Philadelphia Magazine |
"Don't Tell My Husband"
By Stephen Fried
This was ironic because the cause might never have been reopened, and the confession never obtained, if not for McGillen. It was because of the retired investigator's memory and files that the magazine and later the police could re-examine the case. The investigative file itself was extraordinarily detailed: McGillen and his partner had gone so far as to create a wall-size chart of three generations of the Noes' families, showing what happened to every kid born to any of them. But as impressive as McGillen's enterprise had been in the 1960s, what mattered most in the 1990s was that he knew where to find his files.
When McGillen left the M.E.'s office in 1984 to live quietly with his wife in the Northeast, distracted only by his grandchildren and his job scouting high school and college prospects for Major League Baseball, he elected to retain his personal copies of the case files. He kept them in a box in his garage until his youngest daughter moved away and her room was turned into a den. The box sat on the den floor for years.
That's where it was when I first contacted McGillen in November 1997, at the suggestion of a former member of the M.E.'s staff. By that point, I was frustrated with the Noe case, which I had been investigating for several months. My interest began when my editor at Bantam gave me a new book on sudden infant death syndrome that the house had published, The Death of Innocents. It explained the new science of SIDS and called for the reinvestigation of past multiple child deaths, focusing on the landmark case of Waneta Hoyt, a Syracuse woman who killed her five babies between 1964 and 1971. (Hoyt died in prison four days after Marie Noe's arrest.) The Noe babies are mentioned several times in the book, but the family is referred to by a pseudonym.
I first asked the husband-and-wife authors, Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, to cover the Noe case for Philadelphia Magazine. They declined but encouraged me to pursue it, sharing some materials and recounting their attempts to get Philadelphia authorities interested in the case back when they were researching the book. Talan remembered calling D.A. Lynne Abraham several times about the Noes in 1995 but never getting a call back. She did get through to the D.A.'s homicide chief at the time; she recalls him dismissing her plea that he look into the deaths. (This as not current chief Charles Gallagher, who has aggressively pursued the case since March.) Talan, who had nightmares about Marie Noe's babies, wished me better luck.
After I contacted Dr. Molly Dapena, the SIDS expert who had worked on several of the Noe baby autopsies, and she expressed her suspicions about the deaths, I enlisted the help of two members of the Vidocq Society, the Philadelphia-based sleuthing club that delves into old, unsolved crimes. Dr. James Lewis brought me to a pathologists' meeting where I was able to buttonhole Dr. Fillinger and secure his crucial support. Private investigator William Fleisher introduced me to Sergeant Larry Nodiff, who supervises the Philadelphia Homicide detectives who look into the "cold" cases. I later learned that Nodiff had quietly reactivated the long-dormant Noe case, after I asked him about the babies.
When McGillen left the M.E.'s office in 1984 to live quietly with his wife in the Northeast, distracted only by his grandchildren and his job scouting high school and college prospects for Major League Baseball, he elected to retain his personal copies of the case files. He kept them in a box in his garage until his youngest daughter moved away and her room was turned into a den. The box sat on the den floor for years.
That's where it was when I first contacted McGillen in November 1997, at the suggestion of a former member of the M.E.'s staff. By that point, I was frustrated with the Noe case, which I had been investigating for several months. My interest began when my editor at Bantam gave me a new book on sudden infant death syndrome that the house had published, The Death of Innocents. It explained the new science of SIDS and called for the reinvestigation of past multiple child deaths, focusing on the landmark case of Waneta Hoyt, a Syracuse woman who killed her five babies between 1964 and 1971. (Hoyt died in prison four days after Marie Noe's arrest.) The Noe babies are mentioned several times in the book, but the family is referred to by a pseudonym.
I first asked the husband-and-wife authors, Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, to cover the Noe case for Philadelphia Magazine. They declined but encouraged me to pursue it, sharing some materials and recounting their attempts to get Philadelphia authorities interested in the case back when they were researching the book. Talan remembered calling D.A. Lynne Abraham several times about the Noes in 1995 but never getting a call back. She did get through to the D.A.'s homicide chief at the time; she recalls him dismissing her plea that he look into the deaths. (This as not current chief Charles Gallagher, who has aggressively pursued the case since March.) Talan, who had nightmares about Marie Noe's babies, wished me better luck.
After I contacted Dr. Molly Dapena, the SIDS expert who had worked on several of the Noe baby autopsies, and she expressed her suspicions about the deaths, I enlisted the help of two members of the Vidocq Society, the Philadelphia-based sleuthing club that delves into old, unsolved crimes. Dr. James Lewis brought me to a pathologists' meeting where I was able to buttonhole Dr. Fillinger and secure his crucial support. Private investigator William Fleisher introduced me to Sergeant Larry Nodiff, who supervises the Philadelphia Homicide detectives who look into the "cold" cases. I later learned that Nodiff had quietly reactivated the long-dormant Noe case, after I asked him about the babies.
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