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Unraveling a twenty-five-year tale of multiple murder and medical deception, The Death of Innocents is a work of first-rate journalism told with the compelling narrative drive of a mystery novel. More than just a true-crime story, it is the stunning expose of spurious science that sent medical researchers in the wrong direction--and nearly allowed a murderer to go unpunished.
On July 28, 1971, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby named Noah Hoyt died in his trailer home in a rural hamlet of upstate New York. He was the fifth child of Waneta and Tim Hoyt to die suddenly in the space of seven years. People certainly talked, but Waneta spoke vaguely of "crib death," and over time the talk faded.
Nearly two decades later a district attorney in Syracuse, New York, was alerted to a landmark paper in the literature on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS--that had been published in a prestigious medical journal back in 1972. Written by a prominent researcher at a Syracuse medical center, the article described a family in which five children had died suddenly without explanation. The D.A. was convinced that something about this account was very wrong. An intensive quest by a team of investigators came to a climax in the spring of 1995, in a dramatic multiple-murder trial that made headlines nationwide.
But this book is not only a vivid account of infanticide revealed; it is also a riveting medical detective story. That journal article had legitimized the deaths of the last two babies by theorizing a cause for the mystery of SIDS, suggesting it could be predicted and prevented, and fostering the presumption that SIDS runs in families. More than two decades of multimillion-dollar studies have failed to confirm any of these widely accepted premises. How all this happened--could have happened--is a compelling story of high-stakes medical research in action. And the enigma of familial SIDS has given rise to a special and terrible irony. There is today a maxim in forensic pathology: One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is very suspicious. Three is homicide.
- Sales Rank: #142384 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Bantam
- Published on: 1998-10-06
- Released on: 1998-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.22" h x 1.42" w x 6.11" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 640 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
A rule of thumb in forensics: one dead baby is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome(SIDS); two dead babies is suspicious; three dead babies is murder. The Death of Innocents starts off a bit slow, but as soon as a new district attorney decides to pursue an old case of five siblings whose deaths were attributed to SIDS, the story kicks into high gear. There are two villains: the quietly furious mother who admitted to smothering her children--one of whom was 2 years old, and kicked and flailed as he died--and the arrogant medical researcher who was so eager to make a name for himself that he was willfully blind to the warnings of danger. Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, a husband-wife team, write about abuse of the scientific method as suspensefully as they write about parental abuse of babies. The Death of Innocents was named a 1997 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. The NYT writes, The Death of Innocents "...seamlessly weaves the tales of the earlier and later murder cases, separated by two decades, with the complicated scientific and social issues, the many disparate personalities, documents, interviews and dramatic moments. The book is paced like a thriller, and it will be read like one."
From The New England Journal of Medicine
So starts the 1961 Journal article "Slaughter of the Innocents: A Study of Forty-Six Homicides in Which the Victims Were Children" (L. Adelson. 1961;264:1345-49). This classical theme echoes throughout the accompanying grim editorial, "Murder in the Tower" (1961;264:1368-69). Thirty-seven years later, the same themes of passion, corruption, and the death of sweet children reverberate through the pages of The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stakes Science.
The book opens with a gripping tale of the investigation into the deaths of the three Van Der Sluys siblings -- deaths that had been written off as due to accidental choking or the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Ten years, three exhumations, and a dramatic trial later, the dogged determination of a group of tenacious law-enforcement officials was rewarded when a judge found the father of the children guilty of murder. He had suffocated the children for the life-insurance money. If the book had ended there, it would have been a better-than-average true-crime story, but it would not have been reviewed in the Journal. What makes this book appropriate for review in these pages is a piece of the medical literature itself.
In 1972, Pediatrics published an article that described five patients with abnormally prolonged periods of apnea, two of whom were siblings who eventually died of SIDS (A. Steinschneider. "Prolonged Apnea and the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Clinical and Laboratory Observations." 1972;50:646). In fact, those two children had three older siblings who had died. This paper provided support for the theory that prolonged apnea and SIDS are linked and hereditary, and it was carefully studied by the attorneys in the Van Der Sluys case. Just as they had been suspicious of the three deaths in the Van Der Sluys family, the prosecutors suspected foul play in the deaths of the five siblings. By coincidence, the Pediatrics paper originated from upstate New York, close to where the Van Der Sluys murders had occurred. After some clever detective work, the investigators identified the second family in the article as the Hoyts, and Mrs. Hoyt was eventually convicted of murder. She was a pathetic murderer, suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Contrary to the conclusions of the Pediatrics article, the children were victims of a serial killer, not a genetic disease.
Although they are the only murderers in the book, Mr. Van Der Sluys and Mrs. Hoyt are not the only villains. The authors, former reporters at Newsday, paint an ugly picture of the clinical investigators in the SIDS field. Starting with the 1972 Pediatrics paper, we are given a detailed description of scientists whose arrogance, ruthlessness, and lust for success prevented them from viewing either their data or their patients objectively. They are shown denigrating colleagues who criticized their interpretation of the data, ignoring the nurses who confronted them because of concern about the research subjects, and marginalizing members of the house staff who questioned the diagnosis and management of familial SIDS. As one of the investigators admits, "When you do research, you can easily be seduced into believing what you want to."
It is hard to judge how accurate this gruesome portrait is, although the authors are careful to document much of what they report in a very creditable fashion. I must admit that as a house officer in the early days of the familial SIDS flurry, I was too beleaguered to insist that the emperor did not seem to be wearing anything.
This book is a most absorbing way to be reminded of the pitfalls of clinical investigation and how to avoid them by involving a diverse research team and listening to their conclusions.
Reviewed by Orah Platt, M.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
From Kirkus Reviews
A can't-put-it-down account of a case of multiple infanticides by an upstate New York mother, intertwined with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), bad science, and good detective work, leading to high drama in the courtroom. In the mid 1980s, while prosecuting a suspicious case in which three babies in one family appeared to have died of SIDS, Onondaga County's chief homicide prosecutor, William Fitzpatrick, came across a landmark 1972 paper by a local researcher in Syracuse on the relation of sleep apnea, or suppression of breathing, to the unexplained phenomenon of SIDS. The article, by Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, shaped medical thinking for years, leading doctors to believe that SIDS-causing apnea could run in families, and launched a multi-million-dollar electronic baby-monitoring industry. But it also alerted Fitzpatrick to another suspicious case in which five children in one family had reportedly died of SIDS. Finding that the mother, Waneta Hoyt, lived in a nearby county, the prosecutor turned his information over to his counterpart there. His investigation resulted in Hoyt's trial and conviction, a quarter of a century after the fact, on five counts of murder. The proceedings also in effect put Steinschneider's work on trial, casting them into doubt. Yet today his theories are still influential, while SIDS remains a mystery. Firstman and Talan have made sense out of a mountain of legal and medical documents, and bring to the page a huge cast of living, breathing, unforgettable characters, from the young Waneta, shy and unexpressive but desperate for attention, to the charismatic, arrogant Steinschneider, who allowed theory to blind him to reality and whose only doctoring was of his statistics. The authors also raise serious questions about the interplay of medical, social, political, and financial factors in the propagation of scientific theories. Rich, riveting, and rewarding. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I truly hesitate to review this book as I am ...
By Dorothy McCabe
I truly hesitate to review this book as I am still not finished with it. It's taking me a long time, as it was not the book I expected. I was looking to understand the motivation of the killer, the mother of the 5 babies. But instead of discussing an example of multiple matricide it is a long and VERY detailed discussion of the subject of SIDS and the medical research that is ongoing. I do see why the author had to share the long and intense research that is ongoing on that topic. As I slowly reach the book's end however (80% read), I hope there is more info on the mother herself and how a parent comes to develop Munchausen By Proxy. I'm making this clear to readers that this is not a typical true crime book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Worth the Time Investment
By cleosmom
This is a VERY long book and usually that equals boring; especially if I told you that right in the middle the authors went off on a tangent and spent over half of the book explaining the entire history of the SIDS research and awareness movement from late 1960's to 1990's. But please don't make that mistake because these authors are pros and they make this subject not only interesting, but clear, concise and easy to follow and make you want to know everything. It is also important to the criminal case which is the backbone of the story, the Waneta Hoyt murder trial, and why it took over 20 years to bring her to justice for murdering 5 of her children. I couldn't put this book down until I finished it and along the way it made me angry and made me cry, and I will never forget those 5 little ones who died 45-50 years ago.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting, yet inconsistent
By groupworker
Interesting, yet inconsistent. I picked it up because I had some familiarity with the first story. I didn't understand that these are two completely different stories put together in one book. I think it was kind of odd that the second story was longer than the first. In retrospect, it just didn't fit together. Each story felt like a great magazine article, but not a great book. Yes, well written and well researched, but got so thick in places that I was ready for the book to end. If this topic is of particular interest (you're in law enforcement a social worker, pediatrician, nurse, lawyer) then it's probably worth the read.
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