Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,168
alcohol and sexually assaulted him repeatedly as a teenager in 2000 and 2001. An eyewitness described a car similar to Erickson’s parked outside the funeral home at the time of the killings. Detectives testified that Erickson knew crime scene details only the killer would know, such as how many bullets were fired into the victims (three) and where they struck (in the head). A church deacon testified that Erickson confessed the killings to him. Erickson was looking out a window when he blurted out, “I done it, and they’re going to get me. . . . Do you know what they do with young guys in prison, especially priests?”
Judge Lundell wrote, “I conclude that Ryan Erickson probably committed the crimes in question. On a scale of one to ten, I would consider it a ten.” The Vidocq Society awarded the Medal of Honor to several members of the Hudson Police Department for solving the double murder at the O’Connell Funeral Home.
Fleisher was especially proud of their work on the tragic case of Marie Noe, convicted of killing eight of her babies. Three months after her arrest, Marie Noe, then seventy years old and walking into the courtroom with a cane, pleaded guilty in June 1999 to smothering eight of her ten children beginning in 1949. The case drew national attention, forcing police and medical professionals to rethink many cases long believed to be sudden infant death syndrome or “crib death” as possible murders.
Marie’s husband, Arthur, sat shaking his head as the names of the eight children were read aloud, and the prosecutor described his wife as “as much a mass murderer as Ted Bundy.”
Noe’s lawyer, David Rudenstein, said Marie did not have “the heart of a killer. This is one of those situations that make us human. Some things happen in life that we cannot understand.”
The court treated Marie more like a sad old mother than a psychopathic killer. She would serve no jail time for mass murder. By the conditions of her plea bargain, which took into account Arthur’s frail health, she was given twenty years of probation, the first five under home confinement, with at least a year with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. She was also ordered to undergo treatment sessions with a psychiatrist; her brain was said to be important to study for clues to the root causes of infanticide. Marie told detectives, “All I can figure is that I’m ungodly sick.”
The Vidocq Society had awarded Medals of Honor to Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried and Philadelphia homicide Sergeant Larry Nodiff for their work on the Noe case.
Even amid celebration, Fleisher had regrets. “I’m Jewish,” he said. “I always have regrets.”
Near the top of the list was Carol Ann Dougherty, the nine-year-old raped and murdered in a church in 1962. The Bristol police investigation had gone nowhere. DNA testing advised by the Vidocq Society was “inconclusive.” In 1997, Chief Frank Peranteau told the Vidocq Society that “he considers the matter over as the Grand Jury had identified a possible suspect who has been convicted of another murder in another state,” O’Kane wrote in the Vidocq case log. “The investigation appeared to clear the suspect priest, but he could not explain the ligature,” the strangulation marks that matched a priest’s cincture. No arrests were made.
But thirteen years after the Vidocq Society called the priest the prime suspect, a Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 named Father Sabadish one of sixty-three pedophile priests that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had allowed to prey on their flocks in the past fifty years. The archdiocese was accused of routinely transferring molesters to keep hundreds of abuse allegations from surfacing.
Joan McCrane testified to the grand jury that Sabadish molested her when she was seven years old in 1960, two years before Carol was murdered, at St. Michael the Archangel in Levittown. It started with “tickling,” she said. “He’d put his hands on my shoulders. Then, on my chest. Then, down my pants. . . . He told me that it was our secret and that I was never to tell anyone or we’d both go to hell. I never said anything because I was a little girl and I was scared to death.”
Transferred to St. Mark’s in 1962, Sabadish molested her for two more years, then started abusing her ten-year-old brother, Bill Henis. Sabadish’s assaults on the siblings occurred at the rectories at St. Mark’s and St. Michael’s, the priest’s home, his car, and his mother’s home, often weekly.