In 1972 the journal Pediatrics published a paper by Dr. Alfred Steinschneider of the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse arguing that sudden infant death syndrome might be caused by prolonged apnea, pauses in breathing during sleep, and that it could run in families. His central evidence was a woman he called "Mrs. H.," who had lost five children, two of them after they had been monitored in his sleep clinic. The paper became one of the most influential in its field and helped drive the spread of home apnea monitors. Mrs. H. was Waneta Hoyt, and more than twenty years later a jury found that she had smothered all five.
She was born Waneta Ethel Nixon in Richford, New York, on May 13, 1946. She attended Newark Valley High School until the tenth grade and left to marry Tim Hoyt on January 11, 1964. The couple lived in Tioga County, in the southern tier of upstate New York.
Their first child, Erik (also spelled Eric), born October 17, 1964, died on January 26, 1965, at three months and ten days old. More than three years later two children died within three weeks of each other: Julie on September 5, 1968, at one month and seventeen days, and James, two years and four months old, on September 26. Molly died on June 5, 1970, at two months and eighteen days, and Noah on July 28, 1971, at two months and nineteen days. The two youngest had been patients at Steinschneider's clinic. The Hoyts had brought Molly there on April 15, 1970, when she was three weeks old, and both she and Noah died soon after being sent home. The deaths were attributed to natural causes, and in Steinschneider's paper they became evidence for his theory.
Other medical professionals were less sure. In 1985 a Dallas forensic pathologist, Dr. Linda Norton, reviewing the anonymous case in Steinschneider's paper while advising on another supposed crib death, told a prosecutor in Onondaga County that there might be a serial killer in his part of New York. That prosecutor, William J. Fitzpatrick, was elected district attorney of Onondaga County, which includes Syracuse, in 1992 and made the case of Mrs. H. one of his first priorities, sending the records to the forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who concluded the children had been murdered. Working from details in the paper, including the children's initials and dates of birth, he concluded that she was Waneta Hoyt and found the family in neighboring Tioga County. He took his suspicions to the Tioga County district attorney, Robert J. Simpson, who studied the old medical records and came to the same conclusion.
After Noah's death the Hoyts took in a boy, Scott, on a temporary basis in August 1971. He was removed from the home after Waneta told her psychiatrist she was afraid she would harm him. In 1977 they adopted a son, Jay, who was in her care until her arrest.
In March 1994 a New York State trooper she knew approached her at the post office and asked her to help with research he said he was doing on SIDS. She agreed, and was questioned by him and two other officers. After nearly two hours she confessed and described how she had killed each child: Erik with a pillow, Julie by pressing her face into her shoulder, James with a towel, Molly and Noah with pillows. She said their crying had driven her to it. "They just kept crying and crying," she said, "and I just kept squeezing and squeezing and squeezing." On March 23, 1994, she was charged with ten counts of second degree murder, two for each child, one alleging intent to kill and one alleging that she had created a grave risk of death.
She recanted, and the voluntariness of the confession became the central dispute at her trial in Owego before Judge Vincent Sgueglia, which ran from late March to April 1995. A psychologist hired by the defense, Dr. Charles Patrick Ewing, diagnosed her with dependent and avoidant personality disorders and testified that her statement "was not made knowingly, and it was not made voluntarily." A psychiatrist retained by the prosecution, Dr. David Barry, agreed that the police tactics had manipulated her. Nurses who had cared for the Hoyt children testified that they had suspected the deaths at the time. Dr. Michael M. Baden, a forensic pathologist who had examined the exhumed remains, testified that all five had been deliberately suffocated: "There are no natural conditions, including sudden infant death, that can explain the deaths."
The main witness for the defense was Steinschneider himself, by then president of the American SIDS Institute in Atlanta. He maintained that Molly's and Noah's deaths were consistent with SIDS. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for less than five hours and on April 21 or 22, 1995 (accounts differ), found her guilty of five counts of second degree murder. On September 11, 1995, Sgueglia sentenced her to fifteen years to life for each child, to run consecutively, seventy-five years to life in all.
Hoyt continued to deny the killings. She died of pancreatic cancer at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women on August 13, 1998, at fifty-two, after about three years in prison, and was buried at Highland Cemetery in Richford. Because she died while her appeal was pending, New York law abated her conviction, which in legal terms left her without one. Some writers have since suggested Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a diagnosis not universally accepted. The verdict undercut the apnea theory that her children's deaths had been used to support, and her case became a standard example in the argument that repeated unexplained infant deaths in a single family should be investigated rather than presumed natural.