Their names were Eric, Julie, Jimmy, Molly and Noah.  They were all babies, they were all the children of Waneta Hoyt, and they were all dead.

“Congestive Heart failure,” the bewildered doctors said about Eric, “strangulation on rice cereal,” the doctors said for Julie, and “enlarged thymus” was the guess for two-year-old Jimmy, but really they didn’t know – sometimes babies just die.  “Crib death” it was called or the newly minted “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome”.

The tragic deaths of the Hoyt children coincided with the burgeoning SIDS movement: a group of concerned parents, scientists and doctors who were desperately trying to understand the sudden deaths of seemingly healthy infants.  When the Hoyts’ fourth child, Molly, was born, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, a SIDS researcher, kept her in the hospital for two months to determine if apnea – cessation of breathing during sleeping – could be the cause of SIDS.  Molly, and later her brother Noah, both had documented periods of apnea, but Dr. Steinschneider felt confident that these essentially healthy infants could go home with monitors and be just fine.  Both of them died, at home, under the care of their mother Waneta.

Using information gleaned from Molly and Noah, Dr. Steinschneider published a landmark paper on SIDS in 1972 that profoundly influenced the medical community for two decades.  He proposed that apnea was a factor in SIDS, and that SIDS could run in families.  But to prosecutors in the 1990s who stumbled upon the paper during a trial of a man accused of smothering his children, the facts in the Hoyt case didn’t add up.  A toddler dying of SIDS?  And all the children were alone with Waneta at the moment of death?

Was this a tragic case of familial SIDS?  Or was it something far more sinister…  Check out this title!