In the case of Dr Alfred Steinschneider, two decades and tens of millions of research dollars were lost trying to find the elusive link between infant sleep apnea, which Steinschneider said he had observed and recorded in his laboratory, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), of which he stated it was a precursor. The cover was blown in 1994, 22 years after Steinschneider's 1972 Pediatrics paper claiming such an association,[45] when Waneta Hoyt, the mother of the patients in the paper, was arrested, indicted and convicted on five counts of second-degree murder for the smothering deaths of her five children.[46] While that in itself was bad enough, the paper, presumably written as an attempt to save infants' lives, ironically was ultimately used as a defense by parents suspected in multiple deaths of their own children in cases of Münchausen syndrome by proxy.