Why feature this case? It is foundational for a number of reasons. It’s the first story about shaking babies that was widely publicized. It spread like wildfire to every major newspaper in the United States within days. The SBS hypothesis itself was constructed on the foundation of Virginia Jasper’s and a few other confessions. There is no way to know how much coercion occurred during the police interviews. Virginia clearly came to believe she did indeed hurt and kill the babies, albeit unintentionally.

The case occurred in 1956 in Connecticut. On August 23 of that year, an 11-day-old girl died.  A medical examiner was suspicious.  This was not the first time a baby had died in the care of 33-year-old Virginia Jaspers, a nearly 6-foot-tall pediatric in-home nurse.

Miss Jasper’s father, a former state Senator, accompanied her to the police station. After several intense hours of police questioning, she admitted to shaking Abbe after she refused formula. Subsequently, she admitted to killing two other babies, including Jennifer Malkan, and seriously injuring two more. 

Abbe’s parents initially believed their daughter died naturally. They were shocked and deeply grieved when told that their child had been killed. 

On August 26, 1956, twelve newspapers carried the breaking headlines. Within days, the story went viral. 812 newspapers across the United States blazed headlines that a trusted babysitter had violently shaken and killed a tiny child in her care.

Two months after her arrest, Virginia Jaspers pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and was sentenced to 10-22 years. James Peinkofer, a child advocate who authored a 2007 book about the case, found that many of the relevant records, including those related to incarceration, were lost or destroyed. Virginia Jaspers died in 2004 at the age of 80.

Nearly two decades after she was sentenced, Dr. John Caffey wrote a landmark article in Pediatrics agreeing with an earlier hypothesis by Dr. Norman Guthkelch that shaking could produce subdural and retinal bleeding, even death, without external evidence of trauma such as bruising. Caffey called it “an extraordinary diagnostic contradiction” that such violence could be inflicted on an infant with no external signs of injury.

Of the 27 infants in Dr. Caffey’s first series of cases, 15 were attributed to Virginia Jaspers.