FBI catches killer who hacked baby from mother's womb

By Jacqui Goddard
Last Updated: 11:10PM GMT 18 Dec 2004

A woman determined to replace the baby she had just miscarried tracked down a pregnant stranger on the internet, strangled her and cut the live foetus from the womb.

Bobbie Jo Stinnett was eight months pregnant when, on Thursday, Lisa Montgomery used a knife to perform a crude Caesarean section on the dead body. Montgomery then took the premature baby girl home and presented it to her husband as her own.

When police and FBI agents confronted Montgomery on Friday at her home in Kansas, she at first claimed that the baby was hers. It appeared that her husband was unaware that she had miscarried in her sixth month of pregnancy.

Montgomery later confessed to having hacked the baby girl from her mother's dead body after strangling Mrs Stinnett from behind, using what police said was a rope or piece of wire.

Despite her traumatic birth, the baby appeared healthy. Yesterday, in an emotional reunion at a hospital in Topeka, Kansas, the child's father, Zeb Stinnett, cradled his new-born daughter for the first time. "I am overwhelmed by the fact that we are able to give this baby back to its family," said Sheriff Ben Espey, who led the hunt for the missing child.

"I don't think she [montgomery] was going to take this child to try to sell it," he told CNN News. "I think she was probably going to take it because she had lost one through a miscarriage."

Montgomery, 36, who has two teenage children, was charged with kidnapping resulting in death, which carries the death penalty. She did not know her victim, whom she had met on the internet just days earlier, but made meticulous plans to take her baby.

As a hobby, Mrs Stinnett bred and sold rat terrier dogs from her home in Skidmore, Missouri. She advertised the puppies online and used to log on to message board, chatting about new puppies and dog shows - and the pending birth of her first child.

FBI agents who examined Mrs Stinnett's computer discovered that she had unwittingly led her killer to her home after she received an online message from a woman calling herself Darlene Fischer, who expressed an interest in buying one of her dogs. During her exchanges with Ms Stinnett, Montgomery, or 'Darlene Fischer', used the chilling sign-on, "fischer4kids".

On Thursday afternoon, while speaking to her mother on the telephone Mrs Stinnett told her she was expecting someone and then said 'Oh, they're here, I've got to go'," according to an FBI report.

Less than an hour later, Mrs Stinnett's mother, Becky Harper, found her dead on the dining room floor, blood seeping around her and strands of a stranger's blonde hair clenched in her fists. "Mrs Harper noted it appeared as though her daughter's stomach had exploded," the report states.

Police issued an urgent call for help after doctors said they believed the baby could still be alive. Among the tips that flowed in, one caller said that they were suspicious of a woman who had come home with a new baby but had not been to hospital. The call may have been made by Montgomery's husband, Kevin.

The FBI, meanwhile, traced the fictitious Darlene Fischer's e-mails to a modem hooked up to a telephone line at the Montgomery's home.

Mr Montgomery told investigators that he had returned home from work at about 5.15pm on Thursday when he received a telephone call from his wife. She said that she had suddenly given birth while out shopping in Topeka, about 30 miles away.

He put their two teenage children in his car, drove to Topeka and – bizarrely – collected her from the car park of a fast food restaurant, where he found her clutching a baby.

Montgomery told investigators that she had given birth at a named clinic on Thursday. Checks revealed, however, that no deliveries took place there that day. She then broke down and confessed.

"The baby was certainly in danger," said Sheriff Espey, adding that the little girl was now "probably going to be OK".

Choking back tears, he said that he found the gruesome crime "inconceivable. Nobody here could ever perceive this taking place, to have a foetus taken out of someone's womb".