This is a case of an obsession that turned deadly.
Maternal instinct leads a killer
to a crime beyond comprehension.
This is a person who robs a mother of the most sacred gift:
her unborn child.
♪
Skidmore, Missouri is a rural community
in northwest Missouri.
♪
Like many towns in the Midwest,
its fortunes rose and fell with the fate of the railroad.
Skidmore is a charming small town
with hardworking folks.
But they have some notorious crimes in their history.
December 16, 2004.
At 3:28 p.m.,
the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department dispatch
received a 911 call from the residence
of Bobbie Jo and Zeb Stinnett.
A woman named Becky Harper had called the 911 center.
She was very distraught, very emotional.
She said that her daughter, Bobbie Jo Stinnett,
was laying on the floor, There's blood everywhere,
and it looks like her stomach had exploded.
She related that her daughter, Bobbie Jo Stinnett,
was 23 years old and 8 months pregnant.
We're on the scene in less than 11 minutes.
The paramedic finds Bobbie Jo and her mother
in the back room.
Becky Harper is over her daughter.
She is hysterical
and confused as to what has happened.
Bobbie Jo was laying on her back,
and she's just laying in this massive amount of blood.
She's lost so much blood that she's deceased.
She's barefoot.
She has a jagged gash across her abdomen
that has exposed some of her internal organs.
It's a horrific scene.
They find the umbilical cord, and it has been cut,
and they determine that the baby is
no longer inside of Bobbie Jo.
Someone has cut this baby out of this woman,
and the baby is missing.
You could see where there were marks,
where it looked like a struggle had ensued
in the middle of a pool of blood.
The rest of the house did not seem to be disturbed at all,
which would have indicated that attack
only occurred in the back bedroom.
There was no evidence of forced entry.
It was very possible that the person that attacked Bobbie Jo
and took her baby was known to Bobbie Jo.
Who would do such a thing, and why?
When we look at the crime scene, the victim,
and the manner in which this child was taken,
somebody who probably knew this victim,
knew she was pregnant, knew that she was far along enough
that this child would survive.
Bobbie Jo's death was collateral.
The baby was the objective.
"Let's kidnap this baby, keep the baby alive.
Who cares what happens to Bobbie Jo?"
In some crimes--certain robberies, violent crimes--
the motive isn't necessarily as important as it is here.
In this case, the motive and the purpose
for killing this woman and taking the baby is
of utmost importance and urgency.
They need to track down this child,
and there's no way to do that without knowing the motive
of the perpetrator.
We were able to get the Amber Alert issued
to help us locate perhaps where the baby was.
We had activated additional people to come in.
We had the FBI.
We had the Highway Patrol.
Time was off the essence. It's imperative that
we, as a group, get together on this
and find the killer,
and hopefully find our baby alive.
At this point,
deputies move to conduct a neighborhood canvass.
One neighbor tell us
that about 1:15,
she saw a dirty, red, small car
parked in front of the Stinnetts' residence
that she had never seen in the area before.
Maybe the perpetrator was in that car.
If nothing else, maybe a witness was in that car
and saw something, so now we're looking
for a dirty, red, sub-compact car
that might match that description.
But we didn't have a license plate number,
and we simply, at that point,
did not have enough information.
Becky Harper contacts Bobbie Jo's husband
and tells him what has happened to Bobbie Jo
and that the baby is missing.
We always look at a spouse or someone close first
until you can eliminate them.
Zeb is interviewed formally.
Zeb told the investigators he went to work
at Kawasaki Manufacturing plant on the 16th at 7:00 a.m.
And that was verified by his employer
and co-- and, you know, coworkers.
He had a perfect alibi.
Could not have possibly been involved with the homicide.
He was devastated by what had happened.
He told the investigators that
he and Bobbie Jo had been married
for two and a half years.
Zeb and Bobbie Jo were high school sweethearts.
They had not been married all that long.
They were both anxiously awaiting
the birth of their first baby.
They had had a sonogram
and knew that they were going to have a baby girl.
Him not knowing where the baby was added to his despair.
Bobbie Jo was little miss independent.
She was smart as a whip. She did great in school.
Bobbie Jo got excellent grades,
and she participated in things like the yearbook
and the school paper.
She loved animals.
Bobbie Jo raised rat terriers
and loved the little critters.
We learned that Bobbie Jo bred and raised
rat terrier dogs,
and when she would have a litter of puppies
to sell from that.
She would advertise
and talk to different people on the internet.
Detective Jill Voltmer was assigned
to interview Bobbie Jo's mother, Becky Harper.
About five hours after the 911 call,
I went over to Becky Harper's house.
She was a grieving mother. It was awful.
Crying hysterically.
Took a very long time to get information out of her.
The only way she could get through an interview
was the thought that maybe we can save the baby.
Becky told me she had spoken to Bobbie Jo at 2:30 p.m.
Bobbie Jo was supposed to give Becky a ride home from work
at 3:30, so at 2:30, she called her to say,
"Hey, you are gonna come, right?"
Bobbie Jo answered and said,
"They are here looking at the dogs now.
But I will be able to still pick you up at around 3:30."
And that was the end of the conversation.
3:30 came, and Bobbie Jo was not there to pick up Becky.
Becky Harper's work is about two and a half,
maybe three blocks from where Bobbie Jo lived,
so she walked from work to the residence, came inside,
and that's when she discovered her daughter.
We know that Bobbie Jo was alive at 2:30 p.m.,
when Becky Harper talked to her,
and then she was deceased shortly after 3:30,
so there's a one-hour window
during which the murder occurred.
And then, Becky told us she had been
to Bobbie Jo's house the night before, and they had dinner.
While Becky was cleaning up dinner,
Bobbie Jo was on the computer, communicating with a person
who stated she was Fairfax, Missouri,
and that she was going to be coming to the house
to look at her dogs the next morning.
Becky doesn't have any idea who the person is from Fairfax,
other than it's a woman.
We had to find the woman as quickly as possible.
We don't know-- was the child injured
while it was being removed from Bobbie Jo Stinnett?
So we don't know if it needs medical attention.
We just know that we just need to find this baby fast.
A subject was overheard,
stating that he was
stealing babies from mothers
and then selling them on the black market.
♪
That afternoon, on December 16th,
Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant,
was attacked, killed,
and her baby was taken from her.
Someone had cut Bobbie Jo Stinnett's baby out,
and the baby is missing.
We have to find this baby.
We learned from Bobbie Jo's mother
that Bobbie Jo was alive at 2:30 p.m.,
when she had talked to her, and that Bobbie Jo said,
"Well, someone's here now looking at the dogs."
She knows that Bobbie Jo was on the computer
communicating with the person,
who stated she was from Fairfax, Missouri
and that she was going to be coming to the house
the next morning to look at a dog.
It was evident to us immediately
that we needed to look at that computer.
We wanted to find out, who was she talking with?
Who had she planned to meet?
So we get a forensic examiner
to examine that computer for us.
I'm taken into the crime scene
and shown where the computer is at,
so it's at that point that I start my analysis.
Based on the information from Becky Harper,
Curtis Howard does a word search
of the database of her computer for the word "Fairfax."
And there was a lot of hits.
So, after managing to comb through a lot of that,
that's when I found what I believed to be
a conversation in a chat room
between Bobbie Jo and the woman from Fairfax, Missouri.
A lady that had named herself in there as Darlene Fischer,
and her email address was fischer4kids@hotmail.com.
It was a chat room
for people that were interested in rat terriers.
On the chat, this woman makes an appointment
to see Bobbie Jo on the day of the murder at around noon,
to look at puppies to buy.
She was possibly the person
that was at the residence of Bobbie Jo that day.
We want to talk to Darlene Fischer and see what she saw.
She's a person of interest.
Is she witness, or is she a suspect?
We need to locate Darlene Fischer
in Fairfax, Missouri as quickly as possible.
Fairfax, Missouri is only about 20 miles from Skidmore,
in Atchison County.
It is now very late at night, sometime around midnight,
and we drive over to Atchison County
to the sheriff's office.
Fairfax, Missouri's a small community,
and no one had ever heard of Darlene Fischer.
So we're doing records checks,
and we come up empty.
It was found that nobody by the name of Darlene Fischer
lived in or around Fairfax or in Atchison County.
So that is a real red flag for us at that point.
We suspected that that was an alias.
Who uses an alias?
Typically a guilty person,
someone who wants to hide their true identity.
At this point, we still do not know
who Darlene Fischer is.
Finding her might lead us to the baby
as well as Bobbie Jo's killer.
We had the IP address
from the computer that Darlene Fischer was using.
Unfortunately, we were not able
to get the user information at that time.
In 2004, there was a little bit of a lag time.
The next morning, the autopsy was performed.
We could clearly see that her abdomen was
a large, jagged wound that went from one side to the other.
There had been a very crude C-section performed.
We could see ligature marks around her neck.
And you could actually see the imprint
of the weave of this rope.
Not very thick. Less than 1/4-inch wide.
Like a cotton clothesline rope.
But the cause of death was not the strangulation.
It was exsanguination.
She bled out from the C-section.
There was blood actually between Bobbie Jo's toes,
and so it would appear that, during the struggle,
she had attempted to stand up.
What was really troubling was,
based on what the medical examiner saw in the feet,
that Bobbie Jo was alive
when the cutting had started.
The theory that we came to pretty quickly
was that she had been strangled.
Knocked unconscious. The C-section was started,
and that's what brought her back to consciousness.
She was trying to fight off this attacker
and to save herself and her baby.
She was knocked unconscious again,
and then the C-section is completed
and the baby is removed.
We don't know if-- was the child injured
while it was being removed from Bobbie Jo Stinnett?
So we don't know if it needs medical attention.
We just know that we just need to find this baby.
There's multiple reasons why somebody would want
to steal an infant child,
one of them being to sell that child on the black market.
This can be incredibly lucrative,
though dark proposition for somebody.
To go to this extreme, to rip a child from an abdomen,
there's another psychological level to this.
It's probably someone desperate to be a mother,
someone who fantasized about motherhood.
You can't rule out any theory.
I mean, what if this is a Satanic cult in operation
that cuts the baby out of the womb
to offer up some kind of a sacrifice?
It's not beyond the realm of possibilities.
This case garnered a lot of attention in the media.
Main Street of Skidmore was just lined up
with, you know, camera trucks and media outlets
across the country, so it was a huge story.
It's been just wild around here.
People--news coverage and visitors and everything.
I feel so bad for him and for the family and everything else.
They were very excited about their family
they were about to have.
Lot of information started coming in
to the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department.
A domestic violence advocate contacted us.
She had some information that a man in a bar
was overheard stating
that he was taking babies from their mothers
and then selling them on the black market
for as much as $50,000.
When this woman heard about the crime
against Bobbie Jo Stinnett, she became upset
and started to think, maybe this guy had done it.
♪
Bobbie Jo Stinnett had been strangled,
and her lower abdomen had been cut open to remove her baby.
Due to the crude and violent manner
in which the baby had been delivered,
I was very concerned whether or not
we would find the baby alive.
Tips come in,
and one of the more credible tips
came from a social worker
who had worked with victims of domestic violence.
Man in a bar was overheard stating
that he was taking babies from their mothers
and then selling them.
This was a lead that needed to be followed up on.
Immediately, we discovered that the suspect
was on probation and had a prior criminal record
for drug activity.
The suspect was located by investigators.
He tells us that
during the day when Bobbie Jo was killed,
he was actually at the probation office
and was being fitted for an ankle bracelet
because he had been placed on house arrest.
In fact, the ankle bracelet activated at around 3:00.
So police knew
exactly where the suspect was.
There's no way he could have committed this murder.
One crime cleared him of another.
A few hours later, based on the Amber Alert,
a woman in Texas called in with a tip
of a woman she knew by the name of Lisa Montgomery.
She had met Lisa Montgomery at a dog show.
Lisa raised rat terriers.
She went to some dog shows and showed them.
The same as Bobbie Jo.
She had told us that Lisa Montgomery
had been telling people that she was expecting,
but no one really believed her
because she didn't look pregnant.
And she learned that Lisa has given birth
on the same day that Bobbie Jo was murdered
and her baby's taken.
She is very suspicious
that this might be Bobbie Jo Stinnett's baby.
What I did at that point was,
I contacted our intelligence unit at the Highway Patrol
and asked for a search for Lisa Montgomery.
And they found her in Melvern, Kansas.
Once that lead hit,
we took off for Melvern, Kansas,
171 miles south of us.
Now, at the same time, we were still working
to resolve who was using the alias Darlene Fischer,
the woman was supposed to have met with Bobbie Jo
on December 16th.
We had the IP address from the computer
that Darlene Fischer was chatting
with Bobbie Jo Stinnett at.
We were able to get the user information that morning.
And that IP address that Darlene Fischer was using
comes back to a computer registered
to a Kevin Montgomery in Melvern, Kansas.
And guess what? Kevin's married to Lisa Montgomery.
This is amazing.
Two completely independent sources of information
point to the exact same people.
We thought Lisa Montgomery, Kevin Montgomery,
that they were involved.
About the time we were getting close
to Melvern, Kansas, I get the call that,
"Hey, you know that email "darlenefischer4kids?"
I said, "Yeah."
They told me, "It came from the house you're going to."
I thought, "We're gonna find the killer
and we're gonna find the baby at this house."
Meanwhile, I called our agents in our Topeka office,
gave them the address to Lisa and Kevin Montgomery.
They got on to the scene, and they set up surveillance.
It's a real agricultural area,
and it's an old farmhouse that sits by itself.
And about a quarter of a mile down the road,
there's a hedgerow
that runs along the opposing cross street.
And the FBI surveillance team has taken up a position there.
They saw a dirty, red car there,
which matches, obviously, the description
of the dirty, red, small car that was seen up
in Skidmore, Missouri the day before,
outside Bobbie Jo's house.
And they saw Lisa and Kevin Montgomery
walk into the house after they arrived,
and she was carrying a baby.
My thought is that that's our baby,
and I need to separate the baby from Lisa Montgomery
before we end up with a hostage situation
or she tries to do harm to that baby.
We don't know if we're getting ready
to walk inside the devil's house.
FBI agents conducting surveillance
see Lisa and Kevin Montgomery.
They arrive at the house with a baby.
♪
Shortly after, detectives, they arrive at the address
in Melvern, Kansas at about 12:45 p.m.,
which is about 22 hours
after we believe the homicide occurred.
We drove up into the driveway.
As we get out of the car,
Kevin Montgomery steps out of the house,
shuts the door behind him, and he stands on the porch.
I said, "We're investigators.
"We're here following up on a case out
of Skidmore, Missouri, involving Bobbie Jo Stinnett."
The detectives explained that there's an Amber Alert
and they are checking out all recent births.
So he says, "Sure. Come on in. We had a baby yesterday."
And that seemed to put him at ease.
He opened the door for us,
and it was just kind of an eerie feeling.
We don't know if Kevin's involved.
Is Kevin going to launch an attack on us?
Are there people inside that assisted in this?
And as I step across the threshold
into this house, the room is darker.
It's very cluttered.
And there is Lisa Montgomery sitting on the couch,
holding this baby.
I'm looking at the baby,
trying to size the situation up.
I was an old medic and I saw a lot of births.
This baby did not come through the birth canal.
Its head is not misshaped. It's not cone-shaped.
This looks like a Cesarean baby.
My real concern is that
the baby isn't crying and making any noise.
But I can see it breathing.
I asked her about the baby,
and I say, "I see you have a new baby,"
and she said, "Yes. I gave birth yesterday."
I said, "Oh, where did you give birth?"
She said, "Well, I was up shopping in Topeka,
"and I went into labor and I had the baby
at the women's birthing center in Topeka, Kansas."
I said, "Would you mind showing us
some discharge papers from that facility?"
And she says, "Well, I don't remember
what I've done with them."
One of the agents steps off to the side,
and he calls the birthing center in Topeka, Kansas.
And lo and behold, there were no births that previous day.
It was at that point, it was apparent to us
it was Bobbie Jo's baby.
We wanted to get the baby out of Lisa's hands
as soon as possible.
I don't want to scare her.
I don't want to force her to take the baby as hostage.
So I'm trying to be very calm.
So I said, "Lisa, would you let one of these agents
hold your baby while we go talk?"
Which surprisingly, she said sure.
So one of the agents took the baby.
And they separate Lisa from Kevin.
They wanted to get their own independent story,
not their combined story.
We absolutely thought they both might have been involved.
Lisa is taken to the sheriff's office
to do an interview with her.
We sat down with Lisa Montgomery,
and Don Fritz and I began
the interrogation process with her.
I didn't accuse her or anything.
I just said, "Maybe you can help us."
And Lisa said, "Now that my husband Kevin isn't here,
I can tell you what really happened."
She says, "I didn't want Kevin to know this,
but I had the baby at home, 'cause we're not very wealthy."
And Lisa said, "But don't you worry.
I had three of my girlfriends here to help."
I said, "Okay. Would you mind if I had their names
and phone numbers so I can follow up with that?"
But then, the story changes again.
"Well, they weren't really here.
They were sort of on-call if I needed them."
So she's told me several lies.
As these investigators start to peel away the layers,
they're boxing her into a corner.
She's losing ground.
She knows that they're on to her.
She makes up stories.
When that doesn't work, she makes up another story.
She's trying to come up with whatever possible,
feasible explanation she could have for having this child.
They were asking her follow-up questions
to statements she was making.
Oh, she gave birth at this particular clinic.
"Okay, well where are the discharge papers?"
"Oh, they're in the car."
"Oh, I guess, actually I didn't give birth in the clinic.
I gave birth at home, with two friends."
"Oh, who are your friends? We'll call your friends."
"Oh, actually, they weren't here.
They were on standby."
So these follow-up questions that she couldn't answer
showed how she was lying.
Lisa held to her guns for a while
that she was not involved in Bobbie Jo's murder.
You just have to be patient.
If you lose your patience, then you've lost the game.
All of her lies were collapsing.
And eventually, Lisa breaks down, starts sobbing,
and admits that, "The baby you have is Bobbie Jo's."
We didn't know if Lisa was the murderer,
if Kevin was, both of them.
We didn't know who had killed Bobbie Jo and took the baby.
She knew she wasn't pregnant.
But she had boxed herself in.
They found that Lisa was researching
how to do Cesarean section.
She was stalking Bobbie Jo online.
Lisa Montgomery was interviewed
on December 17th, 2004.
She admitted that the baby we had taken from her and Kevin
was Bobbie Jo's baby.
We reach a stalemate eventually,
where she's really not disclosing
any more information for us.
So we agree to take a break.
Meanwhile, we hope to gather evidence to solve this murder.
Kevin Montgomery is interviewed at the house.
We thought, perhaps Kevin Montgomery was involved because
he would have had to have known
the baby wasn't their baby.
The story that Kevin told was that,
at the time of the murder, on December 16th, 2004,
he had been at work.
He got a call from his wife that evening.
She had told Kevin, "Well, I had the baby,
"and I've been discharged in Topeka, Kansas.
Can you come get me?"
So Kevin drives up to Topeka, Kansas.
Meets Lisa Montgomery
in her small, red, dirty car in the parking lot.
She says, "This is our baby."
And he says, "Great."
Kevin is very convinced that this is their baby.
We found out where he was working that day,
on December 16, and verified with his employer
that he was there at work, all day.
He had an alibi.
We believed Lisa Montgomery did this by herself,
that Kevin Montgomery was unaware of his wife's crime.
We found that somewhere incredulous at first,
hard to believe that someone could be quite so naive
as not to realize his wife wasn't pregnant.
Kevin is a very simple man.
I think he had trouble grasping that his wife had tricked him.
She lied and said she was pregnant,
and she used the date of our expected mother as her own.
That, in itself, is telling you this is premeditated.
She sort of changed the due date on him,
and he didn't sort of think that was suspicious.
He trusted his wife and believed what she told him.
He had no reason to not believe her.
And so, it seems like
he was someone who just got sort of fooled,
like everybody else, by his wife.
She had to know that there was a huge risk
that Bobbie Jo would die,
because she intended to cut the baby out of her womb
and leave this woman bleeding on her floor.
We contacted Zeb Stinnett and let him know
that the baby has been recovered
and the baby is at a hospital being checked out.
The baby is in remarkably good shape.
It took less than 24 hours to find the baby,
thank God, alive.
It was a pretty moving moment.
For all the investigators.
Knowing that we had found the baby alive
just meant everything to us.
Still tears me up a little bit.
I'm just an old softie.
Later that day, we got the search warrant
to the residence of Lisa and Kevin Montgomery.
The FBI Evidence Response Team searched the dirty, red car
that was spotted outside of Bobbie Jo's house,
that belongs to Lisa and Kevin Montgomery.
There was a tremendous amount of evidence in the car.
There was a yellow Post-It Note
with Bobbie Jo's address in Skidmore, Missouri
stuck on the shifting console of that car.
But everything was in the trunk.
The bloody knife was in the trunk.
The rope with strands of hair.
There was a home birthing kit, and part of the umbilical cord.
And then, they searched the house.
We seized the computer.
On Lisa Montgomery's home computer,
they found that Lisa was stalking Bobbie Jo online.
Bobbie Jo, as she was going through stages of pregnancy,
she would post pictures of herself on her website,
and Lisa was tracking that pregnancy.
You could see on her computer where she had
looked at Bobbie Jo's photos.
This went on for a period of time.
Not just one or two days,
but weeks leading up to the murder.
We also found that Lisa was researching
how to do Cesarean section.
So all these things that she did,
she obviously premeditated this.
This is not a spur-of-the-moment murder.
With the information from the search,
we continued to try to get details out
of Lisa Montgomery.
It took some time.
Lisa Montgomery admitted
that she had lied to her husband about being pregnant.
Through continued questioning,
she admitted that she knew Bobbie Jo.
They had been in dog shows together before.
And she watched Bobbie Jo's pregnancy progress.
She was basically tracking Bobbie Jo's pregnancy
to try and match her own false pregnancy to it.
In the investigation, we learned that
Lisa Montgomery has a history of claiming she's pregnant.
She really likes the benefits of being pregnant.
She got attention. She didn't have to work.
She was pampered.
She has had several reasons
why her pregnancies didn't end with a baby--
a miscarriage,
she asked Kevin Montgomery for money for an abortion
and he gave her money.
The last time that she claimed she was pregnant,
she said she had a stillbirth.
And then, she had told Kevin again that she was pregnant.
Six or seven months before,
she was going to get her prenatal check-ups.
She had taken ultrasounds and showed them to Kevin.
She lost the baby before. She's pregnant again.
So Kevin Montgomery puts his foot down and says,
"I am coming to your prenatal check-up on December 17th."
And she said that, if he found out,
she was afraid he was gonna get violent.
So she was really running out of excuses.
Suddenly, it was time to produce a child.
♪
We continued the interrogation process
with Lisa Montgomery.
Lisa admitted, on that Monday,
before the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett,
she sent an email out to a number of her friends saying,
"I'm gonna go in for an ultrasound,
"and if the baby's not here my Wednesday,
they're gonna induce on Thursday."
We now know she has to have a baby before the 17th,
because otherwise Kevin will go with her to the doctor.
She knew she wasn't pregnant. But she had boxed herself in.
So she makes that fake email from "darlenefischer4kids."
And she makes an appointment to see Bobbie Jo
on the day of the murder, at around noon,
to look at puppies to buy.
On the morning of December 16th,
she leaves Melvern, Kansas
and arrived at Bobbie Jo's house
around 12:30 or so that afternoon.
She's there for a couple of hours,
and they're talking and playing with the dogs.
Lisa said, "When it was time
"for Bobbie Jo to put the puppies back in the kennel,
I followed her in there."
She brought a rope with her in her coat pocket.
She came up behind Bobbie Jo.
Strangles her.
To the point where she passes out.
Lisa starts performing a crude C-section with a kitchen knife.
She cuts the umbilical cord. She takes the baby.
She leaves Bobbie Jo to bleed out.
She tells us that she's a monster.
But she really showed no remorse for what she had done.
I remember how horrified I was
having to sit there and interrogate the woman
that did that.
It was just a really, really heavy burden on that.
The savagery of a woman that can go strangle a woman
and cut the baby out of her is just
really, really hard for me to wrap my head around.
It's just horrific.
The evidence was overwhelming
that this was a premeditated, cold-blooded murder.
She planned it. She executed the murder.
So when we have a first-degree case,
it's a death penalty case.
The trial begins October 4th, 2007.
I don't think there was ever really a dispute
that Lisa Montgomery killed Bobbie Jo and took the baby.
I think the issue always was, what was her mental state
and whether she was competent to stand trial.
The defense claims that she was insane,
that she did not have the capability
of understanding the wrongfulness of her conduct.
And they believed
it was from her years of abuse as a child.
Someone who suffers abuse from their parents--
their mother, their father-- is gonna grow up
with a very sort of twisted, backward sense
of love, of being needed.
And so, for her to grow up
and want to have as many children as possible
and sort of feed off of this unconditional love
from her children makes much more sense
when you go back and look at the history
of the sort of lack of love
that she experienced her entire life.
Even though her life was tragic,
a lot of people have tragic lives
and don't grow up to become murders,
cutting babies out of the womb of a pregnant woman.
She extracted the child from the womb
and left the mother there to bleed out and die.
The trauma that she had as a child
doesn't quite measure up
to this level of sadistic violence,
of simply wanting to become a mother.
From working the investigation,
I felt Lisa Montgomery knew exactly what she was doing
and there was no insanity
in regards to what her actions were.
October 22nd, 2007, the verdict comes in.
The jury found Lisa Montgomery guilty
of kidnapping resulting in death
and sentenced her to death.
My heart ain't broke just for me and Lisa and her kids.
It's them too. That was a precious baby.
Shortly after midnight on January 13th, 2021,
Lisa Montgomery was executed.
Lisa Montgomery was the first woman
executed by the federal government in almost 70 years.
I thought that was wholly appropriate,
because what she did was so evil
that you--you have to send evil out of this world.
The baby, to have survived what she went through,
stolen from her mother's womb,
tells me she's a fighter, like her mother.
And her mother fought Lisa Montgomery
to save her own life and her baby's life.
I still get choked up.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's just--it was a horrible, senseless, needless crime.
The best result was to get that baby back alive for the family,
'cause that's what's left of Bobbie Jo.