Waneta Hoyt murdered her five infant children during the 1960s-early '70s; by an implausible coincidence, she lived in and was active in the same region of upstate New York as Marybeth Tinning, who killed all nine of her children during the same era. It took a quarter century after the demise of her last child before she was finally caught. Hoyt was born as Waneta Nixon in Richford, best known as the birthplace of business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, on May 13, 1946, one of eight children of Arthur and Dorothy Nixon, an unassuming working class couple. Nothing in her background would have drawn any red flags. She met her future husband Tim Hoyt on the 9th grade school bus and dropped out at 17 to marry him.
Waneta first became pregnant in early 1964 and gave birth to a boy, Eric, on October 17. He died January 26, 1965. According to Waneta's later confession, Eric was crying and she wanted him to stop so she smothered him with a pillow. She had forgotten some of the details with the passage of three decades, but remembered that he bled from his nose and mouth. Eric's death was written off as accidental and no suspicion was raised.Waneta became pregnant again later that year and gave birth to another son, James, on May 31, 1966. A daughter, Julie, arrived July 19, 1968. On September 5, Waneta pressed her mouth and nose into her shoulder until she stopped moving. On September 26, two year old James walked into the bathroom while his mother was changing. She made him go out of the room. James began crying and yelling "Mommy, Mommy!" Waneta was annoyed by his hollering, so she grabbed a bath towel and smothered him. After he was dead, she picked up his lifeless body, ran down the street yelling for help, and flagged down a passing garbage truck. Her fourth child, Molly, was born March 18, 1970. After a night in the hospital to monitor her health on June 4, she was brought home by her parents, after which Waneta smothered her in her crib. The Hoyts' final biological child, Noah, was born May 9, 1971. On July 28 (Waneta recalled it being a hot summer day) he was smothered with a pillow. Like with Molly, Noah was hospitalized for observation since all his previous siblings had inexplicably died.
Neighbors remembered Waneta as being a nice, normal woman who gave off no indication of being a serial infant killer. As far as anyone knew, she had simply suffered an inexplicable series of tragedies and the neighbors had no problems with letting her babysit their kids.Medical observation of Molly and Noah prior to their deaths had not disclosed anything especially out of the ordinary other than some momentary interruptions in their breathing. One of the hospital's attending physicians, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, wrote it up for the noted journal Pediatrics. He went on to become a national expert on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. That 1972 article was seen as pioneering work. Pediatricians often cited it as evidence that the unexplained phenomenon of SIDS may well run in families. Those abnormal pauses in breathing could be foretellers of a sudden death. If so, SIDS was possibly preventable with the use of monitoring devices at home. Not everyone believed it; some skeptics argued that there was no way to tell SIDS apart from intentional smothering. Indeed, none of the Hoyt children's bodies had any sign of obvious foul play; no bruising or any sign of the killer being visibly angry. Smothering would produce burst capillaries, but these would be difficult to notice in children that young, and not noticed at all if no one thought to look for them, as they did not since Waneta's claims about finding them suddenly dead were accepted with no questions asked.
After the demise of the Hoyts' last baby, the couple decided to adopt. They adopted an infant boy named Scott a few weeks after Noah's death. This did not last long; Waneta gave him back to the adoption agency after telling a psychiatrist that she feared she would harm him. The Hoyts adopted another baby, Jay, in 1977. Remarkably, he survived infancy and grew into a normal child and teenager who was in high school when his step-mother's dark deeds were finally exposed.The investigation took nearly a decade. It began in 1986 when assistant DA William Fitzpatrick was prosecuting a Syracuse father who had murdered his three children. During that investigation, Dr. Linda Norton, a Texas forensic pathologist known to distrust the medical establishment, told Fitzpatrick about the Hoyt babies and he may have a potential case there. After looking into it, he immediately felt that something was up and found it bewildering that foul play was never suspected. However, the case was put on hold for some years when Fitzpatrick went into private law practice before returning as an elected DA in 1992.
After that, Fitzpatrick ordered an investigation into the case. He managed to obtain Noah's medical records, a couple hundred pages documenting his all of 81 days of life. Fitzpatrick found the records "moving" and wished he could go back in time to 1971 and save him. Noah had experienced periodic breathing difficulties, sometimes enough to turn him blue, and these somehow always seemed to happen when he was in his mother's care. Examination of Molly's medical records drew similar conclusions, although of the five Hoyt children, only Noah had actually been autopsied and nothing suspicious was found. The DA's office felt sure by now that they had enough probable cause to charge Waneta Hoyt with murder.The investigators eventually managed, with some difficulty, to exhume the bodies of the five Hoyt children, but with the youngest still deceased for more than two decades, there wasn't much of any evidence to be found.
The Hoyts had not gone anywhere and were still living in Tioga County, their adopted son Jay now a high school junior. Background checks of the couple found nothing interesting. On March 27, 1994, Waneta was at the local post office when she was approached by a state trooper who told her he was doing some research on SIDS and requested her help. He took her to an interrogation room with two other officers who questioned her for the next two and a half hours. They ran down the list of all five of Waneta's dead children. She didn't show much emotion until the officers bluffed some and told her they knew the truth about what had happened to the children.At this point, Waneta broke down and confessed, describing how she killed each one. She said she had sought psychiatric help in the hope it would stop her from doing it again and she knew what she did was wrong. She added that she loved her stepson Jay, and that the reason he was spared was because her husband had been around enough that she couldn't have gotten away with killing him too. Waneta said the main reason she killed her children was that they wouldn't stop crying and she didn't know how to deal with it.
Waneta would later retract her confession and psychiatrist Dr. Patrick Ewing, who testified for the defense, argued that the New York state police had manipulated it out of her and exploited her "vulnerable" mental state; they had not informed her beforehand that she was under suspicion of murder. Another psychiatrist, Dr. David Barry, who testified for the prosecution, agreed. Nonetheless, Waneta was found guilty of five counts of second degree murder on September 11, 1995 and sentenced to a total of 75 years in prison.At the time of her sentencing, Waneta was not yet 50 years old, but could have passed for 75. She looked older than her years and was in poor health, suffering from heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and arthritis. The Nixon clan were not known for their robust constitutions--one of Waneta's brothers had a degenerative disease of the hip joint, two had cancer--one sister was dying of a brain tumor and Waneta was nursing her at the time of her arrest, another, paralyzed from the waist down, was married to Tim's brother, who had multiple sclerosis. Her mother had died several years earlier in a car accident.
Waneta began serving her sentence at the Bedford Hills Correctional Institute For Women in Westchester County. She died of pancreatic cancer on August 13, 1998. Under New York law, Waneta was posthumously pardoned of the murder charges since she died before she had been able to file any appeals.
>>18754817SIDS is a ruse, a made-up illness when it was always bitches offing their babies the whole time.
>>18754846This is just so odd to me. Growing up in our neighborhood, we were all more afraid of our moms than our dads. Moms hit first, and then “wait ’til your father gets home” (Ironically, this was such a common phrase that it became a cartoon)ETA: just odd to me that maternal abuse is the third rail in medicine when it was a common childhood occurrence.
>>18754830>>18754827It can be disturbing to read through this because one of the things it brings to mind is the less severe yet quite real dangers my mother put me through. Both my father and his mother were terrified by the way she used to cross the street while I was an infant: she would put the stroller out in front at full arm's length, put her head down, and run. Dad tried and failed to reason her out of that. Then she came up with other tricks as I grew older: teaching me the wrong way to cross the street, leaving me unsupervised in public places, ordering me to ride a bicycle home from school during thunderstorms. It often felt as if she were setting me up for an accidental death so that she could be rid of the burdensome responsibilities of parenting and collect sympathy instead.
this woman was obviously an immature shithead who couldn't deal with parenting. maybe she had grown up a little by the time she adopted Jay since she was 30 by then, but still...
>>18754832>At the time of her sentencing, Waneta was not yet 50 years old, but could have passed for 75. She looked older than her years and was in poor health, suffering from heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and arthritis. The Nixon clan were not known for their robust constitutions--one of Waneta's brothers had a degenerative disease of the hip joint, two had cancer--one sister was dying of a brain tumor and Waneta was nursing her at the time of her arrest, another, paralyzed from the waist down, was married to Tim's brother, who had multiple sclerosis.upstate NY is a post-industrial shithole with awful soil and water pollution; that's why they were so sickly--constant exposure to toxic chemicals in the air and water
>>18754830if a cop randomly asked me to help him do research on SIDS i would find that pretty suspicious since that doesn't seem like a usual policing subject
the fairer sex my left nut
>>18754835>Waneta began serving her sentence at the Bedford Hills Correctional Institute For Women in Westchester Countyhopefully as a last act she was forced to eat out her bulldyke lesbian cellmate
>>18754851all the most self-absorbed and sociopathic people i ever met in my life were female
>>18754817tf man? why couldn't boomers just stop killing people?
>the main reason she killed her children was that they wouldn't stop crying and she didn't know how to deal with it.what was she supposed to do
Hoyt was said to be a huge attention whore, often taking the baby out of her husband's arms and sitting on his lap in place of it.
>>18756156Female hands typed this post.
>>18754846Yep. My niece wanted me to buy her some baby monitor that would alert them if the baby's O2 levels dropped. She was quite put out when I told her that SIDS was just women killing their babies and unless she was the murderous type the only alarms she would be getting from that monitor would be false ones. Apparently postpartum hormones are really a thing because she hasn't spoken to me since.
>>18755006>feminist hero Lindsay Clancy says "hush little baby don't you cry"
i heard SIDS was often women carelessly putting infants to sleep on their stomachs so they asphyxiated when you're supposed to lay them face-up
>>18754817there are women who enjoy pregnancy but not actually caring for the kid, and others who love caring for babies but don't know how to deal with an older child
>>18754870Jay was adopted so if she killed him it couldn't be blamed on an inexplicable genetic defect like with her natural children.
Y dafuq some white bitch got a name like "Waneta". Dass sum fucked up shieeet right thurr.
>>18756660i typed "waneta" on Google Images but all photos i got were of white women
>>18756156Woman detected.
>>18754835No matter what you may think, you simply do not hate women enough. They deserve much more hatred than they get. Much more.
>>18756489No, SIDS was just women deliberately killing their children. Nothing more, nothing less. By the way, they’re still doing it.
>>18756815whatever mommy issues you have are between you and your therapist, anon
