Marian Fraser once ran Spoiled Rotten, the go-to day care for Waco’s elite. But people turned against her after she was arrested for the death of a child in her charge. The cause: Benadryl poisoning. Parents came to believe Fraser had been deliberately drugging children. But the truth, Michael Hardy finds, might be less nefarious:
During more than three dozen interviews and over multiple trips to Waco, I kept hearing versions of one refrain: Something about the story didn’t add up. How could a woman who loved children as much as Fraser did be in prison for murdering a four-month-old baby? “There is a missing piece somewhere,” insisted Michelle Franks, who sent her daughter Rachel to Spoiled Rotten in the mid-nineties. “Marian could never do something like that intentionally and live with herself.”
As it turned out, there was a missing piece, a key detail that had been withheld from the police, the prosecutors, and the public for the past twelve years. The new information helped fill in the puzzle. But it also challenged everything I thought I knew about the case.
More picks about true crime
“That Guy is Still Out There”
“Five years after Anthony Broadwater was belatedly cleared for the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, the questions of how he came to be wrongly convicted and how one or more serial rapists operated for years with little consequence have only deepened.”
Tunnel 13
“A botched train robbery in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains left four men dead, led to an international manhunt, and helped usher forensic science into the modern age.”
The Wrong Stalker
“He was locked up for a dangerous infatuation. Nothing was as it seemed.”
