Cradle to Grave: Part II

The Noes were led to believe that any suspicions about them disappeared when they passed the polygraphs. “We had the lie detector test, they let us go home, and that’s all we ever heard from them,” Mr. Noe recalls.

Neither the Noes nor the public ever learned medical examiner Joseph Spelman’s true feelings about the case. But buried in the autopsy files of Arthur Noe are two identical letters that make the opinions of the late pathologist crystal-clear. One is addressed to the city office overseeing adoptions, foster home placements and child protection services, the other to the corresponding state agency. Both were written in response to comments Mrs. Noe made to investigators McGillen and Bristow at the funeral home during Little Arty’s viewing. When asked how she intended to occupy her time, Mrs. Noe said she would still like to adopt a baby or take in a foster child.

Spelman’s letters read:

”You undoubtedly have read about the death of the tenth child in [the Noe] family. ... This office has actively investigated several of these deaths. We have extensive files on the background of this family. We are not willing to declare with certainty that these children died natural deaths.

”In the event that thought is given to placing children under the care of the Noes, we would be glad to discuss our file and our thoughts in detail.”

Yet when Spelman had the opportunity to list a cause of death that was more likely to provoke continued investigation, he didn’t. If the cause of death had read, for example, “undetermined, consistent with suffocation,” both the media and the police might have been encouraged to pursue the case further. But by that time, Spelman may not have had enough political clout left to take such a bold public stance against a publicly sympathetic mother. Fillinger points out that the medical examiner had successfully battled a well-known drinking problem, and that his chief pathologist, the outspoken Dr. Joseph Campbell, had barely survived an attempt to fire him over his erroneous testimony in a case. In the months after the last baby died, Spelman may also have been distracted: He was designing the new morgue (still in use today), he was called to testify in the autopsy of Mary Jo Kopechne, who had drowned in Senator Ted Kennedy’s car, and then Campbell, his second-in-command, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Campbell died in 1969, at the age of 44. Spelman died two years later.

During his lifetime, Spelman’s true feelings on the Noe case were voiced only once — not by him, but by Molly Dapena, in front of two dozen infant mortality experts who had gathered on a remote island in Puget Sound to decide the future of research on sudden infant death. (It was at this 1969 conference that “crib death” was officially renamed SIDS.) After a presentation, a doctor asked about the public perception that SIDS “runs in families,” a misperception popularized by coverage of that “family in Philadelphia” in the lay press.

”I’m familiar with that particular family,” Dapena announced. “Dr. Joseph Spelman, the chief medical examiner of the city of Philadelphia, has concluded that these children did not die of SIDS. However, because of legal implications, we are not at liberty to report the results of his investigation.”

There is no record of the case ever being discussed publicly again until 1997, when the Noes were mentioned by pseudonym in The Death of Innocents.