18-Month-Old Twins Died Hungry, Malnourished, Forgotten

The 18-month-old twins had been dead at least 14 hours when they were found in their sheetless crib Dec. 20, 1983. One weighed 14 pounds, the other 11, less than half the normal weight of babies their age.

They had starved to death in the middle of the largest city in western Massachusetts. In the middle of a housing project. Before the eyes of their mother.

Valarie Miller, 33, was sentenced Oct. 8, 1987, to six to nine years in state prison after pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter by negligence, but the judge cut the sentence to one year in prison and five years’ probation.

Detective Capt. Ernest Stelzer said the case was the most extreme case of negligence he had seen in 24 years on the force. Medical Examiner Loren Mednick testified at the inquest that the children had no fat around their organs and were so dehydrated that they lacked even eye fluid.

Procedural Delays

The case took Hampden County Dist. Atty. Matthew J. Ryan more than three years to resolve because of constant procedural delays, and the inquest results, from 1984, were made public only recently.

Miller refused to be interviewed, but now that she is in prison, neighbors are talking and court records and interviews help paint the painful picture of how it happened.

Latashia and Latoya Miller were born June 6, 1982, a month early. Although underdeveloped, they appeared healthy to state social workers and checked out fine with doctors up through their last visit in August, 1983.

Their mother, however, seemed depressed. “I had the feeling that she was perhaps overwhelmed by the care of two children,” Barbara Buell, a nurse with the Early Childhood Service Team who visited the family until the twins were 6 months old, testified at the inquest.

A small, solitary woman, Miller lived with the twins in a two-bedroom apartment in a project tucked into a residential neighborhood of Springfield. Buell said the apartment was always neat when she visited, but was devoid of toys or other signs of children.

“You’d never think the children were living with her,” she said in a recent interview.

She also said the mother resisted help.

“I know everybody made efforts to keep her in counseling, and they weren’t too successful,” Buell said. “Oh, sure, she’d show up, but she’d just sit there and look away from you.”

Neighbors said Miller socialized in the summertime, often bringing the babies to barbecues held nightly in the yards of the dozen red, white and blue four-family apartment houses.

She drank, the neighbors said.

She also visited other apartments for what appeared to be an afternoon drinking ritual, they said.

The twins were left behind on those occasions.

“Some of the time she came back she was high or just staggering,” a downstairs neighbor, Earl Harris, testified at the inquest.

The twins’ father, Harrison Wright, visited each Thursday. A married man who had met Miller at a bar where they worked, Wright lived with his family on the other side of town but testified that he sneaked away regularly to see his out-of-wedlock daughters, bringing them diapers and cookies “when I have an extra couple of dollars.”

Wright testified that they were fed “adult food, like mashed potatoes,” and that when he mentioned their thinness to their mother, she told him they had a cold and weren’t eating properly.

A week before the twins died, Gloria Green, who lived across the street, said she saw them lying in their crib, “a bottle in each hand and nothing in the bottle.”

Despite the clues, however, “it didn’t dawn on me she wasn’t taking care of them,” she said in an interview. She added that she was afraid to report Miller, a fear experts say is common to friends and relatives of alcoholics.

“If you see somebody coughing to death, you say, ‘How about getting to a doctor?’ But alcoholism is another thing,” said Collette Ross, a counselor at Alcoholism Services of Greater Springfield. “People feel they are infringing on the alcoholic’s right to privacy.”

Miller’s boyfriend, Bobbie L. Stovall, testified that he and Miller spent the evening of Dec. 19 and the early hours of Dec. 20, 1983, at her apartment, drinking vodka and beer. She later told police the children “fussed all night. They cried, but that is not unusual, they do that sometime. I checked on them, and they were OK.”

The police say she added: “I don’t remember if I fed the kids today or not. It might have been yesterday. I think I gave them some water today.”

Late that day, after she had slept a few hours, she visited Green, drank two beers and a half-pint of vodka and left. Twenty minutes later, she called Green from a pay phone, according to police reports and interviews.

‘My Babies Is Dead’

Sobbing, and with loud music playing in the background, “she said, ‘I need a drink bad.’ She said she was having a lot of problems, but she wouldn’t say what,” Green said.

Not long afterwards, in the early evening, a few neighbors were in a downstairs apartment when Miller ran to them crying, “No! No! My babies is dead, both of them.”

Harris, the neighbor, ran upstairs and found the children on their sides, “staring at one another,” he later testified. They were pronounced dead at the local hospital.

On Jan. 25, 1985, more than two years after her babies withered away in their crib, Miller pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter by negligence and two counts of failing to supply adequate care and guidance.

When it came time for sentencing, Elizabeth Scheibel, the assistant district attorney, urged Hampden County Superior Court Judge George C. Keady Jr. to imprison Miller for an unspecified period, saying:

“Motherhood carries great responsibility, and Miss Miller did not live up to that responsibility. Here alcoholism should not excuse what she did or didn’t do.”

“I cannot disagree,” Keady replied. “I don’t think we can forget about these two children. Even back to pregnancy, these children were at her mercy.”

After the inquest, free on personal recognizance, Miller lived for a time with her mother. She had another child, despite birth control counseling.

Boy Fails to Thrive

The boy, who recently turned 2, also failed to thrive under her care. He was placed temporarily in a foster home and then put in the custody of his grandmother, Audrey Young, joining Miller’s 11-year-old daughter, who has lived with Young since infancy.

“She was an alcoholic, that was her problem,” Young said about her daughter. “She was never a bad girl. I never had any problem with her.”

The nurse who tried to help Miller said alcohol counseling simply failed.

“This was a case that more or less seemed to defeat the system,” Buell said. “She couldn’t be helped.”