Between 1965 and 1971 five children born to Waneta Hoyt and her husband in rural Tioga County, New York, died one after another. None of the deaths was treated as a crime. In 1972 a Syracuse researcher, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, published a medical journal article that used the family's history, and in particular the last two deaths, as evidence that sudden infant death syndrome might run in families and might be linked to long pauses in breathing during sleep. The article referred to the family only by initials.
In March 1994, more than twenty years later, Hoyt told New York State Police investigators that she had smothered all five children. She later withdrew that statement. In April 1995 a jury in Owego found her guilty on five counts of murder. She died of pancreatic cancer in prison in 1998. Her case changed the way many doctors, medical examiners and prosecutors thought about repeated unexplained infant deaths in a single family, and it cast long doubt on the research it had once supported.
Waneta Hoyt and her husband had been high school sweethearts, according to a review of the case in the New York University School of Medicine's Literature, Arts and Medicine database, which describes them as living in rural poverty in upstate New York. Time magazine described her in 1994 as a housewife.
Her family had more than its share of hardship. The forensic psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing, who examined her for the defense, wrote that her mother died in a car accident, that one of her sisters was dying of a brain tumor while another was fighting cancer, and that both sisters were partly paralyzed and used wheelchairs. In 1964, the year she married, her husband's father took his own life. In 1973 the family's mobile home burned and they lost nearly everything, by Ewing's account as quoted by the University at Buffalo. Ewing added that those losses were small beside the events that later brought her to his office.
Time magazine, writing in April 1994, set out the five deaths as Hoyt had described them to doctors and friends over the years. Her first child, Erik, died at about three months old. James was a little over two. Julie died at 48 days. Molly died at about three months, and Noah, the last child born to the couple, died in much the same way. In each case Hoyt reported a sudden, unexplained death. The University at Buffalo's account of Ewing's book identifies Molly and Noah as the fourth and fifth children born to the Hoyts. The NYU database review gives the children's ages at death as between about 1 and 28 months.
Time described a mother who seemed to have been dealt a terrible run of luck. She kept the children's photographs and laid flowers on their graves every Memorial Day. A family friend told the magazine that Hoyt would talk of missing her children and of losing them to "that crib disease," and then cry. After the deaths the couple sought to adopt and Hoyt sought mental health treatment, according to the NYU review. They adopted a son, who was 17 when Time wrote about the case in 1994.
Steinschneider was a pediatrician and researcher at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, as the NYU review describes him. His 1972 article dealt in particular with the deaths of the last two Hoyt children, Great American Trials says. Ewing, as quoted by the University at Buffalo, wrote that without the curiosity of a young physician who treated Molly and Noah before their deaths, the story of the five babies would have stayed a private family calamity.
In his 1972 article Steinschneider proposed that a genetic defect causing prolonged apnea, pauses in breathing during sleep, could lead to sudden infant death syndrome, and he included detailed accounts of five deaths in one family, according to Time. The two youngest Hoyt children appeared in the article as "MH" and "NH," and the article presented their deaths as strong evidence that the syndrome could run in families, a wire report in The Spokesman-Review said in 1995. The Associated Press, writing in 1996, described the article as documenting the SIDS deaths of five siblings in Owego, New York, between 1965 and 1971.
The theory proved influential. Great American Trials, a reference work on major court cases, says that Steinschneider's theory and the prevention methods that grew from it won broad acceptance in pediatrics. The NYU review says the apnea theory drew millions of dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health, and that home apnea monitors were sold to parents as a way to prevent SIDS without proof that they did so.
Not everyone accepted the deaths as natural. Some nurses and pediatricians who saw the Hoyt children questioned their mother's attachment to them and suggested at the time that the deaths were not natural, but their concerns were not acted on, according to the NYU review. Several nurses who cared for the children later testified for the prosecution about the suspicions they had held, Great American Trials records.
The wider question of how to tell crib death from homicide was argued among specialists for years. Dr. Vincent Di Maio, then the medical examiner in San Antonio, told Time in 1994 that two SIDS deaths in one family was improbable and three was impossible, and that parents who killed for attention usually went on until they were caught or had no children left. Time noted that suffocation is almost impossible to tell apart from SIDS at autopsy.
The case was reopened because of a prosecutor in a neighboring county. William Fitzpatrick, later the district attorney of Onondaga County, first read the 1972 article while working on an unrelated infant death case, Time reported. Great American Trials places this in the early 1980s, when he was an assistant district attorney; Time, writing in 1994, said it was about eight years earlier. The article was given to him by Dr. Linda Norton, a medical examiner from Texas who was assisting on that case and who doubted Steinschneider's conclusions. She told him that once he read it he might decide he had a serial killer on his hands, both Time and Great American Trials report.
Fitzpatrick was struck by the odds against one family losing five children to the syndrome. The article identified the family only by an initial, but he traced them through county medical records, Time said. In 1992, by then Onondaga County's district attorney, he found that the family lived in Tioga County, outside his jurisdiction, and took his suspicions to the Tioga County district attorney, Robert J. Simpson, Great American Trials records. The Associated Press summarized it in 1996: the case was reopened in 1992 when a prosecutor grew suspicious.
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. After reviewing the old medical records, Simpson and Fitzpatrick concluded that the children had most likely been killed by their mother, according to Great American Trials.
The New York State Police took over the investigation. Police invited Hoyt to take part in what she was told was a SIDS research project, according to a 2011 review of Ewing's casebook in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. During the interview with officers she admitted killing her five children. Ewing, as quoted by the University at Buffalo, called the questioning "intense and calculated."
Her statement said that she had smothered the children because she could not stand their crying, the 1995 wire report said. She later recanted the confession, and her defense argued that it had been made under duress, Great American Trials records.
On March 23, 1994, she was charged with ten counts of second degree murder, two for each child: five alleging that she intended to kill and five alleging that she had created a grave risk of death, Great American Trials records. She was 47. Time reported that the charges rested on a confession she had since withdrawn. "We have brought to justice a killer who preyed on her own children," Fitzpatrick told the magazine, before any trial had taken place.
The arrest came at a time of growing unease about how readily SIDS was recorded as a cause of death. Time reported in April 1994 that medical examiners, police and prosecutors believed the label was too easily applied, and that estimates of the share of the 7,000 to 8,000 SIDS deaths recorded each year in the United States that might have other causes, murder among them, ranged from 1 percent to 20 percent. Great American Trials adds that the same experts stressed that most SIDS deaths are genuine and most parents who lose a baby are not killers.
Dr. Michael Baden, director of the forensic sciences unit of the New York State Police, told Time that a long history of babies brought to hospitals barely breathing was not the pattern of SIDS, in which children usually had no serious earlier problems and were simply found dead. Time set the Hoyt case beside that of Marybeth Tinning of Schenectady, who lost nine children between 1972 and 1985 and was convicted in 1986 of murdering the last of them. "We have prejudices about what killers look like," Fitzpatrick said. Psychiatrists quoted by Time linked some such cases to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a parent harms a child to draw the attention of doctors; Time made that point about such killers in general, not as a finding about Hoyt.
The case also put Steinschneider's work under scrutiny. Since Hoyt's arrest, Great American Trials says, his theory had been examined closely, and Norton and others argued that the apnea theory had turned attention away from parents who killed their children and blamed the deaths on SIDS. By 1994 Steinschneider was president of the American SIDS Institute in Atlanta.
The trial was held in Owego before Judge Vincent Sgueglia and ran from March 30 to April 21, 1995. Simpson and Margaret Drake prosecuted. Hoyt was defended by Robert Miller and Raymond J. Urbanski.
In their opening, prosecutors told the jury about the confession. The defense answered that she had made her statements under pressure and had taken them back. The prosecution then called nurses who had looked after the Hoyt children and had been suspicious of their deaths. The prosecution's forensic pathologist testified that all five children had been deliberately suffocated. "There are no natural conditions, including sudden infant death, that can explain the deaths," he said, as Great American Trials records his testimony.
The main defense witness was Steinschneider. He testified that the two deaths he had studied were consistent with SIDS, and he told the Associated Press later that he still believed SIDS had caused the deaths. Under cross-examination, though, he conceded that he did not know how thoroughly the police had looked for signs of foul play. "For all I know, they could have been suffocated," he said, according to Great American Trials.
The voluntariness of the confession was at the center of the defense. Hoyt's lawyers retained Ewing, a forensic psychologist and law professor at the University at Buffalo, to assess whether she had knowingly waived her Miranda rights and whether her confession was voluntary, according to the 2011 review in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. He spent 21 hours with her in face-to-face evaluation and testing, the University at Buffalo reported. Ewing later wrote about the case as one of ten trials in his book Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook (2008), which, the university said, drew on his own encounters, transcripts, court records and other public documents. Like each case in the book, he said, it came down to a battle of experts, with an opposing expert giving a contrary opinion.
The jury relied on her original confession and the other evidence and found her guilty of murdering all five children, Great American Trials records. The verdict came on April 21, 1995. She was 48. The jury found that Molly and Noah, the two babies described in the 1972 article, had been killed by their mother, as had the brothers and the sister who died before them, the Spokesman-Review's wire report said. Each count carried a minimum of 15 years to life, the report added.
Judge Sgueglia imposed a term of 15 years for each of the five murders, 75 years in all, according to Great American Trials.
The case did lasting harm to the research it had once supported. The NYU review describes the Hoyt case as upending millions of dollars of federally funded work and damaging several scientific careers, and says that Steinschneider's career rose and then fell. In June 1996, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines for investigating the scenes of sudden infant deaths, the Associated Press noted that Steinschneider had testified at the trial that he still believed the deaths were SIDS. Asked about the guidelines, he said it was hard to know whether such details would help identify causes of death, and that he was not sure investigators could go back and say that using such a form would have found anything at the time.
Hoyt was already ill during her trial. She served about three years of her sentence before dying of pancreatic cancer in prison in 1998, according to Great American Trials.
The NYU review, by Vincent Palusci, reads the case as a lesson in how weak science, thin peer review and poor oversight can do harm, raising false hope among parents and steering research money away from more useful work. It notes that a simpler measure, placing babies on their backs to sleep, roughly halved SIDS rates in the 1990s. Great American Trials draws a narrower lesson: that officials must look beyond SIDS when a child's death seems to have no explanation.
The story was told at length in The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stakes Science (1997) by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, and in Ewing's 2008 casebook.
The confession. Hoyt's statements to police were the core of the prosecution case, and she withdrew them soon after they were made. The defense argued they were made under pressure and were not voluntary; the prosecution's pathologist testified that the medical record alone showed deliberate suffocation. The jury accepted the confession, by the account in Great American Trials.
Where the family lived. The sources disagree. Great American Trials places the Hoyts in Newark Valley, Time called her a Berkshire housewife in 1994, and the Associated Press described the children as siblings from Owego. All three places are in Tioga County.
When Fitzpatrick first read the article. Great American Trials says the early 1980s; Time, writing in April 1994, said about eight years earlier.
The legal effect of her death. Whether an appeal was pending when she died, and whether the verdicts were set aside as a result, has not been established; the record is that the jury found her guilty and that she died in prison.
1964: Waneta Hoyt marries; her husband's father dies the same year (Ewing, via University at Buffalo).
1965 to 1971: Her five children, Erik, James, Julie, Molly and Noah, die one after another; each death is attributed to SIDS.
1972: Dr. Alfred Steinschneider publishes a journal article on prolonged apnea and SIDS that uses the family's deaths, identified by initials.
1973: The family's mobile home burns.
1980s (sources differ on the year): Dr. Linda Norton gives the article to William Fitzpatrick, then an assistant prosecutor.
1992: Fitzpatrick, now Onondaga County district attorney, takes his suspicions to Tioga County District Attorney Robert J. Simpson.
March 23, 1994: After an interview with state police, Hoyt is charged with ten counts of second degree murder. She soon withdraws her confession.
March 30, 1995: Trial opens in Owego before Judge Vincent Sgueglia.
April 21, 1995: The jury finds her guilty on five counts of murder.
1995: She is sentenced to 15 years for each child, 75 years in all.
June 1996: The CDC issues guidelines for investigating infant death scenes.
1998: She dies of pancreatic cancer in prison.