Each of the cases below begins with a classification written down at the time: natural causes, sudden infant death syndrome, seizures, heart failure, undetermined. Each was later revised, sometimes years afterward, and the revision has never fully satisfied everyone with a stake in it. In some a court has settled the question as far as a court can. In others it settled only one death out of several, and the rest sit between a suspicion and a finding.
Convictions stand unless a court has quashed them, and none of those mentioned here has been quashed. A death that no court has ruled on is an open question, however firmly an investigator, a relative or a writer has spoken about it. Where a doubt is described below, it belongs to the person who voiced it.
Between 1965 and 1971 five children born to Waneta Hoyt and her husband in rural Tioga County, New York, died one after another. None of the deaths was treated as a crime; each was put down to sudden infant death syndrome, known as SIDS. In 1972 a Syracuse researcher, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, published a medical journal article in which, Time reported, he proposed that a genetic defect causing prolonged apnea, pauses in breathing during sleep, could lead to SIDS, and he included detailed accounts of five deaths in one family. The two youngest children appeared in the article as "MH" and "NH," and the article presented their deaths as strong evidence that the syndrome could run in families, a wire report in The Spokesman-Review said in 1995.
The theory proved influential. Great American Trials, a reference work on major court cases, says that Steinschneider’s theory and the prevention methods that grew from it won broad acceptance in pediatrics. The NYU review says the apnea theory drew millions of dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health, and that monitors were sold to parents as a way to prevent SIDS without proof that they did so.
Not everyone accepted the deaths as natural. Some nurses and pediatricians who saw the Hoyt children questioned their mother’s attachment to them and suggested at the time that the deaths were not natural, but their concerns were not acted on, according to the NYU review. Several nurses who cared for the children later testified for the prosecution about the suspicions they had held, Great American Trials records.
The wider question of how to tell crib death from homicide was argued among specialists for years. Dr. Vincent Di Maio, then the medical examiner in San Antonio, told Time in 1994 that two SIDS deaths in one family was improbable and three was impossible, and that parents who killed for attention usually went on until they were caught or had no children left. Time noted that a killing of that kind is almost impossible to tell apart from SIDS on a pathologist’s table. Dr. Michael Baden, director of the forensic sciences unit of the New York State Police, told Time that a long history of babies brought to hospitals barely breathing was not the pattern of SIDS, in which children usually had no serious earlier problems.
The case was reopened because of a prosecutor in a neighboring county. William Fitzpatrick, later the district attorney of Onondaga County, first read the 1972 article while working on an unrelated infant death case, Time reported. The article was given to him by Dr. Linda Norton, a medical examiner from Texas who was assisting on that case and who doubted Steinschneider’s conclusions. She told him that once he read it he might decide he had a serial killer on his hands. The article identified the family only by initials, but Fitzpatrick traced them through county medical records, Time said. In 1992, by then Onondaga County’s district attorney, he took his suspicions to the Tioga County district attorney, Robert J. Simpson, Great American Trials records. After reviewing the old medical records, Simpson and Fitzpatrick concluded that the children had most likely been killed by their mother.
The New York State Police took over the investigation. Police invited Hoyt to take part in what she was told was a SIDS research project, according to a 2011 review of a casebook by the forensic psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. During the interview with officers she admitted killing her five children in March 1994. She was charged on March 23, 1994, with ten counts of second-degree murder, two for each child. She later withdrew the statement, and her defense argued that it had been made under duress. Ewing, as quoted by the University at Buffalo, called the questioning "intense and calculated."
The arrest came at a time of growing unease about how readily SIDS was recorded as a cause of death. Time reported in April 1994 that medical examiners, police and prosecutors believed the label was too easily applied, and that estimates of the share of the 7,000 to 8,000 SIDS deaths recorded each year in the United States that might have other causes, murder among them, ranged from 1 percent to 20 percent. Great American Trials adds that the same experts stressed that most SIDS deaths are genuine and most parents who lose a baby are not killers.
At the trial in Owego the prosecution’s forensic pathologist testified that all five children had been deliberately killed. "There are no natural conditions, including sudden infant death, that can explain the deaths," he said, as Great American Trials records his testimony. The main defense witness was Steinschneider himself. He testified that the two deaths he had studied were consistent with SIDS, and he told the Associated Press later that he still believed SIDS had caused the deaths. Under cross-examination, though, he conceded that he did not know how thoroughly the police had looked for signs of foul play, and that for all he knew the children could have been killed.
Ewing, retained by Hoyt’s lawyers, assessed whether she had knowingly waived her Miranda rights and whether her confession was voluntary. He spent 21 hours with her in face-to-face evaluation and testing, the University at Buffalo reported. Like each case in his book, Ewing said, it came down to a battle of experts, with an opposing expert giving a contrary opinion.
On April 21, 1995, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on five counts of murder, one for each child. The judge imposed 15 years for each child, 75 years in all. Hoyt died of pancreatic cancer in prison in 1998, about three years into the sentence. The researcher whose article had made the deaths famous, for his part, told the Associated Press that he still believed SIDS had caused them.
Marybeth Tinning was convicted in July 1987 of murdering her daughter Tami Lynne, who was four months old. The baby died on December 20, 1985, in Schenectady, New York. A jury convicted her of murder in the second degree under the theory of depraved indifference to human life, while acquitting her of intentional murder. She was sentenced on October 1, 1987, to 20 years to life.
Tami Lynne was the ninth of Tinning’s children to die young. The eight before her had died between January 1972 and March 1981, and their deaths were recorded at the time as natural or unexplained: respiratory failure, cardiorespiratory arrest, brain edema, sudden infant death syndrome, acute pulmonary edema, cardiopulmonary arrest or unknown causes, the Daily Gazette and UPI reported in 1986. One of the nine, Michael, was a boy the family was in the process of adopting. Three of the children died within about two months of one another in early 1972, and some of the deaths were at first thought to stem from a possible genetic defect, the Daily Gazette reported.
The deaths did not go unnoticed. Richard E. Nelson, the Schenectady police chief, told the Daily Gazette in 1986 that three of the earlier deaths had been investigated fully and that the finding each time had been natural causes. "It’s a very, very difficult type of case to detect and prove and prosecute," he said. "We just could not prove it scientifically. What do you do when you can’t prove it?" UPI reported that the earlier investigations had reached dead ends because the deaths were always attributed to natural causes. District Attorney John B. Poersch said he was not embarrassed that the authorities had been unable to make an arrest sooner. Dr. Robert Sullivan, the Schenectady County chief medical examiner, at first believed Tami Lynne had died of SIDS, as he had concluded in two of the earlier deaths, UPI reported. Because of the family’s history he ordered further laboratory studies. The appellate court later summarized the medical sequence: preliminary reports suggested SIDS or a genetic abnormality, but after further study, laboratory tests and consultations, the medical authorities concluded that she had not died of natural causes.
In February 1986, after questioning that began at the request of police, Tinning gave a statement in which she admitted causing the deaths of Tami Lynne and of two of her sons, Timothy in 1973 and Nathan in 1975, and said she had done nothing to five of the others named in it. She was never charged in any death but Tami Lynne’s. At the trial the dispute was about two things: how the baby had died, and what the statement was worth. For the prosecution, Dr. Thomas F. D. Oram, a Schenectady pathologist, testified, and the jury concluded that the baby had not died naturally. For the defense, Dr. Jack N. P. Davies, an Albany pathologist, attributed the death to Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome, a rare inherited childhood form of progressive paralysis. The defense also offered SIDS as a natural explanation.
At first the judge admitted the statement in a redacted form, with the references to six of the children removed, so that the jury heard only the lines about Timothy, Nathan and Tami Lynne. When the defense put on medical evidence that the children had died of natural causes, the court ruled that the whole unredacted statement, describing all nine deaths, could be read. Her husband testified that in a five-minute conversation after her questioning she had said to him, "I killed Tami," according to UPI. Tinning, then 44, showed no reaction to the acquittal on the first count but appeared stunned by the guilty verdict on the second. Her husband said the jury "did its job," but he held a different opinion.
The Appellate Division, Third Department, affirmed the conviction on December 29, 1988, holding that the statements had been properly admitted. The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, denied leave to appeal on April 17, 1989, making the conviction final. Tinning was refused parole at six hearings, in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. In 2011 the Daily Gazette reported her telling the board that she had been "messed up" when she killed her child; she has said she harmed no other child. She was granted parole after a hearing on July 10, 2018, and released from Taconic Correctional Facility on August 21, 2018, after 31 years. The record therefore holds one proven death out of nine. For Joseph, Barbara, Mary Frances, Jonathan and Michael, police suspected her, she was never charged, and she never admitted harming them. The first child, Jennifer, was never treated as suspicious by the authorities. For Timothy and Nathan she gave a statement that she later contested.
Claudette Kibble was 23 when she was charged with murder in Houston in September 1995. The charge concerned the 1990 death of her nine-month-old son, Quinten. By then, according to the Associated Press, she had confessed to the deaths of three of her sons, two of whom died while she was still a child herself. Authorities said she was not charged in those two earlier deaths because she was a minor when they happened.
The deaths passed through the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office, which was run at the time by Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, the county’s chief medical examiner for about 35 years. Dr. Eduardo Bellas examined Joshua, 17 months old when he died in August 1986, and ruled that he had died of natural causes, as a result of epilepsy, and the case was closed. The office later ruled Edward’s death in 1988 natural as well and listed the cause of Quinten’s death as undetermined, the Houston Press reported. Each death had first been attributed to seizures.
Investigators suspected foul play in all three deaths for years, the Associated Press reported, but could not prove anything. The medical examiner’s office reopened the cases several times after 1990 at prosecutors' request, and the children showed no signs of abuse that would prove she had harmed them.
The pressure came from several directions. According to the Houston Press, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, the Houston Police Department and Children’s Protective Services all urged the medical examiner’s office to change its rulings, and it would not. In 1990 Marie Munier, then head of the district attorney’s child abuse division, asked Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the chief medical examiner of Bexar County, to review the files. Di Maio confirmed to the Houston Press that he had reviewed them; the paper reported that he was dismayed by the rulings, particularly in the second and third deaths, and that he believed the third should have been called a homicide.
District Attorney Johnny Holmes told the Houston Press that prosecutors were bound by the medical examiner’s rulings unless they could persuade the office to reconsider. Dr. Bellas defended the findings, saying there was not enough information to rule any of the three deaths a homicide without a confession or a witness. Cecil Wingo, chief investigator for the medical examiner’s office, said officials had known something was wrong but had not known where to look. Judy Hay, a spokeswoman for Children’s Protective Services, told the Associated Press that the agency had been suspicious from the beginning but that, without evidence, and especially without a medical examiner’s finding, its hands were tied.
The rulings turned on a confession, made first to her own mother, who told the authorities. The Associated Press reported that Kibble then admitted to investigators that she had killed all three boys. Sergeant David Ferguson of the Houston Police Department declined to discuss her account in detail, and later told the Houston Press that he did not believe the cases would have been cleared without her confessions. In September 1995, after the confession and after the murder charge was filed, the medical examiner’s office ruled all three deaths homicides.
In January 1996 the Houston Press reported that she had been held in a county jail since her arrest and was expected to go to trial that spring. Her lawyer, Ricardo Rodriguez, said she had neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the deaths and would plead not guilty. He planned to call the three pathologists as the first defense witnesses, arguing that they could not establish how the children had died. How the case ended, by plea, verdict or sentence, has not been reported. The case became part of a wider public argument over the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office. When the paper reported on it in January 1996, Dr. Bellas was serving as acting chief medical examiner while a county committee interviewed candidates for the permanent post, among them Dr. Di Maio.
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 left. 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.
The Perry case showed the older classification at work. Jennifer Daniels was eight months old and died in July 1981 while in Falling’s care. Her death was first attributed to sudden infant death syndrome, and a Taylor County indictment later accused Falling of killing her. 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.
One death was never charged at all. Wilbur Swindle, an elderly man who had hired Falling as a housekeeper, died in a way that was not treated as suspicious at first. 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, and in 1982 a deputy linked it to her by testimony. The 2017 reports said she later confessed to killing a man on her first day as his housekeeper. UPI gave his age as 77 in 1982, and the 2017 reports as 70. No charge over his death was reported. The 2017 reports also noted that the charges might never have been filed if she had not confessed, and that the first four children who died, and the elderly man, were at first thought to have died of natural causes, which changed only with the last child’s death. She was turned down for parole on November 29, 2017.
Orville Lynn Majors was a licensed practical nurse in the four-bed intensive care unit of Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, a small city in west-central Indiana near the Illinois line. He worked there from 1993 to 1995. In those years deaths in the unit rose sharply. A 1997 newspaper report, summarized by the Greene County Daily World in 2009, put the yearly number of deaths in the unit at 24 to 31 in the early 1990s and at 101 in 1994, while admissions stayed about the same. Unusual deaths had first been noticed in 1993, soon after Majors was hired, the Daily World reported.
The criminal inquiry ran for about 33 months, examined 165 deaths at the hospital from 1993 to 1995 and cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Daily World. Investigators estimated it at 90,000 hours of work. An epidemiologist, Steven Lamm, studied the figures and calculated that a patient in the unit was nearly 43 times more likely to die when Majors was on duty than when he was not. Court records showed one death for every 23.1 hours of his shifts, against one for every 551.6 hours when he was off, the Daily World reported. A rural resident who knew Majors told the paper that the talk of an "Angel of Death," the name the press gave him during the investigation, "made the town crazy." The owner of a downtown restaurant in Linton said that many of his patrons never believed the charges, while others were not surprised.
On October 17, 1999, a jury in Brazil, Indiana, convicted Majors of murdering six patients in his care. The Associated Press reported that the six deaths fell within a 13-month span between 1993 and 1995, and on November 15, 1999, the judge, Ernest Yelton, named the patients at sentencing: Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon (spelled Dixon in the AP report), Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith. He imposed six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years in all. The jury deadlocked on a seventh count. Statistical studies linked him to as many as 130 of the 147 intensive care deaths from May 1993 to March 1995, but those studies were kept out of the trial and were never tested before a jury, and no other deaths were charged. Investigators believed that he may have been responsible for many more deaths at the hospital, more than 100 between 1993 and 1995 by some estimates.
The record is not consistent about which patients the verdicts covered. A 2009 Daily World article listed the six patients in the case differently from the AP’s sentencing report, and a 2017 WTHR report said the jury deadlocked on the death of Cecil Smith. Which patient was the subject of the deadlocked count is therefore unclear. Majors denied every accusation until his death. On September 24, 2017, he became unresponsive while being escorted to a medical appointment at the Indiana State Prison and was pronounced dead at a Michigan City hospital. He was 56. Preliminary results showed heart problems, and the Indiana Department of Correction said he died of natural causes. The six convictions are the only findings of guilt.
Stella Elizabeth Williamson spent her whole life in the borough of Gallitzin, in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. She was born in 1904, never married and died in late August 1980 at the age of 76. Within days a sealed letter she had written two decades earlier was opened, and on September 2, 1980, authorities learned of five infants in Gallitzin. They were her own children, born and dead between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, according to later accounts in The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown and the Altoona Mirror. None had lived to a first birthday.
After a forensic examination, three of the deaths were ruled homicides; the cause of the other two was recorded as undetermined. Investigators read her letter as a kind of confession. Because she had died before anyone knew of the children, she was never arrested or charged, and no court ever heard the case. The letter also named a man. Authorities withheld his name. When they tried to interview him in October 1980 he was too ill to speak or write, and the commander of the state police barracks that handled the case said there was never any hint that he had any part in the deaths. Cambria County Coroner John Barron said investigators had arrived "a year too late" to question him.
The rulings, reported again by the Altoona Mirror in July 2025, are the official findings on how the five children died. In 2025 two Mount Aloysius College faculty members, a criminologist and a historian, spoke about the case at a Beaverdale Public Library event, The Tribune-Democrat reported. The two had been gathering old newspaper articles and records, and the historian hoped to collect oral histories from people who still remembered the town in those years. She said many of the questions would likely never be answered, but that the story was worth preserving while people who remembered it were still alive. The Altoona Mirror’s own editorial that month called the case a mystery destined to stay one. The official record consists of the rulings that three of the deaths were homicides and two were of undetermined cause, and of a letter that investigators read as a kind of confession without saying for certain that she caused the deaths or acted alone. No court ever made a finding about her.
In the space of about six weeks in early 1979, three women in Buenos Aires who had handed their savings to the same acquaintance died one after another. Each death was first put down to natural causes. The acquaintance was Yiya Murano, a lawyer’s wife who lived in the Monserrat district near the city center and who had been taking money from friends, neighbors and relatives on the promise that she could make it grow. After the third woman died, her daughter went to the police, tests were ordered, and on April 27, 1979, Murano was arrested.
The first death, that of Nilda Gamba, a neighbor, came on February 11, 1979. The doctor who had treated her refused to sign a death certificate, saying he had not been the last to attend her. A doctor attached to the funeral service signed it instead, for a tip, according to the Noticias Argentinas account and Infobae, and gave the cause as a non-traumatic cardiac arrest. Because the death was certified as natural, there was no post-mortem examination. Diario UNO reported in 2019 that a doctor was later prosecuted, without giving further detail. The second woman, Lelia Formisano de Ayala, a family friend, died later in February. Once again a funeral-service doctor certified a natural death, this time a non-traumatic myocardial infarction, and once again no examination followed, Infobae reported. The Buenos Aires Herald reported that Murano helped the families of both of the first two women obtain certificates that listed natural causes.
The third death came on March 24, 1979, the third anniversary of the military coup. Carmen del Giorgio de Venturini, Murano’s second cousin, known as Mema, fell ill and died the same day. Murano had visited her earlier that day, according to Infobae and Minuto Uno. The Noticias Argentinas account says that Murano arrived as neighbors were helping her cousin, asked whether Mema had said anything before she lost consciousness, and later asked the doctor whether an examination of the body would be needed. C5N described her reaction to the news of the death as theatrical surprise.
The daughter then saw that the other two women had died in much the same way and had also been owed money by Murano. She went to the police. A judge ordered forensic examinations. The findings differed from one death to another, according to the Noticias Argentinas account and Diario UNO, and only Mema del Giorgio’s death was classified as a killing. The tests on the other two women were inconclusive, because such compounds can form during decomposition and it could not be said for certain whether the compound had been taken in life. Other reports, among them Minuto Uno and La Gaceta, say it was present in all three. Infobae wrote that the examination of one of the three confirmed it. That disagreement has survived into the way the case is told today.
Criminal trials in Buenos Aires were then conducted in writing, without oral hearings, Minuto Uno noted. On June 15, 1982, according to C5N, Judge Ángel Mercado, who had replaced Judge Perés, acquitted Murano of homicide and fraud for lack of proof. Other reports date the acquittal only to June 1982. She was released at once. The acquittal was appealed, La Capital reported, and the case went to the third chamber, Sala III, of the Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Criminal y Correccional in Buenos Aires. The chamber overturned the acquittal and sentenced her to life imprisonment for the three homicides, aggravated under article 80, subsection 2, of the Penal Code, together with fraud, which C5N reported as three counts in "material concurrence." Under the Penal Code, Minuto Uno pointed out, a homicide so aggravated carries only one possible penalty, life imprisonment.
The date of the ruling differs between sources. C5N gives May 16, 1985, as the day the chamber reversed the acquittal. The Noticias Argentinas account, Diario UNO and La Capital of Rosario date the life sentence to June 28, 1985 (La Capital to June 1985). Minuto Uno describes June 28, 1985, as the day the chamber notified its final decision, rejecting an extraordinary appeal and making the life sentence final. Diario UNO’s 2019 account names the three judges of Sala III as José Massoni, Oscar Ocampo and Pablo Laoumugne. By then, the Noticias Argentinas account notes, the country’s attention was on the trial of the former military juntas, and Murano had been largely forgotten. Minuto Uno reported that police could not find her at the places she was known to go, that she was reported as a fugitive for a few days, and that she then gave herself up. She was about 54 when she went back to prison, according to C5N. "I never invited anyone to eat," she said, in the words reported by several outlets. The sentence was later reduced and she left prison in the 1990s, Infobae reported; she spent the rest of her life giving interviews and television appearances in which she denied killing anyone, and died in a Buenos Aires residence for the elderly in 2014, on April 26 according to Infobae, C5N, Diario UNO and La Gaceta, or on June 23 according to Noticias Argentinas and La Capital.
Beyond the three convictions, the claims multiply. Police investigators in 1979 spoke of ten or more possible victims, Infobae reported, but only three cases were brought. In 2026 her son said on a television program that three older women with money ties to his mother had died in what he called mysterious circumstances before the 1979 deaths, El Litoral reported; he gave no names or dates and the claim has not been tested in court. La Capital reported in 2023 that he suspected seven to eleven victims, perhaps more. Diario UNO’s 2019 account relays a 2016 report that a married couple to whom she owed money may also have died at her hands. None of these deaths has been charged or proven. Even the origin of the case is contested: most accounts say Mema del Giorgio’s daughter went to the police, while a 2006 Infobae report said Murano’s own son had turned her in.
Set side by side, the cases show how many different things "disputed" can mean. In the Hoyt case a court reached a verdict and the scientist whose theory the deaths had supported still said, afterward, that the cause was SIDS. In the Tinning case the dispute is arithmetic: nine children died, one death was proven in court, two more were admitted in a statement she contested, and five were suspected and never charged. In the Kibble case the argument was between institutions, a medical examiner’s office that would not change its rulings without a confession and the prosecutors, police and child-protection workers who wanted it to. The Falling and Majors cases are about the deaths that were not charged at all: an elderly man whose cause of death had not been determined as of November 1982, and a larger set of hospital deaths that statistical studies linked to one nurse but that no jury was permitted to weigh. The Williamson case is the extreme, five deaths that a coroner’s office has classified and no court has ever examined. In Murano’s case the disagreement is partly about science, since reports differ about what the tests on the first two women showed, and partly about numbers, since the figures offered for her possible victims run from three to eleven.
None of those arguments is likely to be settled by a new fact. They persist because the evidence is what it is: a classification written at the time, a statement made in an interview room, an expert who holds a different view from another expert, and a person who is no longer alive to be asked.
• Mid-1920s to early 1930s: the five infants born to Stella Williamson die in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania.
• 1965 to 1971: five children born to Waneta Hoyt die in Tioga County, New York; each is attributed to SIDS.
• 1972: Dr. Alfred Steinschneider publishes the article that uses two of the deaths as evidence that SIDS may run in families.
• January 1972 to March 1981: eight of Marybeth Tinning’s children die; the deaths are recorded as natural or unexplained.
• February 1979 to March 24, 1979: three women in Buenos Aires die within about six weeks; each is first certified as natural.
• April 27, 1979: Yiya Murano arrested.
• 1980 to July 1982: five young children die in Christine Falling’s care.
• August 1980: Stella Williamson dies; her letter is opened.
• September 2, 1980: authorities learn of five infants in Gallitzin.
• June 1982: Murano acquitted for lack of proof.
• December 3, 1982: Falling pleads guilty to two murders.
• 1985: Murano’s acquittal reversed; life imprisonment (May 16 or June 28).
• December 20, 1985: Tami Lynne Tinning dies; February 1986, Tinning gives a statement.
• July 1987: Tinning convicted of second-degree murder in Tami Lynne’s death; sentenced October 1, 1987.
• 1990: Quinten Kibble dies; the medical examiner lists the cause as undetermined.
• 1993 to 1995: deaths in the Clinton, Indiana, intensive care unit rise while Orville Lynn Majors works there.
• March 1994: Hoyt confesses to state police and is charged March 23.
• April 21, 1995: Hoyt convicted on five counts.
• September 1995: Kibble charged with murder; the medical examiner rules all three deaths homicides.
• 1998: Hoyt dies in prison.
• October 17, 1999: Majors convicted of six murders.
• 2014: Yiya Murano dies.
• September 24, 2017: Majors dies in custody.
• August 21, 2018: Tinning released on parole.