Lawyers: Mother Hid Baby Murders

Between 1949 and 1968, Marie Noe had 10 children: seven girls and three boys.

Richard and Constance each lived exactly one month. Arthur Jr. died after 13 days, Catherine Ellen after 14 months.

Not one lived to see a second birthday.

In all except two of the deaths, Noe said the babies had died while sleeping when she was home alone with them. Eventually the deaths were blamed on sudden infant death syndrome, also known as SIDS.

Thirty years after the final death, Noe, 69, was arrested at her Philadelphia house Wednesday and charged with first-degree murder accused of smothering eight of her children to death with a pillow or another soft object.

All eight children were declared healthy at birth and were developing normally, District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said Wednesday.

Mrs. Noe's lawyer, David S. Rudenstein, said his client denies the charges.

"She feels very burdened by these accusations," he said. "She has had to live (the) last 30 years with the knowledge that her children passed away. Any mother would be grossly distraught by that."

Her husband, Arthur Noe, 76, was not charged.

Mrs. Noe was not charged in the deaths of two of her children. Letitia was stillborn in 1959. Theresa suffered complications from birth in 1963 and lived only six hours. Police said there was no reason to suspect foul play.

Autopsies were performed on all of the children except one, but at the time, doctors could not offer any conclusive medical explanation about why the babies died.

After medical experts defined SIDS in 1969, doctors believed that was how the Noe babies had died, according to court documents.

The case had never been closed, but the investigation into the deaths intensified recently because of heightened interest in the unexplained deaths of children and developments in medical and forensic science.

"Over the past 20 years science has been solving old, unsolved cases," Abraham said, citing the development of DNA and fingerprinting and other advances in medical technology.

"Certainly children die of SIDS, but in 1 to 20 percent of the cases they actually die of something else, including murder," Abraham said.

A 1997 book on SIDS, The Death of Innocents, explored the Noe case. Jamie Talan, an author who conducted a three-year survey of infanticide cases for the book, said the charges against Mrs. Noe could be one of the worst cases of infanticide on record.

In 1987, Mary Beth Tinning of Schenectady, N.Y., was convicted of killing one of her children. Prosecutors were unable to prove Tinning was responsible for the deaths of her eight other children, none of whom lived beyond age 5.

Neither police nor the district attorney would speculate on a motive, though they said the Noes had taken out insurance policies on six of the children.

In March, police questioned Mrs. Noe about the children'deaths. Police said she confessed to suffocating four of her children but could not remember what happened to the other four.

Authorities would not disclose what medical evidence they had.

Prosecutors said they will seek life imprisonment for Mrs. Noe.

Dr. Neil Kaye, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in infanticide, said Mrs. Noe likely would have been arrested sooner if the deaths had happened recently.

"The index of suspicion in child-abuses cases is much higher," Kaye said. "In the past 10 years, many states have instituted mandatory reporting requirements. If someone says they found their child dead, autopsies can rule that in or out, and usually some form of trauma can be diagnosed."

SIDS is blamed for the deaths of about 3,500 U.S. babies each year, about 2,000 fewer since doctors began recommending in 1992 that parents put babies to sleep on their backs.

Written by Amy Worden