for years and to the act that caused the condition. Two years later, Caffey wrote a “Part II” follow-up to his whiplash shaking article.10 Here he chronicled the deadly spree of violence that a baby nurse from New Haven, Connecticut had unleashed on her tiny victims in the 1940s and 50s. Her name? Virginia Belle Jaspers. She had confessed to killing infants by shaking them to death. Caffey thus sealed his name as the creator of what would be called Shaken Baby Syndrome (or SBS). This recognition lasted another forty years, until credit returned to Dr. Guthkelch as the first clinician to describe the syndrome as it is known today.
Virginia Jaspers was the daughter of a successful Connecticut state senator. She had aspirations to work with children in the homes of new parents in and around New Haven beginning in the early 1940s. Though qualified to do so, having recently completed high school and attending a basic pediatric nursing program at a nearby nunnery, she had a physical presence that caused people to be taken aback. Jaspers stood six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. She was extremely talkative and overcompensated for her appearance by being excessively pleasant to her clients. She became well-respected in her chosen field; her name was even added to the list that local pediatricians kept to recommend baby nurses to new parents. It was during these years of caregiving that her lethal side came out. The first baby she shook to death was three-week-old Cynthia Hubbard. Alone with the baby, who was crying excessively, Jaspers became highly volatile. Cynthia’s parents never knew what killed their infant, but her death certificate listed her cause of death as “congenital malformation,” like something let loose inside the girl and she died.11
Jaspers’s temper continued to get the best of her. She shook and killed Jennifer Malkan in 1950 and then Abbe Kapsinow six years later. The nurse also inflicted injuries on twelve other infants and children during her tenure as a caregiver. She slapped babies, shook them and broke bones. This was her modus operandi for handling crying, bottle refusal and other normal behaviors of the young.
Though suspicions about Jaspers surfaced over the years, there were only two action-takers. One was Marvin Schaeffer, the father of three-month-old Bruce, whose leg was broken by Jaspers while Marvin and his wife were out at a party. He convinced one area pediatrician, Robert Salinger, to strike Jaspers from his list of preferred nurses and asked him for help in getting justice for his son. But it wasn’t until 1956, when the nurse caused the death of twelve-day-old Abbe Kapsinow, that Dr. Salinger and others went to authorities with their concerns and let them know they didn’t believe it to be accidental.
When Virginia Jaspers was finally interviewed about the deaths, she broke down and confessed. This was vital to our understanding of perpetrators and Shaken Baby Syndrome today, because Jaspers was one of the first in history to confess to shaking an infant to death. No one guided her or suggested to her that shaking was a lethal form of abuse—she said this herself. The act of violently shaking tiny infants will not only do irreparable harm, but can kill them as well. This was her tactic to put infants under her control when they became out of control. One boy was “lucky.” He was shaken but lived through it. Yet he was left permanently handicapped from the act. As Jaspers confessed and as word got out, people all across the U.S. were shocked about the “Killer Baby Nurse from New Haven.” She fits today’s criteria of a serial killer but didn’t shoot, stab or poison adults; instead, she brutally shook babies and they died.
Jaspers was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison for manslaughter but only served a few short years in jail. She was never allowed to care for children again and later led a quiet life.
Once Guthkelch and Caffey opened the door to shaking as a mechanism for abuse, others followed. Over the years, thousands of journal articles, research papers and presentations have been featured in the pages of respected medical periodicals. Yet there have been unscrupulous authors as well—those who have set out to dispute the very nature of SBS and have sought to deny its existence. Because of these individuals, many court cases have been lost and perpetrators set free. This is the dark side of the clinical aspect of SBS.
Emily Grace
I am the mother of an angel in heaven named Emily Grace. Emily was born September 6, 2009. She was a perfectly healthy, beautiful baby girl. Her father lived with us at the time. On the morning of November 17, 2009, I got up and got ready for work. I kissed my baby girl, told her that I loved her, then looked at her father and told him if he had any problems to call me and I would come home immediately. He said, “It’s okay, I got it.” I went to work and just two hours into my shift he calls and is frantic, saying Emily had a seizure and stopped breathing and is on her way to the hospital. Immediately I rushed home to pick him up and get to the hospital. Once we got there we were taken into a waiting room and asked for consent to do a spinal tap because Emily’s white blood cell count was high. They did the procedure and told me she had been placed on a ventilator and they were airlifting her to another hospital that was better equipped to take care of her. I rode in the helicopter with her to Sutton Children’s Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Once we got there, Emily was taken to the ICU and evaluated. A pediatric specialist came in and questioned me about what I knew and her health history, etc. At the time we still didn’t know what was going on, so they went with the first diagnosis of hypothermic sepsis. Once they got her stabilized, they did a CT scan that showed brain swelling and blood around the brain. None of their findings were ever discussed with me until the day she died. They immediately started her on a different type of IV fluid to help with the swelling. That night she wasn’t showing any signs of distress, but we couldn’t touch her because they didn’t want her overstimulated.
The next day her condition was about the same, so her dad and I went home so I could get clean clothes. My mom stayed with Emily. We were headed back to the hospital when my mom called saying Emily was breathing a little bit. We finally got back to Emily’s room and they were doing tests on her again (checking her eyes, taking a full body CT scan, etc.). Nothing really changed that day. We still couldn’t touch her because her brain swelling wasn’t going down. The next morning I was told they were going to be doing tests on her brain to see if there was any activity, because the CT scans showed severe brain damage. They also told me if she was to survive she would be severely handicapped with little to no quality of life. On that night a neurosurgeon came in and told me she was brain dead, but I begged for a second opinion.
The next morning, a specialist from LSU came in and evaluated Emily, re-ran tests and came in and told me she agreed that my sweet Emily was brain dead. The pediatric specialist who was assigned to Emily said they had to run the tests one more time to have her be declared legally brain dead and then they would pull her from life support.
I stayed with my baby girl all day and night. I also had Emily baptized. On November 20, the nurses came in and took her for the last test they had to do. She came back and they finally let me hold her. I was able to rock and love her for four hours. I sang to her and told her how much I loved her, read a couple of books to her and the social workers did a foot cast and footprints plus took pictures. At about 2:30 her blood pressure started dropping even with the medications they were giving her to keep it stable, so they paged the doctor. He came in and said she was settling in and going on her own so he had them turn everything off. She lived for thirty minutes without life support and passed away at 3:15 P.M.
The next day, Child Protective Services contacted me to talk. While I was talking to them they told me she had been shaken and asked me what I did on the morning of November 17. I told them that I went to work and left Emily with her father. That
