For example, one mother claimed that she had suffocated her son because of stress related to his crying and continually waking her from sleep. However, under surveillance, the mother was seen, with premeditated planning, to suffocate her infant when he was deeply asleep. The majority of other cases showed attempted suffocation when the child was asleep or lying passively on the bed. Children did not appear to provoke their parents into abusing them. And more than that, they seemed to get some acidy trickle of satisfaction out of terrorizing their children.
Mother slaps the infant's head.
Give me a kiss, you little sod, give me a kiss. And so on and on. With further investigation, it turned out that the 39 patients under surveillance, ages 1 month to nearly 3 years old, had 41 siblings, and that 12 of those siblings had died suddenly and unexpectedly. Marybeth Tinning, the Schenectady, N.Y., housewife who, over the course of 14 years, just kept ferrying her kids to the hospital, and collecting flowers at their funerals, until she was eventually found to have killed nine of them. Had she been a man, she might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur, an organized criminal, a serial rapist.