Driving his garbage truck up Davis Hollow Road on Thursday morning, September 5, 1968, Dick Rinker saw a young woman running at him with a bundle in one arm, flagging him down with the other. “Something’s wrong with my baby!” Waneta Hoyt trembled. Julie Hoyt was forty-eight days old, and she wasn’t breathing.
Rinker, as it happened, was a member of the Newark Valley emergency squad. He ran inside, called for help, and a few minutes later, squad members Bob Vanek and Morris Lyons came racing up the hill in their station wagon ambulance, the siren blaring, and screeched to a halt in front of the Hoyt farm. They found Rinker working on the baby inside the trailer, as Waneta, terribly agitated, paced nearby and Jimmy sat quietly on a couch. Vanek took the baby, set her down, and began feeling for a pulse. He checked the baby’s mouth, her ears, her nose. She was limp, drained of color. Vanek looked up.
“This child is deceased,” he told Lyons. “Will you verify that?”
Lyons repeated the routine. “That’s correct,” he said quietly.
Tim Hoyt was working on a road project near Waverly when he saw a foreman striding up to him. There’s some trouble at home, the foreman said. Racing home, Tim thought of Jimmy, and shuddered. A few weeks before, his son had taken a spill off the top of a blanket chest in his grandmother’s house. Dr. Hartnagel said it was a badly bruised collarbone and put the child’s arm in a sling, but it seemed to Tim that Jimmy was still missing a good deal of his get-up-and-go. Now, Tim was in a near panic.
When he arrived home, he learned that it was not Jimmy but Julie who was the cause of alarm. Hearing that his third child, like his first, was dead, he went straight for Neta, and held her close. He found it impossible to understand what powers might cause such mind-bending misfortune. “We had a dog,” he remembered vividly many years later. “He was a basset, and we called him Zoomer. And he howled the night before. He just wailed and wailed. And then, Julie died. And shortly after that, the dog died. I thought he ate a bone that killed him, but I don’t know. I couldn’t afford to take him to a damn vet to find out how he died.”
When Dr. Hartnagel asked Waneta what happened, she said she had been feeding Julie, and the baby had begun to choke. Then she had gone limp. That was when she called for help. “What were you feeding her?” Hartnagel wondered. “Rice cereal,” Waneta said.
In the midst of their shock, some in the Hoyt family were baffled by the circumstances of Julie’s death. Eric’s death was tragic, but explained. A heart problem, Dr. Hartnagel said. But choking to death on a bottle? How could rice cereal have been thin enough to get through the nipple, yet thick enough to strangle the baby? Why hadn’t Waneta, such a good burper, been able to simply pat the baby on her back or clear the obstruction with a finger?
Whatever his own thoughts about these questions, Hartnagel made quick work of his coroner duties. He returned to his office in Berkshire, pulled out a blank death certificate, and completed the record of Julie Hoyt’s seven weeks of life. As the cause of death, he wrote: “strangulation—was eating rice cereal.” Again he saw no need for an autopsy, and released the body to Neil MacPherson.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Clarence Lacey said when Waneta and Tim drove up to Richford and climbed the steps to his porch once again to say they were going to need another grave. He went up the hill with his shovel, and the next day the family gathered at the Nixon plot, where Julie’s pine coffin was buried alongside that of her brother Eric.
On the morning of the funeral, Neta and Tim left Jimmy with the Hilliards. Natalie and Art found the anguish unimaginable. What would it be like to lose two babies? And what about Jimmy? What would the effect be on him? Would he remember Julie, or her death? He had been there when she died. “I told him to stay on the couch when I ran outside with the baby,” Waneta later related. “And he was so good. I said, ‘Stay here, Jimmy. Something’s wrong with Julie. Mommy’s got to go take care of her.’ And he stayed right there on the couch. He was good as gold.”
A few days after the funeral, Natalie went to the trailer and spent a while in the baby’s room packing away her blankets and clothes. She folded them neatly and put them in boxes, while Neta sat alone in the front room.
Two weeks later, on the morning of September 26, Natalie was preparing to go out for a round of errands when she happened to look out the window in her front room and see something that just could not be. It was exactly three weeks after Julie’s death, almost to the hour. The shock and sympathy, the immense, cumulative sadness among the Hoyts and the Nixons, their friends and neighbors, was still overwhelming them all. Now, incredibly, Waneta was coming down the hill with Jimmy in her arms. No, Natalie thought, this just can’t be.
She dashed out the front door, and met Waneta in the road.
“Help me,” Waneta said. “Jimmy’s sick.”
Natalie realized that he was not just sick, but unconscious, his face ashen. She saw that Waneta’s blouse was completely unbuttoned, as if something had happened while she was getting dressed.
They rushed into Natalie’s house and Waneta put Jimmy on the living room couch as Natalie ran for the kitchen phone. Standing amidst the sudden commotion, Dana looked on, perplexed, as his little friend lay motionless on the couch, cushioned by two throw pillows. “Jimmy’s sick, honey,” Natalie told him, pointing him away. “Please go to your room and play.” She went into the kitchen, her mind swirling, and called Margaret Horton. “This is Natalie Hilliard on Davis Hollow Road,” she said. “I have a very sick child here. His name is Jimmy Hoyt. He’s unconscious. His mother is here. Hurry—please.” She hung up the phone, and returned to Waneta, who was moving about aimlessly in the living room.
“What’s Tim’s number at work?” Natalie asked. He would be out on a job by now, but Waneta gave Natalie the office number in Waverly.
“Can I leave a message for him? It’s urgent,” Natalie was telling someone at Streeter Construction a few seconds later. “Please tell him that he’s needed at home as soon as possible. Tell him his son is sick.”
Waneta was crying softly now, sobbing and pacing, waiting for the rescue squad. There was not a sound from Jimmy, still lying motionless on the couch. In shock, Natalie was afraid to touch him.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was getting dressed.… He came to me, he just collapsed in my arms.… He just collapsed.… Did you call Tim?”
“I just called over there,” Natalie said, trying to stay calm herself. “They’re getting a message to him.”
“I wish they’d hurry up,” Waneta said, peering out the window for the rescue squad.
“They’ll be here any minute,” Natalie assured her. She put her arm around Waneta’s shoulder. “Better button up your blouse.”
“Are you sure they’re getting Tim?” Waneta asked again.
“I’m sure he’s on his way.” Natalie didn’t know what to do. “Try to sit down,” she said. “Let’s wait in the kitchen.”
Waneta wouldn’t move from the front room. She kept looking out for the squad, and for Tim.
She was standing in the doorway when the station wagon ambulance pulled up and Hank Robson and Morris Lyons came toward the house. Robson worked the second shift at IBM and was available for morning emergency calls. He’d heard, of course, about the deaths of the two Hoyt babies, and now here was a strapping two-year-old, lying lifeless on the neighbors’ couch as his mother beseeched, “Please do something!”
Robson knelt down and felt for a pulse. There was none. He began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR. “Nothing,” Robson said. He looked at Lyons, then at Waneta.
“He’s gone,” he said softly.
“Can I use your phone?” Robson asked Natalie. She heard his muted voice in the kitchen but paid no attention to what he was saying. All she could think of was Jimmy. And Waneta. And Tim. She didn’t believe what had just happened. It just could not be.
Robson and Lyons stayed with the body until they heard a car pull up and the door slam. “Hello, Doc,” Robson said to Dr. Hartnagel.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a tumultuous year in America. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated two months apart, battles from the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Chicago raged on television screens, and as they campaigned for president that fall Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey vied for the soul of a country in agony. But to a good number of the citizens of a rural farming community in central New York State, none of it was as riveting, as mysterious and shocking and eerie, as what was going on in the trailer home of one of their neighbors up the hill.
The sudden deaths of Julie and Jimmy within twenty-one days of each other, together with Eric’s death three and a half years before, caused a quiet uproar in Newark Valley. Bewilderment, incredulity, horror—these were some of the emotions twisting in the air that September. And suspicion. It all depended on how close one was to the events. Those closest, like the Hilliards, could be ripped apart by the whispers going around, so they sequestered themselves from the talk. They saw only devastating loss, felt only tremendous pain and sympathy. Those on the outskirts, meanwhile, heard the murmurings about the tragic couple up on Davis Hollow. Waneta Hoyt was only twenty-two, and already she had lost three children. Many people knew the essential facts, but not what to think, other than that it was probably the strangest thing they had ever heard. But there were some among them who had much more uneasy thoughts, and they wondered whether the right questions were being asked by the right people. Could Waneta Hoyt actually be doing something to her children?
Dr. Hartnagel was certainly one of the right people, and this time, he did not hesitate to order an autopsy. He sent Jimmy’s body directly to the pathology lab at Tioga General Hospital, in Waverly. Then he called Howard Horton, Newark Valley’s part-time police chief.
Later that day, there was a knock on the door of the trailer.
“Hello, Tim,” Hartnagel said. He had come with Horton and a deputy county sheriff. “Can we come in?”
Tim, obviously distraught, glanced warily at the deputy.
“Waneta, Tim,” Hartnagel began. “I’m sorry. We’re going to have to check into this.”
“Whenever there’s more than one death in a family the law dictates we have to look into the possibility of foul play,” Horton said, implying that they could look it up.
Tim could not believe what he was hearing. How could Doc Hartnagel actually suspect such a thing? He was Doc Hartnagel. If you called him at 3:00 in the morning, he’d be at your house at 3:10, in his pajamas. Maybe you’d get a bill, maybe not. And Howard Horton, the police chief they’d known since they were kids, who worked practically alongside Tim’s mother at Endicott Johnson. How could he accuse them of something so horrible? “We got nothin’ to hide,” Tim said angrily. “My God, we wouldn’t do something to our own children. We don’t know what’s wrong. We want to find out ourselves.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Hartnagel asked.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Waneta said. She had been silent up to now. “We didn’t do anything. The children were in trouble and I called for help, and now you’re saying I did something.”
“We just have to check into it,” the deputy sheriff said. Waneta said she was getting dressed when she heard Jimmy running to her. And then he just collapsed in her arms. “Then I carried him across to Natalie Hilliard’s house,” she said. Asked again about Julie, Waneta told Hartnagel, as she had three weeks before, that the baby had choked on rice cereal.
The conversation was brief. Both Hartnagel and Horton were indeed out of their element, and Tim sensed that they were terribly uncomfortable about the situation in which they found themselves. Townspeople invariably regarded Horton as an affable amateur policeman, “a part-time Andy of Mayberry,” in one person’s memory, who, since before the war, had counted among his usual duties the keeping of order at the Memorial Day parade and the wagging of a finger at truant teenagers. Murder investigations were not part of the job. He left that sort of thing to the sheriff’s department or the state police. And while death was part of Hartnagel’s business, he was far more accustomed to fulfilling his coroner duties by saying, “Yes, this person is indeed dead,” checking his watch, and signing his name, than to confronting so disquieting and strange a circumstance as the one before him now. He was, after all, a country doctor, not a medical examiner, and these were his patients. He had delivered Waneta twenty-two years before.
Still, a country doctor saw a lot of things in his life. Revered in these parts for his easygoing kindness, Hartnagel was now in his late sixties and thinking about retiring to a house up on Cayuga Lake. Having practiced since the Depression, he had once been known to see to patients by horse-drawn sleigh in harsh winters, and one time delivered a baby on a kitchen table, in a house with dirt floors and pigs and ducks at his feet. More than once, his daughter, Marilyn, saw her father go out on a house call to take care of a baby—and come home with the baby. “They said they couldn’t take care of him,” he’d explain, then try to find someone to adopt the child. He also saw some things that he knew were just not right. In a poor county like Tioga, child abuse was not uncommon, though nobody called it that. When he came upon a child he thought was in trouble, Hartnagel tried to do something about it. Twice he had shown Marilyn pictures of children with burn marks that he believed were inflicted by their parents. In each case he went to the county judge down at the courthouse in Owego, and each time the judge ruled against him. “My father was livid,” Marilyn later remembered. “When he was coroner he had lots of cases that were suspicious and no one ever did anything. He grew disgruntled. It made him fed up with medicine.”
The deputy sheriff told Tim and Waneta he would have to take some things with him. The cereal. The dish. Food from the refrigerator. The clothes Jimmy was wearing when he died. The diaper pail, with the diapers. A washcloth, and the box of Julie’s blankets. Tim put up a perfunctory protest and gathered the items, as Waneta sat still. They wouldn’t find anything, he promised the men as they headed for the door.
Howard Horton saw Chuck Hoyt in front of his mother’s house. “Charlie, I need to talk to you,” he said. He took him off to the side.
“Charlie, what’s going on here?” he asked.
Chuck was stunned by the question; he stared right back at Horton. He was not among those whose first thoughts were the worst. He was still absorbing what had happened that morning, just trying to keep his brother from going over the edge. “What do you mean, what’s going on?” he asked.
“Something’s not right here,” said Horton. “Look, Charlie, I gotta ask you this. Do you think Waneta is doing something to these kids?”
“What?” Chuck stammered. “No. No!”
“Well, you know we have to investigate this,” Horton said.
By the time he got inside, Chuck was sobbing. “You’re not gonna believe what Howard Horton just asked me,” he said to Loretta. “He thinks Neta’s doing something to the kids.” Loretta looked at him. Then she too broke down.
“The body is opened by a Y-shaped incision,” dictated Dr. James Mitchell, the pathologist at Tioga General. “There is no external evidence of injury to the head or body … the pupils are dilated and equal … the lips appear somewhat cyanotic.…”
Mitchell began Jimmy’s autopsy at 10:30 that same morning, one hour after his mother carried him to Natalie Hilliard’s house. Standing over the little boy’s body beneath a bright surgical lamp, the pathologist was on a hunt for signs of disease that might explain his strange death. He began removing and inspecting organs, dictating his observations into a tape recorder.
He started with the larynx, trachea, esophagus, and lungs. Finding nothing remarkable, he moved on to the cardiovascular system. “The valves show no vegetation or thickening,” he said as he examined Jimmy’s heart. “The coronary arteries are in their normal position and show no gross pathologic changes. The great vessels are in their normal relationship. No congenital abnormalities are noted.”
Removing the liver, Mitchell took a section of the organ and noted that it was dark red. All livers are various shades of deep red but for some reason Mitchell thought Jimmy’s showed evidence of congestion. A section of the kidney was also dark red. When he examined the child’s head, Mitchell found no evidence of hemorrhage, though there was “some congestion of the subpial vessels,” meaning the delicate wrapping around the blood vessels that cover the brain. But none of the supposed congestion could explain the death. If anything, it was an effect, not a cause.
Now, the organs of the endocrine system. Here Mitchell found something he thought interesting, perhaps revealing. The adrenal glands, he thought, were unusually small. They weighed just 2 1/2 grams, less than half what he expected. Looking further, he removed and weighed the thymus gland, and judged that it, too, was not the normal size for a child this age. He didn’t think the gland was too small, however, but too large. A two-lobed organ at the root of the neck and above the heart, the thymus’s function was ambiguous. (Medical researchers would later show the gland to be critical to the development of the immune system.) Unlike other organs that grow with the body to adulthood, the thymus is largest at birth and diminishes in size as a child matures, virtually disappearing after puberty. Jimmy’s thymus weighed 40 grams when Mitchell put it on his organ scale. He thought it should have weighed no more than 25.
Perhaps the discrepancies Mitchell noted were valid, perhaps not. He may not have been especially familiar with children, living or dead. “It is the body of a well-nourished well-developed four-year-old child,” he had dictated at the start of the autopsy. Jimmy, though big for his age, was just a few months past two. Mitchell hadn’t verified Jimmy’s age with a birth certificate or a phone call to Hartnagel or the family. He also did not pay too much attention to precision. Weighing the child’s small organs on a standard pathology scale, instead of one fine enough for autopsies of small children, was not the most accurate method. In any event, the size of a child’s thymus is variable, and it has nothing to do with life and death.
The autopsy left Mitchell fishing for a plausible cause of death. As his final anatomic diagnosis, he chose congestion of the liver, kidneys, and brain, and adrenal insufficiency. Under cause of death, he wrote: “Acute adrenal insufficiency.” The child’s supposedly undersized adrenal glands, he concluded, were lethally ineffective.
Hartnagel didn’t buy this. Even if the adrenal glands were too small for a child Jimmy’s true age, it wouldn’t then follow that it was “acute adrenal insufficiency” that had killed him. Problems with the adrenals, two triangular glands atop the kidneys that produce crucial hormones, would have been evident long before he died. But in rejecting Mitchell’s conclusion when he filled out Jimmy’s death certificate two days later, Hartnagel could do no better. Going back into the pathologist’s findings, Hartnagel pulled out the only thing that came within a hundred miles of a fatal diagnosis. “Enlarged thymus,” he wrote under “immediate cause of death.” Beneath that, where the form asked what the immediate cause was “due to or a consequence of,” Hartnagel left two blank lines.
Though typically applied to infants as an explanation for crib death, the finding of “enlarged thymus” was an old chestnut for the sudden, unexplained death of young children. The archaic theory, first proposed in the 1700s, was that the oversized organ could interfere with the normal function of the heart and lungs. By the 1960s, it was a hopelessly anachronistic hypothesis—pathologists had known for decades that all children have “enlarged thymuses”—but after nearly two centuries, there were still physicians left who welcomed the convenient reasoning. And as Hartnagel demonstrated by implication if not in precise words, doctors were willing to attribute just about any sudden death of a child to the all-encompassing crib death, whether the child was young enough to sleep in a crib beneath a twirling mobile or old enough to run over to Grandma’s house and fill his pockets with sticks and stones. Still, even Hartnagel seemed to acknowledge that the thymus finding was not much more than a space filler. Under “Conditions contributing to death but not related to cause given,” Hartnagel wrote: “Unknown and undecided as to cause.”
To many who heard about them, the autopsy results were a sea of ambiguities. On one hand, it was full of medical language that gave the impression that Jimmy was a very sick child indeed. Congested liver and kidney, congested brain, adrenal insufficiency, enlarged thymus. The interpretation that made its way around the family was that this enlarged thymus had choked Jimmy, and who was to say it didn’t run in the family? This was the first autopsy. Perhaps Eric and Julie had had the same problems. Maybe an enlarged thymus had caused Eric’s heart to stop and Julie to choke to death. Weren’t some diseases genetic, striking family members again and again? Waneta, for one, suddenly started talking a lot about enlarged thymuses.
On the other hand, there were common logic and gut feelings. Jimmy was a healthy, energetic little boy. Wouldn’t he have shown some signs of illness? And if his death made no sense, one had to then go back to the others and consider the pattern. Tim’s oldest brother, George, never one to mince words, came right out and spoke his mind to Chuck. “I think she’s killing these kids,” he told him.
George had moved back to Newark Valley from New Jersey and was working in a Chevrolet dealer’s garage when he got the call about Jimmy and raced home. George had always been a gruff, irascible character, full of overwrought opinions, but he sometimes demonstrated a surprising insight and a penchant for forming conclusions from odd little pieces of experience. He thought of a time he was driving up Route 38 into Berkshire and saw Neta in her car, pulled off to the side of the road, staring straight at her steering wheel. He tooted his horn, but Neta never moved. To him it was part of the picture. He thought something bad was going on here. He’d seen Jimmy just a few days before, and he remarked to himself what a vigorous little kid he was. He couldn’t have just died, not just three weeks after Julie. George’s wife, Gloria, shared this opinion, as did his dairyman brother-in-law Weldon Wait. Weldon was well-known as one of the valley’s more entertaining characters, and among the farmers he visited in his social rounds it became almost common knowledge that he openly regarded Waneta as his wife’s crazy, child-murdering sister-in-law. He did not, however, feel moved to do anything about it. That was for the Hoyts to worry about.
The Hoyts did plenty of worrying, and yelling at each other, over what was going on. When they gathered for Jimmy’s funeral that Sunday afternoon, there was an air of unreality hanging over them. In her head, Tim’s sister Janet could still hear Jimmy yelling, “Grandma, Grandma, Grandma” as he ran happily across the field to Ella Hoyt. Jimmy was physically precocious; not yet two and a half, he was already learning to tie his shoes. Janet thought this was remarkable. She had collapsed on the sidewalk when she heard the news. Her mother was so traumatized that she blanked out the moment. She had come out of her house when she heard the ambulance, had screamed in abject horror when she saw Jimmy’s body, and fainted. When she came to, she had no memory of what had happened in the moments before she dropped to the ground. The last thing she remembered was that Jimmy had been over early that morning, an hour before his death.
Even Neil MacPherson, the funeral director, was having a hard time. He was an old man, about to pass on the reins of the funeral home to a young associate, and he found the unfathomable tragedy of the Hoyt children almost unbearable. “You know,” he remarked to Tim’s brothers, “these little kids haven’t had a chance. They should be just starting out on a long trip.”
As family members and the Methodist minister Gary Kuhns mounted their second brief journey to Richford in three weeks, their shock was now compounded by a cloud of suspicion. Some found themselves focusing on Waneta. They watched how she comported herself, searched for a hint of inappropriate behavior. Loretta always looked into Neta’s eyes, and it seemed to her that there was a certain hollowness that the rest of her behavior—that of the helpless, grieving mother, holding on to her stoic husband—could not completely mask. With Eric’s funeral, and then Julie’s, there was all that awful crying and carrying-on. This time, something else was in the air.
A lot of people in northern Tioga County shook their heads in disbelief and thanked God for sparing them such misfortune. But there were some who spent that fall waiting for the other shoe to drop. The questioning was contained and discreet. “Why aren’t they looking into this?” Margaret Corn well said to her husband after dinner one night. From her store on Water Street, the Valley Dress Shop, Margaret heard plenty of “sidewalk talk,” as she termed the snippets of conversation she’d catch from people passing by. Many people in town knew the Hoyts, but not much about Waneta. They just knew that she’d married into the family, that she came from up in Richford, and that her children kept dying while Tim was at work. Some heard that the Sheriff’s Department had “raided the Hoyt place,” others that Doc Hartnagel was asking people what they thought. When Hartnagel asked Loretta during an appointment, “What do you make of these deaths?” she said she just didn’t know. Few were so bold as George Hoyt and Weldon Wait. The notion of Waneta, or any mother, hurting her own children—much less killing them—was so horrendous that few could let themselves articulate it. If something was going on, people told one another, the authorities would find out.
The authorities, though, found nothing. Not long after their visit to the Hoyts, Horton and the sheriff’s deputy returned the things they had taken—the diapers, the blankets and clothes, the cereal. Nothing unusual had been discovered, they told Waneta and Tim, and with the thymus finding of the autopsy, there seemed no reason for further investigation. They were just doing their duty, they said apologetically. Well, Tim said, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. “It would have been nice if they did the diapers,” Tim said scornfully when he told Chuck about it later.
As much as anything, it was the autopsy that cooled the suspicion—that and the fact that to most, the Hoyts seemed like such a perfectly average couple. The police decided the right thing to do was to leave it alone. Horton’s brief conversation with Chuck was the extent of their questioning, and they bothered Waneta and Tim no more. As cryptic and unfulfilling as the cause of death was, as skeptical as Hartnagel might have been, ultimately nothing he said or did dispelled the spreading notion that Jimmy, and therefore Eric and Julie, had died of some unknown but natural condition. It is impossible to know who first suggested the words, but it was the impression of many that the Hoyt babies were dying of the sudden, mysterious, and vaguely defined entity known as crib death.
This was the impression of nearly all two dozen members of the Newark Valley rescue squad. They were by nature and training disinclined to challenge the doctor’s findings, and there was nothing about the Hoyts that seemed suspicious. They were nice people—Waneta made a point to send a note of thanks to the squad after each rescue effort. “The whistle blew, you’d run in—‘What’s going on?’ ‘Hoyt kid having trouble breathing again’—we thought nothing of it,” Arthur Balzer would later recall. “You know, there are sick families with breathing problems. A lot of families have asthma.”
But this response was not quite unanimous. Bob Vanek, for one, was skeptical. The squad met on the first Tuesday of each month to discuss business and practice its techniques, and Vanek was puzzled by the absence of suspicious talk about all those calls to the Hoyt farm on Davis Hollow Road. Vanek seemed to be alone in his feeling that Waneta’s behavior was a bit too strange to discount. “When you got there she wouldn’t talk to you or answer you,” he’d recall. “She would stand away, in the doorway. She didn’t cry or go into hysterics. I would say, ‘The child is deceased’ and glance at her. She’d be staring, like this. And Tim was never there.” Of course, Vanek considered whether Waneta’s demeanor meant she was in shock. But he could not shake the vague sensation that the circumstances might mean something else. He talked to his wife about it. “Three in a row, there’s something funny about it,” he told her. Let the police handle it, his wife advised. If there’s a problem, they’ll come to you.
Vanek waited. But they never came.
Though it was commonly perceived that Jimmy was closer to his father than to his mother, and that Tim seemed more emotionally bonded with the children generally, it was Waneta who expressed her pain more openly. In town, she appeared weary and drawn and accepted sympathy in a way that tended to engender even more pity. The mystery was part of what made it all so dreadful—as if God Himself were playing a cruel joke on this hapless woman. At home, Waneta would often tell Tim that the deaths of the children were the result of her inadequacy as a mother. If she had been more vigilant, she would say, gotten to them sooner, they would still be alive. Or maybe there was something wrong with her genes. Tim would have none of this. “It’s not your fault,” he’d insist. “It’s nobody’s fault.” And they would not give up on the idea of having a family.
Holding his wife up, seeing to her needs, was the only response that gave Tim any sort of comfort. It was by now the central dynamic of their relationship. He didn’t go to work for months after the deaths of Julie and Jimmy, and eventually his solicitude cost him his job. “I couldn’t make myself leave her alone,” he later recalled. More than once, when Tim dropped in on his brother Chuck he would say, “I gotta leave soon. Neta’s talking about killing herself.”
Art Hilliard tried to lessen the burden for Tim. “Every once in a while we might go hunting and not take our guns,” Art said years later. “And he and I would just walk on the hill. It wasn’t that we would go up and sit under a great big old maple tree and talk. That’s not the way it happened. We’d walk up on the hill and talk about what we saw up there. We’d look at the wood-chucks, the turkey, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, birds. And just shoot the bull. Maybe just look and see how the field was developing. What’s the hay gonna be? The things us old hill people would talk about.”
In early October, a young woman named Joyce Aman drove up to Newark Valley and knocked on the front door of the Hoyt trailer. “Good morning. Mrs. Hoyt?” she said when Waneta opened the door. “I’m with the Tioga County Public Health Nursing Service. I’m just here to pay a visit to see how you’re doing with your baby.”
In counties like Tioga, it was not uncommon for babies to be born to young or poor mothers. The county had started its public health nursing service with a staff of four in the summer of 1966, and Aman had joined them that December, soon after finishing nursing school. Among their key jobs was to visit new mothers, counsel them, see if they needed any help. Aman vividly remembered her first case, “a pregnant twelve-year-old who wanted to talk about hopscotch.” After that, nothing shocked her—until that day in Newark Valley.
Weeks before, she had gotten a referral form from Tompkins County Hospital directing her to the home of Waneta and Timothy Hoyt, who had brought home a newborn baby girl during the summer. “Assess bonding skills, feeding, baby’s reaction in home” was the assignment. She came several times, but found no one home. This time, Waneta answered the door. Quickly, she learned the dreadful news. Not only was the baby dead, but so was her two-year-old brother.
They sat at the kitchen table, and Waneta tearfully recounted the tragedies of her dead children. Aman, pregnant herself, was aghast. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said sympathetically, “one after another like that.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me either,” Waneta said.
Aman suggested professional counseling to help cope with the grief, and Waneta liked the idea. Tioga County had recently opened a mental health clinic, and on October 17, three weeks after Jimmy died, she was sitting in the office of a psychiatrist named Waldo Burnett, explaining that all her children had died of enlarged thymuses. “It runs in the family,” she reported. “It shuts off their air.” She said that six other children in her extended family had also died of either unknown causes or enlarged thymuses.
Waneta told Burnett that she’d led a tortured life since Eric’s death three years before. She slept fitfully and cried several times a day. “I tried to be consoling with her,” the psychiatrist wrote in his notes that day. “I pointed out to her the possible gain which she might derive from active religious participation. She told me that she did think it caused her to feel somewhat better, coming to this clinic and talking about the unhappy events of the past.” Burnett didn’t detect any mental disorders: “It is true she is unhappy; however, her unhappiness seems to me to be a normal grief reaction. I would feel that just because she is grieving the loss of her children would not cause her to be considered mentally ill.”
Waneta was feeling better when she came back eleven days later. She and Tim had gone out to the movies, and her minister was coming by once a week to visit. Reverend Kuhns had invited them over for supper the following week. “She says she goes grocery shopping with her husband, is doing her dishes and sweeping the floor in her mobile home and at times, makes the bed,” Burnett summed up in his notes. “She said she did not cry today. Yesterday, she visited young children and cried briefly. She did not cry the day before that.”
Waneta saw Waldo Burnett twice more, and by February, the psychiatrist was finding her to be “cheerful.” Tim came along to her last appointment and agreed that she no longer needed counseling. Burnett told Waneta to call if she needed help in the future. She thanked him effusively for his help. She felt much better. “Final diagnosis,” he wrote. “No mental disorder.”
Joyce Aman, meanwhile, continued to drop in on Waneta and Tim, and she discussed the family with her supervisor, Grace Gurdin. At one point, Gurdin questioned the enlarged thymus finding that was listed as Jimmy’s cause of death. She thought the little boy’s death should probably have been called a “sudden infant death.”
Gurdin’s remark reflected the increased attention crib death was beginning to receive. Some people in the medical world were starting to use this more dignified name, with its implication to the uninformed that it was an actual, identifiable disease, not just some inexplicable consequence of being alive, and that like other diseases, it could strike older children as well as small babies, and run in families. Whatever was killing the Hoyt children, it was the consensus of nearly everyone who knew them that there could be no good reason to tempt fate again, so it was assumed that Waneta and Tim would take the appropriate measures to prevent the birth of any more doomed babies. It was with dismay, then, that people around them greeted the news in the spring of 1969, only six months after the September deaths of Julie and Jimmy, that Waneta was pregnant yet again.