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