about 1,100 children died from abuse or neglect, and such deaths are far more common than the sensational murders that are found in the news media. More common are the smaller deceptions practiced by mothers who claim that abused or neglected children died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or accidents, and Charles Ewing, a law and psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, estimates that only half the country's abuse deaths are uncovered as homicides. Dr. Michael Durfee, a child psychiatrist with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and a leading expert in the area, states that men are more often responsible than women for killing offspring under 12, as shown by state and local statistics. It is believed that the younger the victim, the greater the chance that his or her mother is the culprit, if only because mothers are still America's primary care givers during infancy. Dr. Randell Alexander, a child abuse expert at the University of Iowa Medical School, also notes that when there is a more elaborate cover up offered, the perpetrator is more often a female.
The issue of SIDS deaths complicates any effort to gain an accurate figure for the number of children killed by their parents, and authorities across the country are taking a harder look at such deaths. According to medical examiners, police, and prosecutors, SIDS is a label that is too readily affixed to mysterious deaths, and they believe that anywhere from 1 percent to as much as 20 percent of the 7,000 to 8,000 U.S. babies who die of SIDS each year actually expire of other causes, including murder. The killer in such cases is the mother, and she may slay for insurance or from frustration or even in a twisted bid for attention and sympathy. One reason the murders go undetected is that suffocation, the usual method of these infanticides, is virtually indistinguishable from SIDS on autopsy, and thus single deaths do not r...