Martha Woods

Victims

7 deaths - 1 murder conviction, for the killing of her adopted son Paul David Woods in 1969, with seven further counts relating to the same child; the other 6 deaths were admitted at trial only as evidence of a pattern and were never charged, and she was acquitted on three counts relating to a surviving child

Years active

1946 - 1969

Location

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Method

Suffocation

Status

Tried in the United States District Court in Baltimore, the case being federal because the death occurred at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The trial before Judge Frank A. Kaufman ran from February 13, 1972 for about forty-five days across five months of testimony. Convicted of first-degree murder and of seven further counts of assault with intent to murder, attempted murder and mistreatment, all relating to Paul David Woods, and sentenced on July 24, 1972 to life imprisonment with concurrent terms totalling seventy-five years. The court granted a judgment of acquittal on three counts relating to her adopted daughter Judy Woods, who survived. She maintained at sentencing that she was innocent of smothering the child. The Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction in United States v. Woods, 484 F.2d 127 (1973), and that ruling on the admissibility of prior-acts evidence in child-death cases is what the case is cited for. No release, parole or death record has been located.

Woods was an army wife who moved with her husband between postings in the United States from the 1940s. Between 1946 and 1969, nine children in her care suffered episodes of respiratory collapse and seven died. Each was treated as a medical event; the children were infants, they stopped breathing, and she was the one who raised the alarm and brought them to hospital.

The last was Paul Woods, an eight-month-old boy she and her husband had adopted, who was brought to hospital at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland repeatedly with cyanotic episodes and died in 1969.

She was tried in federal court in Baltimore in 1972 for that death. The prosecution was permitted to put in evidence of all the earlier deaths and collapses, on the argument that the pattern itself was probative: twenty-three years, nine children, one common factor. The defence objected and lost, and the admission of that evidence became the point of law the case is known for: it is cited in American courts on the admissibility of prior-acts evidence in child death cases, and it was affirmed on appeal.

She was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. She was later described in the medical literature as a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term that did not exist at her trial.

Only one of the seven deaths was ever charged. The other six form the pattern that convicted her, which is an unusual arrangement and the reason the case is still taught.