The Death of Innocents

Book by Firstman Richard Talan Jamie

Miller and Urbanski weren't terribly worried about the testimony of the nurses.  They knew they had bigger problems ahead.  This would be the week when Waneta's statements to the police would be presented to the jury.  First, though, Miller would get the chance to do something he relished: tear into the testimony of Simpson's forensic experts.  A few minutes after 9:00 on Monday morning, he watched Dr. Janice Ophoven make her way to the witness chair.  He could hardly wait to get at her.

Just arrived from Minnesota, Ophoven wore a black skirt and jacket with an orange-and-green print blouse, a pair of glasses nestled in her short, thick hair.  She had a midwesterner's plainspokenness, the face and manner of authority.  Simpson spent the better part of an hour on her credentials and expertise, working in a thorough explanation of what it is that a pediatric forensic pathologist does, and how it was her job to determine the cause and manner of a child's death based on every bit of evidence, whether physical, circumstantial, or historical.  Finally, Simpson signaled the real beginning of her testimony, and his case.  "Do you know what SIDS is?" he asked.

Simpson wanted the jury to understand that no one dealt more closely with the intersection of SIDS and infanticide than someone in Ophoven's line of work.  And no one could speak with more assurance on the specific medical and legal aspects of the unusual case at hand than a forensic pathologist who had once been a practicing pediatrician.  First, he wanted to imbue the jurors with the doctrine of SIDS as random occurrence, not given to repeating itself within families.  There is no connection between SIDS and genetics, Ophoven explained, setting up one of the basic tenets of the prosecution's case.  The chance of one SIDS in a family was remote enough.  Two was cause for alarm, and a serious police investigation.  "By the time a third event would occur within a family," Ophoven said, "the SIDS diagnosis is no longer a possibility and an alternative explanation must be identified."

Simpson turned immediately to the alternative explanation being proposed.  "Do you generally find signs of suffocation?" he asked, alluding to John Scott's testimony.  "Fingerprints, bruises, any external or internal sign?" No, Ophoven said, not generally.  "A little person doesn't have the capacity to struggle in a coordinated way in that SIDS age group." What if one arrived at the scene fifteen or twenty minutes after a suffocation? "If a hand was used, or if a hard object was used, maybe.  But if the object was soft, then I expect I wouldn't....  Whether it was fifteen minutes or not, if there's no mark, there's no mark." She demonstrated, spreading her hand to cover her own face.  The sound of camera shutters snapping echoed through the courtroom; the front page of the next day's Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin would be dominated by a large color photo of Ophoven's chilling display.

Simpson was loath to leave the impression that the absence of marks meant the Hoyt children went quietly.  Could a two- or three-month-old resist an attempted suffocation? he asked.  "Oh, sure," Ophoven said.  "Again, those of us who have taken care of little people, if you do something to them they don't like, they let you know instantly.  And if it's a big thing they don't like, they arch their back, they get mad right away, they use their muscles, but it's kind of like this whole body reaction, as opposed to a coordinated reaction.  But even little, tiny premature infants will struggle if they're uncomfortable or if something's happening that isn't right."

"Would a two-and-a-half-year-old resist differently?" Simpson asked, moving on to the image of Jimmy.

"Oh, Lord, yes....  A small boo-boo or a big boo-boo, they turn the whole thing on.  For a two-and-a-half-year-old, to draw blood or to start an IV, you may need two or three people to hold these folks down if they don't like what's happening." But regardless of age, it would take several minutes to accomplish a suffocation.  A child, like an adult, would lose consciousness after about two minutes without breath.  Death would come another two to four minutes later.

Had she had occasion to actually witness the suffocation of an infant? The question startled some of the jurors, as did the answer.  "Yes I have," Ophoven said.  "In a qualified way." She described two video surveillance tapes she'd seen in the apnea center at the Children's Hospital of St. Paul.  In both cases, mothers were observed suffocating their babies.  That's how she knew what a baby fighting for his life looked like.

"Just so we're clear on this," Simpson said, "nobody was watching this so that someone should have rushed in and rescued the child." No, Ophoven said, the tapes were viewed later.  It was part of the hospital's method of diagnosing apnea.  Sometimes, the camera caught a horrific example of "factitious apnea." There are parents out there, she told the jury, who cause or fabricate reports of life-threatening episodes.  And sometimes they go all the way.  If they do it in the hospital, she implied, imagine what they do at home.  She never uttered the term Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Ophoven's testimony was at once repellent and riveting to the courtroom spectators.  Among them was Gail Pfeiffer, who had decided to come back on Monday morning and resume watching the trial.  She found she could not stay away--she needed to see this to conclusion.  She sat on a chair in the balcony opposite the jury box, peering down, intent on the testimony.  People noticed her, jurors included, and began to wonder about her.  Some of Waneta's family glared when they encountered her outside the courtroom.

With Ophoven's lecture on suffocation serving as a prologue, Simpson moved on to what it had to do with the children of Waneta Hoyt.  He spent the next phase of the testimony introducing twenty-seven exhibits, handing them up to Ophoven and discussing their meaning with her, one by one.  They were birth and death certificates of each child, the various records from the hospitals in Ithaca and Syracuse, and eight autopsy reports--the three performed at the deaths of Jimmy, Molly, and Noah, and the five from the exhumations a few months before the trial.  Then he moved to the children.  His first piece of business was to refute the original causes of death.  "I'd like to start with Eric," he said.

In 1965, Dr.  Arthur Hartnagel attributed Eric's death to "congenital anomalies of the heart." Ophoven testified there was no clinical record of such a problem, nor could a coroner come to this conclusion without an autopsy.  "It is not the kind of thing where you would make the initial diagnosis without any previous information," she said.

They moved on to Jimmy, whose elusive 1968 autopsy report, missing since the beginning of the investigation, had turned up only weeks before the start of the trial.  It happened serendipitously.  Late in winter, Miller had subpoenaed Waneta's county mental health records.  Sgueglia read them first, then distributed them to the defense and prosecution.  Flipping through the file when it arrived at the district attorney's office, Simpson's secretary, Pat Gray, came upon a document that tripped a switch.  "Which autopsy did you say is missing?" she asked him.  James, he said.  "Well, here it is." It was part of the record left by Dr.  Mokarram Jafri, the psychiatrist who had requested copies of the autopsy reports for Jimmy, Molly, and Noah after the disquieting incident with the adoptive baby named Scotty in 1971.

Jimmy's autopsy was peculiar, full of findings about the thymus and the adrenal glands and congested organs that a jury of lay people might consider descriptive of a sick child.  It had had that effect on Waneta's family in 1968.  For Ophoven, it made Jimmy's case more difficult than his brother's to clarify on the witness stand.  She decided an anatomy lesson was in order.  "The endocrine system is like the body's pony express," she said, addressing the jurors directly, "and the brain stem is like the control panel." Revisiting the autopsy performed by Dr.  James Mitchell on the morning of September 26, 1968, she took them on a tour of the thymus gland and explained why its size had nothing to do with the child's death.  She explained, point by point, why the autopsy described a normal, healthy little boy whose death could not be attributed to any natural cause--not enlarged thymus, not adrenal insufficiency.  For the jurors, it was a long and grueling lecture.  "Doctor, try and move it along a little bit," Simpson said at one point.

Julie was next.  Hers was a simple case.  Babies don't choke to death on rice cereal, Ophoven testified.  Pieces of hot dog, peanuts, toys--yes.  Rice cereal--no.

Now, Molly.  Ophoven read from the voluminous hospital records, first from Tompkins County Hospital, then Upstate Medical Center.  Here, the jury heard for the first time that the Hoyts, in giving Molly's history, had told the doctors that blood had been present at the deaths of Eric and Jimmy.  Ophoven read all the in...