The Profound Journey of Stacey Lannert: A Murdered Father’s Legacy

When Normal Looked Perfect From the Outside

When I talked with Stacey Lannert on the podcast, she told me something that stuck with me about her childhood. “In the beginning I had a very normal childhood which middle class right, blonde hair, blue eyed, one to two kids I have a younger sister, she’s two years younger. And our life was really pretty good.”

The abuse didn’t start until she was eight. That’s when her father began what Stacey describes as a grooming process that made her not realize how wrong it was at first. “When it first started it wasn’t scary. Like there’s this grooming process that happens and unfortunately I was led through that so I didn’t really realize how wrong it was,” she explained.

This was the 1980s. No internet. No cell phones. And as Stacey put it, “there was always this perception that sexual incest molestation didn’t happen to families like ours. Because you were the people next door, the all-american people that were just being normal.”

The Fracture That Changed Everything

When Stacey was 12, her parents divorced. Her mother remarried a military man and moved to Guam. Stacey went to live with her father, along with her younger sister Christie. But the family dynamics had already shifted in ways that would prove crucial later.

“Before the divorce ever even happened there was like almost this fracture in the household,” Stacey told me. She described how she and her sister had different relationships with their parents. Christie was closer to their mother, while Stacey had what she thought was something “special” with her father.

It wasn’t special. It was abuse. But at 12, Stacey was still trying to protect her sister from knowing about it.

The drinking got worse after the divorce. Stacey learned to separate her father into two people in her mind. There was her dad, and there was Tom. “Every time that there was some kind of abuse, he smelled like alcohol,” she said. “And to me his features would change and he would morph and he felt like a completely different person.”

The Hospital and a Devastating Discovery

At 17, Stacey got sick and had to go to the hospital for exploratory surgery. The diagnosis was pelvic inflammatory disease. The consequence was scarred fallopian tubes and the news that she could no longer have children.

“I day dreamed a lot. Like any time my life was really raw for painful. I’d just kind of create this little safe space in my entire world. And someday I’m going to have my own family,” she explained. Learning she couldn’t have kids was devastating to someone who had built her future hopes around that dream.

After the hospital, Stacey went to live with her mother in Guam. But it didn’t work out. “I expect my mom to be there. And my mom has spent the last several years growing and changing into somebody else. And we didn’t really know each other,” she said. She came back to St. Louis in April. Three months later, on July 4th weekend, everything exploded.

July 3rd: When Everything Fell Apart

The night that changed Stacey’s life forever started with a puppy that had an accident on the floor. Her father got angry and said the puppy had to go. When Stacey said she’d leave too, he pointed to her sister Christie and said, “You can go. The puppy can go. But she stays.”

Stacey refused. “That is not going to happen. We’re all leaving,” she told him.

What happened next escalated quickly. Her father pulled the phones out of the wall, grabbed Christie, and took her into his bedroom. Stacey couldn’t get in. She ran outside, tried to beat on the windows, but couldn’t reach them. “For whatever reason, it doesn’t even dawn on me to go next door. Or to just start screaming,” she said.

When Christie came out of that room, “she just didn’t look. She looked changed.” Stacey still doesn’t know exactly what happened in there. The sisters have never talked about it, even now.

They left for the county fair with friends, somehow managing to act like nothing had happened. But when they came back to the house that night around 11 p.m., Stacey knew she couldn’t go back inside. “I just don’t want to walk in that door. I just I don’t want to go back in there. And because I can’t. I can’t. Like if we go back in there we’ll probably never get out.”

The Nightmare

They went to a hotel, but Stacey realized they needed clothes and she couldn’t leave her puppy with her father. “I thought, how can I just leave her there? I got to get her. I don’t necessarily. I can get more clothes. I can get a job, but I can’t leave her with him because he’ll kill her.”

They went back. Christie stayed outside while Stacey climbed through their bedroom window. Earlier that day, her father had shot through a wall while she was downstairs. The gun was still there.

“I picked it up and went upstairs because now, now I am upset, right? Like now everything’s coming back and I don’t want to be here. And I want to leave. I just want to leave.”

Her father was passed out on the couch. “There was a ledge behind the couch. And I set that, I set the gun on the ledge and I just closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.”

The first shot hit him in the shoulder. He sat up, calling her name. “I still feel the nausea. And not, not over him calling my name, but over what I had just done, right? Like the full force of it just kind of hit me all at one time.”

She ran to find a phone to get help, but remembered he had pulled them all out earlier. When her father got angry and started “cussing and calling me and my sister all kinds of names,” Stacey thought, “if he gets up, we’re dead.” She shot him a second time.

Standing on Her Truth

Stacey was charged with first-degree murder and offered a plea deal for life in prison if she’d say she did it for money. She refused. “I knew that if I had taken that life sentence and just platted out that I would never be able to look at myself again. Yeah. Right. Like this is all I have. Right. It’s all I have. I have nothing else except for my truth.”

She was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. She spent 800 days in county jail before trial, with no counseling and minimal contact with her attorney. The detective who believed her wasn’t called to testify. Laws about battered person syndrome were brand new and poorly understood.

Stacey served 18 years before her sentence was commuted. She was eventually pardoned. Today, she’s an attorney with the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, using her experience to help others navigate the system that once seemed determined to keep her locked away forever.

The prosecutor who convicted her still doesn’t believe the abuse happened. But Stacey held onto her truth through almost two decades in prison, and that truth finally set her free.