Starved to Death With No Heat : Deaths of 3 Tied to Husband’s Religious Zeal

At 3 1/2, Melanie Hines could read storybooks. As a kindergartner, she helped in the grade school library. At 6, she was reading encyclopedias.

By age 10, she could order dinner and wine for her parents in a New York restaurant and had already attended off-Broadway shows. She wrote poetry and tutored her junior high classmates on the bassoon.

While studying anthropology and history in an African studies curriculum at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., she ran the Women’s Center and worked as an athletic trainer. She spent one college summer helping to build a school in Kenya.

By age 22, she was a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She hoped to work against social inequities and hunger, particularly in Africa.

Family Found Dead

But this extraordinary life ended in mystery in its 28th year. Melanie was found dead last Oct. 16, along with her husband, Samuel Amponsah, 33, and their 10-month-old daughter, Rebekah. Constables who had come to evict them for non-payment of rent found the bodies.

The medical examiner’s office ended its investigation Jan. 19. It found that the Amponsahs died of malnutrition, dehydration and low body temperatures in an unheated house with bare cupboards.

Dr. Brian Blackbourne, Massachusetts’ chief medical examiner, said that three months of toxicology tests had ruled out poisoning. Diary notations indicated that the family had had no money for food for several weeks.

Officials could not determine who had died first or whether the deaths were the result of misfortune or of a conscious choice. Their report could not address the mystery of how such a promising life as Melanie’s came to such a dismal end.

“We left the manner of death undetermined, indicating we don’t fully understand it,” said Blackbourne. “There are still puzzling factors.”

Religious Fervor Cited

Friends speculated that Sam, immersed in a religious fervor to start a church, had lost touch with reality in the preceding year. His behavior became paranoid, they said, and he twisted their gentle challenges into opposition to his dream. Eventually, he isolated his family in the rented house without food or fuel.

Melanie and Sam, a native of Nsawam, Ghana, met at MIT, where he was in a Ph.D. program in chemical engineering. He had come to the United States in 1974 on a scholarship to Cornell and had already earned a master’s degree at MIT.

Sam had been a gregarious man who dressed in jeans and corduroys and enjoyed parties. Friends said he was so full of life he seemed even taller than his 5-foot-11 frame. He pored over scientific journals, but his first love was vintage cars.

Fresh from Trinity, Melanie entered MIT’s Ph.D. program in autumn 1982. In her second year, she won a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship.

Both joined the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cambridge.

“He was very active in Bible study,” said the Rev. Raymond Hammond, who became Sam’s friend and mentor.

In the summer of 1984, Sam asked Melanie’s father for permission to marry her, and the couple flew to Ghana to meet his mother. On Jan. 5, 1985, Hammond married them in the MIT chapel.

Parents Gave Approval

Sadly recalling that day, Melanie’s father, Herbert E. Hines, a New York City housing official, said he worried even then that Sam was too rigid a man, but he and his wife, Sara, gave their blessing because they considered their daughter wise.

In June, 1986, Sam told Ray Hammond he believed that God had called him to help Christians become stronger in their beliefs. Hammond said Sam’s ideas for a new church were vague and never got off the ground.

“His feeling was that evangelism would be a part of it, but he saw it as a matter of teaching and working with people who were already Christians,” Hammond said.

Two months later, with the lease running out on the couple’s Cambridge apartment and the birth of their first child nearing, Hammond offered to rent them a two-story brick house he owned in Boston. Sam and Melanie took this as an important sign of God’s support for his ministry.

Sam’s behavior, already annoying to some friends when he preached at parties--began to alarm others. He stopped wearing eyeglasses. God had cured his nearsightedness, he told one fellow student.

Vision of a Son

He was adamant that God had told him his unborn baby would be a boy, to be named Paul Samuel after St. Paul and the prophet Samuel. The child was a girl, named Rebekah after the wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob. That fall, Sam quit MIT, six months short of earning his Ph.D.

The Amponsahs moved into Hammond’s house in September. The minister knew they had no steady income, but by the winter, with no rent paid, he was getting concerned--especially when Sam told him God had given him the house. Sam rejected a public heating subsidy, and a water pipe burst and flooded the basement. He also disconnected the telephone and refused to accept most mail.

The Hineses were in Boston in December, 1986, to visit their new granddaughter. Soon after their visit, Sam severed all contact with Melanie’s family and his friends, including Hammond.

Melanie was also showing signs of trouble. She had taken leave from MIT beginning in September, 1985, after she failed to complete several courses. She returned for the 1986 fall term but left again after Rebekah’s birth.

Student Became Wife

“She had run into difficulties,” said her adviser, Dr. Willard Johnson. “My advice was to take a break. Perhaps much more was going on in her mind. By now she is married and Sam’s problems are emerging. Perhaps her own academic work stopped sometime in 1985. Subsequently, she got caught up in just being a wife, then a pregnant wife, then a mother.”

On two successive weeks last February, Sam refused to let in Melanie’s parents after they had driven up from Staten Island. The first time, while standing outside, Hines said he could hear his son-in-law chanting in tongues.

The second time, concerned about Melanie and the baby, the Hineses called police. Hines said that Sam asked him: “Do you think I would harm your daughter?”

Melanie’s mother told her she thought Sam needed counseling. Melanie insisted that he was going through a phase, that he was not insane. That was the last time the couple would see their daughter or granddaughter alive.

Last Aug. 1, Melanie’s parents and godparents came to visit. Still angry about the police call in February, Sam and Melanie refused to see them. But they did meet with the godparents.

‘All Looked Healthy’

“We asked them if they needed any help,” said Marlene Archer, the godmother. “They said they were doing just fine. They all looked healthy and robust.”

Eleven weeks later, all three were dead.

At her death, Melanie, who was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 118 pounds, Hines said. In August, Marlene Archer estimated that Melanie weighed about 150 pounds. When the Hineses inspected the house after the deaths, the dishes were packed in boxes and the cupboards were bare except for some condiments and baby food.

Hines struggled to find reasons for the tragedy.

“If she wasn’t being provided for and her reaction was to, in essence, have an induced fast and then pray for better things to come and he joined her in prayer and did nothing to provide, then that’s one scenario,” he said.

“She was a strong kid, and I can find no rational reasons except she loved the guy.”

Memories at Christmas

Melanie’s parents spent Christmas in Ohio with their son, Christopher, and his wife and 4-year-old son. But they couldn’t escape the memories of past holidays when Melanie and her three siblings performed hilarious parodies, or the Christmas when Melanie and her sister Jocelyn stuffed grape leaves into a red snapper’s mouth so it appeared to be smoking a cigar.

When Melanie’s friends request keepsakes, her mother gives them poems Melanie wrote while she was at Trinity.

“I thought we would give them remembrances of the Melanie we knew. She was deeply in love with (Sam), and because of it she lost her own identity.”