Morgue (11 page)

An hour later, the baby was dead. Martha said Carol Ann had simply choked and turned blue. She died before the ambulance arrived.

Based on what Martha told him, the doctor signed the death certificate without an autopsy and declared the cause of death to be epiglottitis, a dangerous condition that happens when an infected epiglottis—a little cartilage “flap” that covers the windpipe—swells and blocks air flow to the lungs. He later admitted he hadn't actually observed such an infection but based his conclusion purely on what Martha told him.

Carol Ann had lived just three months and twenty-one days, the longest life span of Martha's three natural-born children. She was buried beside her late sister in the Beanhill Cemetery, where today they share a marker.

Martha fell into a depression bad enough that she tried to kill herself. On a morning in early December, after Stanley went to work, she pulled one of his guns from the closet. She chose an unusual one, an “over-under” double-barreled rifle that shot .22-caliber cartridges from one barrel and .410 shotgun shells from the other. The shooter toggled between them by pushing a little button.

She lay on the bed and held the barrel against her chest as she pulled the trigger. The gun roared, but miraculously she was still alive, with only a nasty graze across her left shoulder from a .22 bullet. She ran outside screaming until a neighbor drove her to the hospital, where doctors simply swabbed her powder-burned skin with antiseptic and bandaged her superficial wound with some tape. Martha told doctors she thought she was pushing the safety button when in fact she had switched the firing mechanism from shotgun to .22.

Martha scared Stanley. She was crazy. He drove her directly from the emergency room to the Columbus State Hospital, where he committed her involuntarily for almost two months.

Home alone in the spring of 1953 after the asylum released her, Martha needed distraction. She took a job as a cottage attendant at the Columbus State School (which had only recently changed its name from the Institution for Feeble-Minded Youth). There she cared for mentally handicapped kids, aged six to nine, eight hours a day, five days a week. The perfect job for an experienced mom like Martha.

One day Martha was dandling a retarded child on her lap when she claimed he lapsed into an epileptic fit. He clamped his teeth on her fingers when she tried to prevent him from swallowing his tongue. He then just stopped breathing and turned blue. Her bosses praised Martha for saving his life.

Another time, one of her young charges was wheeled away on a gurney … unconscious, not breathing, blue around the mouth and nose. He was lucky Martha was there.

Life went on, day after day. It was a strange place for strange people, so nobody paid much attention to the strange things that happened to retarded kids.

*   *   *

In June 1954, Stanley was drafted into the US Army. By the time Stanley shipped out to Germany that fall, the marriage was on life support.

Twenty-five-year-old Martha bunked briefly at Stanley's parents' farmhouse in Vinton County. One day while she was there alone, Martha saw smoke billowing from the barn, so she rushed out to save all the animals inside just before the structure burned to the ground.

Although her in-laws praised Martha as a brave heroine, she soon moved back to her parents' Columbus house. When her divorce was final in August 1956, she rented a tiny row house that she shared with her unmarried teenage sister Margaret, who already had two young children of her own. Laura Jean was a toddler, and Paul Stanley was a newborn.

One day little Paul suddenly stopped breathing and turned blue. A hysterical Margaret called her boyfriend, a young auto mechanic named Harry Woods, who was about to join the US Army. Harry rushed them all to the hospital in his car, with Martha screaming the whole way to go faster.

In the emergency room, a nurse perched the barely breathing baby on a table beside a wall-mounted oxygen hose but couldn't find a mask small enough to fit the child. When she left the room to search for one, Martha grabbed a paper cup, jabbed a pair of scissors through its bottom, and inserted the oxygen line. After she pressed her improvised oxygen mask over Paul's nose and mouth, he quickly began breathing easier. Once again, the quick-thinking Martha had averted a catastrophe and saved a baby's life.

She also eventually stole her sister's boyfriend, Harry Woods. They started flirting later that year, just before Harry was sent to Korea for two years.

By May 1958, Martha was living alone in an efficiency apartment, where she slept on a sofa bed off the kitchen. At the time, Martha's only income was $108 a month from a worker's compensation claim after a career-ending head injury she suffered in a scuffle at the state school. She told doctors she was having terrible headaches and as many as twenty seizures or blackouts every day, and they concluded she must have epilepsy. (Those symptoms magically vanished completely when the State of Ohio paid off Martha with a lump sum of $2,800 in 1959.)

Ever the dutiful sister, she invited her unemployed little brother Paul Stewart, his wife, and their fourteen-month-old daughter Lillie Marie to live with her until Paul could find work. Four people shoehorned into a no-bedroom apartment would be tight, but Paul's family could sleep on Martha's couch and she'd bunk on a borrowed cot in the breakfast nook.

On May 18, they all went to bed early. Some time before midnight, Martha got up to go to the bathroom but heard a choking noise in the dark. It was the baby. Martha cried out.

Lillie Marie's startled parents awoke to see Martha in the shadows, holding their limp baby. Then she ran downstairs and down the street, two blocks to her parents' house, where they called an ambulance.

But it was too late. Lillie Marie Stewart hadn't breathed for several minutes, and her face was blue. She was dead when the medics arrived.

No autopsy was performed, but doctors attributed her sudden unexplained death to acute pneumonitis, the general term for a lung inflammation they never actually saw.

And she was buried at Wesley Chapel Cemetery beside her cousins Mikey and Johnny, who'd died so similarly. The family plot was filling fast with little graves.

All a heartbreaking coincidence, the family said.

Crib death must just run in our blood, the family said.

And poor, poor Martha had bravely tried to save them all, the family said.

*   *   *

After dating steadily for a few years, Martha and Harry were married in the pastor's study of her mother's Columbus church on April 14, 1962, a week before Martha's thirty-fourth birthday. They lived with Martha's parents briefly before Harry shipped out to Korea for a year, and then in early 1964, Harry returned Stateside to Fort Carson, Colorado. He and Martha rented a cozy one-room cottage between two of Harry's buddies in nearby Colorado Springs.

Martha made fast friends with the other young Army wives. So fast that she'd hardly unpacked her moving boxes when the wife of a military mechanic who lived in the cottage behind the Woodses asked Martha to babysit while she worked. Martha was delighted to help.

Marlan Rash was just a year old on January 10, an unseasonably warm winter day in Colorado. Martha was alone with him in the house when Marlan suddenly stopped breathing, passed out, and turned blue.

Martha administered mouth-to-mouth and rushed Marlan to the nearby Army hospital. He was conscious when they arrived, but lethargic. Doctors poked and prodded him for five days, testing his spinal fluid, blood, and urine, X-raying his skull and chest, examined his brain patterns … and found nothing wrong with the child. They chalked up his breathing spell to an epileptic seizure and sent him home.

It happened again a few months later, May 3. This time Martha said she found little Marlan lying in the yard, unconscious, feverish, convulsing, not breathing, blue. Again she gave mouth-to-mouth and rushed him to the hospital, and again the child was subjected to four days of testing that showed nothing. Once more, baffled doctors sent him home with a vague diagnosis of “acute pharyngitis and seizures.”

Back home on May 7 after another exhausting hospital stay, Marlan's mother again left him in Martha's care and went to work. The baby bawled when she left, but Martha left him in his crib to cry himself to sleep. Only a few minutes later, she claimed to hear a gurgling noise and found Marlan rearing his head back, choking and turning blue in the face. She tried to breathe into his mouth, but it didn't work. Little Marlan Rash, just eighteen months old, died in her arms.

His autopsy said simply: “Death, sudden, cause unknown.” When he was buried a few days later in Evergreen Cemetery, Martha dutifully attended to support his bereaved mother.

*   *   *

Harry shipped out to Vietnam in 1965 and Martha moved back to Columbus to care for her ailing widowed mother. In 1966, her mother died, Harry came home from the war, and they returned to Fort Carson, where they eventually ended up in the same cottage where Marlan Rash had died.

But now they had new neighbors, the Thomases, another of Harry's Army buddies, his wife, and two children. One day, while the ever-helpful Martha babysat the couple's eighteen-month-old son Eddie, the child choked in his crib and turned blue. Martha revived him in the front yard by dislodging what she called a large mucus plug from his throat, then drove him to the hospital. Afterward, she offered to show Eddie's mom the actual mucus plug in the grass, but couldn't find it. Dogs must have eaten it, Martha surmised.

Eddie survived, and Martha continued to babysit him and his siblings for almost a year as Harry and Martha applied to adopt a child of their own. Their dream of starting their own family came true in July 1967 when a five-day-old baby came into their lives. She'd been born to an unwed teenager in Denver. They named her Judy Lynn.

Almost from the start, Judy was in and out of the Army hospital with colds, infections, and breathing spells. In December, five-month-old Judy was hospitalized for a week after passing out in her crib and turning blue. Then it happened again the next March. Twice.

During those first few months, other strange things happened to the new little family. The family home caught fire twice, but both times Martha saved Judy. And then a strange woman began calling almost every day after Harry left for work, demanding that Martha surrender Judy or die. Martha reported the frightening calls to military police and civilian cops, but they continued for months.

One day when Martha was home alone with Judy, a menacing dark man appeared at her living room window. He wanted Judy. When he threatened Martha, she picked up Harry's handgun and shot the man through the screen. He ran away wounded, Martha later told police, and got into a car driven by a woman.

The incident rattled Harry and Martha, so they asked the Army to transfer them out of Colorado, beyond the reach of these strange people who wanted to take Judy away. The Army obliged, plucking them out of Fort Carson and setting them down in new quarters at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

But it didn't work. Within days, the calls started anew. Then Martha reported the swarthy man she'd wounded in Colorado was back at her door in Aberdeen, demanding Judy. She chased him away again—possibly saving Judy's life again—and again reported the incident to military police.

This time Army detectives told Martha they'd put a “trap” on her phone to catch the culprits. The calls and scary visits stopped. Years later, the cops admitted they'd never actually tapped Martha's phone.

With the threat behind them, Harry and Martha sought to adopt another child. They applied to the county authorities, submitted to interviews, and openly discussed the loss of Martha's three little babies.

They left everything else out. Nothing about Johnny Wise. Or Lillie Marie Stewart. Or Marlan Rash. Or Eddie Thomas. Or those two retarded kids. Or Judy's spells. Or the fires. Or the mysterious callers.

And certainly nothing about how many children who'd come within arm's reach of Martha Woods and stopped breathing long enough to turn blue.

The math is grotesque but simple. Over twenty-three years, at least seven children died and at least five others suffered dangerous breathing spells in Martha's care. They all had different parents, lived in different places, had different histories, but their deaths were eerily similar. And one person was always there: Martha Woods.

The FBI had seen enough. In November 1970, more than a year after Paul Woods died, Martha Woods was indicted by a federal grand jury on eleven counts, including the first-degree murder of Paul and the attempted murder of Judy.

Martha pleaded innocent to everything.

*   *   *

The case was assigned to a young assistant US attorney named Charles Bernstein, barely a couple of years out of the University of Maryland law school. He was a plucky young guy who'd clerked for a judge during the day to pay for his night classes.

Until Bernstein called me, I'd forgotten about Paul Woods. I didn't know his case had gone any further, much less that his mother had become the prime suspect in his murder. My fellowship in Baltimore was done and I was now a major in the US Army. I was about to become the new chief of the Wound Ballistics Section of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the office that studied fatal war wounds for all branches of the military—still a busy place in those waning years of Vietnam.

When I autopsied Paul, I believed there was about a 75 percent chance he'd been murdered. A good chance, but plenty of reasonable doubt for a jury to acquit any accused killer.

When I read Judy's complete medical history, my certainty rose to about 95 percent. Almost a sure thing, although still room for a legal doubt.

But when I saw the pile of dead babies strewn in Martha's wake over the past twenty-three years, and how they died, I knew
without a doubt
that Martha Woods had killed those children.

Federal murder cases were rare when Martha Woods's file landed on Bernstein's desk. To be honest, he thought she was crazy as a loon and was likely headed straight for a padded room at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. But shrinks who examined Martha at Walter Reed during Paul's and Judy's hospitalization found no signs of insanity. In fact, they found Martha to be remarkably sane, forcing Dr. Kerr to find another reason to remove Judy from the home.