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before her illness was diagnosed.
    Susan showed a great deal of interest in the details of that policy and how much money Tom would get in the event of little Tommy’s death.
    The Suenrams were also rather perplexed by Susan’s insistence on dressing the two boys in identical outfits. But they were even more stunned when Tommy and Jacob came to lunch and they saw that Tommy’s hair had been dyed brown to match his stepbrother’s.
    Susan’s bizarre attempts to turn the boys into twins was becoming more than just an eccentric piece of parenting.
    To make matters worse, Tommy still could do no right in the eyes of his stepmother. One day, Susan got so angry with the child that she pinned the two-year-old to a stake out in the backyard of the house and left him there all day in scorching eighty-five-degree heat. The boy suffered appalling burns and blisters and began being sick from the moment she took him in that evening. She then gave him a severe beating.
    The following day, at 3:30 P.M. on Saturday, May 7, 1983, Tom Whited arrived home at the family’s neat, comfortable detached house on Rushing Road and found Tommy, then aged two, throwing up. The doctor was called and Tommy was given a dosage of medicine to stop his sickness. He also appeared to be suffering from sunburn.
    A few hours after the doctor had left, the little boy lost consciousness. As Tom Whited later put it, “I held the little man and he was as limp as a rag.”
    Tom and Susan then decided to take him to hospital. As they carried little Tommy to the car, Susan pleaded with her husband, “Oh my, if we go to the Baptist Hospital they’ll think I’ve beat him again. Let’s go to the South Community.” But the pediatrician they had consulted before, Dr. Quillen Hughes, was not at the South Community Hospital where he worked, so the child was immediately transferred by ambulance back to the Baptist Hospital. Tommy was readmitted to the hospital in a coma. Doctors diagnosed the problem as a brain hemorrhage and general brain dysfunction.
    Bruises were found on his forehead, body, arms, legs, and around the rectum, and there was also retinal hemorrhaging in his eyes. The injuries were the result of repeated blows over the course of four to seven days.
    Susan had told her husband that the boy had been involved in an accident with a shopping cart while the family was out at a local supermarket. She claimed a car had hit the shopping cart while Tommy was in it. She also insisted the little boy had suffered another accident a few days earlier when he had fallen over their pet dog and hit his head on the concrete. She said the boy had cried a little and then stopped and continued playing, so she had not felt it necessary to take him to hospital.
    At 9:30 P.M. that evening Detective J. M. Einhorn of the Youth Bureau of the Oklahoma City Police Department was contacted at home by worried hospital officials. His presence was urgently requested.
    Einhorn had dealt with numerous child battery cases over the years and he knew what to look for. Injuries to the arms and legs below the knee were not consistent with child abuse, but above the knee and chest and around the head, “you can pretty well know something is wrong because most children hold their hands out when they fall to grab out and reach for something.”
    Einhorn joined the Oklahoma City Police Department in 1968 after spotting a recruitment sign as he travelled through the city while serving in the military, following a tour in Vietnam.
    What sent a cold shiver up Einhorn’s spine with this case was that he had a child exactly the same age as little Tommy Whited and he could not imagine why anyone would want to hurt an innocent youngster.
    Just before 10:00 P.M. that same evening, J. M. Einhorn arrived at the Intensive Care Unit on the ninth floor of the hospital.
    Einhorn was met by Officer T. Nelson and Nancy Agee of the hospital medical staff. All three went to Room 5, located in the southeast