On April 30, 1990, a babysitter in Garden City, Kansas, called Diana Lumbrera at work to say that her four-year-old son, Jose Antonio, was vomiting and seemed feverish. Lumbrera left work, picked him up and later that day took him to the emergency room at St. Catherine's Hospital, where the doctors found abdominal pain and vomiting, prescribed amoxicillin, diagnosed nothing life-threatening and sent him home with her. The next day, May 1, she brought him back. He was dead on arrival.
The cause was recorded as asphyxia due to smothering. Jose Antonio was the seventh child in her care to die in fourteen years, and the first whose death anyone questioned. This time hospital staff called the police, and a Garden City detective, James Hawkins, questioned her at length and drew up a list of her other children, with the places and dates of their deaths. He had been insured for $5,000. A pathologist, Dr. Vachal, attributed his death to 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. He died on February 13, and the cause was recorded as undetermined.
The others followed. Melissa was three when she died on October 2, 1978, of what the death certificate called asphyxia due to aspiration of stomach contents. Her father, Lionel Garza, later told a grand jury, by the account of Bovina's police chief, Gary Coleman, that he had been playing with her that morning before work and saw nothing wrong, and that half an hour after he reached his job he was called and told she was dead. Garza filed for divorce in 1980. Ericka Aleman, a cousin's six-week-old daughter in Lumbrera's care, died on October 8, 1980, and her medical records could not be found. Melinda Ann Garza, two, died on August 17, 1982, of heart failure attributed to congenital heart disease. Christopher Daniel Lumbrera, five and a half months old, died on March 28, 1984, of what doctors said was septicemia, an infection of the blood. None of the certificates gave the Texas authorities a 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. The question is, what caused the 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 the first Kansas trial, in the fall of 1990, the state offered the jury two reasons a mother might smother her son. One was the insurance money. The other was that she enjoyed the attention and sympathy given to the parent of a sick or dead child. 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. In his opening statement the prosecutor told the jury that Diana Lumbrera "had a need to obtain sympathy," that the condition was called Munchausen syndrome, and that there would be evidence of it.
That evidence never properly arrived. Late in the trial the state recalled Vachal and had her define Munchausen syndrome and Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a parent fakes or induces illness in a child to become the center of attention. The witness could offer no opinion about Lumbrera herself, who had never been examined. The judge then told the jurors that no foundation had been laid for the testimony and that they were to disregard it completely.
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.
On December 11, 1992, the Kansas Supreme Court set the conviction aside. In an opinion by Justice Kay McFarland, it held that the "bizarre circumstances" of the case had demanded extraordinarily careful control by the trial judge, and that while no single error or ruling might have been enough on its own, taken together they had denied her a fair trial. A law review analysis later noted that the reversal did not rest on the stricken Munchausen testimony itself. The decision became the Kansas court's standard citation for the rule that cumulative trial errors can require reversal, quoted in murder appeals for decades afterward.
She was retried in April 1993. This time the state's theory was the insurance alone: that she had intentionally smothered Jose Antonio to benefit from his policy. The case again came down largely to competing experts, the state trying to prove suffocation and the defense arguing that death from natural causes was at least possible, and Lumbrera's lawyers objected to the state's expert rebuttal testimony. She was convicted again of first-degree murder. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed the second conviction on March 10, 1995, in an opinion that noted the five other young children of hers who had "inexplicably died at tender ages" in Texas, each in a separate incident over several years.
The Garden City case set off investigations 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 the death of another son also examined. A Parmer County grand jury indicted her in the summer of 1990 for the deaths of Joanna, Melissa and Melinda, alleging that she had smothered them to collect $15,000 in life insurance; under a new Texas statute she could have faced death. Her explanation was a curse. She said her former mother-in-law had cursed her, and her sister Virginia Bribiesca said she had heard the woman say the children would die at their mother's hands. Lionel Garza denied that his mother had ever said any such thing. A close friend, Maria Antillon, said Lumbrera believed fervently in curanderos, the healers who could bless or curse a life. "In our investigation that's no defense of what she has done," said Deputy Sheriff Richard Bonham.
How the Texas cases ended is recorded in two versions. A widely repeated account says she pleaded guilty in Parmer County to Melissa's murder, that the charges over Melinda and Joanna were dropped, and that Lubbock County added a second life sentence on a plea of no contest over an infant son. Texas prison records, though, list a Parmer County murder with an offense date of August 17, 1982, the day Melinda died, and a life sentence imposed on May 30, 1991. On September 7, 2004, she was released from the Kansas prison system to begin serving her Texas time. Texas records still list her as serving a life sentence, at the Murray Unit, now in her late sixties.