A killer who ripped an unborn baby from the victim's womb should not face execution, her family has begged.

Lisa Montgomery killed pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett before carrying out the gruesome act.

She was sent to prison for the cruel charges, and has been placed on suicide watch.

Lisa and her family are desperate for her life to be spared from the lethal injection as she awaits the death penalty.

In three weeks time, she is set to be executed by the US federal government – making her the first woman for almost 70 years.

Current President Donald Trump stunned lawyers by issuing her death warrant.

But Lisa’s family are begging him to spare her, reports The Mirror.

They claim the jury were told little of her vast mental health problems, – caused by years of rape, trafficking and torture.

Her sister Diane Mattingly said: “My heart goes out to the family of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and the loss that they have felt.

“But my hope is President Trump will stop Lisa’s execution and commute her sentence to life in prison.

“My sister does not deserve to die. She is not the worst of the worst for whom the death penalty was intended. She is the most broken of the broken.”

Trump has been widely condemned for becoming the first president in 130 years to order executions while waiting for his successor to be sworn in.

Until this year no one in America had been killed by the federal government since 2003, although prisoners have continued to be sent to their deaths by individual states.

Some have been women, including serial killer Aileen Wournos in 2002.

But since July this year Trump has rubber-stamped ten executions, before he leaves office on January 20.

His “execution spree” comes despite President elect Joe Biden’s plans to abolish the federal death penalty.

Lisa, 52, is due to die on January 12. But her lawyers claim she was suffering from psychosis when she went to Bobbie Jo’s home in Skidmore, Missouri, more than 16 years ago, on the pretence of buying a dog.

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She strangled the 23-year-old, who was eight months pregnant, then cut into her abdomen with a kitchen knife and removed the baby from her womb.

The tiny girl survived. Lisa, who tried to pass her off as her own, was arrested the next day.

Legal documents seen by the Sunday People show experts believe Lisa was completely detached from reality when she carried out the murder.

When describing how she felt, she said: “I’m not in my body, I’m not real.”

She has bipolar disorder and complex post traumatic stress disorder.

Scans show she has also suffered brain damage because her mum, Judy Shaughnessy, drank during pregnancy.

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One neurologist compared her brain to a city hit by a bomb.

Her lawyer Kelley Henry says her mental health has worsened now she has to live with the “overwhelming pain” of what she did to Bobbie Jo.

She said: “She was tortured from birth and repeatedly gang-raped. That causes your mind to detach from reality.”

She added: “All we can do is present the facts to President Trump and ask him to exercise mercy.”

Diane, now 57, remembers her bleak childhood with Lisa on a trailer park in the Kansas town of Ogden.

When she was raped by a family friend there, four-year-old Lisa was lying silently in the next bed, touching her fingers to provide comfort.

But when social services took Diane into care, they left Lisa behind.

Her stepdad, Jack Kleiner, began to rape her.

Then vile Judy started selling Lisa to other men.

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Lawyers say she was beaten and urinated on by perverts.

But Lisa said: “Nobody listened.”

At 18, Lisa was forced to marry her stepbrother, Carl Boman. In court documents, it is claimed he also raped her and poured hot wax on her.

They had four children before Judy made Lisa get sterilised. But after meeting her current husband, Kevin Mont-gomery, Lisa claimed to be pregnant.

Two days before she killed Bobbie Jo, Boman began a custody bid for two of their children.

Diane said: “The threat of losing her kids, combined with severe mental illness, pushed Lisa over the edge.”

In 2007, Lisa was found guilty of kidnapping resulting in death, by a jury who recommended the death penalty.

Ms Henry said: “The execution warrant came as a complete surprise because there are people who have been on federal death row a decade or so longer than her…There is zero logical pattern to why they chose her.”

Lisa – waiting to die in the Federal Medical Center Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas – will have to go to an all-male prison in Indiana to be killed.

As she is so terrified of men, lawyers believe that journey alone will trigger a “catastrophic mental breakdown”.

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