On April 27, 1990, Cook County's medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, wrote to the state's attorney's office about six children who had died in infancy over fifteen years, all of them born to the same mother. "After careful consideration, it is my opinion that all of the deaths were caused by suffocation, and the manner of death is homicide," he wrote. Then nothing happened. Stein never changed the death certificates. The assistant state's attorney he wrote to, Bill Merritt, said years later that he never read the letter; he left the office two months afterward and thought he had probably handed it, unopened, to an assistant. "If I certainly had ever seen that letter, that would have been what I needed" to put her on trial, he said.
The mother was born Deborah Anne Booe in 1955 and took the names of the men she married: Narbone, then Gedzius, and finally Fornuto. Between 1972 and 1987 she had children by three fathers in Chicago and the suburbs of Burbank and Alsip, and every one of them died young. Denise Marie Booe died on September 18, 1972, at five months. Jennifer Narbone died on May 21, 1975, at four months. Barbara Jean Narbone was born on November 13, 1976, and died two days after Christmas, at six weeks. Each death was recorded as sudden infant death syndrome. Neighborhood rumor had it by the third that the mother was killing them. She said it was "something with the genes, the father," her former brother-in-law remembered. "But there were already two fathers."
In the mid-1970s, pregnant with Barbara Jean and working in a cafeteria, she had begun dating Delos Gedzius, a hard-working pipefitter just out of the Marines, and married him. Their son Jason died on September 5, 1980, six days after his first birthday. Delos's brother, Harry Gedzius, went to the medical examiner's office and told them her earlier babies had died the same way. Because she moved so often and changed her name with each marriage, nobody had connected the deaths before. Harry's own family, including the dead boy's father, did not share his suspicions and thought him a troublemaker. Delos Gedzius Jr. was born in 1982 and died on February 11, 1984, at two. Harry went back to the medical examiner. Daniel Gedzius died on March 21, 1987, at ten weeks.
The marriage fell apart. In April 1989, a few days after he and Debbie had dinner to settle their divorce, Delos Gedzius was found shot in the head in his apartment. Harry said the last person to see him alive was Debbie, who drove him home that night and, by her own account, went into the apartment to use the bathroom. She said she was miles away, with a police officer, at the time of the killing. Police investigated, and no one was charged. It was the investigation of that shooting that led Stein to reexamine the six children's deaths and write his letter.
She married James Fornuto, a Chicago police officer who was fired after being convicted of theft, and they moved to the Southwest. By late 1997, when the case drew national attention as scientists cast new suspicion on repeated crib deaths in one family, Cook County's medical examiner had changed the children's death certificates and a grand jury investigation was under way. Debbie Fornuto, then in her early forties, was living outside Las Vegas. Harry Gedzius had a phrase for the SIDS explanation: "a license to kill."
No charge ever came. She died in a car crash near Las Vegas on July 11, 2002. The medical examiner's ruling that six children were suffocated stands in the record, and no court ever tested it or the shooting of Delos Gedzius.