Husband Despairs but Backs Wife Accused of 8 Deaths

With his wife accused of killing eight of their 10 children, Arthur Noe said he contemplated ending his own life so he could once again see the babies who never got a chance to grow up.

Yet he stands firm behind his wife, saying he knows she did not harm them.

“I was trying to think where I could buy a gun,” the 77-year-old Noe said Friday. “It’s the only way I’ll be able to see my kids again.

“I never did see them go to school. I never saw them ride a bike. I never saw them with a boyfriend,” he said.

With his windows open in the afternoon heat, Noe sat down in his vinyl recliner, covered with a crumpled bedsheet, and looked over at the empty chair where his 70-year-old wife normally sat.

“I know my wife didn’t do anything to them. If she had done something, I would have turned her in myself. Those were my kids too,” he said.

Marie Noe is accused of smothering eight of her children with a pillow or other soft object. The children, all of whom were declared healthy at birth and were developing normally, were 13 days to 14 months old when they died over a 19-year period beginning in 1949.

Marie Noe is being held on eight counts of murder. Her lawyer said she will plead innocent.

On Friday, Arthur Noe wiped tears from his cheeks and peered through a screen door of his home, saying he had just finished writing a suicide note.

“Dearest Marie--I can’t go on anymore,” read the note. “You are my life, my love. Without you there is no life.”

Noe’s voice teetered as he read the note aloud. Tears began to roll down his sunken cheeks again.

“This is one hell of a way to live,” he read.

On Saturday, Noe did not mention suicide and his mood appeared improved after his lawyer and police were told of his writings.

With no evidence to show otherwise, doctors and investigators had reluctantly concluded that the eight infants died of “crib death,” now known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Police, however, never closed the case.

Prosecutors say Marie Noe has confessed to suffocating four of the infants and said she did not remember the other four deaths.

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The couple had two other children: One was stillborn and the other died in the hospital six hours after birth. Marie Noe was not charged in those deaths.

Her husband contends that her confession was coerced after 11 hours of interrogation without a lawyer.

“I’ve known her for 50 years,” Noe said. “I know she didn’t do it. She wouldn’t harm a fly.”

Noe, slender and 5 feet, 6 inches, talked passionately for hours, gradually relaxing as a cloud of cigarette smoke encircled his neatly combed white hair.

The wall behind him was bare except for dusty imprints where the photos of his children once hung. The pictures were seized by police.

“They took my life and my memories. I don’t have anything here anymore, except for my dog,” he said, referring to his brown Pekingese.

The Noes were featured in Life and Newsweek magazines in the 1960s, described as unlucky parents with a genetic link to SIDS. Their case returned to the spotlight after a 1997 book about SIDS, “The Death of Innocents,” and doctors began to doubt that the disease was genetic.

For now, Marie Noe is allowed one phone call a day to her husband. He may visit her one hour a week, starting Thursday.

On Friday, Noe went out to the stoop of their home, in a neighborhood known as the Badlands, for some fresh air. Then it was back inside to smoke and wait.

Occasionally, he glanced at his note to his wife.

“All I wanted was to grow old with you and our memories, but for fate I now know that is not to be,” he wrote. “I will never stop loving you. Love, Art.”