Waneta Hoyt and the Doctor Who Protected a Serial Killer
April 15, 1970, Syracuse, New York: Waneta and Tim Hoyt brought their fourth child, 3-week-old Molly, to see Dr. Alfred Steinschneider in his cutting-edge infant sleep clinic. There, Steinschneider was studying Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which he believed to be caused by sleep apnea, perhaps caused by some unknown genetic factor.
The Hoyt family, he thought, would be the perfect test subjects: their previous three children, though at first appearing perfectly healthy, had all died before the age of 3: one from SIDS, one from choking, and one from adrenal failure.
But to Steinschneider, the individual circumstances surrounding each child’s death were irrelevant. The babies had stopped breathing unexpectedly, so their deaths were, in his view, due to SIDS. And studying Molly would, he thought, provide the vital information he needed to prove his theory that SIDS was caused by apnea — a theory disregarded by most pediatric researchers.
He immediately had Molly admitted to the clinic and monitored around the clock. However, the sleep monitor she was hooked up to was a bulky contraption, prone to having the wires come disconnected and sounding false alarms. The nurses on duty — who took notes of every detail of Molly’s actions — knew this, and would record the false alarms as such. Steinschneider, however, would record these false alarms as accurate — and add some entirely fabricated apneic episodes into his notes as well.
Though Molly seemed to be doing well, the nurses noticed something odd about her mother. They noted that Waneta didn’t ever hold Molly unless she was told to, and even then, held the baby out, away from her body. Waneta never showed Molly any affection, seemingly detached from her own baby. Many attributed this to grief; Waneta had suffered the deaths of three previous children, so perhaps, the nurses thought, this was her way of protecting herself from more grief if Molly died as well.
But there was more odd behavior. When Tim would come to the clinic, Waneta seemed almost jealous of any attention he would give to Molly. If Tim was holding the baby, Waneta would sit close to him and stroke his thigh or move the baby and sit on his lap.
To describe Waneta as “clingy” was an understatement. From the moment she started dating Tim, she had to be the center of his attention. Faking a pregnancy, she dropped out of high school in 10th grade to marry him in January 1964. The two moved in with Tim’s family, who described her as “peculiar.”
She had no desire for a career of her own, but to be a housewife — a perfectly normal aspiration for a girl in the 1960s. However, she also didn’t want Tim to go to work and leave her alone. She would beg and cajole him not to go to work, and when he did, she would repeatedly call him at his job demanding his help with various crises — usually related to her health.
Tim’s family also noticed that she would frequently wear maternity clothes, even when she wasn’t pregnant.
Once Erik came along in October of that year, they said she was a “model mother,” doing everything “by the book.” But in January 1965, she had been alone with Erik when he suddenly stopped breathing. She had run outside, screaming for help. A neighbor tried doing CPR on the tiny infant, but it was too late.
His death — during one of the only times she was alone in the house with him — shook everyone, Waneta the most. At his funeral, she fainted and had to be revived.
After that, her “health problems” got worse. It seemed she not only wanted to be the center of Tim’s attention, but everyone else’s as well. She now started threatening suicide if Tim didn’t come home right away. Needless to say, this made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Nevertheless, the couple welcomed another son, who they named Jimmy, May 31, 1966. Two years later, on July 19, 1968, they had a daughter and named her Julie.
While she was still pregnant with Julie, and Jimmy was just a toddler, Waneta and Tim moved out of his family’s house and into their own trailer on the property. So while there was some space between them now, his family still saw her and the children on a daily basis. They noticed that Waneta, otherwise a “model mother,” would have sudden temper outbursts, screaming and even slapping Jimmy for normal toddler messiness or crying. They chalked it up to her need to have everything neat, tidy, and under control.
Then on Sept. 5, 1968, 2 ½ -month-old Julie stopped breathing. Waneta had run out and flagged down a passing truck driver for help, to no avail. She told the doctors that Julie had choked while drinking rice cereal from a bottle.
Only two weeks later, Jimmy, now 2 years old, simply collapsed and stopped breathing. Waneta had run to her neighbors’ house, screaming for help. Jimmy was the first of the Hoyt children to be autopsied; however, it was only a cursory examination, done by a doctor who was not familiar with pediatric autopsies. Jimmy’s cause of death was listed as “adrenal failure,” a debilitating disease that he had never shown any symptoms of having.
When the two children died within two weeks of each other, everyone’s hearts went out to the couple. Waneta was so overcome by grief, she collapsed in sobs when her son’s coffin was lowered into the ground.
So when they heard that Dr. Steinschneider was going to study Molly, everyone hoped this would break the horrible streak of tragedy for the Hoyts.
Three weeks after she was admitted to the clinic, with no real evidence of sleep apnea, Molly was sent home with a breathing monitor, making her the first infant in the U.S. to use an at-home breathing monitor.
Two days later, Waneta called Steinschneider’s clinic: Molly had stopped breathing, and Waneta had to resuscitate her. Steinschneider told Waneta to bring Molly back to the clinic, where it was found that she had a slight cold, but was breathing normally.
Molly was readmitted and again monitored around the clock for about four weeks. Again, there were a few false alarms, but Molly’s breathing seemed to be fine.
This began raising even more red flags with the nurses who cared for Molly. Waneta’s cold demeanor, coupled with the fact that Molly only had these episodes when she was alone with her, was extremely suspicious.
Several of the nurses spoke to Steinschneider, expressing their fear that Molly might be in danger if she was sent home with Waneta. One nurse explicitly told him, “If you send her home, that lady is going to kill her.”
Steinschneider waved them all off, even calling one “another hysterical nurse.”
On June 4, 1970, Molly was sent home again with a breathing monitor. The next day, Molly was dead. Waneta said she had put Molly in her crib and left her alone for just a minute. When she came back, she found the baby not breathing and turning blue.
At autopsy, the medical examiner noted that Molly was quite blue, which would actually rule out SIDS. However, not finding any other illnesses or injuries, he ruled Molly’s death was due to pneumonia.
Steinschneider immediately challenged this finding. Molly had had no sign of pneumonia when she had been discharged only 12 hours before her death. But Steinschneider wasn’t out to find the truth — he was out to prove Molly had died of apnea-related SIDS.
Back at the Hoyts’, Waneta seemed to take Molly’s death much differently. The day after her funeral, Waneta went out and bought herself a new dress, and the next night, went out dancing with Tim.
Two months later, Waneta was pregnant again. When Noah was born on May 9, 1971, Steinschneider insisted that he be brought to his clinic as soon as he was discharged from the hospital where he was born.
At the clinic, Noah seemed perfectly healthy. Though there was now a new crew of nurses looking after him, they also noticed the oddly distant way Waneta acted towards her son, as well as the way she seemed jealous of Tim’s attention. Like the first crew, they warned Steinschneider that Noah might be in danger, and like the first time, he waved away their concerns.
Noah was released a month later. Three days after he was discharged, Waneta said he’d stopped breathing, and brought him back to the clinic. He was readmitted and monitored for about six weeks; since he seemed to be doing fine, he was again discharged. Again, like Molly, only a day after his discharge, he stopped breathing at home and died.
After losing five children, Tim underwent a vasectomy, worried that whatever was killing his babies might be some genetic flaw he was responsible for.
A week after Noah’s death, the couple adopted a baby named Scott on a six-month trial basis. However, Waneta sent Scott back. She had begun seeing a psychiatrist and had confessed that she feared she might hurt him. She had also begun having serious suicidal thoughts, and was prescribed medication to control her anxiety and depression.
The couple would later adopt another infant named Jay. With Tim now no longer working, he was able to stay home with his wife and help with their adopted son. To everyone’s relief, Jay seemed to suffer no health problems. It also bolstered the opinion that whatever had killed the other babies was probably genetic.
Things seemed to improve for the Hoyts, who were regular church-goers, loved by the small community. Jay was thriving, though his mother’s health was going downhill. The awful tragedies of their past faded with time.
Steinschneider, meanwhile, published his study showing SIDS could be traced to sleep apnea, setting off a craze for at-home breathing monitors — a trend that continues to this day — and earning himself some $9 million from their sales.
However, not everyone trusted Steinschneider’s theories. Other researchers found problems with his methodology, and the fact that he had falsified data. Some expressed the worry that SIDS couldn’t be distinguished from smothering, and could provide essentially a “get out of jail free” card to any parent who murdered their infant by doing so.
One of Steinschneider’s harshest critics was Dr. Linda Norton, a forensic pathologist from Dallas, Texas. She had long thought Steinschneider’s study was sketchy, and that the case of “Mrs. H” wasn’t proof of a genetic propensity to fatal sleep apnea, but rather, a case of serial murder.
In 1986, she was in Syracuse, New York, consulting with the assistant district attorney, William Fitzpatrick, on a case where a man had killed his three children for the insurance money.
As she was working with Fitzpatrick, she told him, “If you think your case is bad, there’s a worse serial killer right in your own backyard.” She then went on to tell him of her suspicions about the “Mrs. H” case in Steinschneider’s paper.
Fitzpatrick got a copy of the paper, and he had to agree — it looked a lot like murder. But he soon left the DA’s office and relocated. It wasn’t until 1992 that he ran for, and won, election as the district attorney for Onondaga County, where Syracuse is located. One of his first priorities was to look into the case of “Mrs. H.”
Based on the details listed in Steinschneider’s paper, such as the infants’ initials and their dates of birth, Fitzpatrick concluded that “Mrs. H” was in fact Waneta Hoyt.
After reviewing the children’s medical records, he had Waneta brought in for questioning. After almost two hours of questioning, she finally confessed, in detail, how she murdered her five children.
Erik, she smothered with a pillow. She pressed Julie’s face into her shoulder. She smothered Jimmy with a towel. Molly and Noah, she also smothered with pillows. In each case, she said, she had been driven to kill by the children’s crying.
Twenty years after her last murder, Waneta Hoyt was arrested.
However, she recanted her confession and pled not guilty. Her trial began in May 1995. Her husband, son Jay, and neighbors all rallied to her defense. No one was willing to believe that the frail, balding, middle-aged woman could have murdered her own children.
Her defense argued that her confession had been coerced, and that the supposed motive — Munchausen’s Disorder by Proxy — was a discredited bit of pseudoscience. Besides, they argued, there was not one piece of concrete evidence proving Waneta had killed her children.
Nonetheless, she was found guilty and sentenced to 75 years in prison. She appealed her case, but died of pancreatic cancer before her appeal could be heard. Because of this, the State of New York posthumously exonerated her.
Steinschneider’s paper is now widely discredited, as is the practice of using breathing monitors on infants. Studies in other countries, where Steinschneider didn’t hold the same sway as in the U.S., showed that placing infants on their backs decreased SIDS by up to 50 percent. However, this research was suppressed in the U.S. for many years by the American SIDS Foundation, which was headed by Steinschneider. Now, the fact that it’s safer to put babies to sleep on their backs is common knowledge.
Perhaps just as importantly, the push to have a national standard for investigating suspicious infant deaths, rather than simply labeling them as SIDS, has helped ensure that cases like the Hoyts’ aren’t swept under the rug anymore.
Note: The Baby Historian does a great deep dive into this case; I highly recommend her video.
Also, the book Death of Innocents is probably the most in-depth research into this case (affiliate link).
