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.
it was the spring of 1998. 30 years after marie noe s tenth baby died, and decades after police first investigated marie and arthur noe. investigative journalist stephen fried had just finished an article on the couple when he received a phone call he ll never forget. dr. hal fillinger, the former assistant philadelphia medical examiner, made the call. hal called me one day and he said, can you keep a secret? and i was like, yeah. and he said, she confessed. and honestly, i fell down on the floor crying. the whole time we had done this investigation while we all agreed that it was an important investigation to do and it would be a really interesting story, everybody always said, the only way that anything happens here is if she confesses, and that will never happen. just days before the article was released to the public, the police received an advance copy. and took action.
moms who are about to give birth. the noes tenth child, arthur jr., their second son to be given that name, was born in july of 1967. 18 years after marie noe gave birth to her first child. like catherine before him, arthur was kept in the hospital for observation. doctors and nurses were also observing the noes behavior during this time and they noted how little the couple visited their newborn baby. one nurse said that they came twice during the three months the baby was there. without solid evidence against the noes, the authorities couldn t keep little arty in the hospital any longer. three months after he went home, marie noe reported finding her tenth child face-up, gasping for breath. and turning blue. arthur jr. died january 2, 1968. he was just 5 months old.
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
msnbc, now. herman cain suspended his bid for the presidential nomination this afternoon. this comes five days after a woman claimed to have an affair with him. cain continues to deny all allegations of sexual misconduct. jerry sandusky breaks his silence in an interview and says they twisted his relationship with students and denies as well abuse charges. now, more on cradle to grave. after nearly two decades of investigation, the philadelphia medical examiner s office was baffled by the unexplained deaths of six of arthur and marie noe s children. one other baby was stillborn and another died hours after birth of a blood abnormality.