8 months pregnant woman murdered for her baby. What the fuck is wrong with people?

The BBQ Pit
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There’s an article in The Washington Post today about the murder of pregnant women. It’s a surprisingly common event, and it probably always has been. Most of the murders are by (ex-)husbands/boyfriends of the pregnant woman, although some are by the wife or another girlfriend of the (ex-)husband/boyfriend, plus there are a few cases like this one where someone steals the baby. It’s estimated that 20% to 40% of American women who die during pregnancy are murdered. A hundred or so years ago, it was approximately 100 times as common to die during pregnancy because of the various medical problems that pregnancy causes. Now that the medical side-effects of pregnancy have nearly all been taken care of, it’s possible to see how often pregnant woman are murdered. There are also a fair amount of women who are killed not too long after having a baby, and the problem of pregnant women being killed by husbands/boyfriends is, in a sense, a subcategory of the problem of pregnant women being beaten by husbands/boyfriends.

I’m not sure why you find a pregnant woman being murdered by someone who steals her baby so much more terrible than a pregnant woman being murdered by a boyfriend/husband (or by another woman that the boyfriend/husband is involved with) In all these cases, it’s somebody killing somebody else because they are an inconvenience. The husband/boyfriend is getting rid of someone who is going to cramp his lifestyle. The other woman is getting rid of competition. The baby-stealer is getting rid of someone else who wants the baby.

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Because we can understand that someone is angered to the point of irrational violence. Everyone has been angry and instinctively feels a hint that signals loss of control and possibly acting in violence. That’s what happens in most cases where pregnant women are attacked.

But to attack a women so that you can have her baby to raise and love?!?

How on earth could a person rationalize that? Looking at that child and thinking,“I killed your mom so that I can love you.” That’s just so foreign to any healthy minded person.

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I can understand somebody unable to control themselves, acting in rage. Or a robbery gone awfully wrong. Suddenly realising they had a dead pregnant woman on their hands, panicky clawing her open, ripping out the baby. And then not going to the police for fear of being discovered. But deliberately planning to murder and rip open some woman to steal her baby and going through with it.

Also I have a very hard time imagining the settings. You kill the mother. Supposedly you have to extract the baby fairly quickly before it suffocates. What is that, 2-3 minutes? In that you have to find a sharp knife. Cut wide open the abdomen and womb, taking care not to cut too deep harming the baby. Pull the baby out. Clean out its throat. Get it to breathe. Etc. The blotty god-awful butchery of it all. Gutting open the abdomen. Blood and birth water and urine and pieces of bone all over the place. And all this on some foreign kitchen floor inside a house you’ve never been in before, just after a grisly murder. I wouldn’t know how to perform a caesarean under the best of circumstances. Where do you start cutting? Down and up? Around the edges? I should imagine you’d have to be a doctor or at least nurse to be able to perform it successfully. And then they have to find warm clothing for the baby and suitable mothers milk formulae. It seems a unfathomable that the baby survived. And the first 24 hours babies are usually much awake and aware, bonding with the mother, her smell and sound and appearance. Now this baby bonded with its mother’s killer.
Killing pregnant woman happens in war, after long time of increasing brutalisation. I didn’t know it was common in peacetime.

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Rune writes:

> I can understand somebody unable to control themselves, acting in rage.

Most of the killings of pregnant women by their husbands/boyfriends are not done in rage. Again, I urge everyone that if you can you should get hold of the article in The Washington Post, please do so. It’s actually a three-part series, one article on Sunday, one on Monday (today), and another on Tuesday. In nearly all cases, the boyfriend/husband was told weeks or months before that he would be the father of the baby. He thought about it for a long time before he went back to the mother and killed her. He wasn’t in a rage, but he was doing something that he had planned for weeks. Sometimes the father was even told that he didn’t have to do anything for the baby, because the mother wasn’t going to ask him for child support or anything, and the father still killed the mother.

> Killing pregnant woman happens in war, after long time of increasing
> brutalisation. I didn’t know it was common in peacetime.

Well, it is common in peacetime. By common, I mean relative to the total number of murders. Of course, murders aren’t that common. The number of people who are murdered each year (in the U.S.) is only a little more than a half as much as the number of people who commit suicide, and it’s well under half as much as the number of people who die in auto accidents. (And, in case anyone is wondering, the number of murders in the U.S. has dropped steadily since about 1993.)

BubbaDog writes:

> How on earth could a person rationalize that? Looking at that child and
> thinking,“I killed your mom so that I can love you.” That’s just so foreign to any
> healthy minded person.

Murder of any kind is foreign to any healthy-minded person. Murder isn’t about rage. Even the people who kill in rage are the sort that were, in a sense, a murder waiting to happen. They were always angry about something and willing to strike out when they were angry. Murder is about someone deciding that someone else is an inconvenience and has to be gotten out of the way. Again, I’m not sure why you think that a woman killing another woman to get her baby is any less cold-blooded than a man killing his pregnant girlfriend. The woman has, in effect, said, “I’ll do anything for a baby. If I have to get rid of this woman to get her baby, that’s what I’ll do. She’s just gotten in my way and has to be killed.” A man has said, “I don’t want to take care of a baby. I don’t want to pay child support. I don’t want to even think about this kid. My girlfriend has gotten in the way of my free life and has to be killed.”

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First example - I want to love and nurture so I’ll kill
Second example - I don’t want to love and nurture so I kill

The second example, while still cold hearted, appears to have some logic to it.
To me the first example seems somewhat contradictory. I’m probably not disputing your point as much as I am failing to grasp the emotional state of a person who will kill in order to develop a nurturing relationship with a baby they don’t even know.

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Whoops, I cropped Wedall Wagner’s quote for brevity, but accidently left his reference to Rune’s quote.

Apologies to Rune and Wendall for the inadvertant misquote.

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Look at number one this way: You are in my way of having a baby. Get out of my way.

The woman had already lied about being pregnant and suffering a late-term loss once. This was the second fake pregnancy (twins but one died? Conveinent so she only needs to find one baby of the ‘right’ sex) and she needed a baby.

And she couldn’t just swipe some pictures from the internet - her husband and others were being told that she was pregnant - she needed a baby and went out to get one. Didn’t eve read the various stories on the 'net that talk about people with fake lives and personalities and families and how they cover their tracks or she wouldn’t have been so traceable.

Or she was deluded and ignorant enough to think she could get away with it. At least she didn’t smush the poor kid’s head in to make it look as though it passed through a birth canal (though I bet the next one will).

I’ve read through a few years of online fantasy childbearing and loss and rearing - enough to last me several lifetimes. I just hope to the gods the one I knew never ever gets it in her scary little head to do this, but “right”.

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By the way, I just looked up Skidmore, Missouri.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Skidmore-Missouri.html

What a grim place. (I thought Fort Leonard Wood was bad!)

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This article is a bit apologist for my tastes, but:
*“What they had in common is this amorality, it seems to me, a deep sense of entitlement, and a longing to have this baby at all costs,” he said.

Montgomery, news reports said, showed off the baby proudly, as if nothing was wrong. This almost certainly reflects delusional thinking, psychiatrists said.

Whether developing suddenly in the wake of a tragedy or gradually, psychosis may give rise to elaborate narrative fantasies of good and evil and voices commanding the person take some action. According to the criminal complaint, Montgomery found her victim over the Internet, where a picture of the woman, very pregnant, could have prompted any number of thoughts and plots, forensic psychiatrists say.

“In these cases, a woman might have a delusion that that’s my baby in that woman, she’s stolen it, and if I don’t rescue it she’s going to kill it, and the motivation is so overwhelming that you just lose contact with reality,” said Jack Gorman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York.*

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/20/news/fetus.html

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Obviously the woman is mental. Not only did she delude herself into believing she could get away with stealing a newborn baby and passing it off as hers, she also thought she could also get away with murdering the baby’s mother. Strands of the mother’s blonde hair were still in her hands when she was arrested. And she’s beaming in her mug shot like it’s just any other picture. This chick is beyond the funny farm. I have a feeling she’s been living in Schizophrenia, USA for a number of months.

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I live in Topeka, Kansas where the baby was taken to the hospital, Stormont-Vail Regional medical center. Earlier this evening I was passing by the hospital,(I work at the library right across the street from it). There is a parking lot to the east of the hospital, on the east side of Washburn.

The lot had a least six or seven big news vans, with their satellite dishes and brighter-than-the-sun lights. I heard later the baby has been released from Stormont-Vail. Those vans were probably trying to get a look at the family/father/baby whatever, with reporters eager to stick their microphones in someone’s face. Damn vultures, leave the family alone, will you?

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According to the FBI affidavit posted at FindLaw, the e-mail address that Montegomery used to contact Stinnett (under the guise of “Darlene Fischer”) was fischer4kids@hotmail.com. Wow.

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I thought Montgomery acted alone. Or did you mean the crime from 15-20 years ago?

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Update from an ex-husband who wants 15 min of fame:

[url=“http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=6F1D4B3B-F123-47D8-A0B2-3E1AE993710B”]

Even tubals aren’t 100%, I know a woman who seven years after her tubal got pregnant and it wasn’t a tubal pregnancy, either, it was just right in her ute.

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Update from an ex-husband who wants 15 min of fame:

[Montgomery has been incapable of having a baby since having her tubes tied in 1990 after delivering a baby girl, according to her ex-husband.

“She never was pregnant,” Boman told WDAF. “Anything they’re buying about a lost baby, a miscarriage, all of it’s a lie. Since 1990, she has never been pregnant.”](http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=6F1D4B3B-F123-47D8-A0B2-3E1AE993710B)

Even tubals aren’t 100%, I know a woman who seven years after her tubal got pregnant and it wasn’t a tubal pregnancy, either, it was just right in her ute.

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Unfortunately, situations like this happen more often than we’d like to for them to. For example, over the summer a similar event occurred in Columbia . Fortunately, the mother survived in that case and was reunited with her child. I could have sworn that I read about another instance in Mexico where it happened with a pregnant woman, while her younger child was with her, and the child was able to go for help, but can’t seem to find the article now. I think was the women the thread had been discussing is despicable and has serious issues (understatement of the year).