Sergeant Nodiff, the city’s lead cold-case detective and a member of the Vidocq Society, was one of the department’s sharpest interrogators. Detective Vivarina could amiably keep anybody talking. So they’d talked and talked with Marie all night. Then before dawn, Sergeant Nodiff confided years later to detectives at an out-of-town conference, one of the strangest things in his career happened to him. He blushed and said, “You just won’t believe it,” as he told it. Marie, sitting right next to the sergeant, reached out and put her wrinkled hand on the dark trousers covering his leg. Slowly, as she gently stroked the sergeant’s inner thigh, the unspoken words of decades came tumbling out.
She confessed.
She had smothered her babies with a pillow, she said. She and Arthur had ten children. One was stillborn. Another died in the hospital six hours after birth. The remaining eight went home in excellent health. None of them lived longer than fifteen months. Marie admitted to killing them all. She waited until Arthur was out of the house, a pattern she repeated each time. She hid all the murders from her husband and relatives. Marie was alone with the babies in the house.
She could remember the deaths of only four of her children in detail. They were the first three and the fifth. The murders of Richard Allen Noe, 1949; Elizabeth Mary Noe, 1951; Jacqueline Noe, 1952; and Constance Noe, 1958, were etched in her mind. She remembered Richard, her firstborn, very clearly. He was born March 7, 1949, a healthy seven pounds, eleven ounces. “He was always crying. He couldn’t tell me what was bothering him. He just kept crying…”
“The day that he died,” Marie said, she was getting Richard ready for bed. “I bathed him and put him in nightclothes and I was going to put him down for the night. I put him on his belly instead of his back in his bassinet, and there was a pillow under his face, he was lying facedown. Then I took my hand and pressed his face down into the pillow until he stopped moving.” Richard Noe was thirty-one days old. His cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but no autopsy was performed. It was accepted medical wisdom in the 1950s that a mother would not kill her children.
Two years later, in 1951, alone in the house with Elizabeth Mary, Marie picked up and held her pink, squirming, squalling daughter, a healthy and vigorous five months old. She put Elizabeth Mary in the bassinet. “I put her on her back, and then I took a pillow from the bed and put the pillow over her face and suffocated her.” Elizabeth was memorable because “she was fussing. Elizabeth was a lot stronger than Richard was, and she was fighting when the pillow was over her face. I held the pillow over her face until she stopped moving.”
A year later, in 1952, Jacqueline Noe died in infancy. Marie admitted to killing her second daughter the same way she did her first son and daughter, but couldn’t remember any details.
As she told the story, she called each baby “it.” Detectives kept insisting she call the children by name.
Six years later, in 1958, Constance Noe was born at St. Luke’s Hospital. Abraham Perlman, a pediatrician who treated the baby, was suspicious because Constance ’s four older siblings had all died. The pediatrician noticed a pattern to the deaths, he told police years later. Marie Noe was always home alone with the child. In each case, she took the infant to a hospital or called a neighbor to help her, saying, “Something’s wrong with the baby.” The children were all dead on arrival. Noe’s explanation was always that the baby had been “gasping for breath and turning blue.” It was medical orthodoxy then that children could suddenly stop breathing, and the fatal syndrome might be a defect that ran in families, so Dr. Perlman performed extensive tests on Constance to find any possible weakness. All the tests came back normal. Constance was a robustly healthy baby girl.
As mother and child left the hospital, Dr. Perlman told Marie that Constance was a beautiful child. Her mother replied, “She’s not going to live… just like the others.”
One month later, Constance, a healthy, thriving baby girl, was having difficulty sitting in a chair. “I was trying to train her on how to sit up in the chair,” Marie said. “I don’t know why, but then I took a pillow and laid her down on the chair, and I suffocated her.”
The autopsy of Constance was performed by pathologist Marie Valdes-Dapena at the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Dr. Valdes-Dapena, who would later become a recognized authority on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), was baffled. Pathologists were mystified by “crib death,” she said. The scientific study of infant death was just beginning, and no one had coined the term “SIDS.” Doctors had no idea why approximately 7,000 babies a year simply stopped breathing. Even years later, when doctors suspected many of those deaths to be infanticide, it was extraordinarily difficult for a pathologist to distinguish a baby who died of SIDS from one who was suffocated.
Marie Noe had discovered the perfect murder.
Marie did not cry during the confession. She said calmly that she killed baby Arthur Jr. in 1955, but couldn’t remember how. Arthur Jr. was born nine months to the day after Marie said she was raped by a stranger and left bound with her husband’s ties in the bedroom closet. Her last three children were featured in the Life story, a compassionate tale of the mother who lost all her babies-Mary Lee, born in 1962, Catherine Ellen in 1964, and the last born, Arthur Joseph. The ninth child, Catherine Ellen, lived the longest-one year, two months, and twenty-two days. She died on February 25, 1966, of undetermined cause. The last born, Arthur Joseph, died on January 2, 1968, at the age of five months. At the time, Marie told police that Arthur Joseph just turned blue and stopped breathing. An autopsy was performed, but no determination was made on the manner of death. Marie now confessed to killing all three babies born in the 1960s, but couldn’t recall details.
As the sun came up, the confession was typed up. Marie read it over and signed it. She leaned back, her face flushed with relief. She told detectives she always hoped police would find out. “I knew what I was doing was very wrong,” she said. She stood slowly to leave Interrogation Room D. Suddenly, she turned to face Nodiff and Vivarina. Her face was creased in concern, her voice a whisper: “Don’t tell my husband what I told you.”
Sergeant Nodiff and detective Vivarina looked at each other. An old lady who would barely walk without assistance had killed more people than David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz or the Boston Strangler. They had a detailed confession of eight murders-infanticide, perhaps the most taboo of human crimes. In God’s name, why? And now what could they do with it?
Marie was weak; Arthur walked her slowly outside. They climbed in the police van for a quiet ride home.
Five months later, Marie Noe was arrested and charged with the suffocation murders of eight of her ten children. Noe’s attorney denied the charges. Prosecutors said they would seek life imprisonment.
Her husband, Arthur, who was not charged, said he was standing by his wife.
“I’ve lived with this woman for fifty years,” he said. “She was my life. That woman was not capable of doing such a thing. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”
CHAPTER 43. MURDER IN TRIPLICATE
She was murdered three times. That was the salient point of the horrific killing of Terri Lee Brooks, Richard Walter thought with grim satisfaction. He took a reluctant nibble of a thick-crust apple pie, a sip of black coffee-a Colombian blend, too weak-and stared at the corpse of the dark-haired young woman whose slaying had confused police for so many years.