Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,121

open collar, no tie—and saw one in the crowd. It was Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried, who’d arranged to get into the speech through the good offices of a source, New Jersey pathologist Jim Lewis, just so he could speak with Fleisher. Fleisher turned to listen. This was the reporter’s chance.

“I want to talk to you about Marie Noe,” Fried said. Fried, winner of national awards for investigative reporting, said he had been working on the long-dormant story of Marie Noe, the tragic Philadelphia woman who lost eight of her ten children, born between 1949 and 1968, to crib death. In 1963, Life magazine wrote a heartrending story of the deaths of Richard, Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Arthur Jr., Constance, Mary Lee, Cathy, and Little Artie despite the couple’s heroic attempts to make a family. Never in American history had such an awful fate befallen a mother. Fleisher knew all about sad Marie Noe; he waited for Fried to reach his point.

His point was that Marie Noe had murdered all her children. That’s what it looked like to Fried, who was inspired to dig into the case after reading The Death of Innocents, by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, the true story of a New York woman convicted in 1994 of murdering her five children decades earlier. The book explored new scientific research that indicated that many “crib deaths” were in fact murder. Fried had spent hours interviewing Marie and her husband, Artie, at the elderly couple’s Kensington row house, turning over their scrapbooks.

He’d interviewed Joe McGillen, VSM, a retired medical examiner’s investigator, a tough, diminutive Irishman who worked part-time as a “bird dog,” or baseball scout, but spent most of his time trying to bring to justice the killers of nine children from the 1950s whose murders he had never stopped investigating—the Boy in the Box and the eight babies of Marie Noe. He’d waited for decades for somebody to ask him about his investigation of Marie Noe’s babies, whom he always thought were murdered.

Fried had interviewed Dr. Marie Valdes-Dapena, now seventy-seven and the “grandmother of sudden infant death research,” who had performed the autopsy on Constance, baby number five, in 1958. After several hours of looking at Fried’s evidence, Dr. Valdes-Dapena said, “It just seems impossible that this woman is still walking around as free as a bird. . . . I’m ninety-nine percent sure that these deaths were not a natural happening.”

Fried had two boxes filled with research material. But he needed access to decades-old police records, the case files, to get any further. He needed help.

Fleisher shook his head sadly. “I can’t get you records, but I can get you help.” Fleisher later introduced Steve Fried to Sergeant Laurence Nodiff, Philadelphia PD’s cold-case squad supervisor. “I made a shidduch, an arranged marriage, between Steve and Larry.”

Sergeant Nodiff was stunned by Fried’s files. The reporter had conducted an investigation worthy of a top-flight detective. Nodiff reopened the case based on Fried’s work. One of his first steps was to take Marie and Artie’s polygraph results to Fleisher and Gordon for a review. In the 1960s, both husband and wife had been judged to be truthful when they claimed to know nothing about how the babies died. If that was still the case in Fleisher’s and Gordon’s view, Nodiff was less likely to go interview the Noes.

In the brownstone headquarters of the Vidocq Society, Fleisher and Gordon studied the charts. They shook their heads in bewilderment. “Marie’s charts are clearly deceptive,” they agreed. “Arthur’s charts are inconclusive at best.”

Fleisher also persuaded Hal Fillinger, the esteemed Philadelphia medical examiner and Vidocq Society Member, to take a new interest in the deaths of Marie Noe’s babies. The cold case was reuniting three graying forensic warriors, all stalwart figures from the renowned Philadelphia medical examiner’s office of the 1960s. Dr. Fillinger had been treated for cancer; investigator McGillen recently had a quadruple bypass; Dr. Valdes-Dapena was becoming forgetful. Marie Noe’s babies had been one of the first major cases of their careers; now it would be one of the last.

Dr. Fillinger had been long frustrated by the case. “I remember telling a nun there were two ways of looking at this. ‘If you give Marie Noe a baby, she’ll either kill it quickly . . . or, if she had no hand in these deaths, nobody deserves a baby more than she does.’ ” He’d long regarded the case as a “ditzel. A ditzel is a case that looks like a goodie, but