Inmate Name: Stacey Lannert
Charge: Murder in the First Degree
Sentence: Life without Parole
Prison: Women?s Eastern Correctional Center in Vandalia, Mo.

Stacey Lannert was born in 1972 in St. Louis Missouri. At first, she had a seemingly normal childhood, but according to Stacey, when she was eight years old, her father began to molest her in the basement of their home. Several months later, Stacey claims, her father became violent and actually raped her. After the rape, Stacey screamed for her mother but she was not at home. Stacey says her father told his frightened daughter that her mother already knew about the abuse and didn?t care. After that, Stacey never told anyone about the molestations, including a psychologist to whom she was sent by her mother.

When Stacey was 12, her parents divorced and shared custody of Stacey and her younger sister, Christy; her father continued the sexual abuse and at 14, Stacey attempted suicide. When her father moved his daughters to St. John, Missouri, Stacey threw herself into high school activities, and appeared on the outside to be a normal, well-adjusted student, as a member of the yearbook staff and the tennis team. Fed up, however, with her father?s behavior, 17-year-old Stacey quit high school and moved to Guam to be with her mother who had married a military man stationed there. But two months later, Stacey returned to her father?s to be with her sister who was distraught without her. Her 18th birthday, Stacey says, marked the occasion of a particularly violent rape by her father.

On the night of July 3, 1990, Stacey and her sister went out with friends and instead of going home, rented a room in a cheap motel to stay for the night. At 4am of July 4th, Stacey and Christy snuck back into the house to get their puppy, whom they say their father had threatened to kill. Stacey says she took her father?s gun and shot him, while he lay in a drunken stupor. He asked her to call for an ambulance; instead, she fatally shot him in the forehead a second time. The next day a neighbor called the police and the sisters were taken to the police station for questioning.

Stacey broke down and after a six-hour interrogation she agreed to do a video re-enacting the crime. Then, in the early morning of July 5, police booked her for murder. Stacey spent the next two years in jail awaiting a trial that began in October 1992. The prosecution claimed that she was a cold-blooded killer. They introduced the video into evidence that showed Stacey?s cool demeanor. The defense argued that Stacey was a confused and battered child and that her remote demeanor was indicative of the disassociative state that happens to abused children. On October 25, 1992, the jury returned their verdict: Guilty of Murder in the First Degree.

Stacey was incarcerated at the Women?s Eastern Correctional Center in Vandalia, MO to serve out her life sentence without parole. Her clemency petition, filed in 1998, was passed over by three governors and now rests on the desk of Governor Matt Blunt.