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Teresa Schoepflin used to dream of returning triumphant, college diploma in hand, to teach at the rural consolidated school she’d attended in tiny Mulhall, Oklahoma. That dream seemed about to come true in 1983, when she was awarded a basketball scholarship to Oklahoma State University in nearby Stillwater.
But Teresa turned down the athletic scholarship and turned her back on college and a teaching career when, at age eighteen, she married her brother’s best friend, Dale Schoepflin, a local boy she’d known since the third grade. The couple settled in Stillwater, a few blocks from the college, and started a family that now numbers three sons. “I wanted to be a stay-home mom,” Teresa explains. “I wanted to be like my mother and do what she did. I wanted to be the best mom I could.”
Now, however, the 29-year-old Schoepflin stands accused in one of the most bizarre criminal cases in Denver history. Prosecutors have charged that she intentionally subjected her youngest son, Kyle, to unspeakable abuse–all while the two-year-old was a patient at two prestigious Denver hospitals. And, in what authorities describe as the first case of its kind filed in local courts, prosecutors are expected to argue that Schoepflin repeatedly brought her son to the verge of death merely to call attention to herself.
In a twelve-page criminal complaint filed in Denver this past spring, prosecutors say Teresa Schoepflin “unlawfully, feloniously, knowingly and recklessly” abused or attempted to abuse her son on 38 separate occasions. According to court documents, 28 of those “events” were considered life-threatening. If convicted of all charges, she could face a prison term of more than 100 years.
Denver pediatrician Leland Fan, who originally brought the case to the attention of investigators, testified at Schoepflin’s preliminary hearing that be believes Teresa forced Kyle to inhale fluids into his lungs, severed a catheter hooked to the desperately ill boy, removed an oxygen tube that had been taped under his nose and, in one instance, nearly drowned him.
Fan added an even more baffling twist to the case with his explanation for the alleged abuse. He told investigators that Teresa Schoepflin fits the profile of someone suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a rare and little-understood condition in which mothers compulsively fake or cause illnesses in their children to gain sympathy for themselves.
Teresa Schoepflin has since entered a plea of not guilty to 33 felony counts of child abuse, 2 felony counts of attempted child abuse and 3 misdemeanor counts of abuse or attempted abuse. She says she’s a victim of circumstance, emphasizing that no one ever saw her harm the boy. She dismisses as inconsequential the fact, noted by police investigators, that she was the only one with her son when nearly all of the alleged incidents of abuse occurred. After all, says Schoepflin, she stayed with her son twelve or more hours a day when he was hospitalized, so it only stands to reason that she would have been present during the episodes. Schoepflin claims that Kyle’s medical chart indicates the boy often struggled to free himself of the tubes and wires taped and jabbed into his body. And she says she never fed him anything that hadn’t been handed to her by nurses.
Teresa’s supporters, including her husband, her family and numerous friends, label the allegations against her “asinine” and a “grievous error.” The criminal prosecution, they say, is the result of a witch hunt by a zealous, overprotective medical community.
But Denver social workers are so convinced Kyle’s life is at risk that they’ve wrested him from his family and placed him in foster care. The Schoepflins, who still live in Oklahoma with their other two sons, have been able to see the boy only twice since May, driving the 700 miles to Denver for two-hour visits that must be arranged at least a week in advance. The couple say authorities have turned down their offer to move Teresa out of the house in Stillwater in exchange for Dale receiving custody of Kyle. Dale Schoepflin says his support for his wife has convinced social workers that he might not take steps necessary to protect his son.
“The way the system is set up, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get Kyle back,” says Teresa in an interview conducted during a recent trip to Denver. “How is our family ever going to get back together?”
Until five months ago, Teresa says, she had never heard of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. But she says she’s learned a lot about it since the March day police hustled her from her son’s bedside and out the door of the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine.
The condition is named for an eighteenth-century baron named Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Munchausen, a blowhard known for telling tall tales about his alleged military exploits. His name went down in history only because an acquaintance decided to put the baron’s fantastical adventures in writing.
The name Munchausen eventually became so allied with the idea of making up phony stories that the term “Munchausen Syndrome” was coined to describe cases in which adults fabricate or induce illness in themselves. Munchausen patients sometimes ingest or inject poisons into their systems. In one well-publicized Colorado case, a woman who competed in disabled skiing events is believed to have faked blindness, cancer and a host of other serious illnesses.
It wasn’t until 1977, however, that British pediatrician Roy Meadow gave the first clinical description of a related condition he called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Meadow outlined numerous cases of children who were repeatedly tested, hospitalized and treated for medical problems that were ultimately discovered to have been fabricated or even caused by their mothers.
Since that time, hundreds of medical treatises have been devoted to the subject. Some of the women said to suffer from the syndrome–and it is women in 95 percent of the cases–simply claimed their children were ill and described symptoms that did not exist. Others tampered with laboratory results to make it appear that their children were ill. And others went so far as to drug their children, starve them or induce seizures to make it appear as if they were afflicted with a mysterious disease.
According to the literature, identifying the syndrome is problematic for medical professionals. For one thing, the women often appear incredibly devoted to their children: They’re always at the child’s bedside, they appear eager to assist in the child’s care and they hang on the doctor’s every word. Additionally, they may engage in “doctor shopping,” carting the child from one physician to another, making it difficult to track an entire medical history. The mothers might also inflict harm on one child, then leave them alone only to abuse a younger sibling.
Many of the women display a surprising amount of medical knowledge; some have worked in the medical field as nurses or nurse’s aides. Unless they’re caught red-handed, they may be able to attribute their child’s condition to one of dozens of causes. (In one case, a mother continued to deny hurting her child even after being confronted with a videotape that showed her trying to smother the infant.) Even in the absence of eyewitness evidence, however, proof is possible, say prosecutors who’ve taken cases to trial in other parts of the country. Usually, the child is only ill in its mother’s presence; the children also tend to recover rapidly when the mother is removed from the scene.
Women suffering from the syndrome have been variously described as affable, meek or gregarious. They come from every social strata and suffer from no one specific personality or psychiatric disorder, although they may claim (falsely) to have suffered a variety of exotic illnesses themselves. Themes of loneliness and isolation have been noted in many of their backgrounds, and they may harbor hidden resentments against parents or other authority figures. Some may have been abused themselves.
Simply put, reasons for the behavior vary from person to person. There appear to be only two common denominators. The women have an amazing ability to lie. And they all have very, very sick children.
The farmers and other folks who live in the country outside Mulhall like their space and guard their privacy, which isn’t a hard thing to accomplish when the closest neighbor is a mile or so away. There isn’t much company even in town, where the population hovers around 250. The nearest decent-size city is Stillwater, a forty-minute drive to the northeast. Oklahoma City is fifty miles due south on U.S. 35.
It was on a farm about six miles outside Mulhall that John and Letha Donaldson raised wheat, hay, cattle and three adopted children–John, Kevin and Teresa. The elder Donaldsons don’t work the fields anymore; they rent them out for someone else to till. But they’ve hung on to the land and to their roots, and they make do with a little vegetable patch beside the house.
Letha Donaldson remembers her brood, now all grown up and moved away, as an active and athletic bunch. She and John were always trooping up to the school to see “entertainments” or to watch the kids participate in one sport or another. Teresa, a tall, big-boned girl, was just as athletic as her two older brothers. She played volleyball in high school and was named an all-state basketball player.
Teresa played basketball with a tough, single-minded determination that astounded her mother. “I remember once she played with a broken foot,” says Letha Donaldson. Before Teresa graduated, her ankle had to be surgically reconstructed due to her athletic injuries. But illness and injury weren’t the norm, Donaldson says of her only daughter. “She’s always been a healthy girl. I guess that’s country living.”
When Teresa met Dale Schoepflin, it wasn’t anything akin to love at first sight. “I didn’t even like him until I was in my junior year,” she admits with a smile. But she wrote to him when he went off and joined the Army. Their first date was on Valentine’s Day, 1983. They married the next July.
Letha Donaldson says she begged her daughter to go on to college despite the marriage. Instead, Teresa voluntarily gave up the four-year basketball scholarship from Oklahoma State. Recalls Letha, “We could have wrung her neck.”
But Teresa hadn’t cared for the semester of college summer school she’d attended. Besides, she’d always loved kids and wanted a family of her own. Dale and Teresa’s first son, Brian, was born a year after they were married. Tye came along two years after that.
Dale got a job working for the National Standard textile plant in Stillwater. He and Teresa never had a lot of money, but they did all right. Teresa didn’t have to work, and she was able to stay home with the boys. Two kids seemed like plenty, so Dale underwent a vasectomy and Teresa set about raising her children.
Teresa “is a very good mother,” says Thelma Hudspeth, who as one of the Donaldsons’ closest neighbors knew the family long before 1965, when Teresa was adopted at birth. “In fact, I really think she’s an above-average mother. She takes part in their school activities, and she tries to cooperate and help the teachers. That’s more than a lot of mothers are doing these days.”
Hudspeth adds that she’s never known Teresa to hurt her boys. “When all this happened,” she says of the charges against Teresa, “I told her mother that Teresa never busted their little bottoms, even when they needed it.”
Despite the Schoepflin’s original intention to stop at two children, the family grew larger. In 1991 Teresa and Dale took in Dale’s teenage stepbrother, David. “My father and his wife didn’t want him from the start,” Dale says. “They said he was too much trouble.” Dale was awarded custody of the youth in late 1992, legalizing the long-standing arrangement. (David, now eighteen and working as a welder, has moved into his own place and is engaged to be married.)
It was during the time that David took up residence in the Schoepflin household that Teresa began campaigning for another child. “Teresa wanted one so bad,” Dale says. “Brian was in school, and Tye was fixing to be in school. And at the time, we could afford another child. We could afford a healthy child,” he emphasizes.
Dale had the vasectomy reversed. Teresa became pregnant a few months later.
Teresa’s third pregnancy went smoothly until her eighth month, when she fell and ruptured a disc in her back. The last month she carried Kyle was painful and difficult. She gave birth to the boy on January 30, 1992, and was scheduled for back surgery one month later. When she came home from the hospital after the surgery, she was put on forced bedrest for the next six weeks.
Teresa says she was unable to nurse her son after that. “Kyle bonded with me,” Dale says, “because Teresa was sick.”
Kyle Schoepflin is a bruiser of a baby, a big kid with blond corkscrew curls. His brothers doted on him from the start, his parents say. And he seemed well and happy–until the age of ten months, not long after the family moved from their house in Stillwater to a trailer home in Orlando, a small town near Mulhall.
“They wanted to put the boys in a smaller school,” Letha Donaldson says of the Schoepflins’ decision to move back to the Mulhall area. And Teresa, Donaldson adds, “wanted to be closer to her mom and daddy.”
Kyle had had his share of colds and stuffy noses when he was an infant, says Teresa, but after the family moved to Orlando his condition worsened dramatically. She now blames the problems on the trailer. “I heard they have warning signs on trailers about formaldehyde,” she says. “It can make you significantly worse.”
Eight-year-old Tye was the first to suffer the effects, she says. “He started wheezing. He spent two or three weeks coughing at night.” The boy’s doctor put him on nebulizer treatments, during which he inhaled a medicated mist. When Brian began wheezing, he, too, was put on a nebulizer. Teresa says she had wheezing spells herself. But it was Kyle who seemed to suffer the most. By the time he was eighteen months old, Teresa says, his wheezing had evolved into terrible attacks where he could not breathe at all.
“He would get restless,” Teresa says, describing Kyle’s attacks. “He would get agitated and start this little cough. Then it would just shut off his breathing. He’d go dusky gray or bluish, and he’d go limp.” Each attack was followed by a wild ride to the hospital in Stillwater, forty miles away.
Kyle’s first doctor was the family pediatrician, Dr. Susan Bullard, who practices in Stillwater. According to Teresa, Bullard diagnosed the boy with asthma. Kyle began nebulizer treatments. He took steroids, which made his face puff up like a chipmunk’s. When that regimen didn’t stop the attacks, Teresa took Kyle to Oklahoma City to see Dr. Martha Tarpay, an asthma and allergy specialist. Dr. Tarpay, Teresa says, also rendered a diagnosis of asthma. (Tarpay could not be reached for comment.)
A complicated and lengthy list of medications was prescribed to halt Kyle’s respiratory problems. Still, the attacks continued. “I got to where I was afraid to be alone with Kyle, because I couldn’t drive and help him breathe at the same time,” Teresa says.
But Teresa wasn’t always alone with Kyle when the attacks occurred, Dale insists. Sometimes, he says, she wasn’t there at all. In the fall of 1993, he says, Teresa took a job in a local nursing home to earn extra money, and he tended to the kids in her absence.
“She was at work one day,” Dale recalls, “and I’d just got through giving [Kyle] his steroids. Ten to fifteen minutes later he started pulling on his shirt. That’s a classic sign that he was having trouble breathing. He started to get cranky and started wheezing bad. I called Teresa at work.”
Teresa walked Dale through the lengthy list of medications to make sure he had given the boy the proper dosages. Dale says he gave the child more medication; the attack eventually eased and then stopped.
By Christmas 1993, Letha Donaldson says, the Oklahoma doctors had given up on being able to help Kyle further. He’d been in and out of the hospital all month. When Tarpay recommended that Kyle be taken to National Jewish in Denver (known nationally for its treatment of asthma patients), the Schoepflins agreed.
Teresa flew with Kyle to Denver on January 4, 1994. His arrival in Colorado marked the start of a further deterioration in his condition–and the beginning of a nightmare.
end of part 1
