Marie Noe is an American woman who was convicted in June 1999 of murdering eight of her children. Between 1949 and 1968, eight of the ten Noe children died of mysterious causes which were then attributed to sudden infant death syndrome. All eight children were healthy at birth and were developing normally. Two other children died of natural causes. Noe pleaded guilty in June 1999 to eight counts of second-degree murder, and was sentenced to 20 years' probation and psychiatric examination.
Biography
Early life
Noe was born Marie Lyddy on August 23, 1928, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia to Ella and James Lyddy. Marie was one of several children born of her parents' troubled marriage. Marie contracted scarlet fever at age five, which she later credited as the cause of learning difficulties. She dropped out of school as a young teenager to work and help care for a niece, born to one of her older sisters when Marie was 12 and raised as Marie's sister.
Marriage and children
Marie Lyddy and Arthur Allen Noe met at a private club in the West Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. On June 1, 1948, after a brief courtship, the couple eloped. The couple proceeded to have ten children, all of whom died between the ages of five days and 14 months.
During the Caesarean birth of her last child, Noe suffered a uterine rupture and underwent a hysterectomy. In 1963 Life magazine published a sympathetic article on Noe, written by Mary Cadwalader and using the pseudonyms Martha and Andrew Moore for Noe and her husband, after six of Noe's children had died.
Reinvestigation and charges
Interest in the case was renewed after the publication of the 1997 book The Death of Innocents, about New York woman Waneta Hoyt, and an investigative article that appeared in the April 1998 issue of Philadelphia magazine. Stephen Fried turned over his investigation results to the Philadelphia Police Department in March 1998. Upon questioning by police after receiving the material, Noe admitted to suffocating four of her children. She stated that she could not remember what happened to the other four children who died under similar circumstances. She was charged with first-degree murder in August 1998. A plea agreement was reached in which Noe admitted to eight counts of second-degree murder and she was sentenced in June 1999 to 20 years of probation with the first five years under house arrest. As a condition of her plea agreement, Noe agreed to psychiatric study in hopes of identifying what caused her to kill her children. In September 2001, a study was filed with the court that stated Noe was suffering from mixed-personality disorder.
Books featuring Marie Noe
The book Cradle of Death by John Glatt is about Marie Noe and her children's murders. Many other books feature Marie Noe alongside other criminals, such as Engendered Death: Pennsylvania Women Who Kill by Joseph W. Laythe and The Crime Buff's Guide to Outlaw Pennsylvania by Ron Franscell and Karen B. Valentine. The book The Life You Longed For: A Novel, by Maribeth Fischer, which is fictional, also mentions Noe's murders.
