Cradle to Grave

Bristow also learned that Mrs. Noe had once reported being raped, and he found a 1954 Inquirer police roundup story that included information about an attack on a Marie Noe. It said that a housewife had fainted after walking into her home, where she was surprised by a red-haired burglar who had been hiding in her bedroom closet. She said she awoke to find herself bound and gagged with her husband’s neckties — which is how her husband discovered her when he arrived home an hour later — and $15 missing from her handbag. According to her emergency room report, she told doctors that the stranger tied a necktie around her neck and then she fainted, yet her physical exam turned up no signs of physical trauma consistent with rape or strangulation.

Exactly nine months from the day of the attack, she gave birth to the son the couple named Arthur Jr. Bristow also found that Mrs. Noe had reported being raped in 1949, only weeks before giving birth to her first child. She told police that just before midnight a man sneaked into Art’s parents’ house, where the newlyweds were living, and attacked her while she dozed on the living room couch waiting for her husband to get home from the mill. Her father-in-law, sleeping upstairs, was not awakened, even after, as Mrs. Noe now recalls, she bit her assailant’s ear. There were no arrests.

One of Mrs. Noe’s siblings would later tell investigators about an even earlier sexual assault alleged by Marie, when she was a teenager. While the family was living in Cape May, Marie said she was raped by a man in the Coast Guard.

But even this was not the earliest trauma experienced by Mrs. Noe. McGillen and Bristow were able to piece together her tumultuous family history from interviews and a sheaf of old public documents generated every time Marie’s mother, a housewife and part-time cleaning lady, took Marie’s father, a wife-beating janitor with a drinking problem, to court.

Because of her parents’ troubled marriage, Marie ended up being committed to the Catholic Children’s Bureau. She was only in the orphanage for three months, but she celebrated her third birthday there before returning to live with her mother.

When she was five, Marie contracted scarlet fever, as did her younger brother. That same year, Marie’s 12-year-old sister was raped; a 40-year-old man was arrested and convicted for the attack. According to court documents, when Marie was 12, another of her older sisters gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, who was taken in and raised as Marie’s sister. Marie soon dropped out of school to work and help care for the infant. In fact, until she married, Marie was required to give every dollar she made to her mother, whom she recalls today as unloving, unsympathetic and sometimes violent, whipping Marie with a cat-o’-nine-tails. According to court documents, when Marie was 14, one of her siblings was sent to a state hospital for psychiatric treatment and was diagnosed with “post-traumatic personality disorder.”

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