Morgue

by Dr. Vincent DiMaio

  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 resuscit
ated 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.

  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 Sta
teside 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.