psychiatrists. both district attorney lynne abraham and assistant d.a. charles gallagher declined to be interviewed for this program. the d.a. s office did issue this statement. marie noe, 79, is and will remain under court supervised probation until the year 2019. she served five years home confinement. she pled guilty to eight counts of murder. in connection with the deaths of her eight infant children. she has been fully compliant with the court s order to submit herself to evaluations by four different psychiatrists. these reports are confidential, in accordance with the pennsylvania rules of criminal procedure. dr. steven samuel was one of the psychiatrists who examined marie noe. he was told by the judge not to comment on this case, but he did say he evaluated marie for a total of some 70 hours.
the noes had four children and not one lived to see the first birthday. arthur and marie s fifth child, constance, was born in february of 1958. mrs. noe talked about her fear with each of the children. and, in fact, after constance was born, there s a mention in one of the files of a doctor coming in and saying to her, i m going to be your new pediatrician. and i m looking forward to taking care of your kids. she said something like, well, why bother, they all die anyway. those words proved prophetic. constance noe lived just one month before she was found dead in her crib by her father. for the first time, the death was referred to as a crib death. today known as sudden infant death syndrome, or sids. sids is a cause of death given when doctors fail to find anything physically wrong with the baby.
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.
possible. led by doctors hal fillinger and molly depena, the medical examiner s office launched an investigation. interviewing neighbors, family members and as many doctors as they could find. and what they discovered was disturbing. they went to talk to the noes doctor, dr. gangemi. a physician the noes loved. they had no idea what he was telling the medical examiner in his investigation was of the extreme suspicion of the noes. he described her as being possibly schizophrenic, possibly psychotic. and he really had grave questions about her mental capacities. investigators with the medical examiner s office also learned that marie noe claimed to have been raped, at least twice. once when she was pregnant with her first child, and a second time, exactly nine months before the birth of her fourth child. she was found by her husband, tied up in his neckties in their closet and claiming that somebody had come, that jumped out of the closet, surprised
money that would have been spent on her criminal prosecution and the money that would have been spent on her incarceration were then to be diverted to this once in a lifetime, perhaps, scientific study of what a person who may well have been the worst female serial killer in our nation s history. dr. feldman strongly believes a range of experts from varying fields needs to examine marie noe before she gets much older. i don t think it is ever too late to study her. i still think it is a brave idea for a sentence. mrs. noe is still alive, even though there have been, i think, a lot of fumbles on the way to this, ten years later, we re still talking about this case because it fascinates people. these murders occurred at a time when there were very few child protective laws on the books. although pennsylvania had a department of public welfare, the first child abuse law in the