Nine children of one Schenectady family died between January 1972 and December 1985, and every one of the first eight deaths was written down as something else: respiratory failure, brain edema, sudden infant death syndrome, pulmonary edema, pneumonia. Doctors signed the certificates. Investigators looked, more than once, and the police chief told a reporter years later that the cases were "very, very difficult" to prove. It took the ninth death, and a telephone call to a state hotline, to put the mother in an interview room.
The mothers in these six cases were convicted of killing their own children, with several deaths spread over years. Most of the children were infants. The earliest deaths were nearly always filed as natural, and that filing is the subject: who made it, who doubted it, and how long the law took to catch up. Each was convicted of the deaths named below and not of the others, even where the number of children who died is larger. One conviction, in Greece, is not final.
Marybeth Tinning was 43 when she was arrested in February 1986. She lived in Schenectady, where her husband worked, and he was never a suspect, the police and the district attorney said at the time. The nine children who died, as United Press International listed them from official records, were Jennifer, on January 3, 1972, at seven days old; Joseph, on January 20, 1972, aged two; Barbara, on March 2, 1972, aged four and a half; Timothy, on December 10, 1973, at 14 days; Nathan, on September 2, 1975, at five months; Mary Frances, on February 22, 1979, at three and a half months; Jonathan, on March 24, 1980, at three months; Michael, on March 2, 1981, a boy the couple were in the process of adopting; and Tami Lynne, on December 20, 1985, at four months.
The recorded causes ran through the medical dictionary. Respiratory failure, cardiorespiratory arrest, brain edema, SIDS twice, acute pulmonary edema, cardiopulmonary arrest. Some of the early deaths were at first thought to reflect a possible genetic defect. Richard E. Nelson, the Schenectady police chief, told the Daily Gazette in 1986 that three of the earlier deaths had been investigated fully and that the finding each time was natural causes. "We just could not prove it scientifically," he said. "What do you do when you can’t prove it?" Officials looked at insurance as a motive and ruled it out: the couple had collected about $5,000 in claims on five of the children, and a claim on Tami Lynne was pending.
Tami Lynne’s death was handled differently. The Schenectady County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Sullivan, first believed it was SIDS, as he had concluded in two earlier cases, but because of the family’s history he ordered further laboratory studies, and in time the medical authorities concluded that she had been killed. The inquiry began with a tip from the child protective unit of the county social services department; UPI reported that a call to the state child abuse hotline set it off. On February 4, 1986, Tinning went with two officers to be questioned. By the end of the day she had admitted killing Tami Lynne. She told them, the Daily Gazette reported, that she "didn’t mean to hurt her" and only wanted the baby to stop crying. In a handwritten statement she also admitted killing two of her sons, Timothy in 1973 and Nathan in 1975, "because I’m not a good mother," and wrote that she "did not do anything to" five of the others. She was arrested just after midnight and released on $100,000 bail on March 19.
At trial in Schenectady County she said the statement had been improperly obtained. The judge allowed the prosecution to use her admissions about the two boys on the questions of intent and absence of accident, and told the jury to consider them for that purpose only. On July 17, 1987, the jury convicted her of murder in the second degree under the theory of depraved indifference to human life, and acquitted her of intentional murder. County Judge Clifford T. Harrigan sentenced her on October 1 to 20 years to life. She was never charged in the deaths of the boys or any of the other children.
She served 31 years. The parole board denied her release six times, in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. In 2011 she told the board she had been "messed up" when she killed her child; in later years she maintained that Tami Lynne was the only child she had harmed. The seventh hearing, on July 10, 2018, granted parole, and she left Taconic Correctional Facility on August 21, 2018. The Daily Gazette has since reported that she was discharged from parole supervision.
Martha Ann Johnson was convicted in 1990 of murdering her daughter Jenny Ann Wright, who was 11 when she died in Clayton County, Georgia, south of Atlanta, on February 21, 1982. Jenny was the fourth of Johnson’s children to die in five years. The other three, all under three years old, had died between 1977 and 1981, and their deaths had been certified as natural: twice as sudden infant death syndrome and once as a seizure disorder.
After Jenny’s death, police told Johnson she was a suspect in all four deaths. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia, nothing more was done until the case was reopened in 1988; 11Alive reported that an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution brought new attention to her. On July 3, 1989, she sat for an interview at the Clayton County Police Department, recorded on audio and video, and admitted killing Jenny and a son. She denied causing the deaths of the two other children. Police suspected her in all three of the earlier deaths; WSB-TV reported in 2020 that investigators believed she had acted to hold the attention of the men in her life. These are accounts of investigators. She was tried only for Jenny’s death.
The jury saw the recording. Johnson testified and denied killing her daughter, and her then husband testified to his opinion of her. The prosecution called a biostatistician, not a physician, who told the jury that "about 5% of these cases, and this is a very conservative estimate, might be due to causes similar to SIDS." The jury convicted her of murder, and on May 5, 1990, she was sentenced to life.
The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed on July 9, 1991, in Johnson v. State. It upheld the use of the recorded interview, concluding the confession was voluntary. It held that the biostatistician should not have been allowed to give the estimate, finding no factual basis for it, and said it disapproved of such testimony, but ruled the error harmless because of her confession. It agreed that the judge was right to refuse an instruction on good character. Two justices concurred in the judgment only.
Johnson was refused parole five times. In January 2020, when she was 64, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles told prosecutors that it had decided to proceed with her release. The district attorney, Tasha Mosley, who had been named to the post three months earlier, opposed it, and so did Jenny’s relatives. Her half-brother told WSB-TV that the district attorney had promised the family in 1990 that Johnson would never be released; an aunt told the station that Jenny had been afraid of her mother. The January 2020 reports gave no release date, and the later outcome has not been reported.
Between 1965 and 1971 five children born to Waneta Hoyt and her husband in rural Tioga County, New York, died one after another. Each death was put down to sudden infant death syndrome. None was treated as a crime. In 1972 a Syracuse pediatric researcher, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, published a medical journal article that used the family’s history, and especially the last two deaths, as evidence that SIDS might run in families and might be tied to pauses in breathing during sleep. The article referred to the children by initials. It carried weight. Great American Trials, a reference work on major cases, says his theory won wide acceptance in pediatrics, and a New York University review says the apnea idea drew millions of dollars in federal research money and sold breathing monitors to parents.
Not everyone accepted the deaths as natural. Some nurses and pediatricians who saw the Hoyt children questioned their mother’s attachment to them at the time, but their concerns were not acted on, the NYU review says. The wider argument, over how to tell a crib death from a homicide, ran among specialists for years. Dr. Vincent Di Maio, then medical examiner in San Antonio, told Time in 1994 that two SIDS deaths in one family were improbable and three impossible.
The case was reopened because a prosecutor read the article. William Fitzpatrick, later district attorney of Onondaga County, was given it by Dr. Linda Norton, a Texas medical examiner who doubted Steinschneider’s conclusions; she told him he might decide he had a serial case on his hands. He was struck by the odds. The article named the family only by an initial, and he traced them through county medical records. In 1992, Great American Trials records, he took his suspicions to the Tioga County district attorney, Robert J. Simpson. Much of the evidence came from Steinschneider’s own research records. "For Molly and Noah Hoyt, we can account for virtually every day of their lives," Fitzpatrick told Time.
State police took over. According to a 2011 review of a casebook by the forensic psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing, Hoyt was invited to take part in what she was told was a SIDS research project; in the interview she admitted killing all five children. Ewing, quoted by the University at Buffalo, called the questioning "intense and calculated." She later withdrew the statement, and her defense argued it had been made under duress. On March 23, 1994, she was charged with ten counts of second-degree murder, two for each child. Time magazine, in April 1994, set the case against a wider unease: medical examiners and prosecutors believed SIDS had been too easily written on certificates, and put the share of the 7,000 to 8,000 recorded annual deaths that might have other causes anywhere from 1 percent to 20 percent. The same experts stressed that most SIDS deaths are genuine and most parents who lose a baby are not killers.
The trial was in Owego, and nurses who had cared for the children testified for the prosecution about the doubts they had held. On April 21, 1995, the jury convicted Hoyt on five counts of murder, one for each child. The judge imposed 15 years for each, 75 years in all. She was 48. She died of pancreatic cancer in prison in 1998, about three years into the sentence. Whether the verdicts were later vacated because of her death has not been reported.
Marie Noe gave birth ten times between 1949 and 1967. Two of the babies died in the hospital, one stillborn and one six hours after birth, of causes nobody has questioned. The other eight went through the early months healthy, and none of them lived past 14 months. For nearly three decades the Noes of North Philadelphia were known, when they were known at all, as among the most bereaved parents in the country.
The writer Stephen Fried, whose reconstruction in Philadelphia magazine in 1997 and 1998 rests on medical examiner, hospital and police files, recorded the early verdicts one by one. The first child, in April 1949, was recorded as congestive heart failure; no examination was done. The next was recorded as bronchopneumonia. When a third died in 1958, a pediatric pathologist, Dr. Marie Valdes-Dapena, who would become one of the country’s leading researchers on infant death, doubted the finding, and after tests and 45 days of inquiry the death was signed out as "Undetermined, Presumed Natural." She said later that the official line at the medical examiner’s office was that there was "absolutely no suspicion of homicide."
There were warnings. In 1963 the medical examiner’s office offered the couple a grant-funded program of prenatal care and study at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. They declined on their family doctor’s advice, and he had written down his own suspicions. That July, Life magazine published a sympathetic story about the family under false names. After another death in 1966, investigators learned of insurance policies on at least six of the children, one issued three months before; the insurer refused to pay, and a lawyer later won the family a $500 settlement. The couple applied to adopt, and when a nun from the agency called one of the investigators he warned her against it. A last son died in January 1968. Two doctors who had reason to be suspicious said afterward that there was no clear procedure for acting on a worry. The chief medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Spelman, wrote privately to adoption and child-protection agencies that his office would not declare the deaths natural, and told the public the opposite. Newsweek reported in January 1968 that he saw "absolutely no evidence indicating an unnatural death." A veteran homicide detective, Joseph Schimpf, concluded that year there was no evidence of murder and held that view thirty years later. A young assistant district attorney asked why his office had first learned of the Noes from Life. After the 1968 coverage the case went unmentioned in public until 1997.
It was reopened by a magazine reporter. In March 1998, after Fried and a police sergeant went through the files, Noe told detectives she had killed her children and signed a statement. She was arrested in Philadelphia on August 5, 1998, on a warrant charging eight counts of murder. In 1999 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in all eight deaths. Judge William Mazzola of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas sentenced her to 20 years of probation, the first five under electronically monitored house arrest, with intensive mental health treatment and a condition that psychiatric experts study her. She died on May 5, 2016, aged 87, at a nursing and rehabilitation center.
Diana Lumbrera was 31 when her four-year-old son, Jose Antonio, was carried into a hospital emergency room in Garden City, Kansas, on the night of May 1, 1990. A pediatrician pronounced him dead at 10:25. A surgeon grew suspicious, a pathologist concluded the death was not natural, and hospital staff called the police. He was, by the count of the Garden City police department, the seventh young child to die in her care.
Six had died in West Texas between 1976 and 1984, five of them her own and one a cousin’s six-week-old daughter. The records were ordinary. The first, a daughter of about three months, was attributed to a convulsive disorder. A son at two and a half months in 1978 had a death certificate listing "multiple natural causes." A three-year-old daughter that year was dead on arrival at an emergency room. The cousin’s infant died in 1980. A daughter of two and nine months in 1982 was recorded as acute viral bronchopneumonitis and heart failure, and a son in 1984 as septicemia, although earlier blood tests had shown no infection. Each of the children had been insured for between $3,000 and $5,000, the police department’s account says. Lumbrera moved to Garden City in 1985.
A detective, James Hawkins, questioned her and drew up the list of her dead children. She was arrested on May 5, 1990. At a preliminary hearing that ended on June 15, the prosecutor, Richard Hodson, argued her motive was "a combination of sympathy and money," and testimony showed she had applied for loans by saying she needed money for her son’s cancer treatment, and that her father had been killed in a car crash taking the boy to Mexico. Her father was alive and there was no sign the boy had cancer. The defense had a second examination done, which reported a chronic viral infection in the boy’s organs. Michael Quint led the defense. She was released on $50,000 bail, posted by someone from Texas.
The first jury, after deliberating less than an hour, convicted her of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to life with parole possible after 15 years. The Kansas Supreme Court reversed on December 11, 1992, in State v. Lumbrera, because of what it called "cumulative trial errors having deprived defendant of a fair trial." The retrial in April 1993 turned on competing doctors. The prosecution’s witnesses included a forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, and an ophthalmologist who concluded from the boy’s eyes that the death could not have been natural. The defense called a pediatric pathologist, Dr. Charles Reiner, who testified that the widespread viral infection would not by itself have killed the boy but might have inflamed part of the heart that controls its rhythm; no slides of that tissue had been made earlier. The jury convicted her again. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed on March 10, 1995, and upheld the admission of her statements to detectives, in which she had agreed that a blackout was "probably what happened," as voluntary. By then, the court recorded, she had also been convicted in Texas, on pleas of no contest, of the murders of two more children, a son who died in 1978 and a daughter who died in 1982. Garden City police describe the Texas sentences as life. Other Texas deaths were the subject of indictments whose outcome has been reported in conflicting ways, and one son’s death was never charged.
Roula Pispirigou is a mother from Patras, the port city in western Greece, and reports describe her as a nurse by training. Her three daughters died one after another: Malena, three and a half, on April 13, 2019; Iris, six months, on March 21, 2021; and Georgina, nine, on January 29, 2022. The first two deaths were recorded as natural. A forensic examiner attributed Malena’s to liver failure, after she had been in hospital in Athens with an illness that, according to the evidence heard later, doctors considered curable. Iris’s was put down to a heart condition. Neither was investigated as a crime. The third was not accepted so easily, and what followed has produced two trials in Athens, three unanimous guilty verdicts, and three life sentences, none yet final.
Georgina had fallen seriously ill in April 2021, a few weeks after Iris died, during a hospital stay in Patras, and she never recovered. She spent most of her last ten months in hospitals. The court later held that this episode was an attempt by her mother to kill her. When she died in a children’s hospital in Athens, her death was first reported as cardiac arrest. Tests ordered by doctors and the authorities detected a substance no doctor treating her had prescribed, hospital records and staff were checked, and a police report to the prosecutor placed the mother alone with the child in the period before her death. An Athens prosecutor charged her with Georgina’s murder on March 30, 2022.
The public reaction was ferocious. At her first court appearance on April 4, 2022, riot police scuffled with onlookers and journalists to clear a path for her, and some protesters chanted "death, death," the Associated Press reported. AFP said the government appealed for calm amid calls for her to be killed. A criminology lecturer at Panteion University in Athens, Effi Lambropoulou, told AFP that the public could not forgive a woman accused of killing children at different times. The press called her a modern Medea. Her lawyers pointed to the possibility of medical error; the family had earlier blamed the deaths on genetic problems. She denied wrongdoing then and has ever since.
In August 2022, after forensic examinations concluded that Malena and Iris had not died naturally, she was charged over their deaths as well. The prosecution put the marriage at the center of its case. Its argument, which the courts accepted at first instance, was that the harm to the children came when her husband was pulling away or wanted to leave, and that she acted to keep him. Ta Nea reported that tensions in the marriage began around 2017 and peaked after Malena’s death.
The first trial, over Georgina, opened before the Mixed Jury Court of Athens on January 9, 2023; the court refused a defense request to merge the three cases. Her lawyer, Alexis Kougias, one of the best-known criminal advocates in Greece, called the case "the judicial error of the century" and challenged the two forensic pathologists whose conclusions underlay the younger girls' charges. The trial ran well over a year. By October 2023 it had held 70 hearings and heard 60 witnesses. On March 29, 2024, the court unanimously convicted her of the murder and attempted murder of Georgina and sentenced her to life. When the presiding judge told her she could appeal, she answered that she already had.
The second trial concluded on March 18, 2025, with unanimous convictions for the murders of Malena and Iris and two more life terms. At that trial the prosecutor argued that the mother showed no grief after Malena’s death, pointing to a trip planned for a month later. Kougias had died on February 27, 2025, aged 74, and a new lawyer took his place.
Neither conviction is final. The appeal in Georgina’s case was adjourned on May 5, 2025, again on January 12, 2026, and a third time on September 18, 2026, to April 2, 2027. The appeal in the cases of Malena and Iris was adjourned on February 20, 2026, to December 4, 2026. As of September 18, 2026, she was in custody.
Taken together, the cases show a failure of record-keeping before they show anything else. The certificates said what the people who signed them could see. In Schenectady and Philadelphia the doubts were spoken aloud, in the cases of three or four doctors, a police chief and a medical examiner, and written into files that no one acted on. In Tioga County the doubt arrived through a journal article that had been read as proof of something else. In Kansas and in Greece, the last death was the one that someone refused to sign as natural.
The sentences differ as much as the countries do. Hoyt got 75 years and died inside. Tinning was released after 31. Noe, who pleaded to eight murders, served probation at her own address. Johnson was about to be paroled at 64. Lumbrera went through two juries and two states, and Pispirigou has two appeals ahead of her.
• 1949 to 1968: eight children of Marie Noe die; two other babies die at or before birth of causes never questioned.
• 1965 to 1971: five children of Waneta Hoyt die, each recorded as SIDS.
• 1972, January 3, to 1985, December 20: nine children of Marybeth Tinning die.
• 1972: Steinschneider’s article on a family’s SIDS deaths is published.
• 1976 to 1984: six children in Diana Lumbrera’s care die in West Texas.
• 1977 to 1981: three young children of Martha Ann Johnson die; February 21, 1982, her daughter Jenny dies.
• 1986, February 4: Tinning questioned; arrested after midnight.
• 1987, July 17: Tinning convicted of second-degree murder in Tami Lynne’s death; October 1, sentenced to 20 years to life.
• 1988: Johnson case reopened. 1989, July 3: Johnson’s recorded interview.
• 1990, May 1: Jose Antonio dies in Garden City; May 5, Lumbrera arrested. May 5: Johnson sentenced to life.
• 1991, July 9: Georgia Supreme Court affirms Johnson’s conviction.
• 1992, December 11: Kansas Supreme Court reverses Lumbrera’s first conviction.
• 1993, April: Lumbrera convicted on retrial. 1995, March 10: affirmed.
• 1994, March 23: Hoyt charged. 1995, April 21: Hoyt convicted on five counts.
• 1998, March: Noe signs a statement; August 5, arrested; Hoyt dies in prison.
• 1999: Noe pleads guilty to second-degree murder in eight deaths.
• 2016, May 5: Noe dies.
• 2018, July 10: Tinning granted parole; August 21, released.
• 2019, April 13, to 2022, January 29: Pispirigou’s three daughters die. 2020, January: Johnson’s parole tentatively granted.
• 2022, March 30: Pispirigou charged. 2024, March 29: convicted over Georgina. 2025, March 18: convicted over Malena and Iris.
• 2026, September 18: Georgina appeal adjourned to April 2, 2027.