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It had been a wearying two decades for Waneta and Tim Hoyt.

Soon after the turbulent years of their children’s deaths, they had sold their second trailer and the land underneath to help with their debts and begun living in a series of rented dwellings around Newark Valley. Waneta’s days passed from one to the next. She kept house, watched television, crocheted, worked her crosswords. She wasn’t bad with words. Her friend Natalie Hilliard was back teaching nursery school, but Waneta didn’t see herself as the working type. Tim put in long days on one construction crew or another, still trying to pay off the medical bills for Molly and Noah, as well as for Waneta’s own visits to the specialists in two counties to whom she had brought her vague physical ailments. Their debts ranged from the immense to the trivial. Tim told his brothers that he and Waneta owed $100,000 to various doctors, with Upstate at the top of the list; for a long time he was bringing five dollars a week over to Dave Cooley at MacPherson’s funeral parlor, until Cooley said, Tim, forget it.

After their abortive adoption bid in the fall of 1971, the Hoyts’ wait for a child lasted five years. They adopted Jay through Family and Children’s Services, the private agency in Ithaca, paying the fee with money they borrowed from Tim’s brother-in-law Weldon Wait, who never let them forget it. That’s my kid, Weldon would joke. But in some quarters of Newark Valley, there was a silent gasp that summer of 1976 when word got around that Waneta Hoyt had a two-month-old baby at home. Hope she has better luck this time, some said. She ought to—this one’s not hers. And there were more than a few others who looked on and thought, let’s just see what happens this time.

Waneta and Tim fretted over their new baby. They watched him the old-fashioned way. Until he was a few months old, they took turns staying up through the night while he slept beside them. They wouldn’t let him sleep in his own room until he was two. He didn’t have the death gene, but on this question there was no need for discussion. Tim was taking no chances, and it was Waneta’s way to nurture his apprehension.

In 1987, when Jay was eleven, Waneta went to the county mental health clinic for the first time in fifteen years. She answered “yes” to every one of the eighteen questions about her emotional health on a form she was asked to fill out. Yes, she had daily headaches and trouble sleeping, and problems with her temper. Yes, she was almost always lonely and depressed; yes, she felt panic, and yes, she felt guilt. She had recurrent dreams of accidents and fires. She was a housewife with few diversions; she embroidered when she had the money for supplies. Though Jay was not a difficult child, and she was not very busy, she found it impossible to keep up with the demands of raising him. But she seemed even more fixated on her relationship with a dog she and Tim had recently gotten him. “She dislikes the dog and is fearful of losing control of hostile impulses toward the dog,” a social worker who interviewed her wrote one day. “She feels quite shaky but her husband is supportive and taking tomorrow off to be with her.”

At forty, her physical complaints had also been mounting. She circled “yes” twenty-two times on another form asking her to list her medical history. She said she had both high blood pressure and low blood pressure, a heart murmur, liver disease, stomach ulcers. Did she have chest pain upon exertion? Shortness of breath? Require extra pillows to sleep? Allergies? Hives or skin rash? Fainting spells or seizures? Diabetes? Urinate more than six times a day? Did her ankles swell? Waneta answered yes to them all.

When she talked to a new psychiatrist, Dr. George Primanis, she came back to the dog. She was afraid she “might do something to the dog.” She returned four weeks later, and told Primanis that the dog had been killed by a car. She felt guilty, she told him, but also relieved.

For a time, Waneta kept pictures of her babies on the TV set. When one of the Hoyts’ landlords, Anna May Kuntzleman, came for the rent each month, she would see the babies staring up at her, and her heart would sink. “They all died of SIDS,” Waneta would say. When a new neighbor came over for the first time, Waneta would pull out her photo album. She also knew that she had a certain status in the medical world. Once, when her sister Ruth came up for a visit from Texas, Waneta showed her Steinschneider’s article. “This is me,” she said proudly. “I’m Mrs. H.”

When they got themselves in serious legal trouble, some of the poorest people in Tioga County were represented by one of the wealthiest. Bob Miller was decidedly not the archetypal public defender. An ex-Green Beret who marched his commanding figure around a courtroom barking questions at witnesses, he was not given to coddling his clients, especially not those whose defense came courtesy of the taxpayers. He’d agreed to set up the county public defender’s office in 1974, figuring he’d pass the chores on to some do-gooder after a couple of years. But two decades later, his private law practice on the bottom floor of a house in the sleepy village of Waverly, entrance around back, was still also the office of the Tioga County Public Defender. It wasn’t that Miller was ideologically committed to it. He just found something appealing about the work. It kept things interesting. In the meantime, he had done well enough with (as his business card specified) Serious Personal Injury, Wrongful Death, Products Liability, and Major Criminal Defense Matters, to live in an immense brick house on acres of land in Waverly and to branch out into a business he had come to love, the Greenhills Land and Cattle Company, the thousand-acre ranch he operated with his son just over the border in Chemung County. Not infrequently, Miller and his wife, Rose, got away to their condo on the west coast of Florida.

He was in Fort Myers when he got the harried call from his paralegal, Annette Gorski. “Thirty years ago?” Miller said when she reported what George Awad had told her.

“The press is all over the place,” Gorski said. “They’re calling here. George doesn’t know what to do.”

By the time Miller reached Awad at home, Waneta had been arraigned and was in jail for the night. “I’ll get back as soon as I can,” he told Awad. “Don’t do anything till you hear from me. Don’t talk to the press. Don’t do anything. Just lock yourself away till I get there.” Then Miller called the jail and talked to his client. “Don’t say anything to anyone,” he instructed her, well aware that she’d already said plenty. “Okay? Just keep your mouth shut.” He called Tim Hoyt and told him the same thing. He called Bob Simpson and asked what the hell was going on. Five children? Thirty years ago? Why now? Miller knew the police had a statement from the defendant, but he wouldn’t get a look at it until a felony hearing a week later. With each call, the enormity of this case became more and more apparent. At three in the morning, Miller realized he needed some help and made one more call. In Elmira, an awakened Ray Urbanski picked up the phone and heard his former partner’s voice in the darkness. It was Easter week, and Miller was having trouble getting a flight north. He asked Urbanski to stand in for him until he could get home. “Ray, can you go over to the jail and see this lady tomorrow?”

The next day, Miller read about the arrest in the Miami Herald, and knew he had his work cut out for him. “It was a medical journal article that sent a prosecutor sleuthing in 1986,” the Associated Press story began. When he read Bill Fitzpatrick’s comment about a killer “who preyed on her own children” being “brought to justice,” Miller was enraged. He and Bob Simpson had been respectful adversaries for twenty years, and neither had to remind the other to fight their cases in court. That was how things worked in Tioga County. This wasn’t some big city where half the job, whichever side you were on, was grabbing headlines. Waneta’s supposed confession started him at enough of a disadvantage, Miller complained to Urbanski over the phone; he didn’t need a poisoned jury pool to go with it. In fact, Miller found the Syracuse prosecutor’s entire involvement perplexing and suspicious. Who was this guy anyway? What was he doing down in Tioga County? He wondered if this whole thing was some sort of publicity gimmick.

Bob Courtright launched his long-planned invasion of Newark Valley and northern Tioga County early on the morning after the arrest. That day and those following, Courtright deployed investigators to the front doors of just about everyone who might have known Waneta in the years her children were dying; everyone he knew about. It was the beginning of the reverse investigation. Now that Simpson had the statement he needed from Waneta, it was up to Courtright’s team to go out and gather the corroboration. Suddenly, nearly everyone connected to Waneta found themselves taken back twenty and thirty years. What did they remember? How did Waneta act after the deaths? What did she say? What did they think then? The painful past was being dug up, turned over, sifted through.

What came through was a jumble of impressions and images. Little of it fell into the category of corroboration. Waneta was just not capable of killing her children, her younger sister Donna declared. But if she really did it, Donna said, maybe she “just snapped.” Donna’s husband, Tim’s brother Don, agreed that it didn’t seem possible. One after another, Waneta’s relatives said much the same. “I wondered why she kept havin’ kids,” her brother Archie said, but he was sure they all died of crib death. Did his sister have any emotional problems growing up? No, he said, no mental problems, she was normal, had a normal childhood. Archie thought Waneta had taken the deaths of the babies in stride, but he seemed to be the only one. Everyone else said it just tore her up, and she never got over it.

Tim’s sister Janet Kuenzli offered the investigators her reminiscences of Jimmy. “He was a bubbly kid that liked to go, go, go,” she said. “He’d run across the field yelling, ‘Grandma, grandma.’ I remember he was just learning to tie his shoes when he died.” Scrambling to get to people before they fell under a lawyer’s gag order, Courtright’s investigators weren’t always sure whom they were talking to. They’d found Janet’s name on Waneta and Tim’s marriage certificate, unaware that she was Tim’s sister. “Stated she was matron of honor …” Courtright wrote, “and has remained in contact with the Hoyts since that time. Mrs. Kuenzli knew all of the Hoyt children and described them all as beautiful children.”

The inquisitors fanned out into the far reaches of the county. Dave Cooley, who took over MacPherson’s Funeral Home a few weeks after Julie and Jimmy died, and who arranged the services for Molly and Noah, said he’d found no apparent injuries on either baby. He always thought Waneta had some emotional problems, but she seemed to be a nice person. How was she at the funerals? Emotional, Cooley remembered. That would be expected, but this thing called Munchausen, if that’s what this was, tended to turn things a little ambiguous. Was she too emotional? “This woman you practically carried out of the funeral parlor,” Art Hilliard had told one reporter, though when Courtright went to see him, he and Natalie respectfully declined to be interviewed, on the advice of Waneta’s lawyer. Like virtually everyone else in Waneta’s life, the Hilliards found the charges absolutely impossible to believe.

The hunt for prosecution witnesses was seriously impaired by the passage of time. Dr. Hartnagel had been suspicious, Waneta had said in the interview room, but Courtright already knew he was long dead. The house in which he had lived and worked still bore the doctor’s office hours painted on the window of the porch door, but a sign out front read GARY’S GARAGE/WELDING. Also dead were Dr. Noah Kassman, the obstetrician who had delivered all five babies and was the namesake for the last one, and both Howard and Margaret Horton, Newark Valley’s police chief and emergency dispatcher. When Standinger and Sherman went to their house, they found the Hortons’ son and asked him if he had any of his father’s old police records. You’re not going to believe this, he said. He had been cleaning out his parents’ house, and had burned all his father’s records just a few weeks before.

The rescue squad didn’t have any records that old, and only a few of the squad members who responded to the Hoyt baby calls were still alive. One of them was Bob Vanek. In September 1968, the back-to-back deaths of Julie and Jimmy made him suspicious, but his wife had urged him to be careful with his thoughts. If anything was wrong, she said, the police would come to him. But they never did, not for twenty-six years. By now, Vanek’s memory was a bit fuzzy.

Waneta’s change of heart the night of her arrest was swift, certain, and probably not unrelated to the conversations she had in jail with her husband, her son, her father, and her lawyer. The guards watched her carefully throughout the night, considering her a suicide risk, but that was not what was on Waneta’s mind. When Ray Urbanski went to see her the next morning, Waneta told him that she was innocent. The police had made her say these things. Now could she go home?

Bob Miller made it home on Friday, and began trying to make some sense of five murder charges stretching back thirty years. He quickly realized he would need Urbanski’s help for a while, maybe for the duration, especially if Waneta stuck to her morning-after denials. Not only was the case itself immensely complex as a legal matter, but the bombardment of publicity seemed to be taking on a life of its own. The larger world was fascinated by the story of Waneta Hoyt’s arrest and how it came to be. Miller was astounded by the instant notoriety. He had to hire extra office help to handle all the calls—reporters from every medium and assorted countries, producers from network magazines and talk shows, even movie people. The temporary receptionists kept a record of the calls, and within a week of Waneta’s arrest, they had logged 537 inquiries. A call every six minutes or so, not counting the contracts people were trying to fax. Everyone wanted Waneta’s story. She wasn’t giving it.

Miller found the publicity infuriating and blamed Fitzpatrick, who was spending a good deal of his time giving interviews to the national media. The day of the felony hearing, Miller held his own press conference at the county courthouse in Owego. Fitzpatrick was out for publicity, Miller declared: “I’m sure Geraldo and Sally Jesse will want to fit him in between the transvestites who want to marry their mothers.” He planned to file an official grievance with the state bar association, accusing Fitzpatrick of making improper and inflammatory remarks that were interfering with his client’s right to a fair trial. In Syracuse, Fitzpatrick found the public defender’s reaction ludicrous. He couldn’t understand why Miller was making him the issue. “Maybe he should concentrate on defending his client,” he told reporters.

Miller and Urbanski were about to get their first look at what they were truly up against. To move the case on to a grand jury and trial in the county court, Simpson was required to present a sample of his evidence at the felony hearing James Van Nordstrand would hold in the town court. It would be Newark Valley’s most famous hour since the Martian landing of 1964. CNN, among others, had called to ask what time the hearing would be. Van Nordstrand didn’t want to mess up. He took several days off from his maintenance job to pore over the criminal procedures laws with the other town justice, Douglas Tiffany, a retired IBM employee whose wife was the court clerk and whose license plate read NV LAW. They also read up on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in case it came up. Van Nordstrand was relieved he had a courtroom. Until a couple of years before, Newark Valley was run from the various officials’ homes, the judge, for instance, holding court on his enclosed front porch. Now there was a modest town office with a makeshift courtroom. The judges themselves had built the bench from which they presided, out of plywood.

On March 30, the back of the courtroom was lined with cameras when Waneta Hoyt made her entrance a few minutes after six. The room was filled with reporters, police investigators, lawyers, and a sizable group of her friends and relatives, many of whom were seeing her for the first time since her arrest seven days before. Natalie Hilliard watched Waneta walk through the door and saw the look of confusion on her face. Natalie still couldn’t believe what was happening. She asked one of the guards if it would be all right to see Waneta for a moment, and he nodded. She walked up to her and hugged her. “I’ll take care of Tim and Jay till you get home,” she said. “Thank you,” Waneta said. Then Natalie backed away. She was gray-haired now, her children grown. Dana, the little boy who had palled around with Jimmy Hoyt, was nearly thirty. Natalie reeled her mind back to those years, searching for clarity. In her memory, Waneta was running across the street, Jimmy limp and lifeless in her arms, her shirt unbuttoned. She couldn’t match the image to what was going on now.

Tim stood beside Waneta, leaning in close as she sat staring grimly ahead. He dropped to one knee, his arm around her shoulder. He hugged her, gave her a kiss.

“Mr. Simpson, are you ready to proceed?” Van Nordstrand asked, glancing at a script he had prepared. “Mr. Miller and Mr. Urbanski, are you ready to proceed? Mr. Simpson, you may begin.”

Sue Mulvey took the witness chair and recounted the events of the Wednesday before. She read Waneta’s written statement into evidence. “… Julie was the next one to die. She was crying and I wanted her to stop.… It was the thing that made me kill them all.…” The television cameras recorded the chilling words. The footage would play on TV screens across the country.

In the audience, Jay sat in dazed silence as the word smothered was repeated again and again; as his mother was accused of “depraved indifference to human life.” He had been crying for days. At school, a posse of friends had formed around him to protect him from cruel remarks and approaches by the press. When he was young, his mother had hovered over him, refusing to allow him outside to play with his cousins at family gatherings lest he hurt himself. Now Jay listened to Investigator Susan Mulvey read his mother’s statement about all the babies she said she had killed because they cried. “… Jay went through those same crying spells, but Tim was always there for that.”

Michael Baden followed Mulvey to the witness chair. Five mysterious deaths, only one person present each time, no evidence of natural death in the medical records—it all pointed, the forensic pathologist testified, to homicide. Miller thought there were huge holes in Baden’s reasoning and that he could find his own experts to refute his logic at trial, thereby cutting the legs out from under Simpson’s crucial medical corroboration. But for now Mulvey, Baden, and Waneta’s statement were more than enough. With great relief, Van Nordstrand sent Waneta back to jail and the case to the County Court judge, Vincent Sgueglia. A few weeks later, Simpson presented the evidence to a grand jury, which quickly indicted her. There were ten counts of second-degree murder, two for each child. One accused her of “creating a grave risk of death” and thereby causing death; the other of intending to kill. (He later had to amend the part of the indictment involving Eric to conform to the statutes in effect in 1965.) Meantime, Miller persuaded Judge Sgueglia (pronounced Squel-ya) to cut Waneta’s bond bail to $75,000. Her father and brother pledged their properties to let her go home until her trial.

Money was on a lot of people’s minds. A few days after Waneta Hoyt’s arrest, the Tioga County Legislature called a special meeting to discuss how much the case was going to cost. “You should be prepared to spend more than you can possibly conceive,” Miller told the worried legislators. “This is going to be the most complex, lengthy, and expensive case this county has ever seen, and I plan to defend Waneta Hoyt whatever the expenses involved.” Urbanski would have to be paid, and Miller foresaw hiring an investigator and any number of expert witnesses. The legislators ultimately approved $35,000. Miller let them know they should not consider that the end of it.

Waneta began attending Sunday church and found that people didn’t hate her at all, most of them at least. They told her they believed in her, that they were sure she would be found innocent, and what could they do to help? They meant it. This baby killer, this monster these big-city types were talking about on the news—this wasn’t Waneta. Waneta was gentle and simple and sad, so vulnerable. Those cops could get her to say anything they wanted.

She had become well known around town over the years for her woebegone life. Her list of ailments was familiar to anyone who had occasion to say hello to her. The roster was ever-changing; no two news stories in the weeks after her arrest had the same list. Her family was just as sickly, as if cursed. Two of her sisters, Donna and Dorothy Joan, had cancer. Her brother Archie was also ill. Her mother had been killed in a car wreck. Not long after her arrest, Archie’s son was killed in another accident. And one day a tire came flying off a truck axle and smashed through Waneta and Tim’s front door. Why couldn’t a woman subjected to this much bad luck also have lost all her children to some mysterious disease?

Some people wanted to get up a petition in her support. Waneta thought this was a great idea, and called Miller daily to find out when he was going to give the go-ahead. Meanwhile, she and Tim went to the library at Cornell to look for information on SIDS that might help her case. Their fifteen-year-old niece Penny, George’s daughter, also made a project of it, and pretty soon other people were gathering research too, using the computer down at the church. Helping Waneta fight back became a cause. “They come in every couple of days with material, most of it irrelevant,” Miller said one day, half-bemused, half-annoyed.

The minister at the Methodist church, Lisa Jean Hoefner, was part of the cluster of friends and relatives who accompanied Waneta to every court appearance. She had always considered Waneta a pitiable figure. Art Hilliard had first pointed her out: She’s the one who lost five kids, he told her soon after her arrival in Newark Valley in 1987. Touched by the tragedies and by the Hoyts’ difficult financial circumstances, Reverend Lisa Jean had responded kindly. About once a year since then, she would get a long letter from Waneta, four or five pages detailing her troubles—Tim was out of work, and she wasn’t doing too well physically. When the minister visited the Hoyts one winter day, she saw that Jay slept on a cot in the dining room because his parents couldn’t afford to heat the upstairs. She thought them a couple with little money but goodly pride. Since coming to “Nerk Valley,” Hoefner, who had grown up in a middle-class home on Long Island, had come across families whose surroundings were practically Third World: “Once, I was going to call on someone and somebody at the church said, ‘Now, when you get there, the first building that you’ll come to, that’s the chicken house. Go beyond that and the second one you come to, that’s where the people live.’ And I was glad they said that because it was very hard to distinguish just from looking at the two shacks which was which.” But the Hoyts were not like that. Their home was humble, but neat and comfortable, filled with Waneta’s knittings. They were trying their best.

Reverend Lisa Jean was one of the few people allowed to visit Waneta in jail. She had come the day after the arrest, and they had prayed together. The next day was Good Friday. “Jesus knew what it was to be accused,” she told Waneta, holding her hand. “He wouldn’t have abandoned us in this situation. Even in this pit we can draw on the presence of God.” She told Waneta she was here to comfort her, not to judge her. “You don’t need to tell me anything,” she said. Waneta told her she didn’t know why this was happening. Throughout the visit, she fidgeted with one of the snaps on her bright orange jail-issue jumpsuit. It wouldn’t close, exposing her underwear. Hoefner found the indignity poignant. She tried to get Waneta to eat some soup.

In the chaos of those first few days and weeks after Waneta’s arrest, the minister tried to keep Waneta’s family from falling apart. They were numb with confusion, their pain sharpened by the invasion of reporters and photographers looking everywhere for clues to Waneta’s past. “Look, this is just a job for them,” Lisa Jean told George Hoyt, who was getting a little rough with some of the cameramen outside the courthouse. She reserved her indignation for the prosecutors. “They arrested Waneta and then put her on suicide watch so they could keep her safe and kill her later,” she told one reporter. “Nothing is going to bring those kids back now. In the meantime, we destroy Jay and Tim and Waneta. What sense is that?” Like many people, she was confounded by the possibility that Waneta had actually killed her children. “Well, it’s just so hard to get your head around it,” she said a few months later. “And I just don’t think it could have been willful. I can imagine, just trying objectively to imagine, screaming children, or sad little babies, and trying to make a baby stop crying. I can imagine a smothering situation.” But five times? “Well, exactly, so I kind of look more toward a, you know, some kind of inheritedness, medical something or other.”

Her confusion rang true for many in Newark Valley and the rest of Tioga County. But not for everybody. Maybe they couldn’t say it out loud, but some who had known Waneta a long time couldn’t stop thinking about this Munchausen syndrome. If it meant a person who thrived on sympathy, who always needed to be the center of attention, it sure sounded a lot like Waneta. And when they first heard the accusations, some people thought: Yes, this was what had happened to these babies.

Nonetheless, it seemed clear that the case of the People versus Waneta Hoyt was not going to be a popular prosecution. The jury pool wasn’t poisoned by Fitzpatrick’s sound bites, as Bob Miller feared. In Tioga County in 1994, people seemed to take umbrage not at the magnitude of the crime said to have been committed in their midst, but at the length of time between the crime and the punishment. There was less revulsion and vengeance in the air than Why are they dredging this up now? Who could prove anything all these years later, and what did it really matter? If she really did it, she must have been sick—“more to be pitied than to be fried,” in Reverend Lisa Jean’s view. “What is it we want in the name of justice? There’s no risk here.” Hadn’t her guilt punished her enough? some people asked. Others worried about all the money it was going to cost the taxpayers.

Bob Courtright heard these sentiments often in the months after the arrest, and they puzzled him. Was it that people considered babies, in some sense, possessions—that they couldn’t visualize them as people? Was it just ancient history? At what point did simple justice cease to be important? Five years after the fact? Ten? Twenty? Courtright refused to get hung up on these questions. Whenever someone gave him a hard time about prosecuting Waneta Hoyt, he kept his response simple. “I can’t give away five free murders,” he’d say each time. He hoped Bob Simpson could find twelve citizens who felt the same way.

Simpson, meanwhile, was open to discussions that might keep the case from going that far. He felt a plea bargain would not be the wrong thing to do in the name of the people of Tioga County, so he intimated to Bob Miller that he was available for conversation. The two men had tried cases and made deals for two decades, and the unspoken presumption here was that Waneta could plead guilty to manslaughter and get a relatively modest prison sentence. But Miller knew by now that his client was adamant: She would not agree to anything that would send her to prison. “I didn’t do anything,” she had declared the one time he mentioned the possibility of a plea bargain. He told Simpson there would be no negotiations in this case. He left Simpson with the impression that he believed she was innocent, and that he planned to prove it at trial.

Miller was posturing. “Manslaughter wouldn’t have been a bad deal at all,” he later said. “Except that she would be admitting she killed somebody. You have to understand the context of any conversation I ever had with her, or with her husband, or with her relatives, or with her friends. It was always, ‘I’m innocent. I’ve been wrongly accused. I didn’t do it.’ You don’t talk to someone about a plea if they say they’re innocent. She was going to have her trial.”

And she was going to be acquitted, Waneta was sure. And so was Tim. The police wore her down, manipulated a false confession—surely a jury would understand that’s what had happened here. Miller found their confidence inexplicable under the circumstances. “I don’t think either one of them grasps the significance of being charged with five counts of murder,” he remarked one day to Urbanski. “They’re so indignant. They just don’t seem to have a conception that they have serious trouble here.”

“Well, that’s good, from my standpoint,” Urbanski replied. “It fortifies me.” He was coming to find Waneta’s resolve remarkable. “When I first met her, she was sitting in jail, in her jail outfit, just out of it,” he said. “But since then, she’s gotten so much stronger. She’s more articulate than I expected. She’s smarter than people think.” Only later would he realize that this was not such a good thing for a jury to see.

With their client convinced that they would get her off and people in Newark Valley rallying to her support, the lawyers found themselves caught up in the positive mood. They felt they had a winnable case, despite the confession. There were no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence, and time was on their side: How could Simpson possibly corroborate a confession involving events that went back three decades?

People in Tioga County didn’t pay very much attention to the other half of it, but in the universe of medical research, Waneta Hoyt’s arrest had a completely different meaning. Alfred Steinschneider found himself a prominent physician conspicuously entangled in a sensational murder case, his reputation dependent on the outcome.

He’d had his own troubles in recent years. He withstood a heart attack in 1989, and went through a period of depression and instability that had worried his wife terribly. Ultimately, it cooled his twenty-year friendship with Molly Dapena. She had always been one of his staunchest supporters, but by the 1990s, she no longer agreed with him scientifically. When he read an article in which Dapena said she had given up on the apnea theory and had changed her mind about the concept of multiple SIDS within families, Steinschneider was furious. Roz called Dapena in Miami in a panic. Al’s beside himself, she said. Steinschneider got on the phone and threatened to sue Dapena. Though she flew to Atlanta for the day and calmed him down, it was the beginning of the end of their close friendship.

But Steinschneider was, as always, a survivor, and he remained as dedicated as ever to his ideas about SIDS. He was still measuring apnea in the overheated sleep labs of his SIDS Institute, still sending babies home on monitors, raising money, getting grants, and leading some parents to believe he could prevent SIDS. But with the Hoyt arrest he found himself pulled back to another era—back to the seminal moment of his career. And reporters were calling for appointments. Fitzpatrick was telling the world that Steinschneider should be held accountable, morally if not legally, for the deaths of the babies who had launched his career in sudden infant death. Steinschneider found remarks like these outrageous and hurtful. He considered Fitzpatrick’s search of the medical records that had led to Waneta Hoyt’s arrest “an abuse of power.”

When Barry Bearak of the Los Angeles Times came to see Steinschneider a month after Waneta’s arrest, he found him to have, as he later wrote in a front-page story, “the affable presence of a country doctor,” if one from the heart of Brooklyn. But Steinschneider’s smoldering indignation was not far beneath the surface. “What’s missing from all this cheap talk, this impugning of motives, this show biz, is that it doesn’t save a single baby,” Steinschneider told Bearak. “What they ought to be saying is: ‘Let’s examine the deaths of babies and make better identification of the causes of deaths to help sort things out.… If people think there were inadequate autopsies done, then check the autopsies, big shots. If they think these kids were murdered, then show me, because what they are saying now is at variance with what the people who investigated the case said then. If there’s criticism I’ll accept from the pathologists, it’s that I accepted the opinion of other pathologists.”

The publicity surrounding the arrest of Waneta Hoyt was also an uncomfortable development for the SIDS community. “When Is Crib Death a Cover for Murder?” asked the headline over Time’s report of the case. The story noted that the Hoyt arrest was not an isolated instance: Two other women, Gail Savage of Illinois and Diane Lumbrera of Kansas, had recently been charged with smothering several of their children. The political wing of the SIDS world reacted with a call to arms reminiscent of the early days. When word got around in early June that the CBS program Eye to Eye with Connie Chung was about to air a segment on the Hoyt case, Pete Petit’s SIDS Alliance went into action. The alliance’s national public affairs director, Phipps Cohe, faxed a “Media Action Alert” around the country, urging SIDS parents to help counteract the expected negative effects of the story by sending their protests to the program. “Let them know how coverage such as this perpetuates a longstanding bias against SIDS families,” she urged.

Connie Chung and her crew had come to upstate New York weeks before, then moved on to Atlanta, where they spent several hours with Steinschneider. Meanwhile, Chung’s segment producer, Patrick Weiland, went on to Chicago to develop an angle of the story suggested to him by Linda Norton in Dallas. It was the provocative case of Deborah Gedzius, who had lost six babies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her husband Delos’s family was convinced the babies had been murdered by their mother, but it appeared that Steinschneider had unwittingly provided her with an alibi, as he had Waneta Hoyt. After the fifth death in 1980, the Gedzius family’s pediatrician, Dr. Eugene Diamond, consulted with Steinschneider, who confirmed that five babies could in fact die of SIDS in one family. Diamond proceeded to write his own paper, adding a new case to the literature. One more child died four years later, as did the babies’ father—he was murdered. His wife collected a $100,000 insurance policy and now owned a bar. Prodded by Delos Gedzius’s family, a new medical examiner changed the cause of death of the six babies to homicide in 1990, naming their mother as the suspect. But the state’s attorney wanted second, third, and fourth opinions. Two of the experts agreed the evidence pointed right at homicide. One of them was Marie Valdes-Dapena. The third consultant said it could very well be murder, but that he could not completely rule out SIDS. This expert was Bruce Beckwith. He based his opinion on Steinschneider’s 1972 paper. The state’s attorney declined to prosecute.

The Eye to Eye segment aired under the title “One by One” and opened with a pastoral view of Highland Cemetery that faded to an aerial shot of Newark Valley. “For more than twenty years, she was known only as Mrs. H.,” Chung narrated, “a mother who, one by one, buried her babies in this cemetery on the hill. In this valley in upstate New York, the mother’s grief was barely noted, nearly forgotten. But in the medical literature, the five H. children are famous—part of a landmark study of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The study helped make its author famous as well.” The scene moved to Atlanta, where Steinschneider was seen showing Chung around his SIDS institute. They sat in his office, where he explained his theory and how it revolutionized SIDS research.

“Your paper has been very influential over a twenty-year period,” Chung said. The camera zoomed in for a tight shot of Steinschneider.

“No, no, that paper …” he stammered. “I’m influential. I’m a big man. Not the paper. The paper was the beginning …”

It was a handy segue to the story of the Gedzius family, a sample of what the paper had wrought. The scene then moved on to Dallas, and a shot of Linda Norton peering into her microscope as Chung’s voice-over explained what the forensic pathologist had to do with the 1972 paper. “It’s a scientific error,” Norton declared on camera. “It should be purged from the literature.” Then on to Syracuse, where Fitzpatrick offered his views of Steinschneider. “His responsibility was to his patients, not to his theory,” he said, glaring. “His patients were Molly and Noah. And Molly and Noah are dead.”

In Atlanta, Chung asked Steinschneider, “Do you think you could have saved the lives of the two babies from the H. family?”

Here, he said something provocative. “Well, obviously, I’ve thought about that. I thought about that the day they died. I thought about it the day after they died. And I’m not sure what I could have done in 1972 or I would have done it.”

“Your paper has been used as evidence that multiple SIDS deaths do occur in one family,” Chung said.

“Those who do, use the paper inappropriately,” Steinschneider said.

“They have misinterpreted your paper?” Chung asked.

“Absolutely. They have misinterpreted the literature.”

Chung told Steinschneider about the Chicago family. “The grandmother in that case calls the paper a ‘license to kill,’ ” she said.

Steinschneider looked genuinely pained. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’m truly sorry to hear that.”

In both her opening and closing, Chung was careful to say that only rarely were unexplained infant deaths caused by homicide. Rarer still were cases of multiple infanticide. “The overwhelming majority of SIDS cases are tragic, natural deaths that baffle doctors and break the parents’ hearts,” she said, introducing a report on the latest research showing that babies put to bed on their backs or sides, rather than on their stomachs, ran a smaller risk of SIDS. The American Academy of Pediatrics, reversing long-held conventional wisdom, had recommended the new sleep position in 1992, after concluding that studies around the world had demonstrated an association between SIDS and the prone position. Preliminary research from Britain and New Zealand, for instance, showed a 50 percent drop in each country’s SIDS rate following public campaigns urging parents to put babies to bed on their backs. The research suggested the downward position facilitated a variety of possible airway obstructions.

Two years after the Academy recommendation—and, coincidentally, two months after the arrest of Waneta Hoyt—the SIDS Alliance and the U.S. government, led by a panel of experts that included John Brooks, launched a national campaign they dubbed “Back to Sleep.” Steinschneider’s SIDS Institute opposed the campaign, saying it was premature. Soon after, he announced that he would be the principal investigator of a new study, involving ten other researchers, looking at the sleep-position question.

He dug in. That October—seven months after the arrest—he and three new followers published a paper in Pediatric Clinics of North America in which they noted how Steinschneider had transformed the SIDS world in 1972 by reporting “his observations of five living infants, two of whom subsequently died of SIDS.” Indeed, even now the apnea theory’s hold on some people was intractable. One mother responded to the reports about Waneta Hoyt’s arrest with an indignant letter to The New York Times. Her daughter was now thirteen and healthy, she wrote, but she would never forget the morning in 1981 when, at four weeks, “she turned deep blue and became like lead in my arms. I knew she was dying.” Oblivious of the apnea mythology to which she had most likely fallen prey, the woman recounted a classic story of new parenthood, circa 1981: how she had rushed her newborn to the nearest emergency room, how the baby had spent three weeks in two hospitals getting “every test in the books,” how nothing was found to be wrong. “The diagnosis was near-miss sudden infant death syndrome,” and her daughter was sent home on a monitor. “For the next year until [she] was declared out of the woods, I slept with my clothes on, ready to run to the hospital.… It was years before I could stop myself from waking several times a night to make sure she was still breathing.” Like many other parents who had similar experiences in those years, she still firmly believed that her baby had almost died that day—“and I still don’t know why.” And so she felt compelled to declare her sympathies for Waneta Hoyt. She had read about her arrest, she said, “with stricken heart, knowing that … I could have been in Mrs. Hoyt’s shoes—handcuffed and accused of murder.”

Steinschneider, meanwhile, sneered at the onslaught of bad press. “I was date-raped by Connie Chung,” he said one day in his office. “I invited them into my living room and I was abused and raped. One shower and I was clean again. The issues they raised are silly and accusatory. I’ve been created by the media. They said I was the most powerful guy, that I wrote a paper in 1972 and nothing happened before or since. It did become important, and I’ve thought about why it had an impact. Lots of people have read it—pediatricians, pathologists, family doctors—and it led to an awful lot of research. It was heuristic. That’s a word I learned in college. The paper led to a lot of learning. Within a year, a paper gets published by Dick Naeye. Heh, slow guy, right? Dr. Richard Naeye, one of the best pathologists in the country. And he said, ‘Hell, if this Dr. Steinschneider guy’s right, then these kids must have chronic hypoxia, and I know what chronic hypoxia does to people. You get scar tissue, you get brown fat, you get thickened pulmonary vessels.’ And he looked at these seven things and said, ‘I found it, it’s there.’ He broke the whole thing. Mine was a rumination. There was no reason to believe it. Naeye was the one who broke it open, back in ’73. He had a series of studies, pow, pow, pow, but he’s busy working, he’s not in show business. He doesn’t go to meetings with a lot of parents, he just goes about his business and does the greatest stuff imaginable. He was the one who made a rather weakly based hypothesis into something solid.”

Jerold Lucey, among others, had a somewhat different historical perspective. Now in his twenty-third year as editor of Pediatrics, he found the arrest of Waneta Hoyt a stunning development. Soon after the arrest, Lucey devoted a page to the controversy under the headline “Very Important Erratum?—20 Years Later.” He included excerpts from two stories about Waneta Hoyt’s arrest that appeared in The New York Times, along with the opening paragraph of John Hick’s 1973 letter and a succinct Editor’s Note: “This is an incredible story. The whole apnea home monitoring to prevent SIDS movement began with Steinschneider’s original paper.” At the bottom of the page, Lucey printed a single reference, poignant in its isolation all these years later.

1. Steinschneider, A. Prolonged apnea and the sudden infant death syndrome: clinical and laboratory observations. Pediatrics. 1972; 50:646.

Science, which had anointed the apnea theory in 1975, also took note of the dramatic development with an unusual news story. The charges against Waneta Hoyt, the magazine suggested, “may be the final blow to the apnea-SIDS theory.” Steinschneider disagreed. “This is a good paper,” he told writer Ginger Pinholster. To Steinschneider’s defense, meanwhile, came the familiar interests, led by Dr. Carl Hunt, head of the Collaborative Home Infant Monitoring Evaluation, the nationwide study being sponsored by the NICHD. In a commentary in Pediatrics, he bristled at the suggestion that a guilty verdict meant the final invalidation of the apnea theory—and hence, by implication, that the vast CHIME project was irrelevant. Hunt also had a connection to the darker side of this story: He and his colleagues at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital had evaluated and sent home on monitors two of the now-dead babies of Delos and Deborah Gedzius. In fact, it was the Chicago doctors’ apnea diagnoses that had made Bruce Beckwith unwilling to say, in 1990, that the Gedzius babies could not have died of SIDS.

The news was received elsewhere in the SIDS world with a mixture of astonishment and recognition—and a new round of hand-wringing over what it meant to parents and pediatricians. “Accepting the Unthinkable” was the title of a meditation in Pediatrics by Doctors George Little and John Brooks, the chairman and one of the members of the 1986 consensus conference, who were now medical colleagues at Dartmouth. Their discussion of the impact of the “new information” about Steinschneider’s H. family brought a response from Vincent DiMaio. That it was murder was “not ‘new information’ to the forensic pathology community,” he wrote with his customary edge of annoyance at his colleagues in pediatrics. “The controversy illustrates the need for better communication between different specialties of medicine.” From England, David Southall wrote that pediatricians had to constantly be on guard against the possibility that Apparent Life Threatening Events were acts of child abuse. There was, finally, the value of simple truth. Better late than never, Bruce Beckwith thought when he heard about the arrest of Waneta Hoyt. By the early 1990s, he had come to realize that the H. children had almost certainly been murdered—and so, too, had the Gedzius babies.

In Tioga County during these months, Judge Vincent Sgueglia was presiding over the various procedural matters leading up to his first murder trial, a considerably more intricate and explosive case than he might have reasonably expected when he took office. Sgueglia was a man fascinated by the faces of human motivation and saw his new job as a window into the struggle between acts of commission and redemption. One day in May, the judge held a brief hearing on Bob Miller’s request to have Ray Urbanski permanently assigned to the Hoyt matter as co-public defender. The case was too complicated for one lawyer, Miller argued, and Sgueglia could not disagree. But the judge also recognized that the prosecution of Waneta Hoyt peeled the cover off a remarkable story that went much deeper than the maneuvers in his courtroom. “What interests me,” Sgueglia confided after Waneta and her regular group of supporters had trudged home to Newark Valley, “is Steinschneider.” A great, relishing smile crossed the judge’s face as he considered a possibility. “Is he going to come and defend his work?”