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.
you don t get two and three cases in a family. it s not part of the nature of that phenomenon. with our present knowledge now. the medical examiner would not call a second one in a family a sids. richard firstman co-wrote death of innocence, the book that started stephen fried s quest. it doesn t run in families. there are no studies suggesting that it is genetic. when you put all the factors together and you have two, and certainly three and four in a family, you need to look very hard at the possibility of homicide. coming up, is it sids or is it murder? lots of people were going, what is going on here? it s easy to see what subaru owners care about. that s why we created the share the love event.
children, but in court, marie confessed to smothering eight of her babies. as part of her plea deal. marie told the court, she was ungodly sick. along with investigative journalist stephen fried, many of the investigators working on the case were there, watching the results of their work play out in open court. so i sat in the back row and watched this amazing thing. to see marie noe get up in open court and admit that she killed her kids. after all that we had been through for the last year of doing the investigation. fried says marie showed a little more emotion in court that day than he d previously seen. her husband arthur sat in disbelief. this guy loves his wife and that s why he cannot fathom the idea that what she is saying can be true. he always says the same thing. do you think i would be with her if i thought for one second that
you don t get two and three cases in a family. it s not part of the nature of that phenomenon. with our present knowledge now. the medical examiner would not call a second one in a family a sids. richard firstman co-wrote death of innocence, the book that started stephen fried s quest. it doesn t run in families. there are no studies suggesting that it is genetic. when you put all the factors together and you have two, and certainly three and four in a family, you need to look very hard at the possibility of homicide. coming up, is it sids or is it murder? lots of people were going, what is going on here? [ male announcer ] imagine all of your missed opportunities in one place. the race of your life you never ran. the trip around the world you never took. the best-selling novel you never wrote. but there s one opportunity that s too good to miss.
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.