Babes in the Woods

Faline · #1 ● 06-07-2011, 06:45 PM

John E. Clark, caretaker of a Kings Gap estate, and Clark Jardine had traveled to South Mountain in Cumberland County for a load of wood when they made a gruesome discovery.

They discovered the bodies of three young girls 50 feet from the road.

The date was Nov. 24, 1934, and the ''Babes in the Woods'' would become one of the most sensational crime stories of the Depression era.

After nationwide publicity, the girls were identified as Norma Sedgewick Noakes, 12, Dewilla Noakes, 10, and Cordelia Noakes, 8, of California.

A memorial sign was erected along Route 233 in Penn Twp. where their bodies were found.

The three sisters were apparently killed by their father, Elmo J. Noakes, 32, who later killed his niece and housekeeper, Winifred Pierce, 18, and then took his own life. The bodies of Pierce and Noakes were found in the Spring Meadow station on the Hollidaysburg Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad about the same time that the bodies of the three girls were spotted in the woods.

Identifying the girls and tying them to the murder-suicide case in Blair County involved a massive investigation that stretched across the country.

The investigation by the Pennsylvania State Police concluded that Noakes, whose wife had died two years previously, left Roseville, Calif., on Nov. 11 with the children and Pierce in a car he had bought for $46.

Police theorized that Noakes, penniless and without prospects of employment, killed the girls on Nov. 21 rather than let them starve. Autopsies determined that the children had not eaten for 18 hours before their deaths.

After leaving the girls' bodies on blankets in the woods, Noakes and Pierce drove west, abandoned their car between McVeytown and Altoona and hitchhiked to Blair County. On Nov. 23, Pierce sold her coat, the couple's last possession except for the clothes they were wearing. With the $2.55 she received, Noakes bought a rusty .22-caliber rifle from a second-hand store and used it to kill Pierce and take his own life on Nov. 24.

Several hundred Cumberland County residents attended the sisters' funeral at Ewing Funeral Home in Carlisle on Dec. 1, and the girls were buried in Westminster Cemetery. Noakes and Pierce were buried in the same cemetery, about 100 feet from the children.