Lebanon — Editor’s note: Paul and Beth Fairfield recently spoke about their daughter’s death in a recent exclusive interview with the Reporter since Beth’s release from jail.



Beth Fairfield remembers the first time Lebanon police said she was a suspect in the death of her daughter.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said when asked. “Aug. 9, 2007.”

She was in an interrogation room at the Lebanon Public Safety Building.

In another room, Paul Fairfield, her husband of 22 years, was learning from police for the first time that an overdose of the prescription pain medicine Tramadol had killed their daughter, Brittany Nicole.

In Indianapolis, attorney Thomas Farlow was punching cell phone buttons, repeatedly calling the police station in a futile effort to formally tell police that he was Beth Fairfield’s attorney.

Detectives had asked the Fairfields to come to the station. As far as Paul Fairfield knew, police were “trying to wrap up the case and had a few questions for us. So we went to the police station. That’s when they split us up and the interrogation started.”

Brittany Nicole Fairfield was born Sept. 27, 1992, with a seemingly endless list of birth defects, some that would be undiagnosed for nearly a third of her life.

Brittany had Down syndrome; at six weeks she underwent emergency heart surgery.

After 4-1/2 of her 14 years, doctors found Brittany had tracheomalacia — her trachea was weak and contracted slightly with each breath. She was literally breathing food, a condition called aspiration. She was asthmatic, had lung disease, reflux, had her tonsils and adenoids removed. Surgical procedures she underwent included a nissen fundoplication to relieve heartburn and a pyloraplasty, to allow her stomach contents to flow more rapidly into the small intenstine.

It wasn’t until Nov. 27, 2002, that doctors deemed her lungs strong enough to breath without supplementary oxygen.



Although she continued to regularly need medical attention, the years after Brittany’s 10th birthday were somewhat better. Her personality emerged. She literally became Beth’s link to life.

“We had a bond,” Beth said. “For years, I used her as a reason to live; I was suicidal. My therapist told me to find a reason to live, and she needed me.”

Beth had her own health concerns. She has carpal tunnel syndrome and fibromalagia. A disc in her neck bulges slightly; the chronic inflammation of her joints makes her body unstable. Because her muscle must work overtime to keep her ligaments in place, the pain is constant. But it migrates.

“I never know from one day to the other what will hurt,” she said. To ease the pain, she takes Tramadol.

“Some days I can’t open a peanut butter jar,” she said. “Picking up coins is difficult.”

Down syndrome kids have an astonishing level of compassion, Beth said, and she and Brittany became more like friends than mother and daughter.

“I would be sitting on the couch and be so sore: She’d come up and pat my shoulder. She’d tell me ‘it’s all right, Mommy, you’ll be OK.”

“She was the only one I can guarantee would never tell me, ‘I hate you, I don’t love you, I want to live somewhere else, I’m mad at you,’” Beth said. “I wouldn’t trade that for the world.”

Brittany was to have surgery, to correct a problem with her ankles. “It hurt her to walk; it hurt me,” she said. “I was already figuring out ways of getting her to and from church, of getting her nursing care.”

Because Brittany received Medicaid benefits, “it wasn’t going to cost us a dime,” Beth said.

In another four years, when Brittany would have turned 18, the Fairfields would have faced a difficult decision: Whether to keep her with them, or to place her in a group home.

“There were arguments both ways,” Paul said.

But Brittany would never celebrate that milestone birthday.



Between midnight and 3:34 a.m. June 13, 2007, Brittany died. She had been taken to the emergency room at Witham Memorial Hospital hours earlier, where she received steroids and oxygen and a breathing treatment for her asthma.

After a pathologist’s autopsy found a fatal level of Tramadol in Brittany’s blood; after an investigation by Lebanon Police; after a Circuit Court grand jury indicted her, Beth was charged with murder.

It was 18 months after the girl’s death. The prosecution contended Beth had given Brittany a soft drink laced with crushed Tramadol pills.

It’s possible, the Fairfields think, Brittany swallowed the lethal dose of Tramadol before she was taken to the emergency room that night.

“We were watching our daughter die and didn’t know it,” Paul said.

The Fairfields believe the grand jury indicted Beth — who has three other children at home — for murder because of her behavior during the Aug. 9, 2007 interrogation.

“They were going on about how the night they were interrogating me, I giggled,” she said.

“When she gets uncomfortable, she giggles,” Paul said. “If we would have freaked out every time we nearly lost Brittany ...”

“She’d be dead,” Beth interjected.

“She’d have died a long time ago,” Paul continued. “Our demeanor, when it happened ...”

“That was born of necessity,” Beth said. “You have to shut that part off so you can deal with the reality of what’s going on.”

After 14 years of medical crises,, “you just learn it gets you nowhere to get hysterical,” she said. “I’m not a hysterical type of person.”

However, the day after the interrogation, Beth was admitted to the St. Vincent Stress Center.

When the indictment came, Beth turned herself in and she was taken to prison just before the holidays.

“The whole jail experience,” she said, “is another story.”

Months of legal maneuvering followed, including an uncommon request — Beth’s attorneys asked for a “let to bail” hearing, at which they would be allowed to interview the prosecution’s witnesses. Bail was denied.

More charges were filed, frustrating the Fairfields and the defense team.



“I know,” she paused to sigh, “the only thing that’s helped me for the past year and a half is my belief in God, and if I didn’t know that she was in a better place that was pain free.”

She hesitated.

“If I didn’t know that God would get me out of jail one way or another, and right all the wrongs that have been, done, I would be a basket case,” she said. “I wouldn’t be talking to you now because I’d be back in St. Vincent stress center.”

Little kindnesses sustained her. Members of her adult Sunday school class at Lebanon Christian Church sent her cards every week. If there wasn’t money for her commissary credit, the class would donate.

Then Beth was offered a bitter choice: Admit, in a plea agreement that she was guilty of reckless homicide, and be released the same day or stay in jail another eight months while her attorneys prepared to defend murder, two counts of reckless homicide, two counts of neglect of a dependent and lying to police. That was too long, Beth decided. She didn’t want to spend more time in a cell, separated from her family.

The plea was accepted. Beth was released May 18.

“I’ve got a 6-year-old, a 15-year-old boy who need me, a 17-year-old daughter” who will be a senior in high school next year, Beth said.

Compared to their needs, the felony conviction, a four-year sentence, prescription drug counseling, and parenting classes were inconsequential.

And there’s one thing more.

“I took the plea because I may have left the bottle out,” Beth said.

“Or I may have left the bottle out,” Paul said.

But the thought that either of them intentionally took the life of Brittany still makes no sense to them.

“(The accusation) invalidated everything we had done for the last 14 years to keep that girl alive,” Paul said.