1 Mother, 3 Fathers, 6 Babies That Died: Was It SIDS or Homicide?

Having babies came easy to Debbie Gedzius. Keeping them alive was the problem.

From tiny Denise Marie, born in 1972 when Gedzius was an unmarried schoolgirl, to angel-faced Danny, who lived just two months in 1987, her babies died, one after the other--six in all.

For all those years, birth and death seemed like the only constants in Gedzius’ life. She quit high school, married three men, moved at least eight times, worked in a cafeteria, taught dance, tended bar.

In different homes, in different cities, she had babies. None lived longer than two years. The explanation was always Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS, one of the most heartbreaking tragedies of infancy.

Was it a horrible coincidence, or something more sinister?

According to the favored medical theory of the day, SIDS could run in families. But, these days, experts are saying it is not so. And Debbie’s former brother-in-law, Harry Gedzius, calls the theory “a license to kill.”

Now, Cook County’s medical examiner has changed the death certificates for Debbie’s children. A grand jury investigation is underway.

And Deborah Anne Booe Narbone Gedzius, now in her early 40s and using her current husband’s last name--Fornuto--is living outside Las Vegas and preparing for what may happen next.

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It was Harry Gedzius who first alerted the medical examiner’s office--in 1980, after the fourth baby’s death--that Debbie’s previous babies had also died mysteriously.

Because she had moved so often and changed names as she remarried, the connection had gone unnoticed for eight years.

Harry met Debbie in the mid-1970s when she dated his brother, Delos, a handsome, hard-working pipe-fitter just out of the Marines. Debbie was a cafeteria worker and pregnant with her ex-husband’s child, her third baby.

Barbara Jean Narbone was born on Nov. 13, 1976. She died two days after Christmas, just 6 weeks old.

Debbie “said it was something with the genes, the father. But there were already two fathers,” Harry Gedzius recalls.

Delos’ response was, “ ‘There’s nothing wrong with my genes.’ ”

Then the couple’s first child, Jason, died on Sept. 5, 1980, six days past his first birthday. Debbie said later she had been napping with the baby while Delos was at work. “She woke up and he wasn’t breathing,” said Joyce Mullin, Harry and Delos’ sister.

Delos, sobbing, called his brother. The scene Harry found at the couple’s home unnerved him. “I heard all this music blaring, it was like they were having a party.” Debbie was dancing with relatives.

Harry called the medical examiner’s office and said, “My nephew just died. You know, he’s the fourth one.”

“We didn’t know about that, we’ll look into it,” was the response.

He called repeatedly after that. The answer was always the same.

With Delos Jr., born in 1982, it seemed the curse was broken. Delos Jr. was put on a home monitor designed to sound an alarm if he stopped breathing. He grew past infancy, into a bright-eyed, brown-haired 2-year-old who loved toy trucks and doted on his dad.

Then, on Feb. 11, 1984, Debbie said she found Delos Jr. dead after napping with him.

Harry contacted the medical examiner again and was told they were already investigating. Again, nothing conclusive was found and SIDS was suspected. But because the four previous deaths were now linked, Delos Jr.’s death was labeled “undetermined.”

The designation, though unsettling, assigned no blame.

Three years later, Danny Gedzius was born. He, too, was put on a monitor. When he was 10 weeks old, Debbie turned the device on and went to work at the Gedzius family’s tavern.

She said she returned home to find Delos passed-out drunk and the monitor shrieking. The baby was dead, and she blamed her husband for not responding to the alarm, Mullin said.

Delos “was crazy over that one,” Mullin said. “I really believe he went to his grave thinking he had something to do with that one.”

The marriage began to dissolve. Then, in April 1989, Delos was found shot in the head in his apartment, a few days after dining with Debbie to settle their divorce. Harry Gedzius said the last time he was seen alive was by Debbie, who drove him home. She said she went into the apartment to use the bathroom.

Debbie said she was miles away with a policeman at the time of the killing. Police investigated, but no one has been charged.

Debbie married James Fornuto, a Chicago policeman who was fired after he was convicted of theft, and they moved to the Southwest.

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SIDS cases--which number about 3,500 a year--are true medical mysteries. Seemingly healthy babies die in their sleep for no detectable reason. SIDS is a diagnosis given when all other causes have been ruled out. The vast majority of cases are not murder.

But on April 27, 1990, Cook County’s medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, wrote a haunting letter to the state’s attorney’s office. The investigation into the death of Delos Gedzius Sr. had led to a reexamination of the deaths of Debbie’s children.

“After careful consideration, it is my opinion that all of the deaths were caused by suffocation, and the manner of death is homicide,” he wrote.

But Stein never changed the death certificates. His inaction is a mystery, though it may simply have been an oversight by the elderly pathologist, who died four years later at 82.

Bill Merritt, the assistant state’s attorney to whom Stein addressed his letter, says he never read it. Merritt left the office two months later and thinks he likely gave the unopened letter to an assistant.

“If I certainly had ever seen that letter, that would have been what I needed” to put Debbie on trial, said Merritt, now in private practice. “I was convinced in my own heart that she killed the kids.”

Dr. Marie Valdes-Dapena, one of three specialists who reviewed Debbie’s case in 1990, said, “Suffocation . . . with an adult holding his or her hand over the baby’s nose and mouth for over three minutes will kill a baby and not leave a mark.”

That’s what makes it so difficult to distinguish from SIDS. Still, she was convinced Debbie’s babies had all been killed.

“It cannot be called SIDS” if there are three or more deaths in one family, the doctor said.

There was also circumstantial evidence, according to Dr. Mary Jumbelic, a Stein assistant who investigated with two Chicago police detectives:

* The children had no disease that would explain their deaths;

* They had different biological fathers, reducing the chance that all shared a genetic defect;

* Their mother was present or had access to them at the time of their deaths.

* There was no medical explanation for the deaths.

Said Larry Nitsche, then a detective who worked with Jumbelic: “I don’t think, I know they were homicides.”

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It was Dr. Alfred Steinschneider who had theorized that cases of SIDS ran in families. He was inspired by a case in Upstate New York involving Waneta Hoyt, mother of five children who succumbed.

In 1995, she was convicted of murder. And Steinschneider’s theory began to crumble.

Pediatrics, the medical journal that published Steinschneider’s study in 1972, printed an apology in October in a review of a new book about the Hoyt case. The book suggests Steinschneider’s theory led some cases of infanticide to be misclassified as familial SIDS.

Dr. Edmund Donoghue, Cook County’s current medical examiner, says the apology led him to change the death certificates for Debbie’s children to “undetermined”--meaning, the death is suspicious.

A grand jury has been convened, but a spokesman for Cook County state’s attorney Dick Devine declined to discuss the investigation.

For Harry Gedzius, seeing his former sister-in-law charged “is like the most important thing in my life,” he said. “These are my nephews and my brother. I want it solved.”

Debbie’s attorney, Rick Halprin, says charges “would seem to be inevitable.” He said his client didn’t want to talk about it, and attempts to reach her by telephone at her Nevada home were unsuccessful.

“She’s always maintained her innocence,” Halprin said. “By all accounts, she was a very caring mother.”