True Stories #187 - Poison in the System

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you'reabout to hear is a true story.
Patricia Stallings was on trial. Shewas on trial for the murder of her
son. Here's what happened. Julythe seventh, nineteen eighty nine. Little

(00:26):
Ryan Stallings was only three months oldwhen he was rushed to a Saint Louis
hospital by his parents, Patricia andher husband, David. Ryan had rapid
breathing, he was lethargic, hewas not eating. The doctors ran a
bunch of tests and they found inhis system unusually high levels of something called

(00:48):
ethylene glidecoll. Ethylene glidecol is amain ingredient in anti freeze. This is
what the doctors had found in hisblood. The hospital staff suspected the worst
poisoning. Little Ryan was immediately takenaway from his mother and father and put
in protective custody. Now we moveforward in this story about two months.

(01:15):
Ryan still in protective custody, rightnot in the custody of his mother,
and yet Patricia was finally given permissionto visit her son. This was the
first of September nineteen eighty nine,and shortly after that visit, Ryan again
started vomiting, he had muscle spasms, he started to hyper ventilate, rushed

(01:38):
again to the hospital, and yetthis time the boy did not improve,
and on the fourth of September,three days after his mother's visit, Ryan
died. In his bloods they foundan alarming level of ethylene glycol. Police

(02:00):
conducted an immediate search of the Stallingshome and they found a bottle of anti
freeze, and on the very nextday, the day after the death of
her baby, Patricia was charged withmurder. The trial date was sets and
at that time, as fate wouldhave at, Patricia was pregnant. She

(02:23):
was going to have another baby evenas she awaited her day in courts,
and she did have that child.David Junior, born in February of nineteen
ninety. He was immediately stripped awayfrom his mother and placed in foster care.
And yet, strangely, despite thefact that David Junior had had no

(02:46):
contact with his mother no contact,David began showing some of the very same
symptoms as Ryan, rapid breathing,spasms, et cetera. He was exam
and this time at a different hospital, and the results showed something different,
a rare genetic disorder a condition calledmethamlonic acidemia or MMA. Now. MMA

(03:15):
is an extremely uncommon genetic disorder wherepeople are not able to produce an enzyme
that you need to break down anduse certain proteins and fats that are found
in food, and this causes abuild up of acids and other harmful things
in the blood and the urine,brain cells and other places and go figure.

(03:37):
The symptoms are loss of appetite,vomiting, muscle spasms, seizures,
and more. But the lab didn'tclear Patricia. They said that it could
have been either MMA or anti freezepoisoning, and Patricia would still end up
on trial for the murder of herbaby. Her legal representation was not great.

(04:02):
Her defense attorney did not provide thecourt with any evidence to support the
findings of MMA, the genetic disorder, nothing to back it up. In
fact, he was so unprepared withanything other than the claim of a genetic
problem, the judge refused to allowthe defense attorney to present any MMA scenario

(04:25):
to the jury. Patricia's lawyer didn'tcall any character witnesses to vouch for her,
and when he tried to suggest thatbaby Ryan might have died from natural
causes. He was mocked in thatcourtroom by the prosecutor, a man named
George Macklroy, who said this quote, you might as well speculate that some

(04:47):
little man from Mars came down andshot him full of some mysterious spacteria.
Well, I guess that prosecution waspretty convincing. Either that or the offense
was pretty unconvincing. January thirty first, nineteen ninety one, the jury pronounced
Patricia Stalling's guilty of first degree murderand assault. She was sentenced to prison

(05:14):
life without parole. Now fast forwardjust a few months. This case was
profiled on a popular television series.It was hosted by Robert Stack. It
was called Unsolved Mysteries, and itdid a segment on the Patricia Stallings case.
And one of the guys watching wasa professor and chairman of the Department

(05:38):
of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at SaintLouis University, a man named William Sly
And he watched the story on TVand he realized something was not right.
He was very suspicious about her conviction, and so using his connections with the
university, he was able to procureblood samples from Ryan. He did his

(06:02):
own tests, and there it wasplain as day methamelonic acidemia. William decided
he was going to go deeper.He sent samples off to a group of
other commercial labs that used the sameprocesses that the hospital had used originally,

(06:23):
and lo and behold, when thoselab results came back, he found that
half of the results were wrong.And on top of all of that,
it was very possible that some ofthe anti poison drugs administered by the doctors
who thought Ryan had been fed antifreeze, those anti poison drugs may have

(06:43):
also tainted the lab results. Andwith all of this, William sly went
to the prosecutor, the original prosecutorin the case Jefferson Counties, George macelroy.
Remember this was the guy who hadoriginally been the agent of Patricia's conviction,
who had mocked her and her attorneyin the courts. And yet Mackelroy

(07:09):
saw this new information, he tookit to a consultant, a renowned geneticist
at Yale University. He realized theremight be something there, and on the
twentieth of September nineteen ninety one,this is more than two years after Patricia's
arrest for murder. Seven months aftershe had been sent to prison, the

(07:30):
prosecutor dismissed all the charges and issueda personal apology to Patricia and her family,
and on that same day, DavidJunior was rightly returned home. And
yet, because of kinks and thesystem, certain quirks in the law,
the state of Missouri would not fullyexpunge Patricia's record. She had lost years

(07:55):
of her life, her reputation hadbeen chattered, her grief had been amplified
exponentially. She had been accused ofbeing a mother who had fed anti freeze
to her baby. The Stallings familyfiled a lawsuit against Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital
and the laboratory that had returned thefalse results, and that lawsuit was settled

(08:20):
for several million dollars. Tragically,David Junior would eventually succumb to his genetic
disorder. Two decades later. Hewould die of natural causes at the age
of twenty three, and the Stallingscase is often referred to by law professors
who call it an overt miscarriage ofjustice, a forensics failure, a wrong

(08:45):
accusation which led to overreach, anineptitude and bias, an assumption which stood
in for real tangible evidence. Whenour legal system works, it is a
beautiful thing. But man, whenit doesn't, so much damage can be
done. And just a final note, if I may, It was back

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in nineteen ninety four. This wasthree years after Patricia had been exonerated.
That prosecutor, the man who hadonce mocked Patricia and her lawyer, George
McElroy, Well, he was upfor reelection and Patricia Stallings donated ten thousand

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dollars to Robert Wilkins, the manwho ran against him. Macilroy lost the
election. And That's a true storyTrue Stories podcast dot com