Baby Taken From Mother in Good Condition

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A 4-day-old girl who was cut from her strangled mother’s womb was in “remarkably good” condition Monday, a hospital spokeswoman said, and the alleged attacker faced an initial court appearance.

Lisa Montgomery, of Melvern, Kan., was set to appear Monday afternoon before a federal judge in Kansas City, Kan., to hear the charge against her. She was later to be transferred to Missouri, where the charge was filed. The office of U.S. Attorney Todd Graves filed a motion seeking to have Montgomery, charged with kidnapping resulting in death, held without bail pending a trial.

Authorities said Montgomery, 36, confessed to strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett of Skidmore, Mo., on Thursday, cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas. She is accused of trying to pass the child off as her own to family and friends. Victoria Jo Stinnett, the baby girl, was later recovered unharmed.

The child remained in the neonatal intensive care unit Monday at Stormont-Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka, Kan.

“She’s in remarkably good condition for what has happened to her,” hospital spokeswoman Tami Motley said. There was no immediate indication when the infant might go home.

On Sunday, churchgoers in two communities struggled to understand the death.

In the small northwestern Missouri town of Skidmore, the minister who presided over Stinnett’s wedding last year is offering his services at her funeral on Tuesday.

“They were kids in the neighborhood, nice young kids,” said the Rev. Harold Hamon of Skidmore Christian Church. “She’s just a real nice girl, real pretty, quiet and reserved.”

Though Hamon didn’t discuss the death directly in the sermon, it was very clearly on the mind of the congregation, he said. A member of the congregation who spoke at the couple’s wedding performed the communion meditation Sunday, and his subject was forgiveness.

“He kind of broke up trying to talk about it,” Hamon said of the speaker, a tough cowboy-rancher type with a big heart. “It is something that is so intense right at the time.”

Hamon said he was probably addressing Christmas cards when Stinnett was killed at her home in Skidmore while her husband, Zeb, was at work. A short time later, a member of his congregation called to say she had heard an ambulance and wondered if anyone near the church was hurt. Hamon said he looked out the window and saw police cars parked in front of Stinnett’s house.

“It’s almost unbelievable that right under your nose something terrible can be happening,” Hamon said.

Across the state line in Kansas, the Rev. Mike Wheatly, pastor of First Church of God in Melvern, said he wrote his Sunday sermon about the birth of Jesus before details about Stinnett’s death surfaced.

Titled, “A Baby Changed Everything,” it had added relevance.

“You could’ve put the situation of Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the same sermon because they are both special babies,” he said.

Stinnett’s mother found her daughter’s body in a pool of blood inside the couple’s small white home on Thursday afternoon. Stinnett had been eight months pregnant with her first child.

Police recovered Stinnett’s baby a day later after tracking down Montgomery through e-mails she had sent Stinnett about buying a dog.

Montgomery, a mother of two, lied to family and friends about being pregnant with twins and suffering a miscarriage, investigators said. Detectives doubt whether she was pregnant at all.

She met her husband at a Topeka fast-food restaurant with Stinnett’s baby, telling him she had gone into labor while shopping in the city, authorities said.

Montgomery’s husband has not been charged.

A few similar cases have been reported. Two of the most highly publicized were in 1987, when Cindy Lynn Ray, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, was abducted and slain in Albuquerque, N.M., and in 1995, when Debra Evans, nine months pregnant, was slain in Addison, Ill. In both cases, infants were cut from their wombs and kidnapped.