Steve Nawojczyk, the Pulaski County coroner, began asking questions in November 1983 because one woman in Little Rock had been connected to too many crib deaths. The police started with the most recent death and worked backward. By March 1984 Debra Sue Tuggle, twenty-six, was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of four small children over eight years, and a fifth death, in Malvern, was under investigation. "It scares the hell out of me that somebody could get away with killing five people over a period of eight or nine years," Nawojczyk told reporters.
The most recent was Tomekia Shenee Paxton, two years old, the daughter of George Paxton of Little Rock. Paxton, then thirty-six, had met Tuggle on a blind date, and in early 1982 he let her move in to help him care for his three children after, he said, her doctor assured him she was well. Tomekia died that year. Her death was first put down to pneumonia. Dr. Fahmy Malak, the state medical examiner, later concluded that she had been suffocated, although the charge as reported in March 1984 described a drowning, and the press accounts of the time do not reconcile the two.
The three older deaths were Tuggle's own sons. Thomas Lee Bates, two months old, and William Earl Henry, twenty-one months, both died in 1974, when she was about sixteen. Ronald Earl Johnson died in 1976 at nine months. Each death had been attributed to sudden infant death syndrome or to pneumonia, and the charges now described them as suffocations. A fourth son, Terranz Andre Tuggle, died at two and a half months in 1979 in Malvern, where she had once lived; Deputy Prosecutor Ed Scrimshire said charges were pending there.
No one offered a motive, and police said they did not know of one. Tuggle had a history of psychiatric treatment, and the wire reports of her arrest called her a former mental patient. Nawojczyk laid the delay on what he called a breakdown in the system: people knew her children were dying, he said, but her stories were believable enough that the deaths were never reported for investigation. George Paxton blamed the officials who had known she was ill. Yet he would not condemn her. "She had always been kind and gentle to my children," he said. "I don't hate her. She's a sick person."
At a preliminary hearing before Municipal Judge Andy Clark she was ordered held on $750,000 bond. The case ended in September 1984 with a ten-year prison sentence in the death of Tomekia Paxton. The published reports do not state the offense of conviction or what became of the counts involving her three sons, and the Malvern death does not appear ever to have reached a courtroom. She was released in 1994.