Patricia Stallings was wrongly accused of poisoning her infant son with antifreeze in 1989 — then later exonerated thanks to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
Unsolved Mysteries / YouTubeAfter Patricia Stallings was sentenced to life in prison, experts confirmed that her baby had died from a rare genetic disorder — not poison.
In July 1989, Patricia Stallings took her three-month-old son, Ryan, to the emergency room after he began vomiting and struggling to breathe.
There, doctors found high levels of ethylene glycol, a compound found in antifreeze, in the infant’s blood. They immediately suspected that Patricia had poisoned Ryan. And after he tragically died a few months later, the authorities charged Patricia Stallings with murdering her own son.
She was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. But when her story appeared on the television series Unsolved Mysteries in 1991, it caught the eye of some of the best biochemists in the country — and new testing revealed that Patricia Stallings was innocent.
Patricia Stallings Gets A Taste Of The American Dream
Patricia Stallings had had a difficult start to life. As a young woman, she had spent years living in poverty and sometimes homelessness. During this time, she also had a baby out of wedlock whom she’d had to surrender to the state. She could barely afford to care for herself, let alone a child.
But by the late 1980s, things were looking up for Patricia. She had started working as a convenience store clerk in eastern Missouri. She also met David Stallings, a printer, and the two got married and moved into a white house overlooking a lake in Jefferson County, Missouri. In April 1989, they had their first son, Ryan.
“That truly was the happiest time of my life,” she later said, according to Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston’s 2010 book Genetic Twists of Fate. “Everything was perfect. Everything. A new house, a new baby. I mean, what could be wrong?”
Family HandoutRyan Stallings, the infant who mysteriously died.
The Suspicious Death Of Ryan Stallings
Everything changed just three months after Ryan Stallings was born. In early July 1989, Ryan started vomiting and showing signs of respiratory distress.
David and Patricia Stallings rushed their baby to the emergency room. There, hospital staff discovered what they believed to be elevated levels of ethylene glycol in Ryan’s blood.
Ethylene glycol is a colorless liquid commonly used in antifreeze and in polyester — and it can be highly toxic in large quantities. Suspecting that Ryan may have been poisoned with antifreeze, the hospital staff placed the infant in protective custody. Then, the investigation began.
“We were split up and talked to by detectives,” Patricia later told Unsolved Mysteries. “They immediately started asking me, ‘Is there a problem at home? Are you and David fighting?’ They were saying that they knew that that baby had been poisoned by either me or my husband. It infuriated me, and I was just… I was devastated. I was blown away… Ryan was my world… He was perfect.”
For the next five weeks, Patricia and David were only allowed to visit their sick son under strict supervision. But during their sixth visit, Patricia Stallings was inexplicably allowed to be alone with Ryan for just a few minutes. During that time, she fed him from a bottle.
After this visit, Ryan Stallings’ condition got drastically worse. The police, believing Patricia had poisoned Ryan, arrested her for assault. This theory was seemingly substantiated when the police found antifreeze in the Stallings’ home.
Accused of being a “baby-killer,” Patricia was forbidden from seeing Ryan, even while he was drawing his last breaths. And on Sept. 7, Ryan Stallings tragically died from his mysterious illness.
Patricia was not allowed to attend his funeral.
Patricia Stallings Is Charged With Murder
Family HandoutPatricia Stallings, her husband David Stallings, and their second son DJ.
After Ryan’s death, the authorities charged Patricia Stallings with first-degree murder. At first, all signs seemed to indicate she had poisoned her own child. But things became more complicated when yet another Stallings child was brought to the hospital with the same concerning symptoms.
Patricia had been pregnant at the time of her arrest. While awaiting trial, she gave birth to another son, David Jr. (DJ), in February 1990. The baby was immediately placed in foster care.
But despite having no contact with his parents, DJ soon began suffering from a condition that looked startlingly similar to Ryan’s. A few weeks after he was born, doctors diagnosed DJ with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder in which the body cannot break down proteins and fats properly.
As part of the condition, the body also accumulates propionic acid — a compound chemically similar to ethylene glycol. Anyone not intimately familiar with propionic acid’s makeup could easily mistake it for the toxic chemical.
Thankfully, DJ survived and was promptly returned to foster care. But the incident inspired Patricia Stallings’ defense team to dig deeper into Ryan’s death. If one of the Stallings’ children had the genetic disorder, it was possible that Ryan had as well. Had doctors misinterpreted propionic acid in Ryan’s blood as ethylene glycol?
Unfortunately, the judge declined to allow the defense to present this theory in court. At the time, there was not enough definitive evidence that Ryan Stallings had MMA; his brother’s diagnosis was not a confirmation of his own.
Instead, the defense team argued that Ryan Stallings had died of natural causes.
“You might as well speculate that some little man from Mars came down and shot him full of some mysterious bacteria,” Jefferson County Prosecutor George B. McElroy III responded at the time, according to the Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions.
Though Patricia Stallings’ friends and family insisted she was innocent, a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder in 1991. At the age of 25, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Unsolved Mysteries Cracks The Case
Unsolved Mysteries / YouTubePatricia Stallings was released from prison when it was found that her son had died from MMA.
In May 1991, the television show Unsolved Mysteries came out with an episode featuring Patricia Stallings’ case. The episode explored the possibility that Ryan Stallings had died from MMA, not poisoning. William Sly, a biochemist at Saint Louis University in Missouri, saw the episode and offered to test Ryan’s blood for MMA.
He contacted his colleague James Shoemaker, the director of a metabolic screening lab at St. Louis University that had access to a sample of Ryan Stallings’ blood. The men re-tested the samples — and discovered elevated levels of propionic acid in Ryan’s blood. It appeared that Ryan, like his younger brother, had suffered from MMA.
Patricia Stallings was innocent.
This bombshell revelation led to Patricia’s early release from prison in July 1991. In September of that year, prosecutors formally apologized and cleared her of all charges. Most importantly, DJ was returned to the Stallings’ care.
Later, Patricia Stallings sued the hospital and laboratory that originally treated Ryan and tested his blood. In 1993, she won a settlement of several million dollars. Today, her case is considered one of the most egregious wrongful conviction cases in American history.
After reading about Patricia Stallings, dive into the true story of David Camm, the state trooper wrongfully convicted of murdering his family. Then, read about Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused of planting a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
