Tragic Tale of Killing of a Newborn Infant : Hearing: The case of an Escondido woman accused of killing child reflects on other slayings of newborns.

Like dozens of times before, Remus Wright rummaged through the garbage of an Escondido apartment complex one chilly morning last November, searching for aluminum cans.

What he found was horrible:

A black trash bag holding the bloodied body of a newborn boy, the placenta and umbilical cord still attached, his life snuffed out.

A preliminary hearing will be held in Vista today to determine if 20-year-old Tiffany Nicole Sandeffer should be tried on charges that she killed the infant authorities are calling Baby Doe.

Sandeffer denies the baby was hers; she insists she was not pregnant.

Authorities say extensive circumstantial evidence, including a diaper, a towel and a plastic cup found in the same bag as the child, links Sandeffer to the infant, who was found in a Dumpster in the apartment complex she lives in.

Furthermore, an examination by a gynecologist indicated that Sandeffer may have recently given birth, though she claims that her only pregnancies--the births of two babies--occurred in 1990.

It’s one of the handful of cases in San Diego County each year in which a child’s birth leads to its death, authorities say. And prosecutors will argue that Sandeffer’s case carries the classic signs of the particular and unusual crime of neonaticide , killing a newborn within the first hours of life.

Neonaticide has dynamics dramatically different from other cases of infanticide, even those that take place just days after the baby’s birth.

The immediate killing of a newborn, psychiatrists and pediatricians say, usually results from intense pressures, both social and economic, that often drive the mother to block the pregnancy from her mind.

The killing of newborns dates back centuries and was done for reasons such as population control, shame of illegitimacy, the inability of the mother to care for her child, superstition and ritual sacrifice, psychiatrists said.

It has become far less common, one psychiatrist said, as the stigma of single parenthood has lessened, abortions have become more accessible and government programs such as Aid to Families With Dependent Children have helped the poor with the costs of raising children.

Unlike those who abandon their children on doorsteps or even kill their children a few days after birth, mothers who kill in the moments after delivery have virtually no emotional attachment to the child.

“They don’t think of the baby as a live being, but just a foreign object that they have to get rid of,” said Phillip Resnick, professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and an expert on infanticide.

Resnick said the mother who kills her newborn is usually trying “to protect her own interests,” which range from avoiding the stigma of having a child out of wedlock or from an extramarital affair to economic reasons.

San Diego County has witnessed a rash of child abandonments, seven so far this year, but Resnick said a woman who kills her child operates under different circumstances from one who leaves a child for someone else to find.

“Both feel that they can’t care for the baby . . . and both are likely to have hidden the pregnancy,” Resnick said. “But the baby abandoner is more likely to be a planner, and the baby killer is more likely to be more impulsive and have more denial.”

Unlike women who have abortions, Resnick said, women who commit neonaticide refuse to recognize that they are even pregnant and are passive, waiting for “something to happen that will miraculously take the baby away.”

When that doesn’t occur and the child is born, Resnick said, the mother acts recklessly, killing the child, usually by suffocation, just as it cries out for the first time.

But Susan Hickman, a psychotherapist in San Diego, said some cases of neonaticide result from postpartum psychosis, a mental disorder associated with giving birth in which the mother loses contact with reality as a result of the hormonal upheaval of the delivery.

The disorder usually does not manifest itself until at least a day after delivery, Hickman said.

However, Hickman said a mother who suffered from a postpartum psychosis that went untreated could experience another psychotic episode during ensuing pregnancies, even before the second child is born.

In these episodes, Hickman said a woman can fluctuate between rationality and psychosis, all the while appearing completely normal.

“It is very similar to dreaming while you are awake,” said Hickman, an expert on postpartum psychosis who testifies in court cases dealing with the disorder. “Part of the reality that the mother is responding to is the real world and part of it is like a dream state where she sees things and hears things that other people don’t.”

Postpartum psychosis occurs in one to three deliveries in a thousand, Hickman estimates, with 3% of those women killing their children and 3% committing suicide.

The jury in Sandeffer’s case will be called on to decide whether that was what happened in late 1991. And one of the arguments they are sure to hear from prosecutors, based on police reports, is that denial of pregnancy was not new to her.

Sandeffer first became pregnant when she was a 17-year-old high school student, the report said, infuriating her father, Clifford, to the point that he would not allow the father of the child, John Daniel Sesma, into their house, according to a report by an Escondido detective.

Sesma’s parents also disliked Sandeffer and her family, according to the report.

Sandeffer and the child, Samantha, born in early 1990, lived with her parents for a while before they and Sesma moved to a nearby apartment complex.

In December, 1990, Sandeffer was admitted to the Palomar Medical Center for treatment of a urinary tract infection that was actually labor, the report said, and gave birth to a son, Jonathan.

No one, including Sandeffer, her family and her mother-in-law that drove her to the hospital, knew that she was pregnant, said both the report and Sandeffer’s attorney, public defender John Jimenez.

On Nov. 8, 1991, Baby Doe was found in a Dumpster in the same apartment complex where Sandeffer and Sesma lived, the police report said.

In an interview with detectives, the report said, Sandeffer “indicated . . . that she had mentally blocked out her last pregnancy with Jonathan and that she could have been pregnant again and blocked it out also.”

She did not deny giving birth, the report said, but said that if she had, she could not remember.

Jimenez said the report misrepresented the interview.

Police also found circumstantial evidence linking Sandeffer to Baby Doe, the report said. The towel in which the baby was wrapped matched one that Sandeffer said she threw away two days before the child was found, the report said.

Also, the report said a soiled diaper found with the dead baby was the same brand as those found in another bag of trash that contained documents bearing Sandeffer’s name.

A mauve plastic cup that covered the dead baby’s nose and mouth was the same as one given to Sandeffer during her visit to Palomar Hospital when she gave birth to Jonathan and one she was known to have when she moved to the apartment, the report said.

DNA tests requested by police to prove a link between Sandeffer and the dead child were inconclusive, the report said. Sandeffer consented to an examination by a gynecologist whose findings were “consistent with a recent pregnancy and vaginal delivery.”

Jimenez dismissed the circumstantial evidence, saying “there’s nothing distinctive about the towel” and that the cup “is a common cup that is given to every patient at virtually every hospital.”

No scientific evidence conclusively links Sandeffer to the child, Jimenez said, and she maintains that she was not pregnant.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Douglas Gregg said scientific evidence “is only one of many means of proving who did what,” but declined to say what other evidence will be presented in the hearing today.

“People shoot human beings coldbloodedly almost on a daily basis,” Gregg said, “and you and me being reasonable people ask how can someone do this to a newborn baby. We know that as a matter of life, this happens.”