On February 25, 1980, two-year-old Cassidy Marie Johnson, known as Muffin, was brought to a doctor's office in Blountstown, in the Florida Panhandle, desperately ill. She was diagnosed with encephalitis and died on February 28. The autopsy found blunt force trauma to her skull. The sixteen-year-old who had been babysitting her, Christine Falling, said Cassidy had passed out and fallen from her crib. The doctor did not believe her and sent a note to the police asking them to look into it. According to court documents, the note never arrived. Years later Falling described that night: "Well, it was about, I'd say about 8:30. She got kind of rowdy or something. Anyway, I choked her until she quit breathing, and she had turned purple."
She had been born Christine Laverne Slaughter in Perry, Florida, on March 12, 1963, the youngest child of a family below the poverty line; her father, Thomas, was sixty-five and her mother, Ann, sixteen. She was put in an orphanage at three and later adopted, returned to institutional care after alleging abuse by her adoptive father, left school in the seventh grade, had seizures, attempted suicide more than once, and was briefly married at fourteen. In two years she was taken to the hospital some fifty times without doctors finding anything treatable; she complained of red dots before her eyes and of irregular bleeding. To make money she babysat for neighbors and friends.
Nobody stopped hiring her. In February 1981 two cousins in her care died within days of each other, Jeffrey Davis, four, and Joseph Spring, two; the deaths were put down to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, and to a viral infection. Joseph died hours after she had agreed, at Jeffrey's funeral, to babysit for his family. In July 1981 eight-month-old Jennifer Daniels died while her mother left her briefly in Falling's care in the car to buy groceries, and the death was ruled sudden infant death syndrome. After the fourth death, Falling told a reporter she had vowed to stay away from children. "Sometimes I wonder if I don't have some kind of spell over me when I get around young 'uns," she said.
There was another death that was only tied to her later. Wilbur Swindle, seventy-seven, died of what looked like a heart attack on her first day working as his housekeeper.
In July 1982 Travis DeWayne Coleman, an infant, died in her custody; accounts give his age as two months or ten. This time an autopsy found internal injuries consistent with suffocation. Falling was admitted to a psychiatric unit in Tallahassee, where she was arrested. Under questioning she admitted smothering the children, pressing blankets over their faces, and said voices had told her to do it. State Attorney Jim Appleman charged her first with the murders of Cassidy Johnson and Travis Coleman, by strangulation, suffocation or both.
She pleaded guilty to the murders of Cassidy Johnson, Jennifer Daniels and Travis Coleman, and on December 3, 1982, received three concurrent life sentences. In exchange, prosecutors did not pursue the deaths of Jeffrey Davis, Joseph Spring or Wilbur Swindle.
She has since been refused parole repeatedly. At a hearing in November 2017 the Florida Parole Commission turned her down unanimously; prosecutors, among them State Attorney Amira Fox, spoke of the families' continuing loss and of what they called her lack of genuine remorse, and no one appeared to speak for her. As of late 2025 she remained at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala with a projected release date in the year 2254.
Five of the six deaths were first recorded as natural: encephalitis, myocarditis, a viral infection, sudden infant death and a heart attack. The one doctor who suspected otherwise, after the first, sent a note that never reached the police.