Morgue (10 page)

The more he learned about the ongoing tests being ordered by Paul's doctors, the more Kerr suspected a darker story. Experts had found no insecticide in the Woodses' home; doctors found none in Judy's blood. A team of entomologists even collected insect carcasses in the area and found no unusual toxins. The house's ductwork wasn't leaking carbon monoxide or any other gas. Environmental explanations were thinning out.

The mystery obsessed Kerr. He learned more about Martha's first three dead children. He visited Judy every day. He pored over Martha's tragic and improbable reproductive history. He ordered more tests and asked more questions. If he had free time, he thought about Judy. He couldn't sleep. Some of the older doctors scoffed at Kerr's youthful passion; they'd stopped wasting time on crib deaths. But until he figured out what was causing these children to stop breathing, it wasn't safe to let Judy go home. He held the poor little girl close in a kind of protective custody.

Kerr's gut ached.

The young pediatrician contacted Child Protective Services with a chilling theory. Judy's and Paul's medical histories, and Martha's own words, hinted at something more horrible than insecticide spraying.

Finally, in an uncomfortable meeting, he revealed his suspicions to Harry and Martha. He told them things they didn't want to hear. They disputed it all. They got angry and pushed back. “Let the grass grow tall, and we'll cut it down,” Harry snarled, and Kerr feared it was a threat.

Ten days after Judy was admitted, child welfare workers secretly checked her out of Johns Hopkins and took her away. When Martha went to Judy's room and Judy was gone, she wilted into a depressive blackout. She knew she'd never see Judy again.

Harry and Martha were forbidden from seeing Paul, too.

The little boy had continued to waste away. Only a machine kept him alive. His tiny limbs were jerking with involuntary spasms, his breathing grew so labored that doctors cut a hole in his throat to make it easier, and his body broiled with fever as his brain decayed.

Two days later, on Sunday, September 21, 1969, seven months and twelve days after he was born, and a month after he was admitted in a coma, Paul David Woods died, alone.

And the young Dr. Douglas Kerr had no idea that the dark story that haunted him would grow even darker.

*   *   *

When I arrived at the chief medical examiner's office in downtown Baltimore on Monday morning, Paul was waiting for me. The morgue wagon had delivered him the night before, and now he lay there under the brilliant fluorescent lights on my table.

I'd seen dead babies. I'd already done over a hundred forensic autopsies before I started my fellowship in Baltimore. I didn't get sad or angry. My faith and my training protected me. What I have on the tray is not a person but a body. Just a husk. The person, the soul, is gone.

In this case, I knew a Johns Hopkins pediatrician suspected abuse. I knew the mother had other children who died under questionable circumstances. I knew the insecticide theory. I knew this little boy had been to the hospital many times with unexplained breathing spells. And I knew a sister had experienced similar spells. It was time to let this child speak for himself.

I examined Paul, inside and out, for a few hours. He was twenty-seven inches long and weighed fifteen pounds. There were no external signs of physical abuse, although his last hospitalization had left its own painful marks. His eyes were clear. His nose and throat were unblocked. I saw a well-developed, well-nourished, seven-month-old boy whose first teeth hadn't yet come in.

I removed Paul's organs, one by one, examining them closely before making microscopic slides of their tissues. I was especially interested in his brain and lungs, which would reveal more of his story, but I looked at every part of him in a way that none of us ever sees (or wants to see) another human. For the most part, he had no infections, no poisons, and his heart was good.

I found nothing that would explain Paul's many breathing spells. Nothing. He had no apparent allergies. He was older than most crib deaths, which peak at three to four months. The presentation and sequence of his symptoms didn't match any disease process I knew. His death puzzled me, especially since so many doctors had found absolutely nothing wrong with him. It is impossible for anyone, much less an infant, to hold his breath long enough to die.

But he was dead. My job was to determine why.

His brain had been dead about a month, starved of oxygen. His brain injuries dated to the time of his last admission—the moment of his last breathing episode. He'd been dead even before he arrived at Johns Hopkins, but his revived heart continued to beat and his resuscitated lungs continued to breathe for a month. As the days passed, certain brain-controlled functions ceased. His lungs clogged with fluid, and blood backed up in his other organs until he died thirty-one days later.

Cause of death: Paul James Woods died of bronchopneumonia related to brain death.

In light of the other infant deaths in Martha Woods's history, and knowing that Paul's symptoms were consistent with deliberate temporary asphyxiation that left no marks or clues, my conclusion about the manner of Paul's death was rare at the time. And it was supported by my boss, Dr. Russell Fisher, one of the most respected medical examiners of his day.

“It is our recommendation,” the report said, “that homicide be given serious consideration in this case.”

I believed Paul Woods had been murdered, possibly by someone in his family, but I had no idea at that moment how this little boy's death would unravel an infernal crime bigger than all of us.

*   *   *

A few days later, Paul Woods was buried in the Babyland section on the western edge of the Harford Memorial Gardens near Aberdeen. Harry, Martha, and one of Martha's sisters watched the tiny casket lowered into the ground. Nobody else came. The state paid for his heart-shaped bronze marker bearing only his names and dates. What else was there?

Very soon, Judy Woods was adopted by a loving Mormon family, and her breathing spells stopped entirely.

But the suspicions didn't subside, although nobody really knew just how big this case might be. Because Paul's possible murder had happened on a military post, the FBI got the case, but in its earliest days, it was tragically simple: Somebody killed a baby.

It didn't stay simple. His killer had made a huge mistake. Paul died of an interruption of the oxygen flow to his brain. He was smothered. The lack of oxygen to the brain caused brain death at the time he was assaulted. The assault was committed on a government reservation to a civilian (Paul). This meant that the case fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI, which had the time and deep pockets needed for a comprehensive investigation.

The more FBI agents dug, the deeper, darker, and sicker the story became. They dredged up decades of musty records from small-town courthouses, sifted through family memories, interviewed far-flung friends and neighbors, and chased leads that bounced back and forth across the country. A chilling image came into focus. What began as a
question
of abuse quickly became a
likelihood
of murder.

And all the evidence pointed to the woman who only wanted everyone to know she was a good mother: Martha Woods.

*   *   *

Martha was born at home on April 20, 1929, the tenth of thirteen children born to William and Lillie May Stewart, a truck driver and his especially fertile housewife. Born on the eve of the Great Depression, Martha mostly grew up in an extended family of seventeen people crammed into a two-bedroom, $15-a-month rental with very little of anything. A middle-school dropout, she'd worked a few menial jobs, in diners, laundries, and shoe factories, but never long.

Just before Thanksgiving 1945, at only sixteen, Martha Stewart got pregnant by a neighborhood boy. She had damn little to be thankful for. Just when she should have been attending high school dances and going steady, she was an unwed teenage mother-to-be without any income.

A month before her due date, Martha went into labor. A baby boy was born prematurely, weighing just over four pounds. She named him Charles Lewis Stewart, after two of her older brothers, one of whom drowned in Germany's Moselle River during the last days of World War II. But she just called him Mikey.

Mikey stayed in a hospital incubator for eleven days, but when he was finally released, he still struggled. Mikey slept with Martha in the upstairs bedroom she shared with her sister, a nephew, and several smaller children. He barely ate anything, Martha said, and when he did, he vomited it up. At one point, Martha's mother was feeding Mikey with an eyedropper, but it didn't do much good.

Then one day, quite suddenly, Mikey just stopped breathing and turned blue while Martha held him. Her parents rushed mother and child to Columbus's Children's Hospital. Doctors determined he was severely malnourished. Mikey was admitted, and over the next seven days, he brightened up and gained a surprising half a pound. He was sent home with some vitamins and some new formula.

Two days later, on August 23, Mikey died. Just like that. He'd been lying on the living room couch when he abruptly stopped breathing and turned blue. The police ambulance raced to the house, but it was too late. The coroner came and took Mikey's corpse away in his little black medical satchel.

Mikey wasn't autopsied, but his death certificate blamed an enlarged thymus (a typical diagnosis for dead babies in the 1940s) and “status lymphaticus” (a high-sounding term for crib death that's equivalent to a medical shrug, meaning absolutely nothing).

Only one month and four days old when he died, Mikey was buried not far from his war-hero uncle and namesake in the Wesley Chapel Cemetery on the outskirts of Columbus.

It wouldn't be long before another child's grave was dug beside him.

Four months later, at Christmas 1946, four children in that claustrophobic little house had taken sick. One of them was Martha's plump three-year-old nephew Johnny Wise, son of her sister Betty, who was also a single, teenaged mother. Johnny had been playing in the snow on Christmas Day, and the next day the normally jolly toddler complained of a headache and sore throat.

That night Martha tucked Johnny in her own bed upstairs while Betty showered. A few minutes later, Betty screamed and ran downstairs with Johnny's limp body. He had stopped breathing and was turning blue. The ambulance arrived too late to save him, but the house was quarantined for three days when health authorities feared an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious upper respiratory infection that was becoming rarer in the 1940s. On the fourth day, the quarantine was lifted and the family buried Johnny beside his late cousin Mikey in the frozen ground of Wesley Chapel Cemetery.

An autopsy was done, but the child's neck organs were not removed and examined—all necessary to diagnose diphtheria. Instead, the death was certified as diphtheria based solely on the other illnesses in the house, not on anything the autopsist saw.

*   *   *

In early 1947, seventeen-year-old Martha was arrested for forgery and sent to reform school for a year. When she got out in 1948, she flitted through a few waitressing gigs until a girlfriend introduced her to a twenty-two-year-old laborer named Stanley Huston. Within a few months, she was pregnant again, so she married Stanley in a hasty ceremony in January 1949 and lived in a series of apartments and bungalows. Unfortunately, amid the chaos, Martha had the first of ten miscarriages, by her own count.

But she soon conceived again. Mary Elizabeth Huston was born prematurely on June 28, 1950, and stayed in the hospital for three weeks before Martha was allowed to take her to their new home, a five-hundred-square-foot rented bungalow. A week later, the month-old Mary suddenly stopped breathing and turned blue. Martha rushed her to the hospital, where doctors found nothing wrong and released her after two days of observation.

Eight days later, Mary was back in the hospital. Inexplicably, while Martha cradled her, she had stopped breathing and turned blue. Martha revived her with mouth-to-mouth, but doctors could find no cause for the breathing episode. They tapped her spine, shaved her head, and put needles in her scalp, but they found nothing. For three days, they watched the baby, who showed no signs of illness. In the end, they blamed it on an unknown respiratory infection and sent the baby back home.

On the morning of August 25—less than two weeks after her hospital stay—Mary again stopped breathing and turned blue in Martha's arms. Again Martha resuscitated her and took her to the hospital. Again doctors found the baby to be alert and vigorous and released her.

That same afternoon, Martha bathed Mary and fed her before laying her in her crib for a nap. Within a few minutes, Mary had stopped breathing and was turning blue. By the time she arrived at the emergency room, the baby was dead. She had lived only one month and twenty-seven days, most of them in a hospital bed.

Mary Elizabeth Huston was buried in a largely vacant family plot in the Beanhill Cemetery, a rural graveyard near her father's hometown in rural Vinton County, Ohio. No autopsy was done, but her death certificate said she choked on a mucus plug that was never found.

*   *   *

One more miscarriage and sixteen months later, Carol Ann Huston was born on January 22, 1952. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and the baby was born by a cesarean section at only seven months. At birth, she was only about four pounds, so she stayed in the hospital about three weeks before going home to a new rented house in West Jefferson, a small town west of Columbus. Martha visited her almost every day.

For the first time in Martha's mothering, a baby thrived for a few straight months in her care. But it wouldn't last.

In May, Carol Ann caught a stubborn cold and developed a persistent cough. On the morning of May 12, before his hospital rounds, a local doctor came to the house and gave her a shot of penicillin.