Christine Falling was a teenage babysitter in the Florida Panhandle when, over about two years, five young children died while she was looking after them. Most of those deaths were at first put down to natural causes. That changed in July 1982, when a baby boy died in her care in Blountstown, the Calhoun County town she came from. She agreed to a psychiatric evaluation, spent a week in a mental health unit in Tallahassee, and was arrested as soon as she walked out. While she was there, according to United Press International, she was alleged to have confessed to killing all five children.
She was 19 when she pleaded guilty, in a Blountstown courtroom on December 3, 1982, to the murders of two of those children, Cassidy "Muffin" Johnson and Travis DeWayne Coleman. A judge gave her two life sentences, with at least 25 years to serve before release. A third murder charge, in the death of an infant in Perry, was still pending that day. Reports in 2017 say she pleaded guilty to killing three children in all and that, in return, the state did not pursue charges in the deaths of two others and did not seek the death penalty. Falling was turned down for parole in November 2017.
Little about Falling's early life appears in contemporary news reports. In 1982, UPI described her as a seventh-grade dropout from Blountstown. In 2017 two Florida television stations, WJHG in Panama City and WJXT in Jacksonville, carried the same report on her parole hearing. It said that as a child she was reported to have strangled cats or dropped them from high places, and that her stepfather adopted her when she was four. In 1982 he defended her, saying she was a lover of children. "I still say that," he said.
The children who died in her care were all very young: the assistant state attorney who spoke against her parole in 2017 put their ages at between two months and four years.
The first child named in the charges was Cassidy Johnson, a two-year-old from Blountstown known as Muffin. She died in February 1980. Her death was not treated as a crime at the time. By September 1982 Falling was under indictment, accused of killing her by strangulation or suffocation.
In February 1981 two Lakeland children died while she was babysitting them, according to UPI. She was never formally charged in either death. By the end of 1982 prosecutors intended to use evidence about the Lakeland deaths in the Perry and Blountstown cases, and one of her defense lawyers had been due to take pretrial depositions about them before that meeting was canceled at the last minute.
The 2017 reports said that the state's decision not to pursue charges in the deaths of two children who had died in her care was part of the arrangement under which she pleaded guilty.
Jennifer Daniels was eight months old and lived in Perry, in Taylor County. She died in July 1981 while in Falling's care. Her death was first attributed to sudden infant death syndrome. A Taylor County indictment later accused Falling of killing her by strangulation or suffocation.
At a pretrial deposition hearing in Perry, reported by UPI on November 3, 1982, an investigator from the state attorney's office, Larry Williams, testified that Falling had told her sister she killed the Daniels baby. According to his testimony, Falling said she wanted her sister to hear it from her before she read about it in the newspapers. Williams also testified that her sister asked Falling why she would sit there and look out the window. The Daniels trial was then scheduled to begin on December 14, 1982.
The same Perry hearing brought a sixth death into the case. Hugh Poppell, a deputy with the Taylor County Sheriff's Department, testified that Wilbur G. Swindle, 77, had been found dead on January 4, on the same day he hired Falling as his housekeeper, and that she appeared to have been the only person with him when he died. The year was not reported. Poppell testified that Mr. Swindle was known to keep large sums of money and to bury it, and that ground around his house had been dug up.
His death had not been treated as suspicious at first. His body was exhumed in the summer of 1982 after a relative gave investigators photographs taken of him, and those photographs were admitted as evidence at the hearing. As of November 1982 the cause of his death had not been determined, UPI reported. No charge over his death was reported. The 2017 reports said she later confessed to killing a man on her first day as his housekeeper; they give his age as 70.
Travis DeWayne Coleman was a baby in Blountstown. UPI gave his age as two months in September and November 1982 and as 10 weeks in December. He died on July 3, 1982, while Falling was looking after him. His was the death that brought charges.
After the Coleman baby died, Falling agreed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. She spent about a week at Goodwood Manor, a mental health unit at Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. It was during that stay that she was alleged to have confessed to killing all five children, UPI reported. She was arrested as soon as she left the hospital in late July 1982 and taken to the Calhoun County jail, where she was held without bond.
The 2017 reports noted that the charges might never have been filed if she had not confessed. They also said that the first four children who died, and the elderly man, were at first thought to have died of natural causes, and that this changed only with the last child's death.
By late September 1982 Falling was under indictment in three of the five children's deaths. In the Blountstown cases she was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, accused of killing Cassidy Johnson in February 1980 and Travis Coleman on July 3, 1982, by strangulation or suffocation. She pleaded innocent to both, and her Blountstown trial was set for November 8. In Taylor County she was charged with murder in the July 1981 death of Jennifer Daniels. Rather than appear at an arraignment in Perry, she entered a written plea of innocent in that case.
Her defense team had three lawyers, among them Philip Padovano. They argued that the Perry case against her was especially weak, so the order of the trials mattered to them. In the week before December 3, 1982, Judge W. L. Bailey, who was presiding over the Blountstown cases, moved their trial date from January 24 to December 27. That put the Blountstown cases ahead of the Perry case. Her lawyers accused Bailey of helping the prosecution arrange the order of the trials to its advantage and asked him to step aside. He did so that Monday, and Judge Larry A. Bodiford of Panama City was assigned to the Blountstown cases.
On December 3, 1982, Falling appeared before Bodiford at a hearing that had been called to argue over the trial dates. Instead she entered what UPI called a surprise plea of guilty to the two Blountstown murders, those of Cassidy Johnson and Travis Coleman. Bodiford sentenced her to two life terms. She would have to serve at least 25 years. On that day she still faced the Taylor County charge in the death of Jennifer Daniels. Reporting from that December, the 2017 accounts quoted her describing how one of the children died: "I choked her till she quit breathing and she'd turned purple."
In 2017 the Panama City and Jacksonville stations reported that Falling was 19 when she pleaded guilty to killing three children, that the state did not pursue charges in the deaths of two other children who died in her care, and that it did not seek the death penalty. When and how the Taylor County charge was resolved was not reported.
After serving 25 years, Falling became eligible for parole, and under the law she remained eligible. On November 29, 2017, a parole panel in Tallahassee considered her case and denied her release. No one appeared on her behalf.
Joy Powell, an assistant state attorney in Perry, told the panel that Falling deserved no mercy. "This woman killed five babies from age two months to four years old," Powell said. She told the panel that Falling had said she did not know why she did it, and that she "just did it the way she saw on TV." The panel set her presumptive release date in the year 2254 and scheduled her next hearing for seven years later.
After the November 29, 2017, hearing, Falling remained in custody, with a presumptive release date of 2254 and a further parole hearing due seven years later.
The courts found, on her own guilty pleas, that Falling murdered Cassidy Johnson and Travis Coleman. The 2017 reports say she pleaded guilty to a third child's murder, and the only other indictment reported in 1982 was in Jennifer Daniels's death; how that charge ended has not been reported.
The deaths of the two Lakeland children were never charged. Falling was a suspect in them, and she was alleged to have confessed to killing all five children during her hospital stay in 1982. In 2017 the prosecutor at her parole hearing said plainly that Falling killed five babies. That was the state's position at a parole hearing, not a court finding.
Wilbur Swindle's death was never charged. In 1982 a deputy linked it to her by testimony, and the cause of death had not been determined. The 2017 reports said she later confessed to it. They put the man's age at 70; UPI, writing in 1982, gave it as 77.
February 1980: Cassidy "Muffin" Johnson, 2, dies in Blountstown.
February 1981: two children die in Lakeland while in Falling's care; she is never charged.
July 1981: Jennifer Daniels, 8 months, of Perry, dies; her death is first attributed to sudden infant death syndrome.
January 4 (year not reported): Wilbur G. Swindle, 77, is found dead on the day he hired Falling as his housekeeper.
July 3, 1982: Travis DeWayne Coleman, an infant, dies in Blountstown.
July 1982: Falling spends about a week at Goodwood Manor in Tallahassee for a voluntary psychiatric evaluation; she is alleged to have confessed there; she is arrested in late July on leaving the hospital.
Summer 1982: Mr. Swindle's body is exhumed.
September 1982: under indictment in three deaths; pleads innocent to two first-degree murder charges in Calhoun County and, in writing, to the Daniels charge in Taylor County.
November 1982 (reported November 3): at a pretrial hearing in Perry, a deputy links her to Mr. Swindle's death and an investigator testifies that she told her sister she killed the Daniels baby.
The week before December 3, 1982: Judge W. L. Bailey moves the Blountstown trial date, then steps aside; Judge Larry A. Bodiford is assigned.
December 3, 1982: pleads guilty to the murders of Cassidy Johnson and Travis Coleman; two life sentences, with a 25-year minimum.
November 29, 2017: parole denied in Tallahassee; presumptive release date set in 2254; next hearing set for seven years later.