Cradle to Grave

The day Cathy returned home, the Noes celebrated a belated Christmas. Cathy got a baby doll with a toy stroller, a tricycle, a toy phone and a “Spell It” learning game. Ten days later, while Art was out having a beer, Marie found the baby having what she described as “a slight seizure,” and gave her oxygen. Two weeks after that, on Valentine’s Day, Marie said she had just finished doing the laundry when she checked on Cathy, who was napping on her stomach in the playpen, and found her turning blue. She said she tried to give the child oxygen, but her “tongue was between her teeth and her jaws set tight.” She called Gangemi, who made a house call. While he could find no reason for Cathy’s reported condition, he prescribed a liquid version of the antiseizure medicine Dilantin.

On the morning of February 25, 1966, Mrs. Noe was again doing laundry when she found Cathy unconscious in her playpen. She called the rescue squad, but when they didn’t respond quickly enough, she ran to her neighbor, who drove them to Episcopal Hospital. Cathy was DOA. Her bluish body was still warm.

At 2 p.m. that day, Joe McGillen and his partner, Remington “Rem” Bristow, arrived at the Noe home to discuss the ninth dead child. While McGillen was a hard-working OME investigator with glasses, prematurely gray hair and a flair for writing reports with dramatic detail, Bristow arrived with his own personal drama. He was the sharp-featured sleuth who wouldn’t rest until the city’s most famous unsolved murder, the “boy in the box case,” was cracked. Every year the media would cover him putting flowers on the grave of the unidentified child who had been discovered naked and dead in a cardboard crate.

The two OME investigators looked around the place and spoke to both parents, who had asked a lawyer neighbor to be present. While Bristow spoke with Mrs. Noe in the kitchen, McGillen quizzed Mr. Noe upstairs in the bedroom. According to their report to the medical examiner, Mr. Noe “admitted that it must naturally look suspicious ... but he insists that he has never entertained the slightest doubts about his wife in this respect.”

Mr. Noe explained that his wife was more religious than he was, and while he had recently returned to the Catholic Church, neither of them was diligent in religious responsibilities. He also confided that he had had an alcohol problem and that his wife had helped him curtail his drinking. (Today, the Noes admit they both had drinking problems. Mrs. Noe says she often drank several glasses of wine in a day during her pregnancies because her doctor suggested it would help boost her low blood pressure. However, none of the babies displayed any symptoms associated with fetal alcohol syndrome.)

The next day, confidential sources told investigator Rem Bristow two interesting facts about the Noes. He learned that the bereaved parents were now hoping to adopt a baby. So he and his partner had to figure out how to quietly alert adoption authorities about the couple.

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