It was 20 years ago this December, in a tiny farming town on the prairie in the ‘Corn Belt’ of America’s Midwest, that a young woman’s life ended in unspeakable horror.
Before then, Skidmore, which lies east of the Missouri River near the borders of four U.S. Heartland states, was relatively unknown outside its county boundary.
It had an annual ‘Punkin Show’, a large commercial apple orchard and cropping and cattle ranches on the rolling, fertile lands of Missouri’s far northwest.
The town had seen one earlier outburst of violence, in 1981, when the town’s resident gangster was shot to death in broad daylight on Skidmore’s main street.Â
Roy McIlroy had been a child molester, rapist, arsonist and burglar. Despite the crowd of 30 onlookers, no one could identify the shooter.
Today, Skidmore’s population has dwindled to 240, down from 340 when young mother-to-be Bobbie Jo Stinnett was killed in an unimaginable act of violence.
Skidmore, a town in decline even back then, took Bobbie Jo’s death personally, as an attack on their little community.
The only glimmer of hope was her baby – who incredibly survived after her mother’s murderer tore her from the womb in a crude C-section.
Lisa Montgomery was convicted in 2007 in Missouri for kidnapping and strangling 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett (left) who was eight months pregnant at the time. She strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a crude cesarean and fleeing with the baby Victoria Jo (right)
Miraculously, baby Victoria Jo survived the brutal attack on her mother. After the attending the same high school where her parents met, she is now flourishing as a university student
‘As the news travelled across the country and the world, that baby became everybody’s baby,’ Skidmore resident Cheryl Huston would later remark. Â
The monstrous event, and it’s miraculous aftermath, has continued to make headlines since, but Skidmore has mostly kept the baby a secret, as small towns can.
The townsfolk rallied around to protect the baby as she grew up. But now that child has reached her legal majority, and has grown into a young adult to make any parent proud.
In a few weeks it will be her 20th birthday, something that would have not seemed imaginable on the day that was both the date of her birth and her mother’s death.
It was December 16, 2004, a Thursday, and Bobbie Jo Stinnett was at home at the white clapboard house she shared with her husband on West Elm Avenue, in a tranquil neighbourhood of streets all named after trees.
The 23-year-old was eight months pregnant and home alone, waiting for a knock on the door.
Zeb Stinnett had gone off that morning to the Kawasaki plant in nearby Maryville, where the couple worked to supplement their income.
Zeb and Bobbie bred rat terriers, a type of small American farm dog which make affectionate companions, and they had a new litter of puppies up for sale before Christmas.
Lisa Montgomery (pictured), who had lied to her husband that she was pregnant, strangled Bobbie Jo then performed a crude C-section to retrieve the foetus inside her. Incredibly, the baby survived the attack. Montgomery was executed by lethal injection for her crime
They had married the year before and their much-anticipated first child was due in January 2005.
At about 2.15pm, Bobbie was talking on the phone to her mother, Becky Harper, about the visitor she was expecting.
She told her mother that a woman she had never met, Darlene Fischer, was coming by to look at the puppies. Fischer had contacted her via a friend from the online rat terrier forum Bobbie belonged to, Ratter Chatter.
Using the name ‘fischer4kids’, the woman had messaged: ‘We are considering the purchase of one of your puppies and would like to ask you a few questions.’
Bobbie Jo had replied, ‘Darlene, I’ve emailed you with the directions so we can meet. I do so hope that the email reaches you. Great chatting with you on messenger.’
Later remembered as a friendly young woman who lifted others with her positive attitude, she signed off: ‘Thanks, and talk to you soon, Darlene! Have a great evening – Bobbie.’Â
At 2.30pm, Bobbie Jo heard a knock and told Becky that the woman, Darlene, had arrived and she had to go.
When she opened the door, there must have been an uncomprehending moment when Bobbie Jo recognised the caller.
It was not a stranger called Darlene, but someone she knew from the dog shows, Lisa Montgomery, who lived in Kansas.
The two women had recently been conversing via Ratter Chatter, with the 36-year-old Montgomery saying she was pregnant too and due to give birth in days.
Montgomery barged into the house, quickly overpowering the heavily pregnant Bobbie Jo, and producing a rope which she tied around her victim’s neck and strangled her from behind until she went limp.
Then Montgomery rolled Bobbie Jo onto her back and took out a kitchen knife and began cutting open her womb. Once the cut was large enough, she extracted the foetus.
It was a girl.
Montgomery wrapped the infant in a blanket, and leaving Bobbie Jo still alive, fled the scene in her car.
At 3.30pm, Becky Harper arrived at the house after her daughter had failed to show up and take her to a mechanic’s garage for work on her truck.
She came across a scene out of a horror movie.
Bobbie Jo lay in a bloody mess, breathing but unconscious, strands of her killer’s long hair clenched in her fists.Â
Becky dialled 911. She told the operator it looked like her pregnant daughter ‘had exploded’. There was no baby.
Paramedics arrived on West Elm Avenue but were unable to revive Bobbie Jo. She was pronounced dead at 4.27pm.
An undated photo of Victoria Jo with her father Zeb. When she graduated in May last year, her proud dad was there to embrace her
Police immediately began canvassing neighbours, who remembered a dirty old red car parked in the Stinnetts’ driveway at about 2.30pm.
Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Epsey, who described it as the most gruesome crime scene he had ever witnessed, went to work on generating an Amber Alert for the missing child.
He had to convince his fellow officers about this, because there were no details like the baby’s hair or eye colour, but after midnight the alert went out.
News of the young woman murdered as her baby was literally cut from her womb spread rapidly.
It wasn’t the first crime of its kind. U.S. forensic psychologist Dr Ann Burgess had written in 2002 about cases of ‘newborn kidnapping by caesarian section’.
But after the action-adventure videogame series of the same era, Tomb Raider, it now had a name for the perpetrator: ‘womb raider’.
Montgomery took Bobbie Jo’s baby girl over state lines, driving 200km to Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas where she called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot.
Kevin Montgomery believed his wife was pregnant, unaware she’d had a tubal ligation after giving birth to her teenage children. Female friends didn’t think she looked it.
She said she’d gone into labour while shopping at a Topeka store, and had had the baby at a the local birthing center.
On the afternoon of December 17, Lisa and Kevin Montgomery showed off their new baby, whom she had called Abigail, to friends at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern, the town where they lived.
Victoria Jo, seen here at her high school graduation, now attends Northwest Missouri State University; she was named in the Fall semester academic honour roll last year
Meanwhile, the FBI had taken over the investigation into Bobbie Jo’s murder and the baby’s abduction, and Ratter Chatter forum members realised the victim was one of their own.
They also figured out the mythical ‘Darlene Fischer’ had lured Bobbie Jo via their own chat board, and called the FBI.
Using computer analysis, investigators traced ‘fischer4kids’ to a modem on a telephone line in the home of Kevin Montgomery on South Adams Road in Melvern, Kansas.
FBI agents were waiting in the driveway when a filthy red ten-year-old Toyota Corolla pulled up with a man, woman and a baby.
The agents went inside and asked Lisa questions, shooting down her story of giving birth at the Topeka health centre which, when they checked, had never heard of her.
Inside the Toyota was a note with Bobbie Jo’s address, a rope knotted with hair, and a bloodied knife.Â
After further interrogation, Lisa admitted what she had done and while her bewildered husband looked on. She was immediately arrested, handcuffed and taken away.
A search of her computer revealed she had monitored Bobbie Jo’s pregnancy by the pictures she’d posted, and had also researched performing C-sections.
One examiner who assessed the carrying-out of the diabolical crime described Montgomery as being ‘deft’ in her execution with the knife.
The only good news was that the eight-month-old baby girl was alive and apparently in good health, with the Nodaway Sherriff Epsey saying, ‘I’m overwhelmed with the fact that we’re going to be able to get this baby back.’
U.S. Attorney Todd Graves said: ‘The baby is fine. The baby is doing great.’Â
By late Friday, a traumatised Zeb Stinnett was able to visit his newborn and hold his baby daughter in his arms. He called her Victoria Jo.
Zeb and Bobbie Jo had been childhood sweethearts at Nodaway-Holt High School and over the coming weekend, the class of the year 2000 was just learning the unbelievable news about their schoolmate.
‘Those things don’t happen here and they don’t happen to Bobbie. You have the wrong person,’ classmate Meagan Morrow would recall.
On December 21, Maryville had its streets invaded by news satellite trucks driving in to cover Bobbie Jo’s funeral.
A crowd of 400 mourners – more than Skidmore’s population – filled the Prince Funeral Home, a grim-faced Becky Harper arriving with her parents, her dad Gene dressed in neat farmer’s overalls.
Looking forlorn and young for his age, Zeb arrived in a Missouri Bulls baseball jacket. The night before, five-day old Victoria Jo had been released from hospital.
Lisa Montgomery had been charged with kidnapping resulting in death, and incarcerated in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas.
The house on West Elm Avenue was abandoned, and has gradually fallen derelict since as residency on streets like West Elm, Cherry, Oak, Ash and Chestnut has dwindled.
A year after Victoria Jo’s miracle rescue, her grandmother Becky Harper spoke publicly about the family’s one-year-old ‘little angel’, whose brown eyes and hair resembled her mother’s.
Zeb, who called his daughter Tory, had moved from Skidmore to another tiny village in the same county, Maitland, where he continued to breed rat terriers.
Becky released photographs of the toddler.
From then on, as Victoria grew up, she was kept from the public eye as she went through junior school.
In October 2007, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Lisa Montgomery guilty of kidnapping Victoria Jo and causing Bobbie Jo’s death.
Montgomery had pleaded against the death penalty, citing a traumatic childhood being beaten by her mother, raped by her stepfather and then a marriage to her abusive stepbrother.
She had divorced him and married Kevin Montgomery, but was in a custody battle over two of her children when she hatched the plan to fake a pregnancy and snatch another child.
The jury was unmoved and unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed.
Lisa Montgomery (second from left), Bobbi Jo (second from right) and Zeb Stinnett (far right) were part of the same circle of dog enthusiasts
The house in Skidmore, seen the day after the murder
Meanwhile, in Nodaway County, Victoria Jo Stinnett was growing up a bright child with a sense of humour who loved her pet cats and her family.
She went to Nodaway-Holt – the same high school where her parents first met – and excelled academically, graduating in 2021Â from junior high with honours.
She went to the prom with another Nodaway-Holt student, participated in drama class and earned good grades.
When she graduated in May last year, her proud dad Zeb was there to embrace her.Â
Family members and, indeed, many residents of Skidmore and Maitland, have worked in local agricultural industries such as cropping and fruit orchards and at the Kawasaki plant, which makes engines for mowers and garden equipment.
But it appears Victoria is taking a different path. She now attends Northwest Missouri State University, just up the road from the Kawasaki plant; she was named in the Fall semester academic honour roll last year.
Among Victoria’s family members are staunch Trump supporters in a state which has voted Republican in every presidential election since before she was born, including this year where Trump won 58.5 per cent of the vote to Kamala Harris’s 40.1 per cent.
As president, Trump enthusiastically embraced capital punishment, and in his final days in office in 2020 made good his pledge to reintroduce the death penalty for federal inmates and increase the number of executions.
Lisa Montgomery was the only woman sitting on federal death row, where no female had been put to death in 67 years.
The last federal woman felon to be executed was Bonnie Brown Heady, who kidnapped for ransom and shot dead Bobby Greenlease, the six-year-old son of a multimillionaire car dealer. Heady died in the Missouri gas chamber in 1953.
Montgomery was due to become the first woman executed in the United States since husband-murderer Kelly Gissendaner in 2015.
She had been on death row for 12 years when, in late 2020, her lawyers asked for another stay of execution.Â
She was moved to the Terre Haute, Indiana, correctional facility and pleaded clemency despite her especially heinous crime.
As her execution date was postponed to January 12, 2021, Skidmore held a candlelight vigil for Bobbie Jo’s family.
Singing ‘This Little Light of Mine’ and ‘Amazing Grace’, the group of about 25 people held candles and stood close together.Â
Cheryl Huston, one of the vigil’s organisers, said it was good to see everyone support each other, and remembered how a decade-and-a-half earlier they had met at the same location on a freezing December day to remember Bobbie Jo.
Huston said: ‘Becky [Harper] and her family have waited 15 years for justice, but will probably never feel like it’s enough.’
She said Bobbie Jo’s daughter Victoria would soon be 16 years old and looked like her mother.
‘Skidmore is a great community and we are here to wrap our collective arms around Becky and her family to let them know we are here for them,’ Huston said.Â
‘Skidmore has gotten a bad rap for years and hopefully people will see that we’re just a community like everybody else. We take care of each other and look out for each other.’
Bobbie Jo’s classmates recalled the frantic days after their friend’s murder, including the anxiety of trying to drive through all the news crews to her funeral and not get photographed.
Some of Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s relatives would travel to Indiana to witness Montgomery’s execution.
Early on January 13, 2021, after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a last-minute stay of execution, Montgomery was strapped to a gurney in Terre Haute’s death chamber.
A woman standing next to her during the execution process removed Montgomery’s face mask and asked her if she had any last words, to which she replied, ‘No.’
Montgomery was administered a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 1.31am, after which her lawyer protested against the legal killing of a ‘damaged and delusional woman’.
Zeb Stinnett is now 43 years old, the same age his wife Bobbie Jo would have been, and lives in Maitland, Missouri.
Victoria Jo Stinnett, who was contacted for an interview for this article, is now a sophomore at her university.
