The last time a woman was executed for a federal crime, a kidnapping riveted the nation

 

The last time a woman was executed for a federal crime, a kidnapping riveted the nation

The judge called it the most “coldblooded, brutal murder” he had ever tried. News articles described it as the most horrible kidnapping in decades, or as the St. Louis Dispatch wrote, a “tale of evil, stupidity and corruption.”

On September 28, 1953, Bonnie Brown Heady walked into Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic school in Kansas City, Mo., and posed as the aunt of Bobby Greenlease, the 6-year-old son of one of the city’s richest men. She and her boyfriend, Carl Austin Hall, kidnapped the boy and demanded ransom from his parents. They picked up a duffel bag of $600,000, the largest ransom ever paid at that point, and promised to return the boy safely to his family.

But the boy was already dead. Hall had shot him soon after the kidnapping and buried him in Heady’s backyard. It became Missouri’s most famous crime of the 20th century.

Just 81 days after the grisly killing riveted the country, the two kidnappers were executed side by side in a Missouri gas chamber. The swift punishment marked the last time a woman died by federal execution.

Now, almost seven decades later, another woman has been executed for a federal crime: Lisa Montgomery, who was convicted in 2007 of strangling a 23-year-old Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and cutting the baby from her abdomen. The infant survived and was raised by her father. A federal jury in Kansas City convicted Montgomery of kidnapping resulting in death and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Her execution took place early Wednesday morning after the Supreme Court lifted one stay imposed by a divided federal appeals court and refused to grant another last-minute request for a delay from her attorneys. 

They had argued that she was too mentally incompetent to be put to death under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, citing “brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caretakers.”

But the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to move forward with the execution.

In the final months of the Trump presidency, the administration has overseen 11 federal executions, the most in a calendar year in the United States in decades, and more in a presidential transition period than any other in U.S. history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Montgomery was one of only a few women in the nation’s history to face death by federal execution, according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. While about 10 percent of people arrested for murder are women, only about 2 percent of death sentences are imposed on women, Dunham said.

There are a few reasons for that, Dunham said. Not only do men commit significantly more murders than women, but the nature of the murders are also different. Convicted murderers eligible for the death penalty typically have a history of other aggravated crimes.

That kind of criminal history is almost exclusively male,” Dunham said. Most women who have been executed, and many of those currently on death row, were convicted of murdering a spouse, romantic partner or child, Dunham said, while men on death row typically committed the murder in the course of another felony, such as robbery or rape.

Still, in the past 100 years, more than 40 women have been executed in the United States, and as of October 2020 there were 51 women on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The women that do face capital punishment are often depicted in trial and in the media as violating gendered expectations of women, said Mary Atwell, an expert on gender and the death penalty, and professor emeritus of criminal justice at Radford University.

“They were considered to be bad mothers or unfaithful wives or promiscuous or in some cases, lesbians,” Atwell said. The crimes “were treated as if they were so much worse because this is a woman that failed to be the woman that she should have been,” she said.

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