Tuggle was born in 1958. Between 1974 and 1982, in the Little Rock area, four children in her care died: her sons Thomas Bates, two, William Henry, twenty-one months, and Ronald Johnson, nine months, and her fiance's daughter Tomekia Paxton, two. The deaths were attributed at the time to sudden infant death and accident.
She was sixteen at the first death. She had a documented history of mental illness.
The deaths were reviewed together after the last of them and she was charged in one case. She was convicted in September 1984 and sentenced to ten years. She was released in 1994.
One conviction and four deaths is the range this roster carries. As with the other infant-death series in this archive, the individual medical findings were made years apart and at the time recorded as natural, and the case against her was constructed from the sequence rather than from evidence in any single death. The ten-year sentence indicates what the prosecution felt able to prove.