Joyce A. Denochick was six weeks old when she was pronounced dead at a hospital in Du Bois, Pennsylvania on August 6, 1983. No post-mortem was carried out. The death was attributed to sudden infant death syndrome. Her mother, Diane Spencer, was sixteen. The family name appears as both Denochick and Donochick in the reporting.
Spencer had run away from home before her fifteenth birthday and was living in Clearfield County. When Joyce died she referred to the baby's father, Jimmy Denochick, as her husband, a paramedic later testified.
Autumn Dawn Spencer was fifteen days old when she died at a hospital in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania on September 21, 1987. There was an autopsy this time, and the medical examiner could find no specific cause of death. The probable cause was recorded as sudden infant death syndrome.
Aaron Avery Spencer was six months old when he died at Wayland, Michigan on September 25, 1990.
Michigan police looked into the third death, and in December 1990 Spencer confessed to suffocating all three children. The trooper who questioned her, John Palmatier of the Michigan State Police, told her he wanted to talk about the Wayland case. He did not tell her he would also ask about the two deaths in Pennsylvania. Investigators told the Grand Rapids Press that all three had been smothered with pillows.
She was arraigned on December 11, 1990 on one count of first-degree murder and held without bond at the Allegan County jail. She was twenty-three. In February 1991 the Wayland police chief, Dan Miller, said two further charges might follow. An examiner from the state Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ypsilanti reported that she was in good contact with reality, free of psychotic symptoms and aware of the charges; the report did not address whether she had been responsible for her actions at the time. On that report, in July 1991, Allegan District Judge Stephen E. Sheridan ruled her competent to stand trial.
Pennsylvania then reopened its two cases. A judge ordered the exhumation of the baby who had died in 1983, and after an autopsy on Joyce both Pennsylvania death certificates were changed to show the cause of death as asphyxiation.
One of the doctors who had been at Philipsburg State General Hospital, A. Nabil Saleh, was asked whether the deaths could have been suffocation and gave the answer that explains the whole case. I cannot swear on it, he said, but it is a possibility. There is not much you can find in suffocation, really.
On March 13, 1992 she was convicted of first-degree murder in Michigan and sentenced to life imprisonment, for the death of Aaron alone. In Michigan that sentence carries no parole.
Pennsylvania intended to try her for the two daughters, and had she been convicted there she could have become the second woman on the state's death row. Her lawyer, Chip Bell, tried to have the confessions and the amended death certificates suppressed. On June 30, 1993, when she was twenty-five, the two murder charges were dropped because the evidence had been improperly collected, and she was sent back to Michigan to serve the life sentence.
So she confessed to three deaths and stands convicted of one. The other two were reopened, exhumed, re-certified as asphyxiation and then abandoned on the state of the evidence, which is a different thing from being cleared and a different thing from being proved.
There may have been a fourth child. Two women testified at the Pennsylvania hearing that Spencer had given birth to another, and what became of it was not revealed. Joyce's grandmother, Joan Denochick, said the child had been offered for adoption in 1984. Spencer's mother-in-law, Linda Spencer, said Diane had spoken of another child who died in a traffic accident. Neither account has ever been resolved.