Dr. Fillinger had been long frustrated by the case. “I remember telling a nun there were two ways of looking at this. ‘If you give Marie Noe a baby, she’ll either kill it quickly… or, if she had no hand in these deaths, nobody deserves a baby more than she does.’ ” He’d long regarded the case as a “ditzel. A ditzel is a case that looks like a goodie, but means nothing. It’s a fairy tale you bought and you get it home and the last chapter is torn out. So there is no answer… I wonder what happened to those little kids. But there are so many blind alleys. You think you’ve got something meaty, but it’s like a papier-mâché pizza. You keep thinking, somebody must know something somewhere. But they don’t, because, well, it’s a ditzel.”
After reading the reporter’s file, Fillinger said, “This changes my whole concept of this case. This file really accuses them of murder… I would have to go to the DA and say these people should be investigated.”
Many of the official records of the Noe case had since been destroyed. But in a spare bedroom of his home, McGillen had kept for four decades his investigative files on the Noe case. It was a startling record, and it gave Fried, Nodiff, the VSMs, and the district attorney a foundation to build upon as they developed the case.
It was registered as Vidocq Society Case No. 55, The Babies Noe Case. It looked to Fleisher like Marie Noe, right in his hometown, had been the most prolific killer of her own children in modern history-and gotten away with it.
CHAPTER 41. THE BOY WHO NEVER DIED
The child was dead, brutally murdered, and the cops were converging on the scene from across the region. But they were driving more slowly now, forty-one years later. Patrolman Sam Weinstein, who carried the boy for the trip to the morgue that distant morning, was seventy-one years old now, but still burly with a hard glint in his eye. Bill Kelly, the gentler-natured fingerprint man, in his late sixties with white hair framing his liquid blue eyes, doted on his six daughters-“Kelly’s Angels”-and grandchildren. President Eisenhower, young pilot John Glenn setting a California-to-New York speed record, Hamilton’s electric “watch of the future,” the world they knew on February 25, 1957, was gone, but not forgotten. The cops were still working the case. From Ike to Clinton, through nine U.S. presidents, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, they had never stopped.
Kelly, retired from the police department, still never passed a hospital without checking the footprints on file of newborns from the early 1950s; he’d studied 11,000 prints, but maybe the next one would identify the boy. Weinstein sorted through the case records, boxes stuffed with files, photographs, hundreds of tips and notes, looking for anything they may have overlooked. Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator, had devoted thirty-seven years to the case, traveling everywhere with a death mask of the boy in his briefcase. When he touched the boy’s death mask he grieved as if he had been touched by a spirit, and he urged others to touch it, too; some investigators believed he had gone around the bend on the case. When Bristow moved from Philadelphia to Arizona, where he died in 1993, his granddaughter drove him across the country, stopping so that her grandfather, sickly and half-blind, could check new leads all the way. “Rem was ‘The Man,’ ” said Kelly, who had worked alongside him for years on the case. Rem’s work went on.
The boy, who would have been nearly fifty years old now, still lay in Potter’s Field, under the small monument the homicide bureau long ago purchased-the only monument in the field of body parts and the insane, criminals, and the forgotten. For four decades the detectives had visited with flowers in the spring, a yellow sand pail in summer, a newly oiled baseball glove for Christmas, as if he were growing up to be a fine young boy. Bristow had said that with his slender build the boy had the makings of a basketball player instead of football. The cold-case cops kept the boy alive with the heat of longing and memory. He was the boy who would never grow up, who would never die.
They prayed over the legend the homicide bureau once wrote:
“Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Child.”
If devotion to solving a child’s murder is a measure, the boy so little cared for in life had been more loved by two generations of police detectives than any child in Philadelphia history-loved when there was no hope.
Now there was hope. The Vidocq Society was on the case.
On Thursday, March 19, 1998, Weinstein and Kelly entered the old Public Ledger Building, across a side street from its twin, the Curtis Publishing Company building, where The Saturday Evening Post was once published, and took the elevator to the tenth floor, to the walnut-paneled Downtown Club. The former men’s club was the new meeting place of the Vidocq Society; the white-linen-covered round tables overlooking Independence Hall were now the setting, on the third Thursday of each month, of the Murder Room.
Vidocq Society commissioner Fleisher greeted the retired cops warmly. Weinstein and Kelly, Fleisher’s former police department colleagues, were now VSMs. Following an invocation by Kelly, the devout Catholic, and then lunch, Fleisher announced that the society was now investigating “one of the most amazing cases in Philadelphia history.” Fleisher had put the full power of the Vidocq Society into finding the identity and the killer of the Boy in the Box.
The Murder Room was filled beyond capacity with more than eighty detectives and their guests. Some detectives were forced to sit on stools at the bar. The menu was chicken, steamed vegetables, and a corpse with a small and unforgettable face. After lunch, the beaten, bruised image of the boy floated on the screen at the front of the room, his sunken eyeballs painted in shadows. Kelly fought back tears, as if he was seeing the picture for the first time. Fillinger, the city coroner who’d worked on the dead boy forty-one years ago, was ready to reexamine the case.
Fleisher had made another shidduch, this one with homicide detective Tom Augustine of the Philadelphia Police Department, which had agreed to reopen the case and work with the Vidocq Society investigators on the case. Augustine brought forty-one years of case files to the society’s brownstone headquarters on Locust Street. It was the sum total, from day one, of all “we’ve worked on day, night, and day year after year. Boxes and boxes, thousands of pages.” In a private second-floor room, Weinstein, Kelly, and McGillen were in the process of going back through all the old records. The three VSMs had formed a Boy in the Box investigative team, headed by Weinstein.
Now, at the meeting, a radiant energy emanated from the table of the old cops, white-haired, stooped, and balding, men whom only a heart attack or cancer could stop from pursuing the next lead. The old Catholic and Jewish detectives saw the murder of innocence not as an end but the beginning of a soul’s journey toward redemption. They were men who had a green thumb in the garden of death.
Fleisher introduced Ron Avery, the veteran Philadelphia Daily News columnist whose research for his new book, City of Brotherly Mayhem, had inspired the commissioner to revisit the case. Avery briefly reviewed the case he said was “indelibly emblazoned in our memory.” He tantalized the detectives with the fact that the case had provided “loads of clues and loads of evidence… dozens, scores, hundreds of good leads.”