means nothing. It’s a fairy tale you bought and you get it home and the last chapter is torn out. So there is no answer. . . . I wonder what happened to those little kids. But there are so many blind alleys. You think you’ve got something meaty, but it’s like a papier-mâché pizza. You keep thinking, somebody must know something somewhere. But they don’t, because, well, it’s a ditzel.”
After reading the reporter’s file, Fillinger said, “This changes my whole concept of this case. This file really accuses them of murder. . . . I would have to go to the DA and say these people should be investigated.”
Many of the official records of the Noe case had since been destroyed. But in a spare bedroom of his home, McGillen had kept for four decades his investigative files on the Noe case. It was a startling record, and it gave Fried, Nodiff, the VSMs, and the district attorney a foundation to build upon as they developed the case.
It was registered as Vidocq Society Case No. 55, The Babies Noe Case. It looked to Fleisher like Marie Noe, right in his hometown, had been the most prolific killer of her own children in modern history—and gotten away with it.
• CHAPTER 41 •
THE BOY WHO NEVER DIED
The child was dead, brutally murdered, and the cops were converging on the scene from across the region. But they were driving more slowly now, forty-one years later. Patrolman Sam Weinstein, who carried the boy for the trip to the morgue that distant morning, was seventy-one years old now, but still burly with a hard glint in his eye. Bill Kelly, the gentler-natured fingerprint man, in his late sixties with white hair framing his liquid blue eyes, doted on his six daughters—“Kelly’s Angels”—and grandchildren. President Eisenhower, young pilot John Glenn setting a California-to-New York speed record, Hamilton’s electric “watch of the future,” the world they knew on February 25, 1957, was gone, but not forgotten. The cops were still working the case. From Ike to Clinton, through nine U.S. presidents, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, they had never stopped.
Kelly, retired from the police department, still never passed a hospital without checking the footprints on file of newborns from the early 1950s; he’d studied 11,000 prints, but maybe the next one would identify the boy. Weinstein sorted through the case records, boxes stuffed with files, photographs, hundreds of tips and notes, looking for anything they may have overlooked. Remington Bristow, the medical examiner’s investigator, had devoted thirty-seven years to the case, traveling everywhere with a death mask of the boy in his briefcase. When he touched the boy’s death mask he grieved as if he had been touched by a spirit, and he urged others to touch it, too; some investigators believed he had gone around the bend on the case. When Bristow moved from Philadelphia to Arizona, where he died in 1993, his granddaughter drove him across the country, stopping so that her grandfather, sickly and half-blind, could check new leads all the way. “Rem was ‘The Man,’ ” said Kelly, who had worked alongside him for years on the case. Rem’s work went on.
The boy, who would have been nearly fifty years old now, still lay in Potter’s Field, under the small monument the homicide bureau long ago purchased—the only monument in the field of body parts and the insane, criminals, and the forgotten. For four decades the detectives had visited with flowers in the spring, a yellow sand pail in summer, a newly oiled baseball glove for Christmas, as if he were growing up to be a fine young boy. Bristow had said that with his slender build the boy had the makings of a basketball player instead of football. The cold-case cops kept the boy alive with the heat of longing and memory. He was the boy who would never grow up, who would never die.
They prayed over the legend the homicide bureau once wrote:
“Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Child.”
If devotion to solving a child’s murder is a measure, the boy so little cared for in life had been more loved by two generations of police detectives than any child in Philadelphia history—loved when there was no hope.
Now there was hope. The Vidocq Society was on the case.
On Thursday, March 19, 1998, Weinstein and Kelly entered the old Public Ledger Building, across a side street from its twin, the Curtis Publishing Company