PEDIATRICS Vol. 93 No. 6 June 1994, pp. 944
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Woman Confesses in Deaths of Children

J. F. L. MD

Waneta E. Hoyte said her five children died because they cried.

"In a signed confession, she said she smothered her children, Erik, James, Julie, Molly and Noah, because their screaming made her feel useless.

"It was the thing that caused me to kill them all because I didn't know what to do for them," Mrs. Hoyt said in a confession taken by investigators hours before her arrest last week on five counts of murder.

The statement, one of two provided to investigators by Mrs. Hoyt, transformed what had been a textbook case of so-called crib death of her five children more than 20 years ago into another kind of family cataclysm: an unthinkable crime..." Mrs. Hoyt now renounces the confession. She now claims she signed the statements only to stop questioning by police.