Cradle to Grave

A psychiatric profile of Marie Noe was emerging from the dozens of interviews the investigators conducted in the neighborhood (where the Noes lived in several different rented houses over the years) and from the decades of family hospital records they were subpoenaing. Family physician Gangemi told investigators he regarded Mrs. Noe as “an unstable schizophrenic personality who quite possibly is psychotic.” He also said that she “loves attention,” and when she was being treated for a while by a psychiatrist, “she seemed to make constant reference to this treatment as if all of this concentrated attention made her some sort of celebrity.” Investigators could not locate any records of this treatment, although Marie does recall attending several psychoanalytic sessions at Temple, during which she was given a Rorschach test but “didn’t see anything on those blots but a blot.” Her husband recalls joining her at one session, but he never returned because “it got too personal about lovemaking.” He also recalls having “a nervous breakdown” after the death of their first child.

McGillen and Bristow did, however, eventually locate a 1949 treatment record concerning an incident several neighbors and family members had told them about: the time Mrs. Noe went blind.

Only 12 days after her first baby died, 20-year-old Marie Noe was led into Episcopal Hospital by her husband. The doctor who examined her agreed she was completely blind — as she had been since 8:30 the previous evening, when she suddenly couldn’t see the television — and wondered in his notes if the condition was “conversion hysteria.” A psychiatric consultant confirmed the diagnosis, assuming the problem had been triggered by the baby’s death and the more recent news that a close uncle was very ill, but also commenting on her “inadequate personality development.” He recommended she be treated with an interview under the influence of sodium amytal, the so-called “truth serum.”

According to the doctor’s notes, Marie said under amytal that she and Art had decided that the baby’s death was unavoidable, and “she neither blamed others nor herself.” She said she very much wanted another baby, and in fact, the day she became blind, Art had told her that he “would not permit her to have another child.”

She said that since the baby died she felt like a stranger with her husband, and if financially able, she would leave him. She said their married life had been adequate before the baby was born, but now intercourse was prohibited.

The doctor believed that Marie Noe “verges on inadequacy but will probably be able to adjust if [her] husband will grant her wish to have another child.” The interview itself, however, was enough to restore her sight, and she was discharged the next day.

What she apparently did not reveal to doctors was that she had been experiencing temporary blindness for years. Today, she recalls briefly going blind before she got her period almost every month, ever since her first menstrual cycle at 14. She associated this blindness with headaches, which she also got premenstrually. Severe migraines can cause physiological blindness that responds to medication, but Marie Noe’s responded to a psychiatric intervention. She doesn’t recall having the headaches and blindness as much after undergoing “truth serum.” On the other hand, she spent almost half of the next 18 years either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.

”I would get these enormous headaches,” she explains today, “and the doctor told me I was getting migraines from the loss of a child, and maybe it might help if I got pregnant again. So I got pregnant again. I was like a factory. I was easy to get pregnant.”

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