"Don't Tell My Husband"

HOMICIDE HAL'S MESSAGE is uncharacteristically breathless.

"It is absolutely imperative that you call me as soon as you hear this," he says. "Unless, of course, you already know."

When I finally get forensic pathologist Dr. Halbert Fillinger on the phone, he swears me to secrecy. Not "off the record." Not "deep background." Secrecy.

Is there really such a thing as a secret anymore? Secrecy usually just means, "When you see it in the paper tomorrow, remember who told you first." But I give him my word.

Then he takes a deep breath.

"She confessed," he says. He sounds as amazed to utter the words as I am to hear them. "Marie Noe confessed, can you believe it?"

ON MARCH 25TH, the day after the Philadelphia Magazine article "Cradle to Grave" was released, Arthur and Marie Noe had just finished dinner, which they typically eat around 4:30, when they heard a knock on their front door. It was Sergeant Larry Nodiff and two detectives from the Special Investigations Unit of the Philadelphia Police Homicide Division. Nodiff asked the elderly couple if they would come in for questioning. The Noes had the right to refuse the request but instead calmly decided to cooperate, asking only for a moment to tend to their pets.

Mr. Noe turned and called to his wife, "Will you put Asshole downstairs?" Noticing the cops' puzzled faces, he explained that "Asshole" was the name of one of the cats.

The Noes were taken to the Roundhouse and led to separate interrogation rooms. It was the first time in 30 years that they'd been questioned by authorities about the deaths of their 10 babies, eight of whom had died of mysterious causes between 1949 and 1968. Mr. Noe was in Interrogation Room C with Detective Jack McDermott. Mrs. Noe was put in Room D with Detective Stephen Vivarina, who is known for having an especially amiable manner with suspects.

Mr. Noe's interview turned out to be a waste of time, and he wasn't asked to make a formal statement. He was offered a ride home but said he would prefer to wait for his wife. He was still waiting — chain-smoking and watching the television that sits atop the battered file cabinets lining the homicide division offices — when the clock hits 5 a.m.

During Marie Noe's remarkable 11-hour interview, she apparently told the secret she had been keeping for decades. She had smothered her babies, she said. She had used a pillow. She could recall the deaths of only four of the children specifically: the first three, Richard in 1949, Elizabeth in 1951 and Jacqueline in 1952, and the fifth, Constance, in 1958. She said she did not remember what she had done in 1955 to Arthur Jr., the baby born exactly nine months to the day after she claimed to have been raped by a stranger and left bound with her husband's ties in the bedroom closet. Nor did she remember what she had done to the babies whose deaths received so much national media attention in the 1960s: Mary Lee in 1962, Cathy in 1966 and Little Artie in 1968. But she did not deny causing those later deaths.