Marie Noe gave birth ten times between 1949 and 1967. Two of the babies died in the hospital, one stillborn and one six hours after birth, of causes no one has ever questioned. The other eight went home healthy, and none of them lived longer than 14 months. Each time, the deaths were explained as natural or left undetermined, and for nearly three decades the Noes of North Philadelphia were known, when they were known at all, as among the most bereaved parents in the United States. In March 1998, after a magazine writer and a police sergeant reopened the files, she told detectives that she had smothered her children. In 1999 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in all eight deaths and was sentenced to probation and house arrest on the condition that experts study her, a study that, by the account of the writer who reopened the case, never took place as promised. She died in 2016 at 87.
Marie Noe grew up in Philadelphia in a poor and troubled household. According to Stephen Fried, the Philadelphia magazine writer who reconstructed her life from court, medical and police files in 1997 and 1998, her father worked as a janitor and drank heavily, and her mother, a housewife who cleaned part time, was violent toward her; court records of her parents' marriage documented the trouble at home. At three she spent three months in the care of the Catholic Children's Bureau. At five she had scarlet fever. She left school at about 12 to work and handed her pay to her mother until she married. Doctors and investigators who dealt with her later described her as slow, and she told Fried that she could barely read when she married. From about the age of 14 she suffered migraines and episodes of temporary blindness. She did not know, she told Fried, her exact date or place of birth.
A psychiatric report filed with the court in 2001 later recorded that she had described physical and psychological abuse and neglect in her childhood, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. Psychologists measured her IQ at 78.
She married Arthur Noe, known as Art, when she was 19, according to the Daily News; Fried wrote that the couple were married by 1949 and had a church ceremony for their elopement around 1958. Arthur was a small, frail man with a history of ulcers who weighed under 100 pounds and was classified 4-F by the military. He worked as a machinist and mill hand, often on night shifts, and later as a ward committeeman in North Philadelphia, which led to low-level patronage jobs with the city, including work for a city councilman. Marie worked mostly in factories, according to the Daily News, and later became a local committeewoman; her husband helped her find jobs at traffic court and the parking authority. For years the couple lived with Arthur's elderly parents, and they moved at least four times, always to rented rowhouses in Kensington within a mile of one another. Arthur later said they moved each time Marie was pregnant, hoping to change their luck.
The children's names and dates come from Fried's 1998 reconstruction of the medical examiner's and hospital records.
Richard, the first child, was born on March 7, 1949. He died in April at about a month old; his father found him after coming home from a night shift. The coroner recorded congestive heart failure due to subacute endocarditis. No autopsy was done. After his death Marie was blind for a day, and doctors diagnosed conversion hysteria; she was given a sodium amytal interview as treatment.
Elizabeth was born on September 8, 1950, and died early in 1951 at about five months. Her mother found her. The coroner recorded bronchopneumonia.
Jacqueline was born on April 23, 1952, and died at 21 days old. Her mother found her. The coroner recorded aspiration of vomit as the cause; the autopsy notes are missing from the file.
Arthur Jr. was born on April 23, 1955, and died at about two weeks old, a day after a second breathing episode. His mother found him. After a standard autopsy the cause was given as bronchopneumonia.
Constance was born on February 24, 1958, and died in March at about a month old; her father found her. Her autopsy was performed by Dr. Marie Valdes-Dapena, known as Molly, a pediatric pathologist who would later become one of the country's leading researchers on sudden infant death. She doubted the finding made at the scene, and when her microscopic and toxicology tests came back negative, the death was signed out, after what Fried called a long discussion with the medical examiner and 45 days of inquiry, as "Undetermined, Presumed Natural."
Letitia was stillborn on August 24, 1959, at 39 weeks. The cause was a knotted umbilical cord.
Mary Lee was born on June 19, 1962, and died on January 4, 1963, at about six and a half months. Her mother found her. Dr. Halbert Fillinger, then an assistant medical examiner, performed the autopsy and thought the death suspicious; the cause was recorded as undetermined. Police questioned the Noes and released them.
Theresa was born by cesarean section in late June 1963 and lived six hours and 39 minutes. Her death was attributed to a congenital bleeding disorder that was not found in any of the other children or in either parent. Fried wrote that her mother apparently never saw her.
Catherine Ellen, called Cathy, was born on December 3, 1964, and was kept in the hospital for about three months after birth, where nurses recorded concerns about her feeding and her bond with her mother. She died on February 25, 1966, at about 14 months. On that day a neighbor, who did not know about the earlier deaths and whose own four children Marie sometimes looked after, drove mother and child to the hospital, where Cathy was pronounced dead. Her death was ruled undetermined.
Arthur Joseph, called Little Arty, was born on July 28, 1967. He spent two months in the hospital after birth and another 19 days after a choking episode. He died in early January 1968, after Christmas, at about five months old. His mother found him. He was the last of the Noe children.
The Noe deaths were looked at again and again while they were happening, and suspicion never became a case. Fried's 1998 account, built largely on the files of Joe McGillen, an investigator for the Philadelphia medical examiner's office, traced how close the authorities came.
In 1963, after Mary Lee died, Fillinger's team and the medical examiner's office offered the Noes a grant-funded program of free prenatal care, genetic monitoring and study at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children. The couple refused, on the advice of their family physician, Dr. Columbus Gangemi. Gangemi had hypnotized Marie, reported his own suspicions, and in his notes called her an unstable schizophrenic personality, an opinion Fried presented as Gangemi's alone. That July, Life magazine published a sympathetic story about the family under the false names Andrew and Martha Moore, and the couple became nationally known as bereaved parents.
After Cathy died in 1966, McGillen and a fellow investigator, Remington Bristow, visited the family the next day. They examined the Noes' finances, which included about $4,000 in debts, and found insurance policies on at least six of the children, one issued three months before Cathy's death. The insurer refused to pay, and a lawyer later won the family a $500 settlement. Bristow found a 1954 police report involving Marie and her earlier medical records. Newsweek covered the case in 1966. Dr. Valdes-Dapena later told Fried that the official line at the medical examiner's office was that there was "absolutely no suspicion of homicide."
The Noes also tried to adopt. They applied through the Catholic Children's Bureau and listed Fillinger as a reference; when a nun from the bureau called him, he warned her against placing a child with Marie. Investigators learned that Arthur had asked whether an adopted child could be insured. The couple withdrew the application when Marie became pregnant again.
Her obstetrician, Dr. Salvatore Cucinotta, had urged her after Cathy's death not to have another baby. During the cesarean delivery of Arthur Joseph in 1967 her uterus ruptured, and Cucinotta removed it to save her life; he told Fried the hysterectomy was medically necessary and not meant to stop further pregnancies. He had shared his suspicions only with Gangemi. Arthur Joseph's pediatrician, Dr. Patrick Pasquariello, was also suspicious but said there was no clear procedure at the time for acting on such a concern.
After Arthur Joseph died, hospital staff records showed that his parents had rarely visited him. An anonymous neighbor told investigators that Marie was "doing something to the children." Investigators interviewed neighbors and relatives, and both Noes took and passed polygraph examinations. The chief medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Spelman, wrote privately to adoption and child-protection agencies that his office was not willing to declare with certainty that the children had died natural deaths. In public he said otherwise: Newsweek reported on January 15, 1968, that Spelman had found "absolutely no evidence indicating an unnatural death." Joseph Schimpf, a veteran police homicide detective, concluded in 1968 that there was no evidence of murder, and he still held that view thirty years later. A young assistant district attorney, Richard Sprague, asked why his office had first learned of the Noes from Life magazine.
At a medical conference in 1969, Valdes-Dapena said that Spelman had concluded the Noe children did not die of sudden infant death syndrome. Fried wrote that after the coverage of 1968 the case went unmentioned in public until 1997.
The Noes stayed in West Kensington. In the decades that followed, Valdes-Dapena became a leading figure in research on sudden infant death; she was lead author of a 1993 text on the subject for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and disproved several theories of crib death that had been popular. At the time, Fried wrote, it was widely believed that sudden infant death ran in families and was caused by breathing pauses during sleep that home monitors could prevent; neither theory held up. In 1977 doctors first described Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition later raised in connection with the Noe case.
One of the cases that shaped those beliefs was that of Waneta Hoyt, a Syracuse, New York, woman whose children's deaths inspired a 1972 medical paper on sudden infant death and who later admitted killing five of them. In 1997 the journalists Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan published The Death of Innocents, a book about the Hoyt case and about infant deaths wrongly filed as natural. According to Fried and the Daily News, the book mentioned the Noe family without using their name; Valdes-Dapena had helped the authors in 1995. Fried later reported that Talan said she had called the Philadelphia district attorney's office about the Noes in 1995 and never got a call back.
Stephen Fried, then a staff writer at Philadelphia magazine, read The Death of Innocents and followed the old newspaper clips listed in its bibliography back to the Noes. He found the couple still living in West Kensington, in poor health and, they said, in dire straits; Arthur had recently had a stroke and told Fried he had thought about suicide. Over several visits they talked to him about their children. Marie told him that no one could prove she had done any harm to the children and that none of them had ever had a bruise. "Just one of them stupid things that happens," she said. "We just weren't meant to have children, I guess." She said she had been frightened through every one of those pregnancies, and that a mother feels such a death is her fault. Arthur told him the Lord had needed angels and that they had a ton of them up there. "It's just something that happened," he said.
Fried also tracked down surviving doctors and investigators. Valdes-Dapena told him she was "99 percent sure that these deaths were not a natural happening." Fillinger, by then the medical examiner of Montgomery County, said, "I would have to go to the D.A. and say these people should be investigated." Dr. Stephen Ludwig, a child-abuse specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the case warranted a thorough investigation. McGillen had kept copies of the Noe files for decades.
When Fried took his questions to the police, Sergeant Larry Nodiff of the police homicide unit's Special Investigations Unit quietly reopened the case in October 1997. Nodiff reviewed the files with Valdes-Dapena, Fillinger and McGillen; McGillen handed all of his records over to police. Years later a retired chief inspector of the detective bureau told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Without his assistance, she would not have been charged." Fried's article, "Cradle to Grave," about 13,000 words long, ran in the magazine's April 1998 issue. Fried was helped in his reporting by members of the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia club of investigators who look at old unsolved crimes, among them the retired FBI agent William Fleisher.
On the evening of March 25, 1998, after the Noes had finished dinner, Nodiff and two detectives came to their home and asked them to come to police headquarters, known in Philadelphia as the Roundhouse. Marie and Arthur were taken to separate rooms. Detective Stephen Vivarina led Marie's interview, which ran about 11 hours, until about 5 a.m.
In the statement she gave that night, Marie Noe said that she had smothered her babies. According to Fried and the Daily News, she clearly recalled the deaths of Richard, Elizabeth and Jacqueline and that of Constance, the fifth child. She said she could not remember the deaths of Arthur Jr., Mary Lee, Cathy and Arthur Joseph, but she did not deny causing them. For much of the interview she called each child "it" and had to be prompted to use their names. She told the detectives she had hoped they would find out, because "I knew what I was doing was very wrong." Asked why she had done it, she said, "All I can figure is that I'm ungodly sick." She read and signed a typed statement. As she left, she whispered, "Don't tell my husband what I told youse."
She was not held. The confession stayed out of the news for nearly a week before it reached the Inquirer on March 31, and camera crews from national television programs then camped on the Noes' block. Police and prosecutors kept a low profile while they worked on the case. Even with her signed statement, Fried wrote, building it would take a great deal of work, because much of the old evidence was hearsay unless the original witnesses could testify. Charles Gallagher, the head of the homicide unit in the district attorney's office, pursued the case from March on.
At about 6:05 a.m. on August 5, 1998, police came to the Noes' home with an arrest warrant. Marie Noe was charged with eight counts of murder. Two of the ten deaths, Letitia's and Theresa's, were treated as natural. She was 69, about three weeks short of her 70th birthday. Arthur, who was never charged, told the driver to keep his eyes on the road, and said to his wife, "I guess you won't be home for your birthday." At the Roundhouse he asked a detective whether he thought she had done it. Police took away photographs of the babies.
At first bail was denied, according to the Daily News, and a prosecutor called her a "serial killer" and compared her to Ted Bundy. Her defense lawyer, David Rudenstein, argued that the confession was inadmissible because she had been questioned for 11 hours without a lawyer and because her mental condition that night did not allow a valid confession. "I've never seen anyone confess to five murders and be released from police custody," he told reporters. Arthur Noe went on a talk radio program to defend his wife and said he had never suspected her.
Plea talks went on for months. The reasons for a deal, as Fried set them out, were plain on both sides: a trial three decades after the last death would be hard to win, there was no physical evidence, the confession might be thrown out, Noe had a history of mental illness, and she had been investigated and cleared when the babies died.
The hearing was called at short notice, on a Monday morning in 1999, in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas before Judge William Mazzola. Arthur Noe, then 77, sat in the courtroom, and the homicide investigators who had rebuilt the case sat at the back. Gallagher, by then a deputy district attorney, read from her statement to detectives. Marie Noe, 70, said "Guilty" loud and clear, then asked, "Where do I sign?" She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of eight of her children, according to the Inquirer.
Gallagher, citing the peculiar circumstances of the case, recommended 20 years of probation, the first five under house arrest, with intensive mental health treatment. The judge accepted the recommendation. The house arrest was electronically monitored. As a special condition of the sentence she agreed to be studied by psychiatric experts, in effect offering herself as a living teaching case. Prosecutors argued that understanding her was important so that authorities could prevent other mothers from doing the same thing, and the district attorney's office said the money saved by not imprisoning her would go toward the work. Arthur wept in court. Afterward, when McGillen offered him sympathy, he answered that McGillen knew she had not harmed those children.
On the day of the plea, National Public Radio reported that the case showed why the deaths of newborns and young children needed rigorous investigation. Much of the press coverage, Fried wrote, focused on anger that she would serve no time in prison. He wrote that he could not share that outrage but would be angry if the probation department failed to follow through on the promised research.
The plan was for a team led by Dr. John O'Brien II, a forensic psychiatrist who worked for the Court of Common Pleas, with outside specialists in child abuse, dissociative disorders and Munchausen syndrome by proxy, among them Ludwig, Dr. Marc Feldman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dr. Richard Kluft. Even at the time of the plea, Fried noted, it was unclear whether there was a budget, whether the experts would be paid, or how the findings would be made public.
In June 2002 Fried reported in an Inquirer opinion piece that the team had never been formed. Feldman, Kluft and Ludwig had not been contacted since the summer of 1999. Only two local clinicians, O'Brien and the psychologist Steven Samuel, had seen her, reportedly about once a month at most, and Fried wrote that neither was a recognized expert in infanticide, child abuse or Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The probation department and the district attorney's office, he wrote, had disagreed over who should pay; keeping her in prison would have cost the city about $74 a day. Feldman warned that the delay meant she might already have settled on a particular understanding of her own behavior.
Fried also reported that Judge Mazzola had quietly revoked her probation in November 2001, for reasons not made public, reportedly after an unscheduled trip to a restaurant that violated her house arrest, and that the court therefore treated her as technically unsentenced. A hearing set for May 2002 had been postponed twice. The outcome of those hearings has never been reported. By the Daily News's later account, she served five years of house arrest with a single violation, a stop at a restaurant after a doctor's appointment.
By 2001, according to the Daily News, the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined her had ruled out neurological illness, Munchausen syndrome by proxy and multiple personality. O'Brien's court-ordered report, which the paper described in 2010 as never before made public, found a mixed personality disorder with avoidant, dependent, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, paranoid and antisocial traits, and concluded that she needed no further psychiatric evaluation or treatment. She admitted being a heavy drinker. She described episodes of "blindness" after three of the deaths, and offered a range of explanations for what she had done: that she had been given a prisoner's blood as a child, that she and her husband were blood cousins, and that she was a wicked person.
Writing in 2020, Fried summed up what had come to light about her: a developmental disability, hormonal and psychiatric disorders, postpartum psychosis after each birth, and alcoholism, which her husband also struggled with. "But disease and disability do not excuse murder," he wrote. "They begin to explain how, not why."
Arthur Noe held to his belief in his wife's innocence even after her plea. He died of heart disease in his sleep at their home on December 27, 2009, two days after Christmas, after 61 years of marriage. He had not wanted a funeral, and his ashes were kept in a cardboard box on the mantel, near photographs of Cathy and Little Arty.
A few weeks later the Daily News reporter Barbara Laker found Marie Noe, 81, living alone with her cat. She was frail, diabetic and arthritic, and for the past year she had slept in the dining room because she could no longer climb the stairs. A neighbor who served as block captain looked after her every day, and nurses visited daily. "They're my children," she said of the babies in the photographs. Asked about their deaths, she said she did not want to think about it and would rather not know. "I got a lot of time left," she said.
The house was sold in 2013. Marie Noe died on May 5, 2016, at 87, at a nursing and rehabilitation center where she had moved only months earlier. Fried confirmed her death in 2020, with help from Fleisher, after a reader online asked what had become of her.
By then most of the people who had worked on the case were gone. Fillinger died in 2006 at 79, Valdes-Dapena in 2012 at 91, and McGillen in October 2015 at 89. Nodiff, who reopened the case, had risen to staff inspector. Fried and the police investigators received medals from the Vidocq Society for their work on the case.
Only four deaths described in her own words. In her 1998 statement she described the deaths of four children and said she could not remember the other four, without denying them. Her guilty plea covered all eight.
The confession's validity. Her lawyer argued that an 11-hour interview without counsel, given her mental condition, could not produce an admissible confession. The question was never decided by a court, because she pleaded guilty.
Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Some doctors connected to the case raised it as a possible explanation, and a specialist in the condition was named to the study team. The court-ordered examinations, by the Daily News's account, ruled it out.
The probation revocation. Fried reported in 2002 that her probation had been revoked in November 2001 and that she was technically unsentenced; the Daily News reported in 2010 that she had served five years of house arrest and 20 years of probation with one violation. How the revocation was resolved has never been reported.
Her age and dates. Fried's 1998 report gave her age as 69 at her August 1998 arrest; his 2020 article gave it as 71 at the March 1998 interview. The Daily News in 2010 gave the year of her arrest as 1999, which does not match Fried's contemporary account.
March 7, 1949: Richard is born; he dies in April at about a month old.
September 8, 1950: Elizabeth is born; she dies early in 1951 at about five months.
April 23, 1952: Jacqueline is born; she dies at 21 days.
April 23, 1955: Arthur Jr. is born; he dies at about two weeks.
February 24, 1958: Constance is born; she dies in March at about a month old. Her death is ruled undetermined, presumed natural.
August 24, 1959: Letitia is stillborn.
June 19, 1962: Mary Lee is born; she dies on January 4, 1963.
June 1963: Theresa is born and dies six hours later of a blood disorder.
July 12, 1963: Life magazine publishes the family's story under false names.
December 3, 1964: Catherine (Cathy) is born; she dies on February 25, 1966.
July 28, 1967: Arthur Joseph is born; he dies in early January 1968 at about five months.
January 15, 1968: Newsweek quotes the chief medical examiner as finding no evidence of an unnatural death.
1997: The Death of Innocents is published; Fried begins reporting; in October Sergeant Larry Nodiff reopens the case.
March 25, 1998: In an interview at police headquarters that runs until about 5 a.m., Marie Noe signs a statement saying she smothered her babies.
April 1998: Philadelphia magazine publishes "Cradle to Grave."
August 5, 1998: She is arrested and charged with eight counts of murder.
1999: She pleads guilty to second-degree murder in eight deaths and is sentenced to 20 years of probation, the first five under house arrest, with a study condition.
November 2001: Her probation is reported revoked.
June 2002: Fried reports that the promised study never took place.
December 27, 2009: Arthur Noe dies.
May 5, 2016: Marie Noe dies at 87.
August 6, 2020: Philadelphia magazine reports her death.