As the stunning toll mounted, the Noes, who also lost their other two children—one was stillborn, the other died hours after birth—were billed in national magazines as America's unluckiest parents. Slow-talking, learning-disabled Marie and Arthur, a slight, feisty machinist, were thought to be singularly cursed by the elusive phenomenon of crib death, now known as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Thirty years later that perception has been drastically altered; Marie Noe awaits trial on eight counts of murder. In March, Noe, 70, put her signature to a statement in which she admitted suffocating three of her children—firstborn Richard, Elizabeth and Constance—and possibly Jacqueline. (She claimed to have forgotten the details of the deaths of Arthur Jr., Mary, Catherine and Arthur Joseph.) "She's as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy," argued Assistant District Attorney Jay Feinschil at an August hearing.
Yet Noe's attorney David Rudenstein insists the confession was coerced. During the interrogation of his frail, diabetic client, he claims, police ignored her request for a lawyer. After an 11-hour grilling, he maintains, Noe, who has a fifth-grade education, was told she would be released if she signed a statement. "She chose to sign and go home," says Rudenstein. "I'm saying the statement is untrue." He adds that Arthur Noe, 77, who has not been charged, stands by his wife of 50 years: "He totally believes her."
Rather than closing the book on this baffling case, Noe's arrest has raised troubling questions: How could a mother possibly kill eight of her children? And why did it take so long to charge her? According to Philadelphia D.A. Lynne Abraham, the answer to the second question may lie partly in increased skepticism as to the likelihood of serial SIDS deaths, which many prosecutors now view as possible homicides. The Noe case, she said, is "a wake-up call to doctors and law enforcement agencies."
In fact, Philadelphia authorities became suspicious of the Noes years ago, in part because the deaths followed a consistent pattern: Each infant allegedly died while alone with Marie, and every time she had given the same explanation—they had begun "gasping for breath and turning blue." But no physical evidence implicated her, and after Marie passed a lie detector test in 1968, the case lay dormant.
Then last year, Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried began delving into the story, interviewing the Noes and unearthing a trove of old police and medical files. In January, he and Philadelphia police Sgt. Larry Nodiff met with the original coroner's investigator, Joseph McGillen, and Drs. Halbert Fillinger and Marie Valdes-Dapena, pathologists who had performed autopsies on some of the babies. After poring over the records, both doctors are now amazed that Marie Noe had gone free. "The first death of a child is a tragedy, the second is a medical mystery," says Fillinger, 72. "The third is murder." When child-abuse expert Dr. Stephen Ludwig subsequently reviewed the files for the district attorney's office, he concluded that the infants had been suffocated.
Apart from her alleged confession, a key component in the case against Noe appears to be the debunking of the theory that SIDS could be hereditary and might occur repeatedly within a single family. Some experts believe that Noe—like Waneta Hoyt of Upstate New York, who admitted in 1994 to killing her five children—may have suffered from a psychological disorder called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. "A need for attention," says New York City psychiatrist Stuart Asch, "may make them injure their child."
The daughter of an alcoholic janitor and his wife, Noe grew up in Philadelphia. "She was beaten as a child," says Fried. "It was a rough family"—so rough, in fact, that a sibling was once institutionalized for posttraumatic personality disorder. At 5, a case of scarlet fever and the drugs prescribed for it "took a toll on my...um...noodle," Marie told Fried. She eloped with Arthur in 1948 and gave birth to Richard on March 7, 1949. Twelve days after the baby's death a month later, Arthur brought Marie to the hospital; she had gone temporarily blind. Doctors blamed it on grief and suggested she try for another child. "So I got pregnant again," Marie told Fried. "I was like a factory."
Baby Elizabeth died at 5 months in 1951 and Jacqueline the next year at 3 weeks. According to Fried, Marie said that after the third child's death, she had considered getting her tubes tied to avoid "another ungodly catastrophe...but [the priest] said it would be a mortal sin." Three years later she had Arthur Jr. He lived 13 days.
When Constance arrived in 1958, "I remember doing every test you could do in those days," says attending physician Dr. Abraham Perlman. "I wanted to make sure the one I saw was going to make it." He recalls Marie's eerie response when he congratulated her on the baby: " 'She's not going to live, make it, just like the others.' " Constance lasted a month, but Perlman was not suspicious. "It was a different world," says Perlman. "We weren't focused on child abuse. I felt like, 'What did I miss?' But I never suspected foul play."
The grim pattern continued as Mary died at 6 months in early 1963. When Catherine was born the next year, cautious doctors kept her in the hospital for three months. Increasingly suspicious, the Noes' family physician later told investigators he had hoped she would survive long enough so her fingernails would grow and "she would have a chance to defend herself." Cathy lived almost 15 months, longer than any of her siblings.
On July 28, 1967, Marie bore Arthur Joseph by cesarean section. He would be her last child—her uterus ruptured during delivery. As a precaution, little Arty stayed in the hospital for two months, during which his parents visited only twice. When he died on Jan. 2, 1968, police read the Noes their rights. "I have nothing to hide," said Marie, and a few weeks later she passed the polygraph test. (Dr. Ludwig, the D.A.'s consultant, has suggested that Marie may have killed her babies in a dissociative state and not be cognizant of her actions.)
Over the next 30 years, the Noes lived on without incident, remaining in the same neighborhood and keeping photos of their daughter Cathy on the wall. Neighbors who had supported the couple through their numerous crises still find the murder charges hard to believe. And the Noes themselves concede nothing. "We just weren't meant to have children, I guess," Marie, now free on $500,000 bond while awaiting a preliminary hearing next month, told Fried last year. "The Lord needed angels," said Arthur, "so we got a ton of them up there."
Richard Jerome
Lisa Kay Greissinger and Bob Calandra in Philadelphia
- Contributors:
- Lisa Kay Greissinger,
- Bob Calandra.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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