Fornuto was born in 1955 and lived in Cook County, Illinois, in Chicago and later in Burbank and Alsip.
Between 1972 and 1989 six of her children died in infancy. Each death was certified at the time as sudden infant death syndrome. A seventh death, of a child who was shot, is also carried against her in this roster.
The six infants were Denise Booe, five months; Jennifer Narbone, four months; Barbara Jean Narbone, six months; Jason Gedzius, twelve months; Delos Gedzius Jr, two; and Daniel Gedzius, ten weeks. Her husband Delos Gedzius, thirty-three, also died.
The pattern was noticed and investigated. Medical examiners in Cook County reviewed the deaths together, and the case was reported in the Chicago press as a possible series. No charge was ever brought.
She died in a car crash near Las Vegas on July 11, 2002.
This entry has to be read with the caution this archive applies to every repeat infant death case, and more so, because here there is no conviction, no confession and no medical finding of homicide in any of the six. What exists is a sequence, and a sequence is not proof. The English cases of the 1990s and Kathleen Folbigg's in Australia were both built on the improbability of exactly this pattern, and Folbigg's convictions were quashed twenty years later when genetic evidence explained it.
Six infant deaths in one family across seventeen years is a fact. What caused them was never established by anybody, and this entry does not assert it. She is recorded here as never charged, which is the whole of the legal record.