On May 1, 1990, Diana Lumbrera brought her four-year-old son, Jose Antonio, to St. Catherine's Hospital in Garden City, Kansas. He was dead on arrival. The cause was recorded as asphyxia due to smothering. He was the seventh child in her care to die in fourteen years, and the first whose death anyone questioned. Jose Antonio had been insured for $5,000. Dr. Eva Vachel blamed his death on deliberate suffocation.
Lumbrera was a Texan who, as a teenager, married Lionel Garza in 1974. Their daughter Melissa was born in 1975, Joanna in 1976 and their first son, Jose Lionel, in 1977. Joanna was barely three months old when her mother brought her body to the community hospital in Bovina, Texas, on November 30, 1976, saying the baby had had convulsions and stopped breathing; the pathologist's report blamed "strangulation due to asphyxiation due to convulsive disorder," and no autopsy was required. Jose Lionel was two and a half months old when she brought him into the Bovina emergency room on February 10, 1978. Over the following years her daughters Melissa, three, and Melinda Ann Garza, two, her son Christopher Daniel, five months, and a cousin's daughter, Ericka Aleman, six weeks, died too. The death certificates gave the Texas authorities no reason for suspicion. "A death certificate may say death due to heart failure," said the Parmer County district attorney, Johnny Actkinson. "Everyone who dies suffers from heart failure." In 1985 she moved from Bovina to Garden City.
By later accounts each of the children had been insured for $3,000 to $5,000, and in Melissa's case a second policy was bought the day before she died. Lumbrera was the only person who saw the convulsive episodes she described, and with the exception of Jose Lionel all the children were beyond help when she sought medical care. At her Kansas trial her employer and a credit union officer described how she had used false stories of misfortune, a bout of leukemia for Jose Antonio and her father's death in a car crash that never happened, to get $850 in sympathy loans. The defense's expert, Dr. William Eckert, blamed the boy's death on a massive viral infection and said his heart, lungs and liver were normal; prosecutors pointed out that he had never examined them, since they had been removed at the autopsy.
The jury was barred from hearing about the Texas deaths. It deliberated for less than an hour, and in October 1990 convicted her of first-degree murder; she was sentenced to life with a minimum of fifteen years. Her family insisted a terrible mistake had been made. "She was a loving mother, and she took care of those children," said her aunt, Elodia Flores. A sister said she had not had a fair trial. The Kansas case set off an investigation in Parmer, Lubbock and Castro counties that produced five murder indictments in three West Texas counties, over the deaths of three daughters, a son and the cousin's child, with another son's death also examined; Lumbrera later blamed a hex for her children's deaths.
On December 11, 1992, the Kansas Supreme Court reversed her conviction for cumulative trial errors. She was retried in April 1993 and convicted again of first-degree murder, on the state's theory that she had smothered Jose Antonio to collect on his life insurance, and the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed that conviction in 1995. In Texas, according to one summary, she was found guilty in 1991 of the deaths of Melissa, Melinda and Daniel. On September 7, 2004, she was released from the Kansas prison system and began serving time in the Mountain View Unit of a Texas prison, where she was still held in 2012.