Marybeth Tinning: “I Am Not a Good Mother”

With the case of Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard dominating the media right now, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, (or, as it’s now known, Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) is the disorder du jour.

But Dee Dee Blanchard was far from the first mother to harm her child for attention. Many believe Kathy Bush had the disorder, which led her to medically abuse her daughter, Jennifer, in the mid-90s. More recently, Lacey Spears was convicted of second-degree murder after slowly poisoning her five-year-old son, Garnett, with lethal amounts of salt.

But the first widely known case of Munchausen by Proxy remains the worst: the case of Marybeth Tinning, who killed eight of her infant children between 1972 and 1985.

Marybeth Roe was born in a small town in upstate New York on Sept. 11, 1942. Her father, Alton, was away for some of her childhood fighting in WWII. Her mother, Ruth, worked outside the home, so Marybeth was often shuffled among different relatives. One of these relatives reportedly told her that she had been unwanted, and indeed, her parents seemed to be emotionally unavailable. Marybeth claimed her father would beat her and lock her in a closet whenever she cried.

During her school years, she was described as not having many friends, but constantly thirsting for attention. Classmates said she was moody and would lie and exaggerate to make herself seem more important.

After she graduated in 1961, she wanted to go on to college, but her grades weren’t good enough. So she worked at a few low-wage jobs before becoming a nursing assistant at Ellis Hospital in nearby Schenectady.

It was here in Schenectady where she met quiet, easy-going Joseph Tinning on a blind date. They were married two years later.

The Tinnings’ first child, Barbara, was born in May 1967. Then Joseph Jr. (“Joey”) was born in January 1970. Both were healthy, happy babies, and by all accounts, Marybeth was a good mother to them. She had said once that all she ever wanted was to be married and have children, and now, she had both of those things. But she really wanted much more than that. She wanted attention, and she would do anything to get it.

In October 1971, while Marybeth was pregnant with her third child, her father suffered a massive heart attack while he was at work. Still desperate for her father’s love, Marybeth rushed to his bedside. But even on his deathbed, Alton refused to show his daughter even the slightest hint of affection. When he died without saying he loved her, she was devastated.

Her father’s death seemed to trigger something in Marybeth, because afterwards, death began to visit the Tinning family in quick succession. Only two months later, in December, Marybeth gave birth to their third child, Jennifer, who was born suffering from a meningitis infection. Marybeth told the obstetric nurses that she had tried to induce labor so that Jennifer would be born on Christmas Day. Instead, she may have introduced the fatal infection.

Jennifer only lived for 8 days before she died from hemorrhagic meningitis and multiple brain abscesses.

Suddenly, Marybeth’s cup overflowed with the one thing she had craved all her life: attention. Neighbors and family members surrounded her with sympathy and kindness — possibly for the first time in her life.

After Jennifer’s death, Marybeth washed, ironed, and folded her dead baby’s clothes. She then packed them up, along with all Jennifer’s toys and furniture, and threw them all away.

There were other odd behaviors. Nurses at the hospital noted that she seemed to show no emotion when told her daughter had died. Friends and family members recalled that at Jennifer’s funeral, she was dry-eyed, and at the reception afterwards, she seemed to actually be enjoying herself.

No one wanted to accuse a mother who had just lost a child. So suspicions were ignored or explained away as shock, or denial, or a stoic nature.

Then, only 17 days after Jennifer’s death, tragedy would strike again.

On January 20, 1972, Marybeth took two-year-old Joey to the emergency room. She claimed he had suffered a seizure, but the nurses and doctors could find nothing wrong with him. They treated him for a viral infection just to be safe, and kept him for 10 days.

Hours after Joey was discharged, Marybeth returned with him. The toddler who had been perfectly healthy just hours ago was now dead. She claimed she had laid him down for a nap, and when she went back in to check on him, he was blue and not breathing. His death was attributed to cardiopulmonary arrest. No autopsy was performed.

Once again, Marybeth was showered with attention and sympathy. Once again, she carefully folded and packed away her child’s clothes and toys.

Six weeks went by before the tragedy repeated itself. This time Marybeth rushed their last living child, 4-year-old Barbara, to the ER. Just like with Joey, she claimed Barbara had gone into convulsions. This time, knowing about the deaths of her other two children, the staff at Ellis Hospital wanted to keep Barbara under observation. Marybeth, strangely, refused, and instead took Barbara home.

Once again, she was back only hours later with an unconscious child. Despite their best efforts, Barbara slipped into a coma and died. Her death was attributed to Reyes Syndrome, and again, no autopsy was performed.
People were shocked that three seemingly healthy children from the same family would die so suddenly. Many neighbors and even doctors speculated that they carried a mysterious “death gene” that caused them to stop breathing.

However, for some, sympathy began to make way for suspicion. One neighbor recalled that the day Barbara had been taken in to the ER, she had been over at the neighbor’s house playing. When Marybeth told her it was time to go, the 4-year-old, predictably, kicked up a fuss. The neighbor said Marybeth threatened to punish the little girl and said to her, “You’re going to go be with your brother!”

A nurse at Ellis also had suspicions, which she voiced to the doctor (as was the protocol in those days). The doctor ignored her concerns.

Perhaps Marybeth sensed that people were becoming suspicious. Or perhaps she was upset that she had run out of “sympathy tickets.” She became moody and withdrawn. So, thinking a change of environment might do them some good, the couple moved to a new neighborhood not far away. Marybeth took a job waitressing at a nearby restaurant.

In 1973, she became pregnant with their fourth child. Her co-workers at the restaurant knew that she had gotten rid of all of her other children’s things, so they threw her a baby shower.

On Thanksgiving day, she gave birth to Timothy. Timothy was a little underweight at five pounds, but otherwise healthy.

However, little Timothy would not last long. When he was just three weeks old, Marybeth brought his lifeless body back to the hospital, claiming she had found him that way in his crib. The doctors could find nothing obviously wrong with him, but again, did not do an autopsy. His death was attributed to SIDS.

As a rather interesting side note, the year after Timothy’s death, Joseph began complaining to his brother that his food was tasting bitter. His brother, who was suspicious of Marybeth, urged him to have it tested. Joseph blew the suggestion off.

Joe’s strange passivity about his wife had been going on for some time — he never seemed too upset about the deaths of his children, or too curious about the causes of their deaths. At each funeral, he would wear the same suit of clothes, and at the wake, he would sit quietly, not speaking to anyone.

Then one night, Joe’s brother and sister-in-law received a panicked call from Marybeth at 3 a.m. She kept screaming that Joe was dead. They rushed to their house and found Joe unconscious on the floor next to the bed. Marybeth was fully dressed, sobbing, “I didn’t do it!” She had not called the police or the hospital.

When Joe was finally admitted to the hospital, he had a near-fatal dose of barbiturates in his system. Joe, however, declined to press charges against his wife.

On Easter Sunday 1975, their fifth child, Nathan, was born. Marybeth’s co-workers were stunned that she would choose to have another child when it seemed they were all doomed to such short lives. “I’m a woman; that’s what women are supposed to do,” she explained. Nonetheless, they threw her another baby shower and expressed hope that this baby would beat the “curse” of its siblings.

In light of that family “curse,” Nathan had been sent home with an apnea monitor. Yet, that September, Marybeth showed up at the restaurant where she worked with his lifeless body, claiming he had simply stopped breathing while they were in the car. Co-workers called the hospital and urged Marybeth take Nathan there immediately.

Strangely, she didn’t take him to Ellis Hospital, which was closer. Instead she drove him to St. Clare’s, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Again, there was no obvious reason for an otherwise healthy 5-month-old baby to be dead, yet no autopsy was performed. His death, like his siblings’, was attributed to SIDS.

Suspicions were growing. Marybeth’s sister-in-law noted that she seemed to treat the children’s funerals like a party where she was the guest of honor. She also noted that Marybeth was a lavish spender, and when the children’s insurance payouts would arrive, she would go on a spending spree. She even recalled Marybeth mentioning that “we just got the check for Nathan, so we’re going out to get new drapes and wallpaper.”

A few years later, the Tinnings applied to become adoptive parents. Rather than raising red flags, their sad past led caseworkers to feel sorry for the Tinnings. They were placed with a young foster child, a boy, who was with them so briefly no one even remembered him. Then they fostered a 10-year-old girl. Joe seemed taken with the girl, and they grew close. However, when Marybeth got pregnant again, she sent the girl back to the agency.

In August 1978, the Tinnings adopted their sixth child, Michael, shortly after he was born. Then in October, she gave birth to their seventh child, Mary Frances. By all accounts, Marybeth seemed to lose interest in Michael once Mary Frances was born.

In January, Marybeth rushed Mary Frances to the ER with the familiar story about a seizure. Thankfully, they were able to revive her.

A month later, however, she returned to the hospital with Mary Frances — who was now in full cardiac arrest. She was revived again, but had sustained irreversible brain damage. After two days, Mary Frances was taken off life support and died shortly afterwards.

Marybeth went through her ritual of washing, folding, and throwing away her daughter’s things, then got pregnant again shortly after the funeral.

In the fall, the Tinnings’ eighth child, Jonathan, was born. He only lived until March 1980, when Marybeth showed up at St. Clare’s hospital with him, unconscious. He was revived, but because of the family history, he was sent to Boston Hospital for more tests. The doctors there could find no medical reason why he would simply have stopped breathing. So, Jonathan was sent home with his mother.

A few days later, she was back at St. Clare’s with Jonathan. Only this time, he was brain dead. He died March 24, 1980, after being kept on life support for four weeks.

While there were many people who had their suspicions about Marybeth Tinning, the doctors at the time were convinced the babies were all victims of some unknown genetic disorder, and approached their care from that perspective. Soon, however, another child’s death would put the lie to that belief.

In March 1981, Marybeth took Michael, their adopted son, to the doctor’s office. She claimed that she couldn’t wake him up that morning. But rather than taking him right across the street to Ellis Hospital, she had waited hours until her doctor’s office was open. By the time the doctor had examined him, Michael was already dead.

Because Michael was not related to the Tinnings, the theory that the deaths in the Tinning family had a genetic origin could no longer be supported. Now, finally, doctors, social workers, family members and neighbors began to voice their suspicions. However, nothing was done.

The Tinnings’ ninth child, Tami Lynne, was born in August of 1985. In December of that year, Marybeth called a neighbor, Cynthia Walter, in a panic. Walter had just been to the Tinning home earlier that day, playing with a seemingly healthy Tami Lynne.

Walter rushed over to find Tami Lynne lying on a changing table, purple, not breathing and unresponsive. Marybeth had not called an ambulance, so Walter told her to do so.

The EMTs arrived and rushed the baby to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. Marybeth claimed Tami Lynne had “gotten tangled in a blanket.” But this time, no one was buying her story. The doctors could find no apparent cause of death, and now that her history of so many dead children was known, suspicions firmly pointed to foul play — at the hands of Marybeth Tinning.

Marybeth’s suspicious behavior continued after Tami Lynne’s death. The neighbor who Marybeth had called (instead of the ambulance) had dropped by the Tinnings’ house the day after Tami Lynne died to offer her support and condolences. She said the couple was calmly eating breakfast, seemingly unconcerned that their child had just died. Later, after Tami Lynne’s funeral, Marybeth hosted a brunch, where she was smiling and chatting with her guests. Her sister even said “it didn’t seem to bother her.”

Since an autopsy had failed to determine a cause of death, it was attributed to SIDS. However, the chief of police was not satisfied. He contacted forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden to ask him an important question: was it possible for nine children from one family to die of SIDS?

Baden said absolutely not. He quoted Dr. Roy Meadow’s law: “One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder until proved otherwise.” After looking through the children’s medical files, Baden noted several facts that raised red flags. For one, there was no known genetic disease that would kill otherwise healthy children so suddenly — and Michael was not genetically related to the Tinnings. For another, SIDS babies don’t turn blue — and nearly all of Marybeth’s children had been blue when they died. He was also suspicious that no one had witnessed the seizures Marybeth claimed the children had. Also suspicious was the fact that Marybeth was the only person present when the children — with the exception of Jennifer — stopped breathing. Baden concluded that the children had likely been killed through homicidal asphyxiation.

On Feb. 4, 1986, Marybeth was brought in for questioning by the Schenectady Police Department about the death of Tami Lynne.

At first, she flatly denied any wrongdoing. After hours of questioning, however, she did finally admit to killing three of her children — Tami Lynne, Nathan, and Timothy. She admitted to smothering them with a pillow because, as she said, “I am not a good mother.”

Later Marybeth was allowed to meet with Joe at the station. There, she admitted to him in a voice so quiet she had to repeat herself, “I killed Tami.”

A court stenographer was brought in, and Marybeth dictated a 36-page confession in which she admitted to smothering three of her children. She continued to deny having anything to do with the other children’s deaths. She was subsequently arrested and charged with second-degree murder for the death of Tami Lynne.

After her arrest, the bodies of three of her children were ordered to be exhumed. In one case, confusion over the location of one of the graves resulted in the exhumation of the wrong body. The other two bodies were too decomposed to provide any evidence.

After her arrest, the news sent shock waves through Schenectady, and the case was covered extensively in the national media. There was a great deal of blame leveled at the doctors, social workers, coroners, and even neighbors. Eight children had died under highly suspicious circumstances, yet no one seemed to have noticed the pattern.

A big part of the problem was, of course, a lack of communication between the various medical examiners’ offices and doctors who handled the Tinning babies’ deaths. Some of the children’s deaths had been attributed to natural causes, so no autopsies were performed and no investigations were done, since, apparently, no crime had been committed.

This fits with the MO of a female serial killer perfectly: they are able to get away with so many murders precisely because the deaths appear to be natural. She even used one of the most common methods women use to dispatch their victims: smothering.

The murder trial of Marybeth Tinning opened on June 22, 1987. She was only charged with the death of Tami Lynne, as there was not enough evidence to charge her with the other deaths.

At first, Marybeth tried to recant her confession, but the judge ruled it admissible.

The trial was dominated by the testimonies of medical experts — each side called six different pathologists, each with a different opinion about what caused the deaths of the Tinning children. Perhaps the most persuasive of these was Dr. Marie Valdez-Dapena, an expert on SIDS. She testified that Tami Lynne could not have died of SIDS, but in fact had been suffocated.

Marybeth Tinning did not take the stand.

The jury deliberated for 29 hours, over three days, before they reached their verdict. Marybeth Tinning was found guilty of second-degree murder. She was later sentenced to 20 years to life in the Bedford Hills Prison for Women.

In 1989, she was indicted for the murders of Nathan and Timothy, the other two children she had confessed to killing, but the charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.

The question of why she murdered her children is at the heart of the Marybeth Tinning case. Baden believes that Marybeth had a mental disorder known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Now called Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, it was only listed in the DSM-5 in 2013, though it was first described by Dr. Roy Meadow in 1977. FDIA is a disorder where the parent or caregiver, usually the mother, invents illnesses in their children and often substantiates the stories by fabricating or inducing physical symptoms. This kind of abuse has a very high mortality rate for its victims.

The compulsion behind this abuse is to garner attention and sympathy. And in fact, Baden described Marybeth Tinning as “a sympathy junky.”

While nowadays, we tend to think of FDIA mothers as inducing illnesses in their children over long periods of time in order to obtain consistent levels of attention and sympathy, Marybeth Tinning didn’t do that. She may not have had the patience or intelligence to deal with such an elaborate, long-term fraud. Perhaps she simply never thought of it. But the deaths of her children fulfilled her need for attention, sympathy, and even admiration — not to mention a nice insurance check to spend on herself. Then, she would get pregnant again, and again be rewarded with attention (and gifts). But once the boring day-to-day life of raising children set in, she was no longer the center of attention. And so, another tragic death would vault Marybeth right back into the spotlight, and the cycle would repeat.

What makes this case all the more shocking that Marybeth Tinning was released on parole in August of 2018 after serving 31 years. Since she had only been convicted of one murder, she had served her time. She went back to Schenectady to live with Joe, and, as she told reporters, is “laying low.”

Note: if you’re interested in hearing from someone who survived Munchausen by Proxy/FDIA, I highly recommend Sickened by Julie Gregory.

Another note: This article contains affiliate links.