Joshua Kibble was seventeen months old when he died in Houston on August 4, 1986. His mother, Claudette, was fourteen. Two years later, on July 1, 1988, her son Edward died at seven months. On February 23, 1990, Quentin died at nine months. She had five babies in those years. Three of them died, and each time she said the death was natural.
Five years passed after Quentin's death before the three were looked at together. In 1995 she confessed. She said she had drowned two of her sons and suffocated the third, and that she had tried to suffocate a fourth child, who survived.
No psychiatric defense was ever raised. She pleaded guilty. The Houston Chronicle, summarizing the case years later, wrote that she was twenty-three and took the plea in exchange for a life sentence; court records give her sentence as three terms of fifteen years to life, imposed on January 14, 1997. The two accounts differ on her age at the plea as well as the form of the sentence, and the records read do not reconcile them.
The confession is almost the whole of the public record. Which of the boys was drowned and which smothered, what the death certificates said at the time, who first put the three deaths side by side, and what became of the child who survived are not set out in the reporting found. What is on the record is the arithmetic: a girl who had her first child at about thirteen, lost him at fourteen, and by nineteen had buried three.