Diana Lumbrera

Victims

7 deaths attributed - 3 COVERED BY CONVICTIONS: her son Jose Antonio in Kansas, where the first conviction was REVERSED in 1992 and a retrial conviction affirmed in 1995; her daughter Melissa in Parmer County, Texas, by guilty plea; and her first son in Lubbock County on a plea of NO CONTEST, which is not an admission of guilt. Charges over two further children were dropped and one county waived prosecution entirely. The children were insured for sums between three and five thousand dollars each

Years active

1976 - 1990

Location

Texas/Kansas, USA

Method

Suffocation - Strangulation

Status

Convicted by a Garden City, Kansas jury in October 1990 of the first-degree murder of her four-year-old son Jose Antonio, whom the state said she smothered to benefit from his life insurance, and sentenced to life with a fifteen-year minimum. THAT CONVICTION WAS REVERSED by the Kansas Supreme Court in 1992 for cumulative trial errors that had deprived her of a fair trial; she was retried, convicted again of first-degree murder, and the second conviction was affirmed on March 10, 1995. The Kansas case prompted five murder indictments across three West Texas counties. In Parmer County she pleaded guilty to the murder of her daughter Melissa, facing a possible death sentence under a new serial-murder statute, and charges over Melinda and Joanna were dropped. Lubbock County imposed a further life sentence after she pleaded NO CONTEST, without admitting guilt, to the death of her first son. Castro County waived prosecution on the outstanding charges to save an estimated fifty thousand dollars in costs. She is held in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on a life sentence, with a parole eligibility date of March 22, 2004 recorded and no release scheduled.

Lumbrera was born in 1958 in Texas. Between 1976 and 1990 seven children in her care died: her daughters Joanna, three months, and Melissa, three; her sons Luis, two months, Jose, six weeks, and Jose Lionel, four; her niece Ericka Aleman, six; and another of her children. Each death was attributed at the time to seizures, pneumonia, heart failure or sudden infant death.

She had taken out small burial insurance policies on several of the children. The deaths were spread across two states and several counties, and no one connected them, which is the mechanism of the case: a mother whose children died was an object of sympathy, and each death was reviewed only against itself.

The other children were her daughters Joanna Garza, three months, Melissa Lumbrera, three, and Melinda Ann Garza, two; her sons Luis Garza, two months, and Christopher Daniel Lumbrera, five months; and her cousin Ericka Leonor Aleman, six weeks.

The last was her son Jose Lionel, four, who died at Garden City, Kansas, in May 1990. A hospital paediatrician who had seen the child healthy hours earlier refused to accept the death, and the examination found suffocation.

She was convicted of that murder in Kansas in 1990 and sentenced to life, and then convicted in Texas of three more, receiving life sentences on May 30 and June 6, 1991. Charges in the remaining cases were not pursued once the sentences were in place, which is why the range runs from four to seven.

The case is cited in the medical literature on serial infanticide misrecorded as sudden infant death, alongside Marie Noe and Waneta Hoyt, and the pattern in all three is the same: the diagnosis of the first death made the second one plausible.