months pregnant. Under the guise of finalizing the sale, Montgomery drove from Kansas to Skidmore, Missouri, and entered Stinnett’s home. Once inside, she strangled the young woman until she lost consciousness and, with disturbing precision, used a kitchen knife to cut the baby from her womb.

“The people that are defending [Montgomery], I wish I could take them back in time, and put them in that room,” Nodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong told the BBC. “And then go, ‘Look at this body.’ And then go, ‘Stand there and listen to the 911 call of [Stinnett’s mother]. This is the stuff of nightmares.’”

Stinnett succumbed to her injuries. But miraculously, her baby girl survived the attack.

Montgomery, meanwhile, cradled the stolen newborn as if it were her own, phoning family and friends to announce the birth. By the following day, authorities had located her. The infant was safely returned to her father, and Montgomery was arrested, ending a manhunt that captivated and horrified the public in equal measure.

The sheer brutality of the crime stunned the country. Yet what followed was an equally complicated legal and emotional journey.

Montgomery’s defense argued that she was the product of lifelong abuse and untreated mental illness. Her childhood had been marked by horrific trauma, including repeated sexual assault, beatings, and neglect. Her sister, Diane Mattingly, later wrote in Elle,

“She hadn’t just suffered – she had been tortured. It’s hard to keep track of all the times she was let down by people she was supposed to trust.”

Medical experts who evaluated Montgomery testified that she suffered from a range of psychiatric conditions—psychosis, bipolar disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress. Her brain scans reportedly revealed structural damage consistent with trauma.

But despite these findings, the jury remained unconvinced.

In 2007, Montgomery was sentenced to death. And in the years that followed, appeals were launched and denied. The Trump administration’s 2020 decision to resume federal executions brought Montgomery’s case back into national focus. Her legal team fought desperately for clemency, arguing that she was not mentally competent to face execution—a requirement under the Eighth Amendment.

“No one can credibly dispute Mrs. Montgomery’s longstanding debilitating mental disease,” her attorney Kelley Henry said. “Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution.”

The execution date was delayed twice—once due to a COVID-19 outbreak among her legal team, and again for a last-minute mental competency hearing. But in a late-night decision, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the government to proceed.

Lisa Montgomery died at 1:31 a.m., quietly, after years of silence broken only by courtroom testimony and a single haunting word: “No.”

Her death reignited fierce national debate over the death penalty, mental illness, and justice.

Before Montgomery, the last woman executed by the federal government was Bonnie Heady in 1953, put to death in a Missouri gas chamber. For 17 years prior to 2020, federal executions had been suspended. Montgomery’s case reopened wounds long debated: Can someone so broken, so mentally unwell, ever be held fully responsible? And can execution ever truly be called justice?

To this day, her story continues to raise uncomfortable questions about accountability, trauma, and whether the criminal justice system has the capacity—or the will—to truly distinguish between evil and illness.

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