Bobby Justinet was a 23 year old woman that was murdered in 2004
for one reason and one reason only.
She was 8 months pregnant and someone wanted to steal her baby
directly from her womb and Bobby had to die in the process.
Outlaw Hello and welcome to Outlaw Podcast.
I'm Eleanor Neil and today we're serving you up a true crime case
from the vault. This episode was originally
posted to my YouTube channel years ago before we existed as
Outlaw Podcast, but I think it's time we add it to the Outlaw
catalog. So now I will hand back to me
from the past to take it away with today's vault case.
So today's video is going to be another solved true crime case,
and this is quite a harrowing 1. Today we're going to be talking
about the case of Bobby Joe Stin it Before we get into it, I do
just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
video. This video is for educational
purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
one video. There are a lot of content
warnings for this case. This is a very, very heavy case,
so listen to the following list carefully.
And if there is anything that you really don't want to hear
about in this list, feel free to click out this video and
hopefully I'll get to see you some of the time with a
different video. But like I said, listen closely
to this because there's a lot. So this video is going to have
themes of sexual abuse, rape, the sexual abuse of a child,
more specifically alcohol abuse, forced prostitution, kidnapping,
fetal alcohol syndrome, animal abuse, mental illness including
depression, PTSD, BPD, and pseudocyesis.
If I've pronounced that right. A huge list and like I said,
click out now if you don't want to hear about any of that.
That being said, let's get straight into the case.
Bobby just in it was born on December 4th, 1981 in Missouri,
USA. She lived with her mum and her
dad in a very small town called Skidmore.
And when I say small, I mean tiny.
Like there was only a few 100 people there and there was
really not much else. There was like nothing.
They didn't even have like big shops there.
They had to travel out of town if they wanted groceries and
stuff. But it was a lovely, lovely
place. From what I've read online,
because it was so small, the community feel was so strong.
It felt like just a massive group of friends living
together. Everyone knew everyone and
helped each other. So it was a lovely place for
Bobby to grow up and she was a very, very happy child.
She had a very happy childhood. Apparently she was like the
smiliest little kid you've ever seen.
She was a proper ray of sunshine, always positive.
She was a little bit shy, especially with people that
didn't know. But once Bobby got to know
someone, she was, she was a hoot.
She was, she seemed like a really energetic, like bouncing
off the walls kind of little kid.
And she was known to be very, very nurturing and caring and
kind. She had just this really like
sweet soft quality to her. She was, she was a proper softy.
And this came out in so many different ways.
She was super, super affectionate with her family.
She loved animals. She always wanted to be caring
for animals. She just had a lot of love to
did this little girl. When Bobby moved up to high
school she met a boy called Zeb and immediately she had a huge
crush on him. And good news, Zeb had a crush
on her too. The two of them flirted.
They ended up getting into a relationship that they stayed in
for the rest of their time in school and shortly after
graduating the two of them got married.
They got their own place together.
They were just super excited to be spending the rest of their
lives together. They both went out and got their
first jobs. They were, they were starting to
make it in the world to by each other's side.
The two of them really, really loved dogs.
This was something that they bonded over.
This was something that they knew they wanted for their
family. They knew they wanted loads of
dogs, specifically rat terriers. That was their breed, that they,
they were just obsessed with rat terriers.
So when they moved out, they did they adopted their own rat
terriers. I don't know how many.
They at least had two because they planned on breeding them.
They planned on, you know, encouraging them to make
puppies. In fact, they made this breeding
like like a little small business for them to run from
their home. They would advertise the puppy
litters online and get people to come and buy them.
Both of them ran the business together.
But as far as I'm aware, Bobby Jo kind of had a lead role in
it. She went and made an account on
a forum like a dog breeder forum and she made an account
specifically on the rat terrier part of the forum called Rat a
Chatter. I love that.
I think that's really funny. So she was talking on this whole
dog breeder forum, but specifically in the rat terrier
one because that's, that's the kind of dog that she had.
The conversation was mainly revolving around rat terriers
and the and the new puppies. But every now and again, users
on this website would kind of swerve off topic and talk about
their lives and they all kind of got to know each other.
They all made friends ish, like Internet friends anyway, through
these forums and they'd ask for updates on each other's lives
when they saw each other posting.
The conversation was mainly about dogs, but you know, it was
just, it was just people being nice to each other as well.
And Bobby was having a great time.
The breeding business was doing pretty well and she was finding
out loads of information about rat terriers online because she
was so, so into this breed. They wanted to like breed them
full time, I believe. So, yeah, everything was going
well. They both had jobs and then they
had this breeding business and everything was going great.
And then things got even better in 2004 when Bobby Jo found out
that she was pregnant and the two of them were absolutely
elated. They found out that they were
having a baby girl and they were just so excited to start their
family. All of their family was super
excited as well to have a new baby.
When Bobby was about halfway through her pregnancy, she
decided to leave work. I think it was maternity leave,
I think she was going back, but she decided to kind of like
finish her work early so that she could come home and do the
breeding business at home during the day while she was on
maternity leave. It worked out great because
they'd actually just had another litter of rat terrier puppies,
so it was perfect. Bobby could have more time off
work, more time to be able to message potential customers
about the puppies. So in December of 2004, Bobby Jo
is 8 months pregnant and she's also just turned 23.
Around this time as well she was placing in rata chatter saying
that her puppies had just had a new litter.
Well her dogs, not the puppies, her dogs had had puppies and
they were available for sale. She was saying she was happy to
have people round at her house to come and visit the puppies
during the day because she was pregnant.
She was on maternity leave so she was free anytime.
December 16th 2004 was the same as any other day.
Zeb went off to work as he did every single single day, and
Bobby Jo stayed home, you know, doing the rat the rat terrier
business. I nearly said the rat business,
the rat terrier business. There were dogs.
You know, she was just chilling at home.
At this point, all her family knew that she was on maternity
leave, so they would come and visit her at different times
just so that she wasn't lonely during the day while Zeb was at
work. So that afternoon, Bobby Jo's
mother, Becky, decides that she's going to drop by the house
and just just sit and have a drink with her daughter, you
know, catch up kind of a surprise visit.
So she goes down to the house, knocks on the door, and no one's
answering. I believe the door was unlocked.
So her mother just kind of tried the door and it opened.
So she walked in, and she called Bobby's name, as she did, to
alert her that it was only her mother walking in.
It wasn't like an intruder. But as Becky entered the home,
she found the most horrifying scene.
Her own daughter was laying on the floor in front of her,
obviously already dead, and her body was just covered in blood.
And it was clear where all of this blood was coming from as
well. Her mother said it looked as if
her stomach had exploded. Her mother called for police and
an ambulance as quick as she possibly could.
They rushed down to the scene. But as soon as paramedics got to
work on Bobby Joe, they realized that there was number chance
they'd be able to revive her. And so she was transported to
hospital and pronounced dead. But what was even more
horrifying, her baby was gone. Her unborn baby that was still
inside her womb was stolen. It was missing.
And her autopsy found that she'd actually been alive when this
huge wound was made on her stomach to literally cut her
baby out of her belly. They think she was alive.
She might have possibly been unconscious, but she regained
consciousness at some point. So she was alive and conscious
with this huge wound in her stomach.
So now police had the most brutal and unique cases they
have ever come across. This is a young woman that was
found murdered and mutilated in her own home and her baby is
stolen. There is a missing baby, an
abducted baby. Someone had physically taken
this baby. And so the murder investigation
was semi separate to the missing persons investigation because
Bobby Jo was 8 months pregnant and at 8 months your baby has
quite a good chance of surviving being born even though it is a
bit. That being said, they don't know
how well this this DIY at home C-section was done on Bobby Jo
so they didn't know if the baby had health complications.
This baby could have survived this, but there was a chance
that it might not. There was a chance that this
baby might need urgent medical attention in order to survive
the birth that they'd had. So police knew they needed to
find this baby fast. There was a debate within the
police force on whether they should send out an Amber Alert
for this baby. Because if you're unaware, an
umbrella is the system in America for when a child goes
missing. Everyone in that area will get
like a text on their phone, a notification of some sort
basically saying this child is missing.
This is what they look like. This is the circumstance we
believe is going on. You know, maybe this is a car
that was seen. Just any information that police
have is immediately sent out to everyone so that everyone is
aware and they can be on the lookout for this child.
Problem being with this case, it was an unborn baby.
No one knows what this baby looks like because it has
literally been cut from its mother's womb, so there's no way
for police to be able to describe this newborn baby.
And besides, all newborn babies kind of look the same, so all
they could really say is newborn baby.
This case was just so different to anything they'd ever
experienced before, and so some people on the police force were
not entirely on board with sending out an umbrella for an
unborn but now born baby. Luckily, the other police
managed to persuade them to send out the umbrella anyway.
Literally just said newborn baby.
And luckily one of the neighbors that lived near Bobby Jo had
noticed a red Toyota Corolla parked outside her house earlier
that day. Presumably it must have belonged
to her attacker. It must have, because the
neighbor had never seen a red Toyota Corolla outside their
house before, ever. So they knew it wasn't friends
or family. So that was put on the umbrella
as well. And that was literally it.
Literally all they had was newborn baby red Toyota Corolla,
and that's all that people could be on the lookout for.
So police wait for any potential leads to come in from that Amber
Alert as the crime scene was searched.
And this is where all the gory details start to piece together.
So if you remember, I said when they did the autopsy, they
believed that Bobby was alive when her stomach was cut open.
They think she could have been unconscious, but then that she
regained consciousness once she had the wound.
Now, the reason they think this is because of blood evidence at
the scene. Bobby Jo had blood all over the
bottoms of her feet, although she was found laying down South.
This suggests that she had been at one point stood up in her own
blood, standing in her blood. And her blood was even found on
her, under her toenails. So she was stood like in a
puddle of it or splashed in it. And they believed that there was
a struggle in this hallway because there were smears of
blood. There were like swells in the
blood where people's feet had like slipped.
So they knew that they'd been a struggle with the attacker.
She'd fought for her life as best as she could.
And there were some other pieces of evidence that indicated A
struggle. Bobby's fingers were found with
long strands of blonde hair intertwined between them, as if
she'd been like, pulling someone's hair.
And this gave them quite good information that her attacker
potentially had long blonde hair.
Bobby Jo was brunette, so of course these hairs weren't her
own, and there was enough of them wrapped between her fingers
that it was significant. Like she this definitely must
have been her attacker's hair. But one thing that paramedics
just could not work out was how much of the attack Bobby Jo was
conscious or unconscious for. They don't know if she'd passed
out for like a split second or a few seconds, or if she'd been
out called for like 10 minutes and then regained consciousness.
They really don't know. But the reason they know that
she'd passed out, by the way, I forgot to explain this, the
reason they know she passed out was because she had very clear
strangulation marks around her neck, mostly around the front of
her neck. So they think that she'd
actually been strangled with a rope from behind.
Her attacker had wrapped around her neck and just pulled it.
They think the attacker strangled Bobby Jo until she
passed out. Maybe the attacker thought
they'd strangled her to death, or maybe they they knew they'd
just made her unconscious. Either way, now Bobby Jo had
fallen to the ground and that was when this DIY C-section took
place, which, by the way, was done with one of her own kitchen
knives. The attacker had gone into the
kitchen and picked which one of Bobby Jo's own knives they were
going to use to cut her baby out of her stomach.
I know that stomach is incorrect.
Biological terminal, but you know what I meant by that.
So one thing that police found quite interesting about this
case was that the front door was unlocked.
There were no signs of forced entry, so it appeared that Bobby
Jo's attacker had gotten in the house quite easily.
Maybe they'd let themselves in, like maybe the door was unlocked
and they let themselves in, or maybe Bobby Jo unlocked the door
for them and welcomed them into her home.
Perhaps that same day that Bobby Jo's body was discovered, news
of her murder and the kidnap of her unborn child started
spreading like wildfire. It was on every news channel.
It was all over the Internet, and it made its way back to her
rat, a chatter forum that she had some good friends on by now.
And everyone was so, so devastated to hear this news.
Not only because this was a friend that they'd lost, like
they were feeling this, this loss and this grief, but they
were also just so upset because Bobby Jo seemed so excited about
her pregnancy. She was so excited to meet her
baby girl. She was so excited to have a
family with Zeb. And now how it was all gone and
all of her friends saw how much that meant to her.
She was so close to having that and someone had just ripped away
every chance that she had to have that.
So people in this Ratta Chatter forum are posting their
condolences and grieving messages.
They're going back through their old messages with Bobby Jo and
reading them. And that was when 1 user on the
website noticed something quite interesting in the public
comments of one of the posts on Ratta Chatter.
Bobby was advertising her new litter of puppies and in the
comments underneath that she had planned to meet up with a
potential buyer on the day of her murder.
The user that was interested in coming to see the rat terrier
puppies was named Darlene Fisher.
Her username was Fisher for Kids.
And yeah, this this interaction didn't seem weird.
It didn't seem suspicious. It was just two women discussing
the potential purchase of a puppy.
But what was odd was the timing. It just so happened to have been
planned on the day that Bobby Jo was murdered.
And so this other user that saw this conversation decided to
turn it into police because, well, obviously that could be a
really important lead. So one of the first things that
police did was seize every single one of Bobby Jo's
electronics, her phone, her laptop, and look through every
single conversation that she had had with this Darlene woman.
Police found all the messages and they seemed pretty normal.
They were just talking about buying a puppy and they'd agreed
on a time and a date, which was the day that she was murdered.
Bobby had given her the full exact address of her home.
And if this was the case, then that means that Bobby Jo would
have voluntarily let this woman into her house, would have
unlocked the door for her and welcomed her in.
So that explains why there would be no signs of forced entry if
this woman is responsible. So now it's all lining up for
police. They know that they need to
track down this Darlene Fisher woman.
And so the next thing they do is try and track her IP address,
which was 3 hours away in Kansas.
And immediately this was kind of odd to police because in the
messages between Bobby Jo and Darlene Fisher when they've been
planning to meet up to, to talk about the dogs, Darlene was
saying, oh, that's great. I only live 30 minutes away from
your address, but this IP address is about 3 hours away.
Police actually found out quite a bit of information about
Darlene Fisher just from the messages that she and Bobby had
been sending between each other. They found out that Darlene was
also pregnant and she was around the same length of time a lot as
long as Bobby was. They were both about 8 months
actually. I think Darlene had her due date
just before Bobby's. But Darlene had quite a
traumatizing pregnancy. She'd been telling Bobby that
she was pregnant with twins, but one of them had actually passed
away a couple of months prior as well.
So she'd been carrying one of her deceased children in her
belly. She had to carry it to full term
with the other child. She couldn't give birth to the
deceased 1 and and keep the living one in there.
So she just had to keep them both in there and until her due
date when she would finally give birth to one living child and
one dead child. I can't imagine how traumatizing
that is to, to have prepared yourself to have two babies and
to be over the moon and then for one of them to die inside you
and for you to have to continue to carry that around for months.
I mean, you, you wouldn't really be able to be happy about about
the other child at that point, would you?
Apparently it had been a huge, huge ordeal for Darlene to go
through. However, some of the Ratta
chatter uses had their suspicions about, well, all of
it, but mainly about whether Darlene was even pregnant at
all. Because when she would post
pictures on Ratta Chatter with her, like holding the dogs or at
these different dog shows, she never seemed to look any
different. Her belly wasn't growing.
She just, I don't know where are the babies and you're pregnant
with twins as well. Like surely her bump would be
pretty big. None of them ever really
mentioned anything though. None of them, like, called her
out on it, mainly because she'd been posting about losing one of
her children. No one wanted to be that guy.
That's like, hi grieving, devastated mother.
I think you're lying. I don't think you're even
pregnant. No one wanted to, no one.
Like it's not worth it. No one wanted to further upset
this woman that says she's lost her baby.
So everyone just kind of took her word for it.
And yeah, no one, no one said anything.
No one asked her. But now that police were finding
this out, it just made everything seem even more weird.
And they felt like they were honestly on the right tracks.
This seemed like quite the story.
And so they managed to locate the exact place in Kansas where
her IP address was being used from.
And they went down to that address to go and speak to Miss
Darlene Fisher. When police arrived at this
address, they immediately saw parked in the driveway a red
Toyota Corolla, the exact same type of car that was seen parked
outside Bobby Justin, it's house on the day that she was murdered
was now parked outside this other address where they believe
the suspect lives. So police stormed inside that
house to find a woman, presumably Darlene Fisher,
sitting on the sofa in the living room with a newborn baby
cradled in her arms. So police obviously asked her
whose baby is that? And she said it's it's mine.
I gave birth to her a couple of days ago.
She said it was a baby girl called Abigail.
But police had good reason to believe that this was Bobby Jost
in its baby. And so they took the baby offer,
arrested this woman that they believed to be Darlene Fisher,
and they sent this baby to the nearest hospital to be checked
over. The baby seemed to be completely
happy and healthy. It had a little cut on its face,
I think, like on its eyelid. But other than that, totally
healthy, totally fine. They were going to keep the baby
in the hospital for a little while just so that they could
continue to check it and monitor how everything was going.
But. Seemed fine.
Meanwhile, police had got Darlene Fisher back to the
police station. And that was when they realized
that of course, Darlene Fisher doesn't exist.
That was a fake name used by this woman, Lisa Marie
Montgomery. But Lisa insisted that even
though she used a fake name online, everything else about
her story and about her child that they'd just taken off her
was true. She said that she had been
pregnant with twins. She'd lost one of them and that
was the remaining one, her baby girl that she'd given birth to a
few days prior. She said that all of that was
still true. She just used a fake name
online. But police were skeptical about
Lisa Montgomery. I mean, of course, all the
previous evidence that they collected still stands.
The red Toyota Corolla was still parked outside Bobby Jo's house
on the day she was murdered. And even worse, actually, now
they know that Lisa Montgomery used a fake name to go and
purchase those puppies. That seemed odd.
Why do you need a fake name on a on a dog breeding discussion for
him? Like, that's like one of the
last things you'd need a sued an info.
So police were listening to Lisa tell this story about how she'd
actually given birth to this baby girl a couple of days ago.
And they just felt like it was a cover story.
Everything just seemed a little bit odd.
And so police started digging into it, starting with Lisa's
husband, Kevin. They wanted to know what he
thought about about the delivery of the child.
He said that he was at work that day when he got a text from his
wife Lisa, letting him know that she had gone into labour.
She'd gone into like, surprise labour.
She'd just been out shopping one day.
Her water's broken in the store and so she just like took
herself off to the nearest women's centre and gave birth to
this baby girl. The next time he heard from
Lisa, it was a considerable amount of time later and she
told him that she was at a fish restaurant, a Long John
Silver's. Is that what it's called, like a
fish and chip place? I think she was at a Long John
Silver's restaurant with their newborn baby and she wanted him
to come pick her up. Why are you not at the hospital
still? Why?
She's taking a newborn baby straight from the hospital
straight to a fish and chip shop.
So anyway, Kevin Montgomery goes and picks up their two teenage
sons. I think they're Lisa's sons from
a previous relationship. Goes and picks up these two
teenage boys anyway and takes them to Long John Silver's to go
and meet their new little sister.
So yeah, everyone's, everyone's gasped about this baby anyway.
Everyone's really excited. They all believe that this is
Lisa's baby. They believe that this is a new
addition to the family. Kevin said that they spent the
rest of the night on the 16th of December just driving to every
family's house, every friend's house, showing them the new
baby, letting them meet their new baby girl because they were
over the moon and everyone else was over the moon as well.
So police pointed out to Kevin that he didn't actually witness
the birth of this baby. And he said no, you're right, I
didn't. I wasn't there when this baby
was born. So I can't say for sure that it
came out of my wife. But he wholeheartedly believed
his wife when she said that it was theirs.
He had no reason to not believe her.
I mean, other than the fact that she wasn't really growing, but I
don't know, maybe she could have just been a not much of a
shower. Maybe she.
And apparently she wore baggy clothes quite a lot throughout
the pregnancy. So I don't know.
For some reason, he did believe her though, and so did the sons.
Everyone did. Literally everyone did.
So anyway, at this point in time, police have Lisa
Montgomery in an interrogation room and they start just
confronting her with every piece of evidence that they had.
Like, your car was literally outside the crime scene at the
time of the murder and she's looking at all this evidence and
she can't fight it any longer. And she just cracks and
confesses to everything. She confessed to tricking Bobby
Jo, to attacking her, to murdering her, to stealing her
baby directly from her womb, performing this DIY at home
caesarean section on this unconscious woman, stealing the
baby, and then pretending like it was hers to everyone, even to
her own husband. He believed that this was his
child. So before we go into Lisa
Montgomery's version of events and what she told police and the
prior planning and everything that went into this sinister
plan, let's talk a little bit more about who Lisa Montgomery
was because I think you need to know quite a bit about her past
to understand her in this case. Notice I said understand, not
defend. I don't want this to sound like
I'm defending her at all, but sometimes murderers do have very
sad lives and I think it's important to to discuss them and
to speak about potential issues that might arise from their
childhood. So let's go.
Born on February 27th, 1968, Lisa had a hard life right from
the off. Her mother was addicted to
alcohol and she never stopped drinking all the way through the
pregnancy she was drinking heavily and so when Lisa was
born, she had a lot of complications due to her
mother's drinking. She had fetal alcohol syndrome,
which is usually characterized by a specific facial features.
I'll put a diagram on screen right now.
A lot of kids that are born with fetal alcohol syndrome tend to
look alike because they have a lot of these features.
And in some severe cases, like in the case of Lisa
Montgomery's, hers was very, very severe.
It can leave the children with a level of brain damage.
In Lisa's case, she suffered with communication and speech
issues, as well as like learning issues and memory loss in
school. So school was really, really
hard for her. Yeah, like I said, it was.
It was an incredibly severe case of fetal alcohol syndrome and it
affected her for the rest of her life.
She always had these communication, speech, memory,
learning problems. So immediately, as soon as she
was born, there's things that Lisa Montgomery is going to have
to deal with in her life. And on top of these medical
issues that Lisa had, she also faced an incredibly abusive
childhood at the hands of both her mum and her dad.
They would do some awful, awful things to Lisa as punishment.
They would whip her. They would put tape over a man
so she couldn't talk or breathe. They would strip her naked and
lock her out of the house like outside in all these like harsh
weathers. They would make her take ice
cold showers. They did all sorts of awful,
awful things. And actually, I think Lisa had a
couple of siblings, or step siblings actually, and at one
point her mother did. This is one of the most awful
things her mother ever did. She sat all the kids down in the
living room. And I think she was already
angry at something else at this point in time.
Her mother, she was angry quite a lot.
She sat all the kids down in the living room, went and got a
shovel and the family dog, brought the dog into the living
room and forced all of the children to watch as she beat
the dog to death. She murdered the family dog in
front of all these very, very young children and forced them
to watch it. At this point, Lisa is not even
10 years old. I don't know how old she was.
I want to say maybe about 6 at this point in time.
And then when Lisa was around 9 or 10 years old, her mother and
father divorced and her mother very quickly found a new man.
But when her new stepfather moved in with them, he very
quickly began sexually abusing Lisa Montgomery.
He would regularly take her out to the caravan that was parked
in the back garden and he would rape her repeatedly.
Lisa was so obviously distressed by all of this abuse that she
was facing that at the age of 11/11, she turned to alcohol to
try to soothe the pain that she was feeling.
She became an alcoholic before she was even a teenager.
So this abuse continued for a couple of years and then her
stepfather decided to get his friends involved.
He would invite his grown adult friends round to the caravan to
take turns raping his stepdaughter.
And what was even worse, he actually started charging the
money for it. They were making money.
Well, actually I don't even think it was him that was asking
for the money. I think it was Lisa's mother.
Her own mother knew that this was going on, knew that her
husband had been raping her daughter for years, and now he
was getting all his friends involved and she didn't actually
care. She didn't care to save her
daughter or to stop this. All she cared about was, well,
they can't do it for free, let's charge them for it.
How sick and twisted is that? I honestly haven't heard
anything like this in quite a while.
We haven't covered anything so heinous.
And these men wouldn't just rape Lisa.
It wasn't just forced prostitution.
These men would also beat her. They would tie her up, they
would torture her, they would urinate on her, they would force
her to eat different things, like this was torture.
Finally, after three long years of this abuse, when Lisa was
aged 14, she finally got up the courage to go and tell her
mother what was going on. And poor Lisa didn't know that
her mum had been in on it the whole time.
She had no idea that her mother knew.
She was probably thinking, well, if my mum knew, she would save
me, right? She had no idea that her mother
had been collecting money from her rapists in order for them to
do this to her. So yeah, Lisa went to her mother
on this particular day, thinking that this was going to be the
end, thinking that her mum was going to save her.
She went and broke down to her mum, told her everything.
She was sobbing. And then her mother pulled out a
gun, pointed it at Lisa and told her not to tell anyone what she
had just said or she would kill her.
She was not allowed to tell anyone what was going on at
home. And so she didn't, well, she
kept it to herself for a little while, but towards the end she
was thinking, well, really, how bad could it be if they did kill
me? Like they I either tell someone
and I managed to escape or I tell someone and they kill me.
Either way, it's better than what she was going through at
that point in time. And so Lisa decides to try and
tell a couple more people. So she mentioned it, but I don't
think she really got into detail and I don't think some people
believed her. She, he even mentioned it to one
of her cousins who worked in law enforcement and nothing was ever
done about it. All these people that she told,
I say all these people, I think it was like 2 or maybe three
more other than her mum. But no one ever did anything.
And the abuse just continued. Finally, about a year later,
when Lisa was 15 years old, her mother divorced her stepfather
and Lisa thought that the constant sexual abuse would
finally be over if he wasn't around.
There was no one to to prostitute her out like that.
But even though the actual acts of sexual abuse were temporarily
over the toll that they had taken on Lisa Montgomery's
mental state, it was awful. This girl was left with severe,
severe PTSD. Like I said, she was an
alcoholic to deal with it since the age of 11.
She had been an alcoholic for years now and just when Lisa
thought that she was safe, her mum got a new husband and the
exact same thing happened again. And this time I, I think it was
Lisa's mother that suggested this to her partner.
She must have brought it up saying, oh, we did this before
me and my ex did this with my daughter.
Do you want to set it up again with me?
Let's start up a prostitution service.
So they did. It was all set up again and her
new stepdad started bringing new men around.
It was the exact same torture that she'd always been subjected
to. And this constant abuse of Lisa
Montgomery had really taken a toll on her.
Just as a person, as as a student, she would turn up to
school. Her grades were horrific.
She looked horrific. I mean, I don't mean that in a
mean way, but she'd stopped showering.
She'd stopped brushing her hair. She smelt really bad.
Her clothes were dirty and ripped and and didn't fit her.
She barely had any friends. She could barely socialize with
anyone. She was so anxious and shy.
She was almost mute. And so at first, teachers
thought the best solution to this would be to transfer her to
like a special educational needs school, but nothing unchanged.
And so that told teachers that the problem must be at home with
Lisa Montgomery. It wasn't her schooling that was
the issue. And actually, a few of the
teachers in this new school did suspect that Lisa was being
abused at home. They saw a lot of telltale
signs, such as letting personal hygiene go.
Victims of abuse, particularly sexual sexual abuse, will
intentionally, whether it's conscious or subconscious, they
will let go of their personal hygiene.
Stop showering, stop making them themselves look appealing and
attractive in hopes that their abuser wouldn't want to abuse
them if they looked so bad, you know?
And they thought that that was what Lisa was doing, yet no one
ever said anything. It's so frustrating how many
times this girl tried to call out for help, tried to tell
people what was going on, made it very clear in her appearance
what was going on. So many people knew, so many
people noticed, yet no one ever did anything to save this little
girl. At the age of 18, Lisa was
forced to marry a man named Carl.
Forced by her mother to marry this man.
And this wasn't just any man, this was her stepbrother.
She was forced to marry her stepbrother, who was equally as
abusive to her as her mother had been, as all of her previous
stepfathers had been. She could just not escape this
absolute horror that surrounded her at all times from every
person she ever met. She was abused and tortured.
He would beat her every single day.
He would demand sex from her whenever he wanted and if she
dared disagree or turn him down, he would just rape her.
He would beat her. He was awful with this woman
over the years as a result of repeatedly raping her.
Carl and Lisa had four children together and after that, after
the 4th child, Carl was done. He didn't want any more babies
with her, but he didn't want to use protection either.
No, absolutely not. He forced her to get sterilized.
He forced her to go have an operation, get her tubes tied so
that she couldn't get pregnant and he wouldn't have to use
protection. She was in her early 20s at this
point. She had had these four children
in such quick succession she must have been like mid 20s and
she's her husband is forcing her to be sterilized.
As I'm sure you can imagine, at this point in Lisa's life, her
mental health is an absolute rock bottom.
She has faced the most horrifying torture and abuse
from every single person in her life.
She's never been able to trust anyone, she's never felt safe
with anyone. And this started to manifest
itself now that she was in her 20s in in quite erratic
behavior. She was having symptoms of
mental illness. I don't know exactly what they
mean by erratic behavior, I couldn't find any specific
examples. But what I do know is that it
got way too much for her husband and stepbrother Carl, and so he
eventually divorced her. So this was a win and a loss for
Lisa Montgomery. Of course it was a win in that
she was finally free from her abuser.
This was the first time in a whole entire life that she would
be able to live her life without constant abuse.
However, him leaving her meant that Lisa was now homeless and
severely in poverty. She had no money, she had no
job, she had nothing. She had no idea how she was
going to live. And honestly, honestly, I don't
know how she did. She must have just been bouncing
between shelters until eventually she met Kevin
Montgomery, the man that she was married to at the time of this
case. I don't know too much about
their specific marriage, but what I do know is that it was a
whole lot healthier than anything she had ever had.
And living with Kevin Montgomery really helped her life to to
settle down as much as it can. She was still very, very
mentally ill, but at least she had a little bit of stability, a
little bit of love in her life now.
Now this is where the murder plan comes in.
Lisa Montgomery, like I said, had her tubes tied.
She was sterilized when she was in her early 20s.
And now she's married to Kevin Montgomery and she really wants
a baby with him. She wants them to to be able to
create their own family, but she can't get pregnant, of course.
And with her very deteriorated mental state that she was
dealing with at this point, this LED Lisa to almost brainwash
herself into believing that she was actually pregnant.
So this gets a little bit confusing.
Stick with me. This is skipping ahead a little
bit. But in the aftermath of this
whole case, Lisa was diagnosed with pseudociasis.
I hope I'm saying that, right? But basically this is a
condition where the individual believes wholeheartedly that
they are pregnant. Some of them know that they're
not pregnant. They know that they're not
pregnant. But they, they get like a lot of
the time they will get physical symptoms.
So they'll get like enlarged breasts, they'll put on a bit of
weight, even their stomach can swell sometimes.
Some of these women that get this actually look a couple of
months pregnant even though scans are done, pregnancy tests
are done, they're not pregnant, but somehow they can have a
phantom pregnancy just by kind of like convincing themselves
that they are pregnant. Some of these women will also
get nauseous and vomit and mistake it for morning sickness.
Like they're getting like the whole 9 yards.
Some of them will have their menstrual cycle interrupted and
with a few of these symptoms together, of course you're going
to think you're pregnant. Like if you're throwing up on
mornings, your periods kind of stopped and your your stomach's
swollen. Of course, I think I'm pregnant
too. But the difference between this
is that the thoughts come first and the symptoms come second,
rather than the symptoms and then the thoughts.
So that's, that's the difference here.
There's actually been some cases of this that have been so severe
that these women have been having symptoms of phantom
pregnancy for months and months and months.
And it gets to a point where they actually think they're
having contractions, they get all the way to the hospital
thinking they're in labour, they go to the ward and then the
doctors are like, what's going on?
There's no baby in you, you're not in labour.
And that's how they find out that they're not pregnant
because they have been so convinced and they've been
getting a couple of symptoms here and there.
Like it's actually a bit crazy. This that like extent of it is
really, really rare. It's more so kind of the milder
symptoms that are more common, but it happens.
It seemed that this was what was happening to Lisa.
And I mean, later it was diagnosed.
So it was what was happening to Lisa by a Logically, she could
not conceive. She could not have a baby in her
belly yet. She was actually having a few
different physical symptoms. She'd gained a little bit of
weight over the months and her belly had swollen slightly.
I don't know if it was the the weight gain or if it was like a
separate symptom, but she did actually maybe look a couple of
months pregnant. If she told you that she was
pregnant and then you looked at her belly, you would kind of
think, oh, OK, yeah. But I mean, just to look at her
just as a woman with the pregnancy out of your head, I
don't think you would look at her and think she's pregnant.
She's 8 months pregnant as well, no less, because that's what she
was telling people. But because she was having these
physical symptoms, the weight gain and, you know, slightly
swollen belly, people were believing her.
Her own husband was believing her.
Their pastor, the the pastor at their local church believed her.
In fact, the pastor at the church did actually question her
about it once. This is like one of the only
people that ever did question her about it.
He said that the baby seemed kind of small to be having a
baby that soon, like her bump seemed kind of small.
But Lisa just responded that she'd always had small babies
because she'd had like 4 kids in the past, hadn't she?
And she said that all of her kids were tiny when they came
out and she never really showed that much.
And so the pasta, like, what's he going to do, argue with her
and say, I think you're lying. Like he just accepted it.
He was like, oh, OK, well, I enjoy your small baby, I guess.
So everyone in her life believed that she was pregnant.
And things only started to fall apart for Lisa Montgomery when
news of her pregnancy got back to her ex-husband, her
stepbrother as well, might I remind you that guy Carl,
obviously Carl knew damn well that Lisa Montgomery could not
get pregnant because he was the one that forced her to get
sterilized because he didn't want any more kids.
So. He knew that biologically this
can't be true, this is impossible, that she's pregnant.
And he decided that he was actually going to use this
against her because he wanted custody of their younger two
children. He had their older 2 and Lisa
had their younger 2 with Kevin Montgomery.
He wanted custody of these other two kids off of Lisa.
And so he started this court case and his plan was to kind of
use this lie against her and say, look, she's an unstable,
unfit mother. Look at her lying about this
pregnancy. It was going to work against
Lisa. And somehow Lisa Montgomery got
wind of the fact that Karl was going to try and use this
argument against her. And suddenly this struck fear
into her. And she's thinking, well, I need
it to be real now. I need a baby.
Bear in mind, by the way, even though she was suffering with
this psychological issue and the phantom pregnancy and stuff, she
knew that she wasn't pregnant. Like she she consciously knew
there was actually no baby in there.
So now she's trying to think of a way to actually get a baby.
She needs to prove that this pregnancy is real, even though
it's not. She needs to get hold of a baby
somehow. And that was when Lisa
Montgomery remembered a post that she had seen on Rata
Chatter not long ago of this young woman, Bobby Jo Stinnett,
talking about this fresh litter of puppies that they just had.
And she briefly mentioned in this post that she was pregnant
and on maternity leave, so she was available anytime for people
to come around and see the puppies.
Lisa now knew that Bobby Jo was pregnant and she was far enough
along to be on maternity leave. This was the perfect victim and
it was also kind of perfect circumstances.
She would be able to literally enter into Bobby Jo's house just
by saying she wanted to have a look at the dogs.
She was interested in purchasing one of them.
So Lisa begins doing a little bit of research because she
knows that she is going to have to try and deliver this baby out
of Bobby Jo. So she starts Googling things
like home births and how to induce a baby, but it seems that
the things she was finding on those searches weren't really
going to work for her. And so Lisa then starts
searching things about Caesarean sections, how to perform AC
section at home, things like that.
And when she was ready, when she was fully researched, Lisa
Montgomery starts posing as Darlene Fisher Fisher for kids
on the Ratat Chatter forum. She starts talking to Bobby Jo
saying that she's interested in these rat terrier puppies and
she would love to swing by the house and come and visit the
puppies. So the two of them agreed a date
and a time. December 16th, 2004, around 2:00
PM Bobby Jo sent her her full exact address so Lisa knew
exactly where to go. And that she did.
Well, actually the day before this, Lisa had actually done
that whole drive, the nearly three hour drive from Kansas all
the way to Skidmore, just to kind of test it like a test run.
She wanted to make sure she knew where she was going because she
had big plans the next day, didn't she?
The next morning Lisa woke up and made that same long ass
drive again all the way to Skidmore and when she arrived
she knocked on the door and Bobby Jo welcomed her inside her
home with a smile. There was nothing seemingly
amiss about Darlene Fisher. She just looked and seemed like
a normal lady that was interested in adopting a puppy.
Now we don't know exactly what happened inside that house and
when and how. All we know is kind of what we
can tell from the crime scene. So this, this is as best as I
can tell it. We do know that at one point,
Bobby must have turned her back from Lisa Montgomery, and that
was when she decided to attack. She grabbed a piece of rope,
wrapped it around Bobby's neck from behind.
So the rope was here and she'd squeezed it as tight as she
possibly could. She strangled Bobby Jo until she
fell unconscious. Bobby fell to the ground and
that was when Lisa Montgomery went into the kitchen, picked a
knife and returned to carry out this at home C-section.
Lisa cut the baby out of Bobby Jo's stomach and left with this
this newborn child as quickly as she possibly could.
The next time she was heard from was about 5:30 that evening when
she texted Kevin saying, I've had the baby, I've had our
daughter, please come and collect me from this fish
restaurant. And Kevin was so excited to hear
this. He didn't doubt her for a
second. He was elated that their baby
was here early. So he went and picked up their
two teenage sons or her two teenage sons.
And they went to go and meet their mam and their new baby
sister at the fish and chip shop.
Anyway, it really didn't take that long for all of this to
catch up to Lisa Montgomery. And about two days after she
committed this attack and this kidnapping, the baby was
recovered, DNA tested, and finally returned to Zeb.
It was their baby. Of course it was.
Luckily, the baby girl survived. And like I said, she didn't have
any health issues or complications.
It was super, super lucky because with a situation like
that, it could have so easily gone wrong.
Zeb renamed their daughter. Of course, they weren't going to
keep the name that Lisa gave her.
Lisa called her Abigail. Zeb renamed her to Victoria Jo,
with the Jo part being a nod to her mother, Bobby Jo.
And in the aftermath of this case, it was found that this
actually wasn't the first time that Lisa Montgomery had lied
about being pregnant. She'd done this multiple times.
This was as far as she'd ever taken it.
Like she'd never had to try and find a baby before.
She would always try and like squash the lie before it got
this far. She had a really good lie that
she could use because she had told Kevin Montgomery that she
had a tube side. So she she was unlikely to have
babies. But she'd conveniently told him
that in some cases, some women can fall pregnant.
So when she kept falling pregnant every now and again,
Kevin didn't question it. But because she'd had her tubes
tied once it got to about four or five months in, she was able
to lie to him then and say, oh, because my uterus is not
actually meant to be holding a baby.
We've had complications. And she would lie about
miscarrying. She would lie about having to
have abortions, like medical intervention abortions to save
her life when she's not even pregnant.
There's no baby in there. She'd lied about being pregnant
with Kevin. She'd lied about being pregnant
with her ex Carl, this whole time.
She's sterilized. She could and not get pregnant
at all. So yeah, she'd done this line
multiple, multiple times and always been able to get away
with it somehow until this particular time when her ex Carl
was threatening to take her to court.
She knew she had to produce a baby from somewhere and it drove
her to such lengths. So Lisa Montgomery was
officially charged with kidnapping resulting in death,
which is a charge I've. I don't think I've ever heard of
before, which goes to show just how unique this case is.
Like, you hear of kidnapping and murder a lot, but kidnapping
resulting in death, I've never heard that that phrase exactly
before. So in her initial court hearing,
Lisa Montgomery actually tried to plead not guilty despite
giving an audio confession and admitting to everything.
She tried to say she was not guilty.
And at first, it wasn't even because they thought they could
get away with an insanity plea. She was literally just saying,
Nah, I didn't do it. But then after a while, it was
kind of like, well, obviously she did do it.
So they tried to get the not guilty on grounds of diminished
responsibility. They tried to say that she was
clinically insane at the time that she committed this murder,
so she can't be held fully responsible for it.
And you know what? I find this really, really mad.
The jury rejected the insanity plea.
I don't know how on earth they could do that because she was
diagnosed with multiple different mental illnesses.
We'll get there in a second. She was diagnosed with so many
different things that clearly influence her actions.
They don't make them OK. But that's why we have this
plea. That's why we can find people
not guilty based on their mental health is when they are
diagnosed with so many things that so directly affected the
crime that they committed. Like, anyway, anyway, we'll get
to all the things that she was diagnosed with in a second.
But first of all, let's go back to her sentencing and her
charging because I got, I got really swept off track.
Then I get quite passionate about this one for some reason.
So anyway, Lisa Montgomery was found guilty in October of 2007.
And for her crimes, she was going to be sentenced to death.
She was going to be executed for what she did, which again, I
don't want this to come off as defensive on Lisa's behalf.
I'm not defending her, but just as a cons, this really doesn't
sit right with me. Finding someone guilty and
sentencing them to death when they are clearly very very
mentally ill. I don't think that should exist.
I don't think that should have happened.
Looking at Lisa's childhood and her extensive history of abuse,
sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse from every single
person in her life pretty much. How can you in good faith decide
to execute someone who is severely mentally ill?
I'm pretty sure there is rules against that but they didn't
find her like clinically insane in the trials even though she
was diagnosed with things. That's where the frustration is
coming in because the doctor's opinions and the courts opinions
are just not the same one. I think she certainly deserves
to be locked up for the rest of her life for what she did.
She is a danger to society and she needs to pay for what she's
done to Bobby Jo and for her whole family and to Zeb and to
the baby that is going to grow up without a mother.
But does Lisa Montgomery need to be executed for this?
I don't know. I'm honest.
I'm honestly shocked that that was the conclusion that they
came to. I really am.
Her defense team did desperately try to appeal this and try to
get her, you know, just life in prison.
But her defence team was shocking.
They were blooming awful. They just couldn't work together
at all, and supposedly individually, so there were
about four or five of them. And individually they were
supposed to be quite good lawyers, but put them together
and it was just way too many big egos in one room.
They all wanted to be the leader, they all hated each
other, they all hated how they would all go about it.
So they spent more of their time and effort and energy bickering
with each other, trying to get each other like kicked off the
case rather than actually trying to make a good defence for Lisa
Montgomery. In fact there was 1 male lawyer,
and I do want to mention this, there was 1 male lawyer that was
incredibly sexist to one of the female lawyers on the team,
saying he was not going to take any orders from any damn woman.
That's how uncooperative the whole group was with each other.
Don't worry, the women were just as uncooperative back.
None of them were working well together at all.
So the case that they presented to the court was terrible and
did not convince anyone of anything.
Even though Lisa had mental illnesses, her defence team were
just so crap like displaying that and arguing that that it
didn't even work and Lisa was still to be sentenced to death.
That being said, it wasn't all the lawyers fault.
They had mentioned the basics, they had mentioned her diagnosis
and they had mentioned all the extensive abuse that Lisa had
faced. They just hadn't argued it very
well. So the court and the jury knew
about it all and still decided to go ahead with the death
sentence. There was just so many people
being just daft throughout this. I think her diagnosis, I've been
telling you, I'm going to tell her a diagnosis.
So this included depression, borderline personality disorder,
post traumatic stress disorder, which was very, very severe, and
pseudosciasis, which is the pregnancy thing.
And of course they detailed all of the abuse that Lisa had gone
through that caused the PTSD. They started from the very
beginning, from when she was literally first born and abused
by her biological mum and father all the way until over the age
of 18 when she was then married off to her own stepbrother and
abused by him too. This woman had faced a life of
hell. Yet the jury still rejected the
insanity plea. It's it's an absolute madness to
me. I cannot believe it.
Lisa Marie Montgomery was executed on January 13th, 2021
by lethal injection. When asked if she had any last
words, Lisa simply said no. She was the first woman to have
been executed in 70 years and no other woman has been executed
since then. I mean, it was only last year,
but still the first in like the last 7, 70 years.
That's crazy. Not that much is known about the
baby, about Victoria Jo. And even if it was known, I
don't think I would be putting it in this video.
I think it's quite important for this girl to be able to live a
normal life. She'll be about 17 now and as
far as I'm aware, she has been able to live a relatively normal
life continuing on from this. And that is all for this
episode. Thank you so much for tuning in
to Outlaw Podcast. Make sure to follow us, rate the
pod and I will see you in the next episode.
Bye.