Paul David Woods was born on February 9, 1969, and spent the first five months of his life in a foster home without a single breathing problem. He was a normal, healthy baby when he was placed as a pre-adoptive foster son with Martha Woods, an army wife living on the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. On August 4 he twice stopped breathing and turned blue. It happened again on August 8, on August 13 and on August 20. Each time mouth-to-mouth resuscitation brought him round, except the last, when he slipped into a coma. He died on September 21, a little over seven months old. On every occasion, the evidence showed, he had been in her custody and she alone had had access to him.
Doctors found nothing. After the first episode he was examined and sent home as apparently well; after the later admissions, even days of observation produced no explanation for the blueness or the failed breathing.
Behind Paul lay more than two decades. From the mid-1940s, the government would show, Woods had had custody of or access to nine other children, who between them suffered at least twenty episodes of cyanosis. Seven died. Three were her own children, two were adopted, one was a niece, one a nephew, and two were the children of friends.
Charles Lewis Stewart, her first child, was born prematurely in 1946 but without malformation. At a month old he turned blue twice while she held him, seemed well in the hospital, and died two days after his release after coughing, choking and turning blue. The causes on his death certificate, an enlarged thymus and status lymphaticus, were shown at trial to be medically impossible, and the government's evidence contradicted her alibi for the moment he died. On December 26, 1946, her nephew John Wise, three years and seven months old and sick with diphtheria, died in bed with her; three other children in the house with the same disease recovered.
Mary Elizabeth Huston, born in 1950, came home after three weeks in the hospital and had four or five episodes while alone with her mother or in her care. She was hospitalized twice without any cause being found, and she died in her mother's arms at a month and twenty-seven days. Carol Ann Huston, born on January 22, 1952, was a healthy baby who turned blue on the day she died, at three months and twenty-one days. The causes on her certificate had been diagnosed after death without an autopsy and were shown to be impossible.
Lilly Marie Stewart, a niece, was fourteen months old on May 18, 1958, when her parents woke in the night to find her in Woods's arms, gurgling and blue around the mouth. She was dead on arrival at the hospital, and no autopsy was done. Marlan Rash, the son of a friend, had three attacks in her care in the last five months of his life. An early diagnosis of epilepsy was largely disproved. The third attack came on the day he left the hospital after the second, and he died on May 3, 1964, at eighteen months. An autopsy found no cause.
Two children lived. Eddie Thomas, eighteen months old, was left with her while his mother visited his father in the hospital. He turned blue, was taken in and released, and his mother later found a bruise on his neck while bathing him. Woods admitted she had been alone with him and blamed a mucous block, an explanation shown to be medically impossible. Judy Woods, her adopted daughter, had at least six episodes before she turned two, the first two on December 12, 1967, and the last on September 9, 1969, weeks after Paul collapsed, when she was taken to Kirk Army Hospital and then Johns Hopkins. Every episode came when she was alone with Woods. Once Judy was removed from her custody, she never had another.
Because Paul died on the proving ground, the case was federal. It opened in the United States District Court in Baltimore before Judge Frank A. Kaufman on February 13, 1972. The government's difficulty was proving there had been a murder at all. Its forensic pathologist, Dr. DiMaio, who had performed the autopsy, testified that the death was neither suicide nor accident and that he found no evidence of natural death, but he put his certainty that Paul had been smothered at seventy-five percent. The remaining doubt, he said, was the chance of a disease unknown to medicine, and he agreed that it was a reasonable doubt. The prosecution closed the gap with the nine other children, and a second pathologist, called in rebuttal, testified that Paul was the victim of homicide by smothering.
The jury convicted her of first-degree murder and of seven further counts of assault with intent to murder, attempted murder and mistreatment, all concerning Paul. The court directed acquittal on the three counts involving Judy. On July 24, 1972, she was sentenced to life, with further terms on the other counts. The judge indicated he would have considered a sentence carrying earlier parole eligibility but held that the law did not allow it for first-degree murder. At sentencing she maintained that she had not smothered the child.
Her court-appointed lawyers argued on appeal that the government had never proved a murder occurred, that the evidence about the other children could not be used to prove one and was too thin to show she caused those episodes anyway, and that the jury had been misinstructed. The Fourth Circuit rejected every point in an opinion by Judge Harrison L. Winter decided September 12, 1973, over a dissent by Judge H. Emory Widener Jr., and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1974. The holding, that proof of similar acts can help establish that a crime took place at all, is still cited in child-death and serial-poisoning prosecutions.
Later writers counted her among the early recognized cases of what came to be called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term that did not exist when she was tried. No record of her release, parole or death has been published.