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
was released to the public, the police received an advance copy. and took action. we released the article to them the minute that it was available. and what i was told was that they took the article, they highlighted it, the parts that they needed for information, and they went and took the noes in for questioning. we weren t told about any of this. it was all happening in secret. on the evening of march 25th, 1998, arthur and marie noe were taken to philadelphia police headquarters, separated and questioned. this was the first time, according to police records, the pair was questioned outside their own home. and the first time they were questioned separately. they spoke to mr. noe for a short period of time and spoke to mrs. noe for a long period of time. mr. noe was sitting in the area watching tv, not understanding why his wife, they were taking so long with his wife. two detectives questioned marie noe for 11 hours. approximately a week before they
to various conditions. ranging from bronchopneumonia to congestive heart failure. yet the couple, apparently desperate to start a family, had another child. letitia. the result was the same. the child died. but this time, there was no question about what happened. they knew that it was going to be a stillbirth. mrs. noe described the situation where the doctors knew that the cord was wrapped around the baby s neck, the baby was dead and they believed that medically, she should carry to term. after the stillbirth, three years passed before mary lee, the noes seventh baby, was born in 1962. marie reported having many problems with mary lee and would call her doctor four or five times a day, complaining that the baby was crying. the baby wouldn t eat for her. and he considered this to be really off the scale. he just considered her to be a highly nervous, excitable woman. six months after mary lee was
halbert fillinger, who had recently joined the medical examiner s staff as an assistant 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
brought the noes in for 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 burying all ten of her children,