Gail Savage

Victims

3 deaths - she was ACQUITTED of murder and convicted of involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct over Cynthia; she did not plead guilty over Michael and Amber but agreed there was sufficient evidence to convict her of involuntary manslaughter for their deaths

Years active

November 5, 1990 / February 25, 1992 / June 28, 1993

Location

Waukonda, Lake County, Illinois, USA

Method

Smothering with a blanket

Status

Tried at Lake County Circuit Court and on April 30, 1994 found not guilty of murder but guilty of involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct in the smothering of her five-month-old daughter Cynthia. On May 30, 1994, in place of sentencing on that count alone, she accepted a negotiated arrangement covering all three children and was sentenced by Judge Charles Scott to twenty years. She did not plead guilty over Michael and Amber; she agreed only that the evidence would support conviction for involuntary manslaughter, an arrangement recorded as a trial rather than a plea. No record of her release has been located, although a twenty-year Illinois sentence imposed in 1994 would long since have expired.

Savage was born in 1963 and lived at Wauconda in Lake County, Illinois. Three of her babies died: Michael, six weeks, in November 1990; Amber, twenty-two days, in February 1992; and Cynthia, five months, in June 1993. Each was recorded as sudden infant death syndrome.

After the third death she was questioned and confessed to smothering all three with a blanket.

She pleaded guilty and was sentenced on May 30, 1994 to twenty years: a sentence that caused public argument in Illinois at the time, three infant deaths having produced a term she could serve part of and be released from.

The case is one of the American cluster that changed how paediatric pathologists treated repeat sudden infant deaths in a single family. It should be read alongside Kathleen Folbigg's entry in this archive: here a confession exists, in that case the convictions rested on the improbability of the sequence alone and were quashed twenty years later.