The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (16 page)

The detective tried to soothe the child, but Tanya had done a good job of agitating Carolyn. Her brother, three-year-old Michael, had been removed from the family and was in foster care. Now her mother was about to be led away by police.

At the Urbandale, Iowa police station Tanya Thaxton Reid was formally charged with endangering Michael’s life. Soon, authorities in Texas would be investigating the death of another of her children, her baby daughter, Morgan.

She, and many who knew her, were stunned by the accusations.

Tanya was a devoted wife and mother. She rocked her children to sleep every night. She had dinner on the table for her husband when he came home from work and she kept a clean house. She was a LVN, a licensed vocational nurse, helping patients – including babies – with day-to-day challenges they faced when hospitalized. She had literally saved the lives of her own children by breathing oxygen into their tiny mouths. She kept a vigil at their bedside during dozens of hospitalizations for a terrible genetic disease she said they had.

Tanya? Responsible for her baby daughter’s death and the near-death of her son? It was impossible. She loved her children to death.

THE URBANDALE POLICE HAD NEVER HEARD OF MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME by Proxy (often shortened to MSP or MSBP). Not many people had when the first of Tanya Reid’s children died in 1984, or even in 1988 when doctors who treated Michael and state child protection investigators finally began to put the pieces together.

“Munchausen syndrome” was coined by a doctor in 1951 writing in the British medical journal Lancet (the name refers to the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron Von Munchausen, who told tall tales about his exploits in war). The doctor used the term to describe patients who faked illnesses to receive unnecessary medical care and the attention and sympathy that accompanies it. It wasn't until 1977 that another doctor wrote in Lancet about two mothers who had inflicted illnesses on their children and received the same attention "by proxy."

Tanya Thaxton was the fourth and last of the daughters born to John and Wanda Thaxton in their middle-class neighborhood in Dumas, a town in the Texas Panhandle. Tanya once described herself this way: "I was raised as a Baptist. I was in the youth choir, and I sang in the church there. I played in the high school band. I played clarinet. Went to all the football games and basketball games. Just a normal growing up."

After graduating from high school in 1976, Tanya began the vocational nursing program at Dumas Memorial Hospital, where as part of her duties she helped care for the babies in the nursery. At about the same time she met her family’s new next door neighbor, Jim Reid. He was seven years older than Tanya and was working for Swift Independent Packing Company, a meat-packing plant. He was the quiet one and Tanya was the more out-going partner. They married in 1977.

The Reid’s daughter, Carolyn, born in 1981, didn’t seem to have any health problems. But from the day her sister was born in May, 1983, little Morgan Renee seemed to struggle for her life.

Just days after her birth Tanya rushed Morgan to the hospital saying she had a strange rash and colic. Doctors said she was healthy, but suggested Tanya stop breastfeeding and try a supplement. She did and the rash disappeared. Later, Tanya resumed nursing.

Lots of babies are allergic to breast milk or colicky, but Tanya was dramatic about even the simplest sniffle dramatic. Neighbors said that if they heard sirens, they knew an ambulance was on its way to the Reid’s house.

Tanya loved the attention. Nurses admired the way she wouldn’t leave Morgan’s side. Other mothers would share the usual worries about their children but no one could top Tanya’s stories. She thrived on the attention and sympathy.

Tanya learned quickly that Jim’s career at Swift made her something akin to a military wife. They moved, and then moved again for his work, back and forth between Texas, Illinois and Iowa. The constant buying and selling of houses, with temporary stays in motels or apartments, were hard on the marriage. So were the children’s illnesses.

It meant that Tanya didn’t only fool her husband, parents and friends about her children’s health. She fooled doctors in three states.

In August, 1983, when Morgan was just three months old, she stopped breathing for the first time. Tanya saved her by giving her mouth to mouth resuscitation. Tanya told her parents that Morgan had experienced a seizure and stopped breathing. She said doctors told her it was a SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) near-miss. At the time, SIDS was a catchall designation assigned to cases in which otherwise healthy infants mysteriously stopped breathing, usually during sleep, and died.

In February, 1984 when the girl was just nine months old, there was another seizure. Tanya didn’t save her this time. Morgan was hospitalized and when doctors said she was brain dead, life support was removed. For a few hours she struggled to live, then died in her mother’s arms.

Morgan was buried wearing a yellow pinafore and white tights, with a white bonnet on her head to try and conceal incisions made during the autopsy. The conclusion was that Morgan most likely died of SIDS. It would take years, but physicians and pathologists would eventually have a keener understanding of just how often child abuse and infanticide – from SHS (Shaken Baby syndrome) and MSBP – was responsible for the death of children.

Tanya and Jim stopped attending church. She told friends that their minister didn’t seem sympathetic and didn’t understand her anger at God.

“There’s all these people who commit crimes—rapists, murderers—or even those dying of cancer. Why did God have to take an innocent child and not one of them? Why did he have to do that?” she cried.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER MORGAN'S death, Jim was transferred back to Chicago and the family moved again. Tanya became pregnant. She fainted several times and each time she did she received some much-needed attention from the aloof Jim. On May 2, 1985, she gave birth to a ten-pound boy, Brandon Michael, who they called Michael. He was a “happy, happy baby," Tonya said. "He slept through the night, never bothering us a bit."

The day after his birth, Tanya had her tubes tied. It was too risky to have more children, she told friends, because “there’s a problem with our genes.”

The happiness was short-lived. When Michael was just 26 days old, Tanya called the paramedics: She had found him unconscious and was performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him alive.

By the time Michael was two, the family had left Illinois and moved back to Texas, and then on to Des Moines, Iowa for Jim’s job. Tanya told Michael’s doctors during his frequent medical appointments that Morgan had died of SIDS and that Michael had frequent bouts of apnea – seizures when he would stop breathing, turn blue and seem glassy-eyed. She would resuscitate him and hurry to the hospital.

Just two days after their move to Iowa, Tanya rushed Michael to the emergency room. She said that he had had a seizure and resuscitated him. Nurses noticed the unusual relationship between mother and son. Some felt the boy was lucky to have such a concerned mother who never left his side. But notes about Tanya’s mothering began to show up in hospital charts. One nurse wrote:
“Mom and child interaction somewhat inappropriate, i.e. seem antagonistic toward each other…”

Hospital staff noticed that while waiting to be admitted, Tanya seemed excited, grinning as she greeted the doctors and nurses she knew with a big smile, almost “showing off.” It was like a social event to Tanya. They also watched at how disturbed Michael seemed when Tanya returned from grabbing some food in the cafeteria. One time, from his hospital crib, he cried out, “Mom - go!”

Hospital staff referred her to a counselor. Tanya seemed agitated when discussing her son and his health concerns but when the counselor suggested the entire family could benefit from therapy, Tanya agreed it might be a good idea. The young mother also talked about Morgan’s death, prompting the counselor to write in her report:
“I believe this issue (SIDS death) is unresolved for her.”

Tanya took Michael to the doctor dozens of times. They knew she was an unusually attentive mother, even paranoid, but decided it was because she had lost a baby girl.

In my book about Tanya Reid,
Cruel Deception – A Mother’s Deadly Game, A Prosecutor’s Crusade for Justice,
I described the moment when doctors finally wondered if they were seeing what for most of them was their first case of MSBP:

Brandon Michael Reid was a beautiful little boy with blondish hair that just brushed over the tops of his ears. His eyes were bright and blue, the color of his father’s. He was the calendar boy for the American Heartland. Under ordinary circumstances he would be the apple of anyone’s eyes. But at 12:14 p.m. on February 7, 1988, he was not a little kid playing in a grassy field, or rolling on the floor with a puppy. He was sweaty and terrified. His hair was matted in whorls onto his forehead. Despite the fact that it was lunchtime, he hadn’t even been dressed for the day.

Instead, he had been fighting for his life. Fighting for air. This one would be recalled as the episode that was very different—in its beginning and its outcome. Jim Reid was not at the office; he was at home enjoying the lull of a Sunday afternoon. He was not in the yard. Not at the neighbors. Not in the garage. Jim Reid was in the house. His son and wife were upstairs in the master bedroom playing. He could hear Tanya and Michael laughing and giggling. It was a good sound. The sound of a happy family. After all they had been through, good times were cherished, savored. Then the noise stopped. It was quiet upstairs, as though the volume control of a TV had been turned off. It was an abrupt, slamming silence. A moment later, Jim lurched in the direction of Tanya’s screams.

“Jim, come quick! It’s Michael! He had another spell!”

Jim climbed the stairs and rushed into the bedroom. Michael, sweaty and limp, was on the bed. Tanya hovered over their son doing mouth-to-mouth.

“Have you called paramedics?”

Between breaths, Tanya said she had.

Jim checked his son’s heart rate and studied the boy’s blue, still face for any sign that he’d be all right. In a minute, even before the paramedics came, Michael was breathing on his own. And by all accounts, the little boy was angry. Michael wore a two-piece pajama set as he was carted kicking and wailing across the glint of linoleum of the emergency room at Blank Children’s Hospital that Sunday afternoon. The child was not a stranger to the staff working that shift. Dr. Robert Colman and Dr. Anne Zoucha had seen the little boy before. They also knew his mother. They knew the routine. But this time it would be different. ER nurse Callie Sandquist watched as they put the Reid boy into Trauma 1, one of a pocket of five examination rooms directly across from the nurses’ station. The little boy was screaming. Not crying, but absolutely howling. He was not saying any words, just making noise.

Callie would later try to describe the boy’s state. “He was inconsolable. . . . You can’t make him stop, it doesn’t matter what you do. It’s almost like being hysterical.” The nurse scrutinized his mother. Tanya Reid was a short, pleasant woman with neatly done dark hair and dressed in a simple pullover top and jeans. She was very calm as she stood talking to Drs. Colman and Zoucha and described what had happened at home. The scene seemed odd to Callie, who had worked at the hospital for seventeen years and thought she had seen it all. Something was wrong with the picture.

“If it was my kid doing that I wouldn’t be able to stand that for very long. But she was over in the corner talking to the doctor, and she just kept going on and on with this long detailed history using all the appropriate phrases, technical terms, long medical names—I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to have remembered them,” she would later say. Tanya seemed oblivious to Michael’s caterwauling. Never once did she step over to soothe her son. “It didn’t seem to bother her. She was just over there chatting with the doctors.”

Later, none of the nurses could recall any details about the little boy’s father. Jim Reid was there, nurses said, but he stayed out of the fray and let his wife handle everything. The atmosphere in the ER took a decided turn when Dr. Zoucha, the pediatrician running the show that night, barreled out of Trauma 1 and slammed the little patient’s charts against a countertop. An attractive woman and usually a calming influence, Dr. Zoucha was not given to such outbursts of emotion.

She was a healer, not an antagonizer. But she was furious. Her words shocked.

“She’s smothering that kid!”

Pediatric resident Colman, also taken back by his colleague’s anger, nodded in agreement. “Yes,” he said, recalling his earlier suspicions, “this has been going on way too long.”

A call was made to the Iowa Department of Human Services for a child protective investigator. The little boy screaming in the ER was a victim of a rare form of child abuse. The alleged abuser was his mother. Both Dr. Colman and Dr. Zoucha believed Michael suffered from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. They suspected his mother was smothering him because of her own need for attention, specifically from medical staff.

Nurse Sandquist was horrified and intrigued. She had never seen an MSBP case before. The veteran nurse drew closer to the patient and his mother as she searched for clues that could reveal what had happened that afternoon. Reporting an allegation of child abuse was serious. Details were a necessity. Written backup would be critical.

In addition to his incessant screams, something else about the supposed seizure patient appeared noteworthy. Brandon Michael Reid had four scratches on his cheek—parallel abrasions that looked as if they could have been made by fingernails. Two were deep enough to bead minute rows of blood. Since the scratches were small, it suggested to Callie they had been made by the child. His lower left eyelid was also flushed with the subtle purple of a fresh bruise.

Tanya Reid, seemingly oblivious to the turmoil brewing around her, accosted the nurse and held out her right index finger. It, too, was scratched. At the nail bed it bled slightly. “I hurt my finger,” she said. “Can I get a bandage?”