would come to headquarters for questioning. The Noes had the right to refuse but they said yes, they’d just be a few minutes. They had just finished dinner, and needed to take care of their cats and dogs.
“Will you put Asshole downstairs?” Arthur called to his wife. Asshole, he explained to the cops, was one of their cats. Marie tended to the cat, then they put on light jackets and slowly climbed into the police van. They had been together most of their lives. Marie was diabetic, and not well. Arthur was trembling. Theirs was an unbreakable bond built, as many are, on things understood, things not said.
Marie and Arthur were taken to separate interrogation rooms in the Roundhouse, the cement police headquarters downtown. In Interrogation Room C, Arthur, a chain-smoker, was downcast and nervous. A sharp, quick-talking man, he had worked in Kensington’s textile factories for years. He had served as a Democratic committeeman in the river ward and as an assistant to a city councilman. He hated to see Marie dragged through the tragedies again. Losing all those children between 1949 and 1968 had been like “taking away half her life.” As he had told a reporter, “It may be news to you. It’s suffering to us.” Detective Jack McDermott quickly realized that Arthur had nothing new to tell them, and offered him a ride home. Arthur said he’d prefer to wait for his wife.
As night came, Arthur lit a cigarette and sat watching the television on the battered filing cabinets lining the homicide division. Marie was in Interrogation Room D with Sergeant Nodiff and Detective Vivarina. Arthur worried about his wife’s health, looked at his watch, smoking all through the night. As the sky lightened, he was still waiting.
At five o’clock in the morning, Marie hobbled out of the interrogation room, her careworn face collapsed in fatigue and relief. It had been eleven hours with the detectives. Arthur came and touched her gently, his eyes lingering in concern. Marie held her husband’s eyes and her secrets. Even when she’d tried to tell the truth, Arthur always interrupted her. Among the couple’s many unspoken routines during the past forty years together, this was the most important. It was as if he didn’t want to know.
Sergeant Nodiff, the city’s lead cold-case detective and a member of the Vidocq Society, was one of the department’s sharpest interrogators. Detective Vivarina could amiably keep anybody talking. So they’d talked and talked with Marie all night. Then before dawn, Sergeant Nodiff confided years later to detectives at an out-of-town conference, one of the strangest things in his career happened to him. He blushed and said, “You just won’t believe it,” as he told it. Marie, sitting right next to the sergeant, reached out and put her wrinkled hand on the dark trousers covering his leg. Slowly, as she gently stroked the sergeant’s inner thigh, the unspoken words of decades came tumbling out.
She confessed.
She had smothered her babies with a pillow, she said. She and Arthur had ten children. One was stillborn. Another died in the hospital six hours after birth. The remaining eight went home in excellent health. None of them lived longer than fifteen months. Marie admitted to killing them all. She waited until Arthur was out of the house, a pattern she repeated each time. She hid all the murders from her husband and relatives. Marie was alone with the babies in the house.
She could remember the deaths of only four of her children in detail. They were the first three and the fifth. The murders of Richard Allen Noe, 1949; Elizabeth Mary Noe, 1951; Jacqueline Noe, 1952; and Constance Noe, 1958, were etched in her mind. She remembered Richard, her firstborn, very clearly. He was born March 7, 1949, a healthy seven pounds, eleven ounces. “He was always crying. He couldn’t tell me what was bothering him. He just kept crying. . . .”
“The day that he died,” Marie said, she was getting Richard ready for bed. “I bathed him and put him in nightclothes and I was going to put him down for the night. I put him on his belly instead of his back in his bassinet, and there was a pillow under his face, he was lying facedown. Then I took my hand and pressed his face down into the pillow until he stopped moving.” Richard Noe was thirty-one days old. His cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but no autopsy was performed. It