Waneta Ethel Nixon was born in Richford, New York, on May 13, 1946, and married Tim Hoyt at seventeen. They lived near Newark Valley in rural upstate New York.
Between 1965 and 1971 five of their children died: Eric at three months, James at two years, Julie at seven weeks, Molly at two and a half months and Noah at two and a half months. Molly and Noah had both been inpatients at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse under the care of Dr Alfred Steinschneider, who was studying prolonged sleep apnoea as a possible cause of sudden infant death, and both died shortly after being sent home.
In 1972 Steinschneider published a paper in the journal Pediatrics using the Hoyt children as its central case, arguing that sudden infant death syndrome had a familial and physiological basis in apnoea. It became one of the most cited papers in the field, was used to justify the sale of home apnoea monitors on a large scale, and shaped how the deaths of successive infants in one family were treated for a generation: as tragedy, not as a matter for investigation.
A district attorney in Tioga County, William Fitzpatrick, read the paper in 1986 and did not believe it. It took until 1994 to build a case. Waneta Hoyt confessed to state police that she had smothered all five with a pillow or a towel because she could not stand their crying, and was convicted of second degree murder in 1995 and sentenced to seventy-five years to life. She died in prison of pancreatic cancer in 1998.
The Steinschneider paper was formally repudiated. The case, with the Tinning case in the same state, is the reason multiple unexplained infant deaths in one family are now investigated as suspicious in the first instance.