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His wife, homemaker marie, had lost five children, attributed to various conditions. ranging from bronchopneumonia to congestive heart failure. yet the couple, apparently desperate to start a family, had another child. letitia. the result was the same. the child died. but this time, there was no question about what happened. they knew that it was going to be a stillbirth. mrs. noe described the situation where the doctors knew that the cord was wrapped around the baby s neck, the baby was dead and they believed that medically she should carey it to term. after the stillbirth, three years passed before mary lee, the noes seventh baby, was born in 1962. marie reported having many problems with mary lee and would call her doctor four or five times a day, complaining that the baby was crying. the baby wouldn t eat for her. and he considered this to be really off the scale. he just considered her to be a highly nervous, excitable woman. ....
In the family. the saying was that one sids death in a family is sids. two is suspicious and three is homicide. dr. molly depena, who is a sids expert and performed autopsies on three of the noe children agrees that a serial sids case just isn t possible. apparently because it s not a genetic phenomenon, it is a natural, as far as we know, death, they are simply, sudden, unexpected and unexplained deaths. if the children weren t dying from sids, then what or who was killing them? on several occasions, marie noe took her babies to the hospital with breathing problems. but the children were released after doctors found nothing wrong with them. dr. feldman believes this kind of behavior could be a symptom of munchausen syndrome by proxy. the mother sickens the child ....
in fact the noes had insured some of their other children. an investigator for the medical examiner s office found that at least six of marie and arthur noes babies had been insured. some for as little as $100. and some for up to $1,000. but soon the noes had no need to adopt. approximately nine months into the process, marie announced she was withdrawing her adoption application. because she was pregnant. the impending birth put the philadelphia medical community on alert, determined to save this next child at all costs. when mrs. noe announced she was pregnant, dr. spellman, the medical examiner, was quite concerned. he called what was the beginnings of sort of the child and youth services agency and asked them to monitor the pregnancy. the medical examiner s office was paying rather close attention to this. and if you think about this, medical examiners investigate deaths. they re not usually following ....
Her, tied a necktie around her neck until she passed out. after finishing their investigation, the medical examiner s office turned over their findings to police. and it was now up to the department to do their own investigation. but police did not find enough evidence to arrest marie or arthur noe. in 1966, after losing nine babies, the noes decided to adopt. they went through an adoption service at a catholic church and were frustrated when they learned they had to wait up to nine months for a baby. the representatives of the adoption in the catholic church were concerned about the noes. they were concerned partly because of insurance. because after one of the meetings they had with prospective adoptive parents, the only question mr. noe asked of the sister was why no one mentioned whether adopted children could be insured, which she found to be a chilling question. in all the years she had been helping with adoptions she never heard anybody ask that question. ....
You want? do you want to send a woman in her 70s who is physically impaired to jail? is that what you re shooting for? that s the dilemma the philadelphia district attorney faced. how do you handle a case like this? like any other murder confession, according to d.a. lynne abraham. this is not unexplained. this is not undetermined. this is homicide. we didn t want to admit to ourselves that women did on occasion kill their own children. arthur noe was never considered a suspect in his children s deaths. that s because marie noe admitted, she was always the last one to see each child alive. mrs. noe is the focus of our attention. there doesn t appear right now to be any evidence linking mr. noe to the deaths of these children, except that he came home after all of the children had been pronounced dead at the hospital. so right now, there is no evidence against him at all. on august 5, 1998, district ....