‘A lifetime of torture’: the story of the woman Trump is rushing to execute | Capital

Lisa Montgomery’s first experiences of sexual abuse occurred indirectly when she was three years old. She would lie in bed at night beside her beloved half-sister Diane, close enough to touch, while Diane, then eight, was being raped by their male babysitter.

At the age of 11, Montgomery learnt what it was like to be attacked herself. Her stepfather Jack, a “mean drunk” who regularly beat her and her mother, began raping her once or twice a week.

The assaults became such an important part of Jack’s life over the next four years that he built a room for the girl on the side of their trailer, deep in the Oklahoma woods. It had its own entrance, so that he could come and go as he desired and nobody would know or hear her screams.

He would rape and sodomise her, often with a pillow smothering her face. When she resisted, he slammed her head so hard against the concrete floor that she suffered traumatic brain injury, MRI brain scans would later show.

One day, her mother Judy happened to enter the room while the child was being assaulted by her husband. Judy was so incensed she fetched a gun and held it to her daughter’s head, screaming: “How could you do this to me?”

Over time, the abuse expanded. Montgomery’s stepfather invited friends round to gang rape her in the room – ordeals that would last for hours and end with the men urinating on her like she was trash. Her mother got in on the act too, selling Montgomery’s body to the plumber and the electrician whenever she needed odd jobs doing.

This is Lisa Montgomery’s story.

These were her formative experiences which doctors, psychologists and social workers have all concluded amounted to torture endured across years. This is the woman, now aged 52, whom the Trump administration intends to put to death in seven days’ time on grounds that she is such a cold-hearted murderer that even being locked up for the rest of her natural life would be insufficient punishment.

On Friday, a US appeals court cleared the way for the execution to proceed. The move was enthusiastically endorsed by the US justice department which has argued under Trump that Montgomery is guilty of an “especially heinous” crime. But those who have looked deeply into the agonized life that lay behind her criminal act see it differently.

“This is a story about a woman who is profoundly mentally ill as a result of a lifetime of torture and sexual violence,” said Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and a consultant to Montgomery’s legal team. “Lisa is not the worst of the worst – she is the most broken of the broken.”

Should Montgomery’s execution go ahead by lethal injection at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 12 January it would be the first execution of a woman by the US government in almost 70 years. She would also be among the first prisoners to be executed by a lame-duck president in more than a century, as Donald Trump rushes to kill three prisoners over four days as a macabre climax of his time in the White House.

Nobody would disagree that the crime for which Montgomery was convicted was anything but horrifying. Its details are hard to contemplate.

On 16 December 2004, at the age of 36, she traveled from her home in Kansas to the tiny town of Skidmore in Missouri to meet Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a woman she had got to know online through their shared love of dogs.

Stinnett, a dog breeder, was eight months pregnant with her first child. Montgomery went to see her ostensibly to buy a puppy, but once inside the house she attacked Stinnett and strangled her to death with a rope.

She then cut out the fetus using a kitchen knife, and over the next several hours attempted to pass off the newborn baby as her own. She was arrested the following day after the discovery of Stinnett’s body; the baby was returned to her family, and went on to be raised by her father.

For some Americans, including it seems Trump who has resumed federal executions after a hiatus of 17 years, the Lisa Montgomery case stops there. She committed a horrendous murder, and now it is time for her to face the ultimate punishment that she deserves.

But to the lawyers and professional experts who have spent years investigating Montgomery’s crime, personality and formative experiences, the chilling headlines about her gruesome act are just the beginning of a journey – not towards condoning or excusing, but towards understanding.

“We need to understand what could lead to someone being so profoundly disconnected from their actions that they would be capable of doing something that a normal healthy person would find unimaginable,” said Katherine Porterfield, a child psychologist specialising in treating survivors…