Cradle to Grave

She then called Dr. Gangemi, who remembered her saying, without emotion, “Mary Lee is dead.”

Police took Mr. and Mrs. Noe to the 25th District precinct, where they were interrogated and released. In the meantime, an extensive autopsy was done by assistant M.E. Dr. Halbert Fillinger, the gregarious young forensic pathologist — half doc, half cop — who had done much of his training in Germany. Fillinger was suspicious about the death, but also worried about the immediate future: Mrs. Noe was three months pregnant. He was less concerned about her, a “bovine, docile, tranquil lady, not strikingly intellectually gifted,” than about the husband, whom he recalls seeing then as a “little bandy rooster of a guy who was feisty, troublesome and more than likely the instigator of any evil that went down.” But he and Molly Dapena both felt that someone should get involved in the situation. They arranged for a grant that would allow St. Christopher’s to offer the Noes free prenatal and postnatal care, delivery and hospitalization if they allowed their baby to be studied genetically and monitored.

The Noes refused on the advice of Gangemi, who told them that the high-profile physicians wouldn’t do anything he couldn’t and would likely take the child away and raise it. Fillinger recalls that Gangemi nixed the deal because they refused to name him lead investigator on the study. (Gangemi died in 1982.)

In April, the official cause of death for Mary Lee was announced as simply “undetermined,” rather than the previous “undetermined, presumed natural.” Then, in late June, Mrs. Noe went into premature labor, and at 38 weeks, six-pound Theresa was delivered by cesarean section at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The baby, whom the mother apparently never saw, died in the hospital after only six hours and 39 minutes.

While waiting for the autopsy findings on Theresa, Mrs. Noe became the most famous bereaved mother in America. A Life magazine story she and Art had been interviewed for just after Mary Lee died was finally published in the July 12, 1963, issue. They were referred to in the article by the pseudonyms Andrew and Martha Moore, but since the case had already received some local media attention, their identities became obvious to people in Philadelphia — among them a young assistant district attorney named Richard Sprague, later to become the most powerful lawyer in the city. According to police files, Sprague dashed off a memo to his staff asking why the first time the D.A.’s office ever heard about the Noes was in Life.

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