Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (9 page)

In December 1993, Tanya Reid went on trial for Morgan’s murder. Again she took the stand in her own defence and again she was found guilty. This time she was sentenced to 62 years, with the proviso that she serve 20 before becoming eligible for parole.

But, in February 1995 the appeals court overturned her murder conviction, arguing that the judge had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Tanya killed her daughter with her own hands. The prosecution said that they would retry the case.

In 1996 she was retried at a different venue – Lubbock in Texas – before a jury and found guilty. For the next 12 years she remained behind bars, supported by her extended family though Matthew, who suffers from permanent hearing loss which he believes is due to his mother’s actions, understandably wanted nothing to do with her.

In September 2008 she was paroled and returned to live with her relatives in Texas.

In October of that year, I interviewed top crime author Gregg Olsen who spoke extensively to Tanya Reid and wrote a book about the case,
Cruel Deception.
Gregg’s other best-selling books include
Starvation Heights, Abandoned Prayers, Bitter Almonds, The Confessions of an American Black Widow
and
If Loving You Is Wrong.
More recently, he has ventured into realistic crime fiction with
A Cold Dark
Place
and
A Wicked Snow.
His website and blog can be found at www.greggolsen.com.

I started off by asking him about why Tanya had insisted on taking the stand to defend herself. Was this an extension of her attention-seeking behaviour or did she truly believe that she could convince a jury of her innocence?

‘Tanya couldn’t stop herself from telling her side of the story during her first two trials,’ Gregg said, ‘Though she wisely stayed off the witness stand during her third time out. She also had a judge, not jury decide the case. Tanya was the kind of woman who seemed so sure that if she could just explain things, tell people, show her love for her children with her tears, they’d conclude she couldn’t possibly have harmed anyone. She saw herself as the quintessential mother. The problem in her testimony wasn’t in her delivery, but in the facts themselves. So yes, I do believe that she enjoyed playing the
martyr, the victim of a witch hunt by child abuse professionals who just didn’t like or respect her.’

We discuss his 1993 visit to her in an Iowa prison where she acted as if she’d done nothing wrong. Did she try hard to convince him of her innocence?

‘Really, she was so pathetic that she didn’t have to try to convince me of anything. I told her that I didn’t know what happened, but I was sure that she hadn’t meant to kill her baby. She sobbed and sobbed and thanked me for that – without admitting guilt, of course. We’d talked on the phone and corresponded before I wrote the book and there was never any doubt that she wanted to win me over to her side. She needed an advocate, which, of course I could never be.’

I ask him how she behaved during the visit? Was she just like the girl next door or was there anything unusual about her demeanour? Was she flirtatious? Confrontational? Shy?

‘Again, she cried through most of it. I think she was absolutely stunned that she didn’t get an acquittal. I think she was convinced that the jury would see things her way – that she was a caring mom with children suffering from some strange seizure disorder that had yet to be fully understood by medical authorities. In her shock of the conviction (and her panic over her future), I think I saw a very frightened and remorseful woman. She knew what she did. She probably would have given anything to rewind that part of her life and deal with her compulsion for attention in some other way.’

Keen to understand more about this perplexing syndrome, I turned to Dr Marc D Feldman, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at The University of Alabama. Dr Feldman is listed in
The Best Doctors in America
and the
Guide To America’s Top Psychiatrists.
He has written several books about his
experiences with Munchausen’s and Munchausen’s By Proxy patients, including
Patient Or Pretender, The Spectrum Of Factitious Disorders
and
Playing Sick
and has appeared on everything from
CNN
to
Court TV.
He maintains a website at www.munchausen.com.

I asked him to describe the worst Munchausen’s By Proxy case that he was aware of in which a mother harmed or killed her children. ‘Probably the worst case of which I am aware is the Marie Noe case in Philadelphia, though it was never formally adjudicated as MBP; that’s because no MBP expert was given the opportunity to review the records or interview Mrs Noe. However, based on the facts of the case as I know them, I do believe it has all the features of MBP.’

Dr Feldman went on to outline the case. ‘Marie Noe had 10 children between 1949 and 1968. Two died without having left the hospital, and there is no suspicion that Mrs Noe was involved in their deaths. However, the remaining eight children died after lifespans ranging from weeks to more than a year, with the deaths being attributed by coroners to various medical ailments that, in retrospect, were not credible. This occurred before there was an awareness of the form of maltreatment called MBP and, indeed, child abuse as a whole was scarcely recognized by the professional and lay communities. There was disbelief that a mother would deliberately act in such a way as to cause harm to her child. This is among the reasons that the remaining eight children died as a result of suffocation by Mrs Noe without her culpability being publicly considered.’

‘In 1998, after a magazine interview by the writer Stephen Fried, who was interested in the serial deaths, Marie Noe finally acknowledged that she had killed at least some of the children, and possibly all. She could never fully put into words why she did what she did, but it is notable that she also had a history of gratuitous lying and falsely claiming multiple sexual
assaults that struck people as dubious. She also seemed to enjoy the trappings of the funerals, and these features are consistent with the pursuit of attention and sympathy in many MBP cases. Startlingly, she received no jail time; instead, she was on house arrest for five years (which she violated without consequence) and instructed to cooperate with doctors who would be allowed to interview her. As I noted, no MBP experts were among the selected interviewers. As of this writing, Mrs Noe is alive and still living in her original home in Philadelphia. Her husband, Arthur, affirms her innocence despite her having admitted to the MBP.’

Nine per cent of MBP children die. Do these murderous mothers feel any guilt at this stage or are they too disengaged to have feelings for others? Tanya Reid seems impervious to the fact that she killed one of her children and permanently damaged another and it seems that Marie Noe is equally blasé.

Dr Feldman admits that he’s also found this to be the case. ‘Many of the perpetrators seem to have disengaged from the children they abused, treating them as objects to be manipulated rather than individuals to be nurtured. For this reason, guilt does not seem to be among the common responses to identification and confrontation; rather, they engage in a pervasive and often entrenched denial of their culpability, including the fatal abuse of the child.’

So what did he make of these MBP mothers who induced repeated symptoms in one or more children yet let another child develop naturally, such as Tanya Reid who repeatedly harmed Morgan and Matthew but spared Bernadette, her oldest child?

The psychiatrist explained: ‘It’s true in all forms of abuse that a mother may target all of her children, or only one. There may have been a failure of mother-infant bonding for various reasons in that case, or the mother may have become more
needy and attention-seeking as the number of children increased, thus targeting the youngest, and most vulnerable, child. I have not come across cases in which the younger children in the family are spared while older ones are abused; instead, the reverse is true in those cases in which only one child is victimized.’

In his landmark book
Patient Or Pretender
Dr Feldman noted that, in 1988, 55 per cent of nurses in an American study hadn’t heard of MBP. Are US trainee nurses and doctors now educated about this syndrome whilst they are in medical school?

Sadly, the answer was no. ‘There is a stunning lack of professional education about MBP. To my knowledge, it is considered a very tangential part of medicine and not covered in any depth. I think that these days more people, including doctors and nurses, have heard the term, but lack an understanding of its detection and implications. In the US, the government and private/public foundations have not funded any research into MBP, and the only educational efforts that occur are the ones arranged by speakers now and then who have become MBP-knowledgeable on their own. That is how my own education about MBP was acquired.’

I tell him that there is equal ignorance about the topic in Britain, with numerous online forums suggesting that doctors and detectives are being overzealous in accusing mothers of sick children of fabricating their symptoms. Why is the general public so unwilling to believe in MBP?

Dr Feldman notes that MBP experts in the UK have been targeted by groups promoting the concept that MBP doesn’t exist. ‘They have this belief despite open admissions of the maltreatment by some (few) perpetrators and despite the confirmatory videotapes that were originally acquired there. Many professionals have been publicly derided for their work
in the field and threatened with endless lawsuits or legal challenges and personal smears, and because of these groups, which generally contain MBP perpetrators hiding from the charge of MBP, there has been a chilling effect on all child protection work. The two main figures who have been victimized have been Dr. David Southall and Dr. Roy Meadow; the latter coined the term MBP in 1977; their reputations have been ruined as a result. There have also been overzealous lawyers and biased members of the media who seek to make their reputations by denigrating the entire field of MBP. Fortunately, these efforts have been much less successful in the US, and in some cases the doctors have been able to work together with those who claim, despite the lack of evidence, that MBP is being over diagnosed.’

So how can concerned professionals differentiate between genuine and MBP mothers? Dr Feldman writes in
Patient Or Pretender
that ‘One way to differentiate between caring mothers and potentially lethal mothers is by being suspicious of a mother (or father, grandparent, foster parent or other) who shows a peculiar eagerness to consent to having invasive procedures performed on the child.’ He also notes that these children remain sick whilst the mother remains by their hospital bed, but recover when she goes home. ‘The mother returns after a couple of days and the child gets sick again. The symptoms closely parallel the mother’s presence.’

Though a small number of murders are wrongly labelled as unexplained infant deaths, most Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cases are genuine and the parents are devastated when their wanted and cared for baby suddenly dies. In England and Wales 250 babies a year die of SIDS, where no cause of death can be found.

A 10-year study, reported in the
Lancet
in May 2008, found that many of these dead infants were carrying
potentially-harmful
bacteria and scientists have speculated that these could trigger a chemical storm which overwhelms the baby and results in his or her demise.

Babies born to smokers are much more at risk from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome than those born to non-smokers – around 30 per cent of cot deaths could be avoided if the mothers hadn’t smoked when they were pregnant. But making sure that the baby isn’t exposed to smoke
after
its birth can still make a huge difference. Infants who are exposed to 1 – 2 hours of smoke a day are more than twice as likely to die, and those exposed to a smoky home all day are eight times more likely to die.

Experts say that, to reduce the risk of cot death, parents should lay a baby on its back to sleep. (They made this easy to remember by running the
Back To Sleep
campaign.) Parents shouldn’t let the infant sleep in bed with them as it’s all too easy for a baby to suffocate. They should also avoid sleeping with a baby on a sofa or armchair as its possible to inadvertently crush or smother the infant to death. The free booklet
Reduce the Risk of Cot Death
from the Foundation for Sudden Infant Death offers further advice, and their address is listed in the Appendix.

K
illing a child for the insurance money seems to be more common in fathers than in mothers. (For details of financially-motivated fathers who kill, see the
Money For Nothing
chapter.) But occasionally a mother will murder her child for profit, sometimes repeating this homicidal behaviour again and again. These murders often have dual motives, with the mother enjoying her role as the bereaved victim – or taking a sadistic pleasure from her offspring’s last moments – as well as pocketing the cash.

Married at 17, Texas-born Diana gave birth to her first child, Melissa, in Lubbock the following year. The already stormy marriage grew even stormier under the stress of dealing with a new baby. Yet Melissa’s birth in 1975 was followed by Joanne’s in 1976. The teenager regularly took both babies to the doctor, complaining that they were suffering from various
symptoms, but medics repeatedly found both babies to be healthy and were baffled by her obsessive behaviour. She insured her daughters for between $3,000 and $5,000 each, naming herself as the beneficiary.

When Joanne was three months old, Diana took her to the emergency room saying that she’d had convulsions and stopped breathing. The baby was dead on arrival and the doctors attributed the death to a sudden seizure. The ostensibly-grieving mother collected, and soon spent, the insurance money.

The following year, Diana had a son, Jose Lionel, whom she immediately insured. When he was two months old, she brought him to the hospital, saying that he’d been having convulsions. Doctors stabilised him that same day – 10 February 1978 – and kept him in for observation and he appeared to thrive. But, after Diana was left alone with him in hospital on the 13th, the baby alarm sounded at 1am, signalling that he was having breathing difficulties. A nurse hurried to the infant’s aid, just in time to see Diana rushing from the room.

That same afternoon, Jose seemed fine yet Diana phoned her husband to say that the baby was dying. Early that evening, the alarm again sounded and another nurse almost catapulted into Diana as she raced into the corridor. Diana looked guilty and turned back towards her son’s sickbay, wailing that he was desperately ill. The nurse found that Jose was cyanotic (had turned blue through lack of oxygen) and, after half an hour of frantic resuscitation attempts, medics pronounced him dead. The official cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
and the bereaved mother again collected a few thousand dollars insurance money and went on a spending spree.

Diana’s firstborn, Melissa, was the next to die. She’d insured the baby from the start, but, on 1 October 1978, she purchased additional insurance on the little girl. The following day, she took her lifeless body to the hospital at Bovina, Texas, claiming that she’d suffered convulsions just like her siblings. Doctors attributed the death to the child choking on her own vomit and Diana Lumbrera received yet another insurance cheque.

The following year she divorced her husband and began a series of affairs, moving from state to state and, in 1980, she gave birth to the similarly-named Melinda, fathered by one of her lovers. The baby was now on borrowed time…

It’s likely that – though profit had been her original motive – Diana Lumbrera found that she enjoyed murdering little children, or at least enjoyed the drama that such deaths caused in the family and in hospital. In other words, there was a Munchausen’s By Proxy element to the homicides. On 8 October, she took a cousin’s six-week-old daughter, Ericka Aleman, out for a drive, but within half an hour she raced into the local emergency room with the dead baby in her arms, claiming that convulsions had claimed her life. Her explanation was accepted and Diana returned to her more usual role of the distraught mother, often taking Melinda to the doctor to establish a medical history, though there was nothing wrong with the little girl.

On 17 August 1982, Diana phoned the emergency services to say that the two-year-old had suffered a convulsion and died.
The death was attributed to acute heart failure. Again, Diana collected the insurance policy and moved to another state. Fifteen months later she gave birth to another baby, Daniel, by a different man, and took out insurance on the child.

On 25 March 1984, Diane took Daniel to her doctor where he was treated for a minor ear infection. Three days later, the weeping mother told paramedics that the little boy was dead. The pathologist listed the death as septicaemia, despite the fact that blood tests taken at the time of his ear infection showed no evidence of this. Diana collected the insurance money and moved to Garden City, Kansas where she soon found herself a new boyfriend and got pregnant yet again.

On 21 February 1986, she gave birth to her sixth child, Jose Antonio. (The fact that she called two of her sons Jose, and called her daughters Melissa and Melinda suggests that they were interchangeable to her, pawns in her game rather than individuals with distinct identities.) Before long, she was lying to her employer’s credit union, saying that the little boy was suffering from leukaemia. Colleagues were sympathetic and her workplace gave her several hundred dollars in sympathy loans to help pay for his treatment. Diana also secured money by pretending that her father had died in a horrific car crash.

Jose Antonio survived for four years and three months before Diana took him to her GP on 30 April 1990, claiming that he was suffering from mysterious convulsions. The doctor could find nothing wrong with the child, but wrote a prescription for antibiotics which would kill off any infection that might be making him feverish. But Diana didn’t bother to fill the prescription as she was simply creating a medical
smokescreen for Jose whom she had decided to kill, having previously insured him for $5,000.

The following day she carried his corpse into the Emergency Room in Kansas, wailing that he’d collapsed and expired. But this time medics didn’t believe that a healthy four-year-old boy had suddenly died of natural causes. They called the police who began to do background checks in Texas and Kansas, discovering that all six of Diana Lumbrera’s offspring – and her cousin’s baby daughter – had mysteriously died in her care.

Belatedly, the authorities realised that the grieving mother was actually a for-profit serial killer. She was charged with the deaths of her six children plus the death of Ericka Aleman.

The prosecution in Garden City, Kansas, said that Jose Antonio had been smothered, whilst the defence said that he’d died from a viral infection. The jury took less than an hour to find her guilty and she was sentenced to life imprisonment with the proviso that she serve at least 15 years before becoming eligible for parole.

Lumbrera then went on trial in Texas and confessed to Melissa’s murder to avoid the death penalty, whereupon prosecutors dropped the charges for Melinda and Joanna’s murders. She was again sentenced to life imprisonment. Lubbock County handed her a third life sentence after she pleaded no contest to Jose Lionel’s death. Castro County, which had charged her with Ericka Aleman’s murder, waived charges to save on court costs.

In June 1991 Diana Lumbrera began serving her time in a Kansas jail.

Though she went on to murder three children and a grandson within 18 months in her native Georgia, Janie’s first victim was her husband of almost 20 years – she had been a 15-year-old bride. She put arsenic in his lunch on 21 January 1965, and he promptly collapsed and died. As the couple were devout Christian Fundamentalists and Janie had devoted her life to running a day-care centre, no one suspected foul play. The doctor put the death down to previously-undiagnosed liver disease and the 34-year-old collected the insurance money and gave a tenth of it to her church.

Almost a year later, Janie started to poison her 16-year-old son’s meals. He began to have headaches and dizzy spells, eventually dying in agony. Pretending to be prostrate with grief at his funeral, she benefited from his insurance policy. Later that same year she murdered her 13-year-old son in the exact same way. Again, she gave a tenth of the insurance money to her beloved church. By now the insurance companies were suspicious but Janie Lou blocked their requests for autopsies, objecting on religious grounds. Her Christian friends still refused to believe that she was a serial killer, convinced that she had merely been unlucky to lose a husband and two sons in such a short space of time.

In August 1967, Janie’s 19-year-old son Roger and his wife presented her with her first grandson, Raymond. Janie seemed delighted at the prospect of becoming a grandmother and talked at length about the impending birth. The boy was born healthy yet by September he was dead. Even more strangely, Roger himself died an agonising death in the same time period. Janie’s distraught daughter-in-law, inexplicably
twice-bereaved,
suspected her mother-in-law was responsible and
insisted that the authorities carry out autopsies, despite Janie Lou’s continuing objections to this.

The results proved inconclusive so the hospital called in the state crime lab which found that the pair had been poisoned with arsenic. The other Gibbs bodies were exhumed and fatal levels of arsenic were also found.

At Christmas 1967, the devout Christian was arrested and admitted to murdering her family. She didn’t give a motive but the prosecutor noted that she had gained a total of $31,000 from the deaths, a sizeable sum in Georgia in the 1960s. In February 1968 she was found guilty and received five life sentences.

The insurance killer served out the next 30 years in prison and was expected to die there. But she was released on compassionate grounds in 1999, age 66, suffering from Parkinson’s disease.