Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio Page A

child’s grave was dug beside him.
    Four months later, at Christmas 1946, four children in that claustrophobic little house had taken sick. One of them was Martha’s plump three-year-old nephew Johnny Wise, son of her sister Betty, who was also a single, teenaged mother. Johnny had been playing in the snow on Christmas Day, and the next day the normally jolly toddler complained of a headache and sore throat.
    That night Martha tucked Johnny in her own bed upstairs while Betty showered. A few minutes later, Betty screamed and ran downstairs with Johnny’s limp body. He had stopped breathing and was turning blue. The ambulance arrived too late to save him, but the house was quarantined for three days when health authorities feared an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious upper respiratory infection that was becoming rarer in the 1940s. On the fourth day, the quarantine was lifted and the family buried Johnny beside his late cousin Mikey in the frozen ground of Wesley Chapel Cemetery.
    An autopsy was done, but the child’s neck organs were not removed and examined—all necessary to diagnose diphtheria. Instead, the death was certified as diphtheria based solely on the other illnesses in the house, not on anything the autopsist saw.
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    In early 1947, seventeen-year-old Martha was arrested for forgery and sent to reform school for a year. When she got out in 1948, she flitted through a few waitressing gigs until a girlfriend introduced her to a twenty-two-year-old laborer named Stanley Huston. Within a few months, she was pregnant again, so she married Stanley in a hasty ceremony in January 1949 and lived in a series of apartments and bungalows. Unfortunately, amid the chaos, Martha had the first of ten miscarriages, by her own count.
    But she soon conceived again. Mary Elizabeth Huston was born prematurely on June 28, 1950, and stayed in the hospital for three weeks before Martha was allowed to take her to their new home, a five-hundred-square-foot rented bungalow. A week later, the month-old Mary suddenly stopped breathing and turned blue. Martha rushed her to the hospital, where doctors found nothing wrong and released her after two days of observation.
    Eight days later, Mary was back in the hospital. Inexplicably, while Martha cradled her, she had stopped breathing and turned blue. Martha revived her with mouth-to-mouth, but doctors could find no cause for the breathing episode. They tapped her spine, shaved her head, and put needles in her scalp, but they found nothing. For three days, they watched the baby, who showed no signs of illness. In the end, they blamed it on an unknown respiratory infection and sent the baby back home.
    On the morning of August 25—less than two weeks after her hospital stay—Mary again stopped breathing and turned blue in Martha’s arms. Again Martha resuscitated her and took her to the hospital. Again doctors found the baby to be alert and vigorous and released her.
    That same afternoon, Martha bathed Mary and fed her before laying her in her crib for a nap. Within a few minutes, Mary had stopped breathing and was turning blue. By the time she arrived at the emergency room, the baby was dead. She had lived only one month and twenty-seven days, most of them in a hospital bed.
    Mary Elizabeth Huston was buried in a largely vacant family plot in the Beanhill Cemetery, a rural graveyard near her father’s hometown in rural Vinton County, Ohio. No autopsy was done, but her death certificate said she choked on a mucus plug that was never found.
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    One more miscarriage and sixteen months later, Carol Ann Huston was born on January 22, 1952. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and the baby was born by a cesarean section at only seven months. At birth, she was only about four pounds, so she stayed in the hospital about three weeks before going home to a new rented house in West Jefferson, a small town west