Patricia Stallings

Patricia Stallings (born 1964 or 1965) is an American woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder after the death of her son Ryan on September 7, 1989. Because testing seemed to indicate an elevated level of ethylene glycol in Ryan's blood, authorities suspected antifreeze poisoning, and arrested Stallings the next day. She was convicted of murder in early 1991, and sentenced to life in prison.

Stallings gave birth to another child while incarcerated awaiting trial; this next child was diagnosed with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder that can mimic antifreeze poisoning. Prosecutors initially did not believe that the sibling's diagnosis had anything to do with Ryan's case. Stallings' lawyer was forbidden from producing available evidence as proof of the possibility. After a professor in biochemistry and molecular biology had some of Ryan's blood samples tested, he was able to prove that the child had also died from MMA, and not from ethylene glycol poisoning. Test samples were sent to several commercial labs that used the same method as used on Ryan's sample. Nearly half of the test results were incorrect.

After spending nearly two years incarcerated, Stallings was released in July 1991. Prosecutors decided to close the case two months later. Stallings sued the hospital and laboratories that were involved in Ryan's care and reached an out-of-court settlement.

Background Stallings lived in Jefferson County, Missouri, and was a convenience store clerk in the mid-1980s. David Stallings frequently came into her store. They began to date in 1986, and married in 1988. Their first son, Ryan, was born in April 1989. Patricia took Ryan to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in early July 1989. He was experiencing vomiting and difficulty breathing, and was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit. The infant was placed in protective custody. On August 31 of that year, Stallings was allowed a short visit with her son.

During the investigation and ensuing trial, Stallings's defense attorney wanted to introduce the theory that Ryan had died of MMA, but the prosecutor, George B. McElroy, considered the sibling's diagnosis irrelevant to Ryan's death and the judge, Gary Kramer, would not allow him to advance the theory without any evidence that Ryan was actually affected by MMA. Stallings wanted her attorney to call character witnesses to testify on her behalf, but he did not do so. She was convicted of first-degree murder on January 31, 1991 and given a life sentence.

The Stallings case was featured on the Unsolved Mysteries television program in May 1991, and biochemist William Sly of Saint Louis University saw the episode. He agreed to test Ryan's blood, and gave it to James Shoemaker, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Metabolic Screening Lab at St Louis University. Shoemaker immediately confirmed that Ryan had MMA. However, ethylene glycol is not a human metabolite, even in cases of MMA, and Stallings had gone to trial with no explanation linking MMA to ethylene glycol. After the trial, Shoemaker asked prosecutor George McElroy for the methods that had been used to measure ethylene glycol in Ryan's blood, and McElroy supplied that information. When the method was used on blood from Ryan and David Jr., it was seen that propionic acid, which produced in MMA, caused a result that careless observers might mistake for ethylene glycol. Shoemaker then sent samples of propionate-spiked blood to several laboratories, who tested it with the same methods used in the Stallings case. Some of the laboratories came to the incorrect conclusion that the blood reflected ethylene glycol poisoning. In September 1991, prosecutors apologized to Stallings and dropped the case against her. Wilkins won the race. When McElroy offered to show Wilkins his information on the Stallings case, Stallings found out and asked a court to have her arrest record expunged. Some of the information was ordered to be expunged, but a judge said that Missouri law mandated that prosecutors confidentially maintain some of the information related to felony arrests.

The Stallings case continues to be cited as an extreme case of a metabolic disorder that mimics a criminal act.

David Jr., known as "DJ", died in 2013, age 23.

Patricia and her husband, David, divorced in the 1990s. David later died in 2019 at age 57, following a long illness.