“Have somebody rip your heart out and hold it in front of your face and just have them squeeze the life out of it. That’s the only way I can express that kind of a pain. Like…it’s torturous,” thirty-eight-year-old Tammy Marquardt said today when asked about how it felt to be wrongly convicted of murdering her two-and-a-half-year-old son Kenneth.

She spent almost fourteen years in prison because (the now disgraced) Pathologist Dr. Charles Smith had given false testimony in 1995—he said Tammy had strangled or smothered her son when in fact it wasn’t possible to determine the cause of the boy’s death…Kenneth could have died a sudden death brought on by an epileptic seizure (he had been treated for seizures eight times and had also suffered from asthma and pneumonia).

To date, the Ontario Court of Appeal has overturned seven convictions connected to Smith’s faulty testimony.

For Tammy, the nightmare is finally over.

“You are free to go now, ma’am,” she was told.

“Now Kenneth can finally rest in peace!” Tammy says.

And Tammy can grieve.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My Friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James