adult, she once claimed that her father abused her when she was a child. During a police interview in 1986, she told one investigator that her father had beaten her and locked her in a closet. During court testimony, she denied that her father had bad intentions. "My father hit me with a flyswatter," she told the court, "because he had arthritis and his hands were not of much use. And when he locked me in my room, I guess he thought I deserved it.” Marybeth was an average student at Duanesburg High School, from which she graduated in 1961. Following high school, she worked at various low-paying, unskilled jobs. She eventually settled on a job as a nursing assistant at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, New York, ten miles north of Duanesburg. Marriage and poisoning In 1963, Marybeth met Joseph Tinning on a blind date. They married in 1965 and their first child, Barbara, was born in May 1967, followed in January 1970 by Joseph Jr. In October 1971, Marybeth's father died of a heart attack. In 1974, Joseph was admitted to the hospital with a near-fatal case of barbiturate poisoning. Later, he and Marybeth acknowledged that, when this incident occurred, their marriage was in heavy turmoil. This led to her placing barbiturate pills, which she took from a friend with an epileptic daughter, into Joseph's grape juice. He declined to press charges against her. Children's deaths On December 26, 1971, the Tinnings' third child, Jennifer, was born at St. Clare's Hospital. She had hemorrhagic meningitis and multiple brain abscesses that had developed in utero. She lived for only a week and never left the hospital; she died on January 3, 1972. Two weeks after Jennifer's death, Tinning took two-year-old Joseph Jr. to the Ellis Hospital emergency room in Schenectady, claiming that he had experienced a seizure and choked on his own vomit. Doctors found nothing wrong with him; he stayed in the hospital for several days under observation and was released. On January 20, a few hours after his release, Marybeth brought him back to the emergency room. He was dead on arrival, and his death was attributed to cardiopulmonary arrest. On March 1, Marybeth rushed Barbara, now almost five years old, to Ellis Hospital because she had gone into convulsions. The next day, she died after being in a comatose state for several hours; her death was attributed