Marie Noe was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and married Arthur Noe, a fire insurance man and later a Republican ward figure, in 1949. They had ten children.
One was stillborn and one died in hospital of a genuine cause. The other eight died at home, between the ages of five days and fourteen months, between 1949 and 1968. Each was recorded as a cot death or as of undetermined cause, and the family was written about sympathetically in the press as suffering an extraordinary run of misfortune, including in a 1963 article in Life magazine.
The medical examiner's office had doubts at the time and did not act on them. What eventually reopened it was journalism: in 1997 Stephen Fried published a long piece in Philadelphia Magazine going through the files, and forensic pathologists reviewing them concluded that eight deaths in one household from undetermined causes was not a medical phenomenon.
She was arrested in 1998 and told detectives that she had smothered four of them with a pillow and could not remember the others. In June 1999, aged seventy, she pleaded guilty to eight counts of second degree murder and was sentenced to twenty years of probation with the first five under house arrest, in a disposition that took account of her age and cooperation and that some of the professionals involved thought inadequate. She died in 2016.