Cradle to Grave

Her nursing colleague, Sister Gemma, told investigators that not only did Mrs. Noe have an “apparent inability to establish a normal maternal rapport with her child,” but “there were times when [she] acted like two distinctly different persons.”

Victorine also noted that whenever the nurses allowed Mrs. Noe to feed the baby, she would always bring the food back to them claiming she couldn’t get her to eat much. Yet after Mrs. Noe would leave, the nurses would feed Cathy, who would consume all her food eagerly. On one occasion, Sister Victorine left Mrs. Noe alone with Cathy in the kitchen adjoining the ward. When Mrs. Noe couldn’t get the baby to eat, Sister Victorine overheard her say, “You better take this or I’ll kill you!”

Cathy was discharged in the early spring of 1965. In preparation, Dr. Gangemi hypnotized Mrs. Noe and gave her posthypnotic suggestions he hoped would instill confidence in her ability to raise the child and reduce her anxiety over the baby’s crying. He also gave her self-hypnosis/relaxation techniques to use every morning for a half hour — she still uses them to this day — and was pleased to see that they seemed to work for a while. That summer, the Noes enjoyed their pudgy-cheeked daughter, taking her to the World’s Fair in New York and to the shore. While none of their other kids had lived long enough to be photographed much, this time they even started a photo album. In it, Mrs. Noe often wrote down not only how many months old Cathy was, but how many days. “I was terrified having every one of them children,” she recalls today, “not knowing what was going to happen, when it was going to happen. It was like a devil sitting on my back.”

Mrs. Noe eventually again began calling Dr. Gangemi incessantly. And on August 31st — just after they had returned from the shore — she called claiming to have discovered Cathy in her crib, choking on a dry-cleaning bag. She said the baby had pulled the bag off one of Art’s suits that was hanging in a nearby closet. Gangemi later recalled being horrified and not even bothering to hide his suspicions, snapping at her, “Now, how could an eight-month-old baby get ahold of a large sheet of plastic off of a suit hanging in the closet?” Marie replied that she didn’t know, but “it was fortunate [I] found her in time.” Gangemi told her to take Cathy to the hospital immediately. When Mr. Noe was questioned about the incident later, he said the suit wasn’t hanging in a closet, but on a bar he had put between two side walls in the room for lack of storage space — which still didn’t explain why it was within the baby’s reach.

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