"Don't Tell My Husband"

But it was still difficult to get even basic information about the case. I was unable to make a complete list of all the children's names and dates of birth and death until after my first meeting with the Noes, in the late fall. They told me that most of the papers pertaining to their children were destroyed when their basement flooded. A friend had made them a new set of birth and death certificates, which they let me borrow, along with their photo album.

My goal was to gather everything that had ever been known about the deaths and let the experts come to their own conclusions, based on current advances in pediatric pathology. The Noes themselves told me they had always wanted to know more about what had happened, and they also understood that some old SIDS cases were being reopened as murders. Both repeatedly denied having anything to do with their children's deaths. However, Mrs. Noe did give an interesting answer to a query about the sodium amytral or "truth serum" interview she underwent in 1949 to treat her hysterical blindness after the death of her first child. I asked if she recalled being afraid of saying something under the "truth serum" that she didn't even know herself relating to her son's death. She said, "I think that… whatever came out of that session, no matter what was said, I think I would have been relieved… When I asked the young doctor [who conducted the interview], he said, 'Don't you worry about itI; you said nothing wrong.'"

I asked again, "You were willing to accept anything you would have said?"

 

"I'da been glad to get it over with," she replied. "I would have been glad to know, because when you lose something as precious as a child, you lose half your life."

Even with the information from the birth and death certificates, attempts by police to locate copies of their Noe files so they could respond to my questions proved fruitless. The medical examiner's office was unable to produce its files or the autopsy reports on most of the children until the original case file numbers were provided to me by McGillen.

It turned out that McGillen was the only one who could locate a full copy of the police and M.E. reports, which also included crucial medical information. As Marie Noe's obstetric surgeon, Dr. Salvatore Cucinotta, found when he tried to request his own records from St. Joseph's Hospital, healthcare facilities now are only required to keep records going back seven years. The M.E. had subpoenaed all the hospital records back in the '60s, and McGillen's files contained abstracts of many medical records important to the case.

Marie Noe's confession in late March was the news McGillen and his family had been waiting for since 1968. It almost came too late. When McGillen and I began talking, his wife, Elaine, had just found out that the cancer she had been fighting since 1993 was spreading. The quiet reopening of the Noe case was one of the couple's only distractions from the pain and the cycles of radiation treatments. In March, when the news of the confession broke, Elaine was still well enough to enjoy the fact that her husband finally felt he had been vindicated. In May, she died at the age of 69.

 

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