In November 1990 James Savage came home from work to find his wife on the floor of their bedroom closet. She would not come out and she would not speak to him. She sat in the dark holding her purse in one hand and, in the other, the blue blanket that had belonged to their son Michael, who had died a short time before.
Her family read it as grief. Three years later the police were saying the blanket had been the weapon.
There were three children. Michael Andrew died on November 5, 1990, and his death was ruled a crib death; reports at the time gave his age as six weeks or as one month. Amber Lynn died on February 25, 1992, at twenty-one or twenty-two days old depending on the account. Her cause of death was left undetermined, and Lake County authorities opened an investigation that ended without charges. Cynthia Gail was born the following January.
As the weather warmed in 1993 the Savages were often seen walking Cynthia around their neighborhood in her carriage. A former co-worker, Kristi Perciach, ran into mother and daughter at the grocery store on Cynthia's five-month birthday. Gail was buying baby food, and the baby looked healthy. Sharon Reynhout, who owned a flower shop in Wauconda and had arranged the flowers for Amber's funeral, remembered the couple coming in during the last days of June to show Cynthia off, Gail holding the baby and James holding a bag of groceries, and talking to her for half an hour. They were, she said, the happiest and proudest people she had ever seen.
Two days after that visit, around noon on June 28, 1993, Gail Savage called the Wauconda paramedics to say that Cynthia was dead in her crib. There was no sign of illness or injury, and the parents said it was SIDS. This time the pathologist, a doctor named Richardson, did not accept it. In September he listed the cause of Cynthia's death as suffocation.
Savage was questioned and, on the night of Wednesday, September 8, 1993, gave a statement. The Lake County state's attorney, Michael Waller, said she had described feeling "some frustration with each child" before she killed them, and police said she had placed a blanket over each baby's mouth. She was thirty. She was arrested that night and held in the Lake County jail in Waukegan. At a hearing in Lake County Circuit Court the next day she was denied bond and, at her lawyer's request, ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
She was from Wauconda and had lived there her whole life. She graduated from the local high school in 1981 and worked eight years washing dishes at a nursing home in the town before taking part-time secretarial work. People who had grown up alongside her remembered the thick glasses she wore because only one of her eyes worked, and not much else. A woman who had supervised her at the nursing home described her as sensitive, the kind of person who took a nasty remark to heart when others would shrug it off.
The people who knew her could not match the statement to the woman they had watched fuss over her children. "It's hard to believe Gail killed the kids," Perciach told the Chicago Tribune. "She doesn't seem violent. Lonely, but not violent. But it's like you know someone and you don't know them at all."
She was tried the following spring in Lake County Circuit Court for the murder of Cynthia alone. The trial ran nine days and she was composed through almost all of it. The jury deliberated more than fourteen hours, and on the night of April 30, 1994, found her not guilty of murder and guilty of involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct.
She collapsed onto the defense table sobbing. Her husband, sitting behind her, wept too. Her lawyer, Robert Hauser, said afterward that the sentence for what the jury had actually convicted her of might be anything from probation to fourteen years.
Two more trials were waiting, for Michael and for Amber. Neither happened. On May 30, 1994, the morning she was due to be sentenced for Cynthia, Savage accepted an arrangement instead. It covered all three children and carried twenty years, imposed by Judge Charles Scott. She did not plead guilty to killing Michael or Amber. What she agreed was that there was enough evidence to convict her of involuntary manslaughter for those two deaths, and in exchange she waived every right of appeal.
A University of Chicago law professor, asked about it at the time, said the arrangement was virtually the same as a guilty plea, but that the distinction was real, because it goes on the record as a trial rather than a plea. That distinction is the whole legal shape of the case. A jury heard the evidence on the one death that went to verdict and declined to call it murder.
Twenty years for three dead infants was argued over in Illinois at the time, and the arithmetic that troubled people was simple: it was a term she could serve part of and be released from. A twenty-year Illinois sentence imposed in 1994 has long since run its course.
Kathleen Folbigg's case in New South Wales ran the other way. Savage admitted what she had done and a jury still refused to convict her of murder. Folbigg admitted nothing, was convicted largely on the improbability of four infant deaths in one family, and had those convictions quashed twenty years later when the science moved.