Marybeth Roe was born in Duanesburg, New York, on September 11, 1942, and married Joe Tinning in 1965. They lived in Schenectady.
Between January 1972 and December 1985 nine children in her care died. Jennifer, the third, died in hospital days after birth of meningitis, a genuinely natural death. The other eight were not. Joseph, two, and Barbara, four, died within weeks of Jennifer. Timothy, Nathan, Mary Frances, Jonathan and Michael, who was adopted, followed over the next thirteen years, at ages from three weeks to about two and a half years.
They were recorded, one after another, as sudden infant death syndrome, Reye's syndrome, cardiac arrest and viral infection. SIDS was then poorly understood, a familial predisposition was assumed, and each doctor who saw a Tinning child was, in effect, seeing the family for the first time. Neighbours and relatives had raised it for years.
The last, Tami Lynne, died in December 1985 at four months. This time the medical examiner did not accept it, and a police investigation followed. Marybeth Tinning gave a statement admitting that she had smothered Tami Lynne, Timothy and Nathan with a pillow, and saying she was not a good mother.
She was convicted of second degree murder in July 1987 and sentenced to twenty years to life. She was denied parole six times and released in August 2018 at seventy-five. The case, alongside Waneta Hoyt's, changed how repeat infant deaths in one family are investigated in the United States.