Tanya Reid on Forensic Files: Trial, Retrial, and Conviction

Tanya Thaxton Reid, the subject of the Forensic Files episode on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, is a former licensed practical nurse from Dumas, Texas, who was convicted of murdering her nine-month-old daughter Morgan in 1984 and, separately, of endangering her infant son in Iowa. Her case became one of the earliest and most closely watched American prosecutions built on the theory that a caretaker had induced medical crises in her own children.¹

Who Tanya Reid Is

Tanya Thaxton grew up in Dumas, in the Texas Panhandle, the youngest of four daughters of John and Wanda Thaxton. Her father co-owned a medical supply company. She worked as a candy striper at Dumas Memorial Hospital as a teenager, graduated from Dumas High School in 1976, entered the hospital’s vocational nursing program, and later worked in the hospital nursery.¹

In December 1974, when she was seventeen, she received a local “Good Neighbor Award” for helping a police officer perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a four-month-old baby, Scott Simmons, whom she had been babysitting when he stopped breathing. The child survived but sustained permanent brain damage from oxygen deprivation. Prosecutors later pointed to this incident as the earliest known example of a pattern.¹

She married Ray Reid, a meat-packing plant employee with an MBA, in 1977. The couple had three children: Leslie, born October 1980; Morgan, born May 17, 1983; and a son born May 2, 1985 (referred to as “Peter” in some accounts and as Robert Matthew Reid in court records). Leslie had no documented medical problems.¹

Morgan’s Death in February 1984

Morgan began having episodes of infant apnea about ten weeks after her birth. Between the summer of 1983 and her death the following February, she suffered at least twenty such episodes and was hospitalized repeatedly. Specialists in Illinois and Texas, including physicians at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, ran extensive neurological, cardiac, and metabolic tests. None found a medical explanation.¹

A pattern emerged. The episodes occurred almost exclusively on weekdays, typically between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., while Morgan was awake and alone with her mother. Tanya Reid was the only person ever present to witness the onset of an episode, and she was always the one who performed resuscitation.²

On February 7, 1984, emergency personnel were called to the Reid home in Hereford, Texas, for what was reported as another apnea episode. Morgan was transported to Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo and declared brain dead. She was removed from a ventilator and died about fourteen hours later, on February 8, 1984. Her death certificate listed the cause as “brain death secondary to cardiorespiratory arrest of undetermined etiology.” An autopsy found a subdural hematoma, which some experts attributed to resuscitation attempts and others to shaking.²¹

The Son’s Apnea Episodes and the Iowa Case

The Reids’ son was born about fifteen months after Morgan’s death. Within weeks, the same cycle began. His first reported apnea episode came when he was twenty-six days old. Over the next three years the family moved from Texas to Illinois and then to Urbandale, Iowa, and the boy was hospitalized roughly twenty times for breathing stoppages and seizures. As with Morgan, the episodes occurred only when he was awake and in his mother’s sole care.¹²

Suspicions had been quietly building for years. In Illinois in late 1983, pediatrician Jerry Skurka questioned why Morgan’s episodes happened only when Tanya was alone with her. After the move to Iowa, an unusually high number of rescue calls to the Reid home drew the attention of paramedics and hospital staff. Doctors at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines suspected abuse. A nurse, Callie Jo Sandquist, observed fresh scratches on the boy’s face after one emergency room visit; Reid said her son had scratched himself, but Sandquist believed the marks were consistent with an infant pushing a hand away from his face.¹³

In March 1988, a juvenile court in Des Moines adjudicated the boy a “child in need of assistance” and removed him from the home. He was placed in foster care. He never had another apnea episode or seizure.²

On August 10, 1988, Tanya Reid was arrested at her home and charged with child endangerment. Authorities alleged she had cut off her son’s air supply on at least seven occasions between October 1987 and March 1988 so that she could “revive” him and gain attention. She was held in the Polk County Jail on $11,000 bond.³

The Iowa prosecution was led by Melodee Hanes, an assistant Polk County attorney who researched the then-obscure concept of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caretaker fabricates or induces illness in a child, often to attract attention or sympathy from medical professionals. Hanes tracked down medical staff who had treated the Reid children across multiple states to construct a pattern. In 1989, a judge convicted Reid of child endangerment and imposed the maximum ten-year sentence.¹

The Texas Murder Trial

With Reid convicted in Iowa, investigators in Texas reopened the question of Morgan’s death. Gene Gerringer, an investigator for the Deaf Smith County District Attorney’s office in Hereford, conducted extensive background research. Criminal District Attorney Roland Saul led the prosecution.¹²

In August 1993, Reid stood trial for murder in Hereford. Dr. Carol Rosen, a pediatric respiratory specialist who had published research on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, testified that Reid displayed classic characteristics of the disorder: a medical background, an unnervingly calm demeanor during emergencies, and a history of unexplained illnesses in multiple children that resolved when the children were removed from her care. Dallas forensic pathologist Linda Norton, known for her work exposing cases of infanticide misclassified as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, provided expert analysis. Dr. Thomas Kelly, a pediatric neurologist, testified that the son’s apnea episodes had no neurological explanation.¹

The defense countered with Dr. Steven Linder, a Dallas pediatric neurologist, who argued that the children suffered from a genuine organic neurological condition and that the son had simply outgrown his seizures. A clinical psychologist who had examined Reid four times testified that she did not suffer from any recognizable psychological disorder.¹

Reid maintained her innocence throughout. Her attorney, Charles Rittenberry of Amarillo, said she had rejected three plea offers that would have resulted in only four to five years of prison time because she refused to plead guilty to a crime she said she did not commit. The jury found her guilty of murder and assessed a sixty-two-year sentence.¹

Appeal, Retrial, and Second Conviction

Reid appealed. In 1995, a Texas appeals court overturned the murder conviction, ruling that there was insufficient proof that Reid had used her hands as a deadly weapon to kill her daughter. The case was remanded.¹

She was retried. The second prosecution again centered on Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. State experts this time included Dr. Thomas Bennett, the Iowa State Medical Examiner, who testified that MSBP was a recognized diagnosis listed in the DSM-4 under “factitious disorders by proxy” and that roughly ten percent of MSBP cases resulted in the child’s death. The prosecution again introduced evidence about the son’s apnea history to establish intent, motive, a pattern of behavior, and the absence of accident or mistake. After a pretrial hearing on admissibility, the trial court ruled the MSBP testimony scientifically reliable. The jury again convicted Reid of murder and assessed a forty-year sentence in the Institutional Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.²

Reid appealed the second conviction. On February 24, 1998, the Court of Appeals of Texas, Amarillo, affirmed the judgment in Reid v. State, No. 07-96-0245-CR. The court rejected arguments that the MSBP expert testimony should have been excluded and that the son’s medical history amounted to impermissible character evidence, holding that the trial judge had acted within his discretion and that the testimony was relevant to explain an otherwise inexplicable cause of death.²

The Evidentiary Problem at the Center of the Case

Both prosecutions turned on a type of evidence that was still relatively novel in American courtrooms in the 1990s. The alleged mechanism of harm, smothering, typically leaves no physical signs distinguishable from natural respiratory failure, and there were rarely witnesses. As Linda Norton observed, it is “almost impossible for a doctor to tell the difference between a child who has been suffocated and one who has accidentally had his airway obstructed.”¹

The state’s strategy in both Iowa and Texas relied not on catching Reid in the act but on assembling circumstantial evidence into a pattern: the episodes occurred only in her presence, no medical tests could explain them, and they stopped completely when the children were removed from her care. The defense argued that the children had a real but poorly understood medical condition, and that the son had grown out of his seizures rather than been protected from his mother.

Where the Case Stood

As of the 1998 appellate decision, Reid was serving her forty-year Texas sentence in the Institutional Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. She had also received the maximum ten-year Iowa sentence for child endangerment, though by the mid-1990s she had served enough time to have been released on the Iowa sentence alone. She remained incarcerated on the Texas murder conviction.²¹

1
Texas Monthly. Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry
2
Findlaw. Reid v. State, No. 07-96-0245-CR
3
UPI. Nurse Charged With Cutting Off Son’s Air