it was considered an odd case. constance was the first noe baby the doctor performed an autopsy on. the doctor said she found no apparent cause of death. but instead of ruling it crib death, or sids, she said the cause was undetermined. no cause of death is apparent in the conduct of the autopsy. it was just nothing. which, of course, is quite unusual. the first person i called was molly depena. she is a very famous, used to be a very famous pediatric pathologist. she had done a number of the original autopsies when she lived in philadelphia in the 50s and 60s and she d also been the first person to ever let out there had been suspicions about the noes way back when. she recalled the medical examiner at the time. dr. joseph spellman, who is dead, that he believed the noes had been responsible for their children s deaths. the doctor says the diagnosis of crib death just wasn t possible in several children from the same family.
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.
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
medical examiner, got a grant. the grant was that they could offer the noes free medical care in order to allow them to monitor mrs. noe s pregnancy and her childbirth and the child s life after the child was born. but the noes rejected the offer. the noes were told by their doctor, and they told this to me, that they shouldn t get involved with this study because these big highfalutin doctors in the medical examiner s office were going to take their baby away from them. in 1963, theresa, the eighth child was born. she died after only six hours from a blood abnormality. dr. salvatore cuciatta, who delivered theresa, said he also recommended marie noe get additional care and psychiatric treatment beyond what she was getting from her primary care physician, dr. gangemi. but this offer was also rejected. it was a pattern in those days that the family doctor would refer their maternity
questioning, police got some new information that could help them secure a confession. after an expert looked at a lie detector test given to the couple in 1968. police learned it had been misread. marie noe did not pass the test as previously thought. and arthur noe s results were inconclusive at best but leaning toward deception. the cops described the situation where when mrs. noe started thinking about that she was going to talk to them, she actually put her hand on one of the cop s legs, which the cop thought was a little strange. they didn t quite know what to do about it. but it was part of the dynamic of seeing that she was sort of connecting to them. and i think there was a little bit of good cop, bad cop in that situation. and then she just started telling them. almost 50 years after her first baby died, and after