In April 1998, Philadelphia magazine published "Cradle to Grave," Stephen Fried's investigation of an old family tragedy: the deaths, between 1949 and 1968, of eight of the ten children of Arthur and Marie Noe, each put down at the time to sudden infant death or to undetermined causes. The same day the article appeared, police brought Marie Noe in for questioning. She was sixty-nine, and she and Arthur still lived together in the West Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. After eleven hours she confessed to smothering at least some of the children with a pillow.
She was born Marie Lyddy on August 23, 1928, in Kensington, one of several children of a troubled marriage. She had scarlet fever at five, which she later blamed for her learning difficulties, and left school as a young teenager to work and to help raise a niece. She married Arthur Noe, and their first child was born in 1949. Over the next two decades she had ten children. One was stillborn and another died hours after birth of natural causes. The other eight were healthy at birth and developing normally, and each died suddenly at home, between the ages of twelve days and fourteen months. For years the family was treated as the victim of an extraordinary run of misfortune.
She was arrested on August 5, 1998, and charged with eight counts of murder. "I think that as a country, we don't want to admit to ourselves that mothers kill their children," said the Philadelphia district attorney, Lynne Abraham. Arthur Noe stood by her and was never charged. "I've lived with this woman for 50 years," he told the New York Times. "She was my life. That woman was not capable of doing such a thing."
In June 1999 she pleaded guilty to eight counts of second-degree murder under an agreement with prosecutors; the date is given as June 28 and June 29, and she was seventy or seventy-one. She was sentenced to twenty years of probation, with an initial period under home confinement given as five years in most accounts and five months in one, a sentence widely seen as controversial. As part of the agreement she submitted to psychiatric study to try to find out why she had killed her children; a report filed with the court in September 2001 said she suffered from a mixed personality disorder. Arthur Noe died in 2009. Marie Noe died in Philadelphia on May 5, 2016, aged eighty-seven.