Morgue (12 page)

Nevertheless, Martha's sanity was a central issue at her trial. Her court-appointed lawyer offered an unusual defense: She didn't kill Paul (or any other children), but if she did, she was insane.

Bernstein's argument was no less unusual: He couldn't prove Paul's death, all by itself, was murder, nor could he prove any of the other six children's deaths, separately, were murders. Only when these unexplained deaths in three decades were considered together did the sinister pattern emerge. Only then was Martha Woods's true guilt apparent.

Problem is, dating back to British common law, courts had forbidden “prior bad acts” as proof of the defendant's guilt. The fact that other children died similarly in Martha's care—especially if she hadn't been charged in those deaths—couldn't be used as evidence that she murdered Paul.

Bernstein faced an uphill legal battle. He'd never prosecuted a murder. Martha's defense lawyer was a sharp-minded and sharp-tongued veteran named Robert Cahill. Bernstein's defendant was a soft-spoken, motherly little lady who didn't look like a killer. His key witnesses were a young pediatrician and a young medical examiner, both of whom had barely started their careers. And one of the American jurisprudence's most monolithic concepts stood between him and a guilty verdict.

Bernstein took the death penalty off the table, fearing it might be a last, insurmountable hurdle for wavering jurors. At worst, Martha faced life in prison.

The stakes were high. If Martha was acquitted or found not guilty by reason of insanity, she would walk away a free woman. At the time, federal law made no provision for hospitalizing delusional people who committed crimes. They were simply not held responsible for the damage they did.

But Martha swore she wasn't guilty and she wasn't crazy, either. She yearned for her day in court. She believed she could convince a jury of her innocence, just as she'd so often convinced friends and relatives she was a hero, not a killer.

On February 14, 1972—Valentine's Day—the trial began, with US District Judge Frank A. Kaufman telling the jury of four men and eight women that he expected the case to last only about three weeks. While he spoke, Martha fidgeted with the buttons on her simple cloth coat, her doting husband Harry beside her at the defense table. Every day for the rest of the trial, Harry worked his duty hours in the early morning and drove to Baltimore to sit with Martha in the dock.

Early on, the pretty Mormon mother who had adopted Judy Woods testified that Judy had suffered no further breathing spells since coming to her home, and was proving to be a normal, active child. (Outside the courtroom, she told Bernstein how the toddler Judy once tried to quiet a crying baby by pinching its nose and holding its mouth closed. Where would a little girl learn such a thing?)

A string of witnesses pieced together the grim death toll, from Mikey in 1946 to Paul in 1969, in a blizzard of alien medical terms. Even if the jurors didn't understand the words, they knew in their hearts that this was no unfortunate series of accidents. They had to ask themselves: How many babies have I seen choke and turn blue? How many babies have I watched die? How many of them was I holding in my arms?

The insecticide defense fell apart quickly, too, as experts, including me, said no evidence existed that Paul (or Judy) was poisoned.

The insanity defense, based largely on a defense contention that Martha suffered epileptic seizures during which terrible things might happen (not that they ever admitted these terrible things actually happened, mind you), was damaged by Martha herself: She didn't think she had epilepsy and vehemently denied she was insane.

Two psychiatrists, two psychologists, two neurologists, and a medical doctor agreed with her.

“One crucial theme is the tremendous importance she attaches to being a good mother, a role that appears to constitute much of her identity,” said one psychiatrist who examined Martha. “For her, being a good mother seems to involve being overprotective of a totally dependent child … she described the hurt she felt when a child showed the earliest signs of autonomy, such as rolling over without aid.”

Did Martha smother those babies when they showed the first signs of not needing her, or were they simply the easiest to kill? They certainly didn't fight back and they couldn't testify against her, and killing them was so simple it left no marks. But her motive remained elusive.

I testified for a week about Paul's autopsy, my growing certainty about Paul's case being a homicide, the other cases, and the medical improbability of one family's having multiple crib deaths. (The term “sudden infant death syndrome” was just coming into the lexicon and not widely used at the time.)

Martha's defense lawyer quarreled with my theory, citing the case of a Philadelphia family that had lost eight of its ten children from 1949 to 1968 to unexplained crib deaths (the other two died of known natural causes). The Noe family's extraordinary tragedy was even featured in a 1963
Life
magazine article that dubbed matriarch Marie Noe “the most bereaved mother in America.” At that moment, none of us knew the Noe family's dark secret.

The most riveting witness was Martha herself. She testified for a full week. With an extraordinary memory for dates, places, addresses, and names, she chronicled her life, loves, homes, jobs, ailments, paychecks, conversations, and deaths she'd observed, sometimes even correcting lawyers on both sides when they stumbled. She spoke so softly that the judge had to ask her several times to speak up. She remained cool on the stand, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief most often when she talked about Paul or Judy.

When confronted with incriminating or conflicting testimony from relatives, friends, and even her husband, she asserted in her unruffled little voice that they simply weren't remembering correctly.

One day during a break, Martha stood outside the courtroom, cuddling a friend's baby in her arms. Bernstein was horrified by what he considered an overt stunt, but the judge couldn't very well order her—a woman presumed innocent for the moment—to avoid babies.

For more than thirty hours of testimony, Martha Woods was the epitome of sanity, even if Bernstein increasingly saw her as a brilliant sociopath.

A big question hung in the air: If she'd killed those kids, what was her motive? Millions of words had been spoken in this trial, but nobody knew.

The trial expected to last three weeks dragged out for five months. Along the way, four charges related to Judy's assault were dismissed, focusing the verdict entirely on the death of Paul Woods.

In his closing, defense attorney Cahill savaged Dr. Kerr and me as inept rookies (and if he could have gotten away with it, he might have said the same about prosecutor Bernstein). Bernstein's whole case, Cahill said, was a “house of cards” built on suppositions, assumptions, and bad science.

“I submit, ladies and gentlemen,” Cahill said, “that Dr. Di Maio should add another specialty to his curriculum vitae, and that's meteorologist, because he renders opinions like a weatherman … a seventy to seventy-five percent chance [of murder].…”

Prosecutor Bernstein hammered back, answering Cahill's attacks point by point. Then he apologized, in a way, for more than five months of sad, thick, tragic, uncomfortable, nauseating, sometimes contentious jabber.

“Somebody is not being heard from, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “It's these children who were killed, who were attacked before they learned to speak.… Who speaks for Paul Woods? There is no lawyer here for him. Who speaks for Judy? Who speaks for Charles Stewart? For Carol Ann? For Mary Elizabeth? For John Wise? For Lillie Marie? For Marlan Rash?

“The answer is, ladies and gentlemen, you do. They'd like to have some justice.”

The jury took almost two days to reach its verdict: Martha Woods was guilty on all counts.

“I did not hurt the child,” a sobbing Martha said at her sentencing a month later as the ever-loyal Harry embraced her. “If I did not want the child I would not have went and got him.”

She also offered an odd deal to the judge: If he didn't send her to prison and gave Judy back to her, she'd let her brother raise the little girl and she'd never associate with children again.

“I don't want to be around a baby,” she said, weeping. “All my life, all I wanted was a family. Now I don't want one. I don't want children. I don't want to be around them.”

Judge Kaufman sentenced her to life in federal prison, plus another seventy-five years on the lesser counts. She wouldn't be eligible for parole until 2003.

Martha went directly to Alderson Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security lockup for women that was nestled in the scenic Allegheny foothills of West Virginia. Built in 1928 to resemble a college campus, Alderson was nicknamed “Camp Cupcake” when a different Martha Stewart was incarcerated there in 2004.

Now in her forties, Martha Woods was older than most inmates and kept to herself. Over the years, she impressed her guards as being matronly, cooperative, eager to please, and a snitch. She was also quick to complain about various ailments, real and imagined, to get special perks.

Harry moved to West Virginia to be near her and retired from the military in 1980. He visited faithfully every week, and they'd sit together in the prison dining room talking for hours.

In 1975, would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot at President Gerald Ford and missed, came to Alderson. She was about the same age as Martha, and they were drawn to each other immediately. They remained close until Moore escaped briefly in 1979 and was transferred to another prison. She was freed in 2007.

“Being a baby killer in a prison full of women, she had a hard row to hoe,” Moore recalled recently.

Martha's appeal was denied. In a 2–1 decision, the Fourth Circuit US Appeals Court upheld the argument that, in this extraordinary case, her “prior bad acts” were admissible.

Martha remained defiant. Sixteen years into her life sentence, she fired off an angry six-page letter to the court, claiming she was railroaded in a “grave miscarriage of justice” and asking to be freed immediately from prison. She condemned me and other “so-called expert witnesses,” the government, her own lawyer, even the judge. She claimed, in the end, no hard evidence of murder was ever shown in any of the babies' deaths. Her request was denied.

In 1994, sixty-five-year-old Martha was transferred to Carswell Federal Medical Center, a prison hospital in Fort Worth, suffering from hardening of the arteries of the heart and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Doctors managed her symptoms, with frequent setbacks, over the next eight years.

Just before dawn on April 20, 2002, in the prison hospice, Martha Woods stopped breathing and died. She was seventy-three.

Her dying wish was to be buried in the Wesley Chapel Cemetery, in the same family plot where her parents, war-hero brother, son Mikey, nephew Johnny, and niece Lillie Marie lay. But the plot had no more empty graves—partly because Martha had helped fill them—so Harry took her body back to his home in West Virginia, where she was buried in a private graveyard on Madams Creek. And although Harry remarried after Martha's death, he was buried beside her in his full military dress uniform when he died in 2013.

He never stopped believing she was innocent.

*   *   *

The murder of a child by an adult, especially a parent, is one of the most difficult crimes for us to understand. Such murders are usually committed in the heat of passion or insanity. Much rarer, thankfully, is the deliberate and systematic murder of children over a long period of time for no apparent reason.

At the time of Paul Woods's smothering, there was no such diagnosis as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder first defined in the late 1970s. Even today, skepticism persists. It is not listed as a specific behavior in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM
), although modern medical literature cites more than two thousand cases of Munchausen by proxy worldwide. But the St. Elizabeth's psychiatrist who examined Martha didn't need a fancy name: “I won't testify to this, but [Martha's] getting something out of this,” she told Bernstein privately. “She likes the attention.”

Nor did we have the term “serial killer”—not widely used until the 1980s—when Martha Woods was convicted. The public is naïve about a human's potential to kill. They expect murderers to be easily detectible fiends, but they aren't. Woods was a psychopath who had no trouble killing kids and never thought twice about it. Still, her name shows up on few lists of American serial killers even though she murdered more people than infamous American psychos such as “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, Aileen Wuornos, Gary Heidnik, Ed Gein, and Westley Allan Dodd.

In 1974, Charles Bernstein and I wrote about Martha Woods's crimes in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
. “A Case of Infanticide” became a watershed article that radically changed the way medical examiners and prosecutors looked at cases of multiple “crib deaths” in a family.

The case was important for two reasons, medical and legal. A peculiar kind of serial killer—a kind not typically recognized and prosecuted at the time—was unmasked by medical and forensic evidence.

But after Woods, prosecutors and pathologists had a new tool. The case changed how the law looks at “prior bad acts,” especially in these cases where a series of seemingly ordinary events add up to a terribly extraordinary calamity. Martha Woods set an unwitting precedent, especially in infanticide cases: Similar deaths in the past may be used as evidence against an accused killer, even if the prior deaths aren't charged.

We gained a new maxim in forensic pathology, too. In 1989, I wrote in my book
Forensic Pathology
: “One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is suspicious. Three is homicide.”