Cradle to Grave

The glory years under Spelman were cut short when the medical examiner died of cancer in 1971, at 52. His death was shocking even to people who worked in a morgue, but now that they’re in their 70s, illness has lost its power to shock. Fillinger has been treated for cancer. McGillen recently had a quadruple bypass. As for Dapena, her body remains strong, but she is starting to misplace things in her mind. When it happens, she squeezes her eyes shut behind wire-rim glasses and concentrates on mentally retracing her steps.

All three are aware that this, one of the first big cases of their lives, could turn out to be their last. And while there’s no statute of limitations on murder, they know the Noes aren’t getting any younger either.

Sergeant Larry Nodiff from the Homicide Special Investigations Unit comes into the conference room. Too young to remember the Noe children, four of whom had died before he was even born, Nodiff quietly reopened the investigation into their deaths last October when I started asking him questions. In the months since then, I’d been tracking down the few people still living who had any firsthand knowledge of the Noe investigation, trying to reconstruct hundreds of pages of police, medical examiner and hospital records, many of which were believed lost. Fillinger, Dapena and McGillen are curious to reexamine the old files with the benefit of accumulated wisdom and offer the engaging homicide investigator their insights. But it is up to Nodiff to actually do something.

The Noe files are remarkably rich, with personal details going back over 50 years. The material is often excruciatingly personal, including many facts the Noes could not possibly know themselves. What their relatives, friends and neighbors really thought about them. What their doctors really thought about them. There are also autopsy reports on most of the children, but they raise more questions than they answer. The early ones carry definitive causes of death that any competent pediatric pathologist would now consider unlikely, if not impossible. Most of the later autopsies simply list the cause of death as “undetermined.” But as Dapena points out, “When an adult suffocates a baby by doing this” — putting her hand over her own mouth to demonstrate — “the autopsy shows nothing, zero.”

After several hours of plowing through documents, Dapena proclaims, “It just seems impossible that this woman is still walking around as free as a bird. ... All cases like this are probabilities, but I’m 99 percent sure that these deaths were not a natural happening.”

Fillinger comes to his own conclusion. “This changes my whole concept of this case,” he says, pushing the papers aside. “This file really accuses them of murder. What this really says is that there’s no explanation for the multiplicity and the similarity in all of these deaths. The circumstances as laid out by the investigator’s interviews indicate a particular pattern that’s pathologically similar.

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