“Five young people aren’t here today because of her,” Tioga County prosecutor Robert Simpson told the jury in closing arguments during the four-week trial. In April an Owego, N.Y., jury ruled that Waneta Hoyt had suffocated each of her children-with pillows, a towel, even her shoulder. On September 11, Tioga County Judge Vincent Sgueglia sentenced Waneta Hoyt, 49, to 75 years-to-life in prison for “depraved indifference to human life,” in this case a devastatingly apt euphemism for murder. “We used to tell her, ‘You’re not a bad mother.’ “ But little did they know “She’d say, ‘I don’t know what I did wrong,’ ” recalls former neighbor Georgia Garray. Scratching out a modest living in the farming community of Newark Valley, some 70 miles south of Syracuse, Waneta Hoyt, a home-maker, and her husband, Tim, for many-years a security guard at Cornell University’s art museum in Ithaca, were regarded as a quiet couple who bore stoically their unfathomable loss-though Waneta occasionally betrayed a flicker of guilt. Over a 6½-year period, from 1965 to 1971, five of them, Eric, Julie, James, Molly and Noah, ranging in age from just 48 days to 28 months, had died one by one, victims of what doctors classified as sudden infant death syndrome. All her own!įor more than 25 years, Waneta Hoyt would drive each Memorial Day to the small cemetery beside her childhood home in Richford, N.Y., to lay flowers on the graves of her babies. Tormented by their crying, Waneta Hoyt killed five children, one by one.
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