5 Babies Mourned, But Then A Confession

NEWARK VALLEY, N.Y. - Between 1965 and 1971, five healthy babies were born here to a woman who seemed to want them desperately and who mourned each of their deaths with a convulsive grief.

At one funeral, Waneta Hoyt fainted after the lowering of the tiny coffin and at another, her body collapsed with the great force of her sobbing.

These family tragedies, one after another, puzzled friends, relatives and doctors. The deaths were all sudden, the causes inexplicable. The last two babies spent most of their short lives in a Syracuse, N.Y., hospital, their every breath monitored by machines. Then, each died within a day of being sent home.

One of the hospital's physicians, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, wrote up the case for the noted journal "Pediatrics" in 1972. He would go on to become a national expert on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

The article was seen as pioneering work. Pediatricians often cited it as evidence that SIDS might well run in families.

But some doctors thought that theory was naive. SIDS cases were too often indistinguishable from smothering.

Several years later, a chance remark to a young prosecutor prompted him to look up the old article, and he began to wonder: Were there awful secrets afloat in a grieving mother's tears?

Two months ago, 23 years after the death of her fifth baby, Waneta Hoyt was interrogated by police for the first time. After almost two hours, Hoyt began to confess the details of how she

suffocated five babies against her shoulder with pillows, or a towel:

"I could not stand the crying," she told police. And, for a while, that appeared to be that. Waneta Hoyt - 47, housewife, churchgoer, mother of an adopted boy now in high school - was arrested.

But now, through her two court-appointed attorneys, Hoyt has recanted. The attorneys say their frail, emotionally scarred client would have admitted to anything that day merely to end the long cross-fire of painful questions.

As a medical term, SIDS is unusual. Rather than a cause of death, it is actually the absence of any detectable cause, a catchall for the unexplained. Each year, about 7,000 deaths in the United States are categorized as SIDS.

Steinschneider's paper, and similar work by others, gave doctors hope that some babies in jeopardy could be identified - and the fatal attack prevented.

But the article, striking to some, was incredible to others. The journal printed a letter from a doctor who raised the matter of child abuse.

Steinschneider replied that child abuse must always be considered in SIDS cases. However, in this instance both he and the nurses had found the babies' parents to be warm and supportive people.

One skeptic was Dr. Linda Norton of Dallas, a forensic pathologist.

In 1986, she went to Syracuse for a case where a father had murdered his three young children.

The assistant district attorney was William Fitzpatrick, an aggressive, steely prosecutor from Brooklyn, N.Y., who thought the crime was extraordinary.

Referring to the Hoyt case, Norton said he may have the same kind of trouble "right in your own back yard and that case is famous. You can look it up."

Fitzpatrick got the article. To him, it read like a homicide.

Six years later, after becoming district attorney, he ordered an investigation. It yielded a wealth of information, including the autopsy report on 2 1/2-month-old Noah Hoyt.

"Several hundred sheets of paper came in, chronicling the life history of this young lad, Noah Hoyt," Fitzpatrick said. "It was really so sad. For some reason, I developed an emotional attachment to Noah, you know, reading a record of virtually every day in his life. He was going to end up like the other four babies. You wanted to just reach back in through the hands of time and protect him."

Noah had suffered those breathing problems, sometimes bad enough to turn blue. There was a curious pattern to the attacks, the prosecutor noted: "They all happened while the child was in the exclusive control of the mother."

Two medical examiners were brought in to confer. They, too, went through the records, including autopsies of the fourth and fifth children. Based on the circumstantial evidence, they agreed with Fitzpatrick: They thought the mother was a murderer.

Three state troopers sat in the interrogation room with Waneta Hoyt.

The police bluffed that they knew the whole truth, that she had killed them all. Hoyt stiffened. Then, according to court records, she confessed.

Tim Hoyt was brought in, and Waneta told him of her great unburdening. He chose not to believe her. Words were put in your mouth, he suggested. She insisted otherwise. He told her he still loved her.

Since her confession, neither of the Hoyts has spoken publicly. Waneta is free on bond and a trial is not likely to occur for months. Her lawyers intend to attack the confession, arguing that it was taken under duress. They also hope to show that SIDS has in fact slain more than one baby in the same family.

There is evidence to support this in the medical literature, but the odds of five in one home are astronomical, many experts say.

"Right now, it seems like straight homicide," says Dr. Michael Baden, director of the forensic-sciences unit of the New York State Police.

"With her adopted baby, her husband had been laid off and he was at home to help out. With the other kids, when she couldn't handle things, she only could figure out one way to keep them quiet. She killed them."

Natalie Hilliard, in defending her friend, recalled how she had helped a pregnant Waneta set up a room for the little ones about to be born.

And how, time and again, they had tearfully packed the baby things away.