Neighbors Rally Around Woman Accused of Killing Her Five Children : Justice: The deaths originally were attributed to SIDS, but prosecutors now contend that she smothered each child--the last one in 1971. Her friends dispute that.

Spring offered its gentle embrace at last as Waneta Hoyt drove to the village on an errand, past snowbanks leaking under the warm sun.

It was almost a daily routine. State police, recognizing the woman’s labored gait and thinning hair, were waiting when she emerged from the post office one morning last month.

They asked if she would accompany them to Owego, the nearby county seat, to assist with research into sudden infant death syndrome, listed as the cause of death of all five of her children between 1965 and 1971.

Hoyt went willingly. “If she thought she could help someone, she would,” said Natalie Hilliard, a close friend for 28 years.

The investigators weren’t really looking for help.

During six hours of questioning, Hoyt was accused of smothering three of her babies with pillows, one with a bath towel and the youngest, Julie, by jamming the 7-week-old’s face into her shoulder. By late afternoon, she was charged with five counts of second-degree murder.

The charges culminated an investigation that began in 1986 when a prosecutor read about the unexplained deaths in a medical journal. Right away, he was convinced the mother, identified only as “H,” was to blame, and set about bringing her to justice.

Eight years later, Hoyt awaits trial, vigorously maintaining her innocence. Her lawyer, Robert Miller, castigates the police subterfuge, noting she was “picked up on the pretense that they were doing research on SIDS.” And her friends and neighbors along Route 38, two miles north of this old valley town in mountainous Tioga County, seem convinced that the police have made a terrible error.

“I can’t conceive that she would be guilty. She’s too caring, too loving. She baby-sat for my children,” said Natalie Hilliard’s husband, Arthur.

“The trauma that she went through when her children died was really heart-rending. This woman you practically carried out of the funeral parlor.”

The Hilliards lived next door to Hoyt and her husband, Tim, from late 1965 to 1971, and they became friends as the tragedy unfolded. The second child, James, lived 27 months; the others died within four months of birth.

The Hoyts were frantic with worry about losing all of their children to SIDS, and used heart-monitoring devices on two or three of them, Arthur Hilliard said.

“They did everything the doctors told them to,” he said.

Martha Nestle, 75, who said she was Hoyt’s closest friend in the 1970s, also disputed the charges.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” she said. “She was too nice a person.”

Hoyt sometimes talked about the deaths of her children and cried, Nestle said. More often, she was upbeat.

“She was jolly, just wonderful to talk to, always smiling,” she said.

Prosecutors contend Hoyt, 47, has Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric condition in which a parent, usually a mother, is driven to harm children to get attention and sympathy.

Janice Ophoven, a forensic pathologist in St. Paul, Minn., who re-examined the medical evidence in the Hoyt deaths, prefers to call it “a unique form of covert child abuse” first applied in court about 1975.

Although Tim Hoyt, a security guard at Cornell University, and his mother were questioned for several hours, no one else is expected to face charges, said senior state police Investigator Robert Courtright.

As for neighbors’ anger and suspicion about the pressure Waneta Hoyt came under during questioning, he said, “We knew there was going to be some ill feelings out there.”

There are poignant memories as well.

Every Memorial Day, Natalie Hilliard said, the Hoyts laid flowers on the graves of their babies.

“She always talked about them when it was their birthday,” Natalie Hilliard said. “My son and their first son would have been about the same age. She mentioned that and wondered what he would have been like.”

The Hoyts have one living child, a 17-year-old adopted son they reared since he was a baby.