Richard Walter was working on a profile of the killer based on the crime scene. Frank Bender, seated next to Walter, closely examined all the old photographs of the boy. Bender was doing an age-progression sculpture, but one even more challenging than John List’s. Bender was sculpting the bust of what he felt the boy’s father looked like, hoping someone would recognize the father and come forward with information on the case. With not an iota of knowledge of the boy’s parents, he was flying purely on intuition. But Bender had performed a miracle with List, and America ’s Most Wanted had committed to airing a fall episode on the Boy in the Box featuring the bust. There was a sense of possibility in the air.
Weinstein stood, heavyset and balding, his face worn with the curse of a photographic memory. He was thirty years old again, passing through the tree line to the field off Susquehanna Road; he was kicking his rubber boots through the muck and wet underbrush. “I saw all this garbage,” he said, “and a young white boy whose hair was chopped. It was a sad, heartbreaking thing to see. It was a dump. This was homicide.”
Weinstein said the case had been taken away from him, a patrolman, and assigned to detectives forty years ago. He’d stubbornly conducted his own investigation, and through a confidential informant found a local man who had photos of himself with a young blond boy on his lap and “an Indian blanket spread out.” He purchased the photos. He interviewed the man, who was “very cooperative” but “extremely nervous,” in a restaurant. The man “started to get shaky.” He had just agreed to go to the Homicide Unit for questioning when a superior officer saw Weinstein in the restaurant and ordered him to leave, ending his role in the investigation. Weinstein said he welcomed a second chance he never thought he’d have.
Kelly dreamed of solving the case as the crowning moment of his career, and in many ways his life. McGillen’s wife was proud of his efforts to help bring Marie Noe to justice and now perhaps helping to resolve the Boy in the Box murder. She was dying of cancer, and she prayed she would see him triumph in the cases.
Bender said he had a vision that the boy had been dressed as a girl. His caretakers had grown his hair out long and chopped it to conceal his identity just before killing him. Walter snorted and others laughed.
“Keep your day job, Frank,” Walter reminded him, his favorite dismissal of his creative partner.
Fleisher longed to give the boy a decent burial. “This case is solvable,” he said. Even if the killer or killers were dead, he said, their purpose would be to restore to the boy the dignity of his name, and avenge him with their only remaining weapon, the truth. They could bring the killer “to reckoning if not to justice.”
“Bah!” Walter glared at Fleisher, a look he usually reserved for people who peddle Bibles door-to-door. The thin man had grown weary of the sentimentality in the air. He openly mocked the consensus that had initially started with Bristow that the boy had been accidentally killed by loving caretakers who fled with broken hearts, unable to afford a decent burial. In 1957, police had seen it as a murder, but over time, at Bristow’s urging, they’d publicly said it was an accident.
The child, Walter thought, was sacrificed to the most malevolent murdering personality of all, and to preserve their own innocence the cops had made a fetish of his lost childhood, keeping him an eternal child as he moldered forty-one years in the grave. The killer represented a force so vile the cops couldn’t face the truth. Without truth, how could they find the killer?
They had waited forty-one years for the truth, and in fact now seemed energetically devoted to the long martyrdom of failure; the mystery gave them such purpose, and the truth admitted none of the romance of beach toys and baseball gloves.
“It’s hard to find something,” Walter sniffed later, “when you don’t know what you’re looking for.” The horror behind his cool, dry words seemed not to penetrate the others.
The fact was that after forty-one years of continuous investigation, thousands of police interviews across thirty states, and thousands of pages or pieces of so-called evidence, they still had nothing to go on. Never in American detective history, outside the Lindbergh kidnapping, had so much effort been expended on a child murder case to produce so little, he thought.
“We don’t have much,” Walter reasoned. “But I don’t need much.” The marks on the body told a plain and incontrovertible story, one the others were loath to hear.
CHAPTER 42. THE EIGHT BABIES CALLED “IT”
On a Wednesday evening in late March 1998, an unmarked black Ford Explorer carrying Philadelphia police sergeant Larry Nodiff and two of his detectives from the Special Investigations Unit parked on a narrow street in the old working-class river ward of Kensington. The murky industrial air along the river was gray with twilight. A crescent moon, nearly black, hung above the lane of small brick row houses.
Sergeant Nodiff knocked on the door of a row home that looked like all the others. Nodiff looked up at darkened windows. His partner Steve Vivarina chewed his coffee stirrer. The day before, Stephen Fried’s investigative story on Marie Noe’s long-forgotten tragedy, “Cradle to Grave,” was published in Philadelphia magazine, and as the magazine hit the streets the city was abuzz with it. Sergeant Nodiff, who had read an advance copy, decided it was time to pay Marie and Arthur Noe a visit about the deaths of their eight babies. It was a historian’s task as well as police work. The babies had died across nineteen years, from the Truman administration to LBJ. The police had not questioned the Noes about the deaths in thirty years. Now a few minutes passed.
Presently the thin, hard face of Arthur Noe, seventy-six years old, filled a crack in the door. Behind him loomed the larger frame of his wife, Marie, sixty-nine. Sergeant Nodiff showed his badge and asked if they would come to headquarters for questioning. The Noes had the right to refuse but they said yes, they’d just be a few minutes. They had just finished dinner, and needed to take care of their cats and dogs.
“Will you put Asshole downstairs?” Arthur called to his wife. Asshole, he explained to the cops, was one of their cats. Marie tended to the cat, then they put on light jackets and slowly climbed into the police van. They had been together most of their lives. Marie was diabetic, and not well. Arthur was trembling. Theirs was an unbreakable bond built, as many are, on things understood, things not said.
Marie and Arthur were taken to separate interrogation rooms in the Roundhouse, the cement police headquarters downtown. In Interrogation Room C, Arthur, a chain-smoker, was downcast and nervous. A sharp, quick-talking man, he had worked in Kensington’s textile factories for years. He had served as a Democratic committeeman in the river ward and as an assistant to a city councilman. He hated to see Marie dragged through the tragedies again. Losing all those children between 1949 and 1968 had been like “taking away half her life.” As he had told a reporter, “It may be news to you. It’s suffering to us.” Detective Jack McDermott quickly realized that Arthur had nothing new to tell them, and offered him a ride home. Arthur said he’d prefer to wait for his wife.
As night came, Arthur lit a cigarette and sat watching the television on the battered filing cabinets lining the homicide division. Marie was in Interrogation Room D with Sergeant Nodiff and Detective Vivarina. Arthur worried about his wife’s health, looked at his watch, smoking all through the night. As the sky lightened, he was still waiting.
At five o’clock in the morning, Marie hobbled out of the interrogation room, her careworn face collapsed in fatigue and relief. It had been eleven hours with the detectives. Arthur came and touched her gently, his eyes lingering in concern. Marie held her husband’s eyes and her secrets. Even when she’d tried to tell the truth, Arthur always interrupted her. Among the couple’s many unspoken routines during the past forty years together, this was the most important. It was as if he didn’t want to know.