Babes in the Wood murders (Pine Grove Furnace)

On November 24, 1934, John Clark and Clark Jardine discovered the bodies of three girls—Norma Sedgwick, 12, Dewilla Noakes, 10, and Cordelia Noakes, 8—under a blanket in woodland along Pennsylvania Route 233, Centerville Road, near Pine Grove Furnace State Park close to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The girls had been suffocated. Investigators determined this was presumably done by Elmo Noakes, father of Dewilla and Cordelia and stepfather of Norma. The following day, November 25, 1934, Noakes and his 18-year-old niece, Winifred Pierce, were found dead at a railroad station near Duncansville, Pennsylvania, over 100 miles from where the girls were found. Pierce had been shot through the heart and head; Noakes had a single gunshot wound to the head, apparently self-inflicted with a .22 rifle he had purchased days earlier.

In the months before the deaths, Noakes had acquired life insurance policies on his children and changed the beneficiary of his own policy from the children to his sister, Mrs. Pierce (Winifred's mother). He purchased a car in late October 1934 and left home with Winifred and the three girls in mid-November, leaving behind unpaid wages. The group traveled across the state, stopping in Philadelphia, before abandoning their car near McVeytown and hitchhiking toward Blair County. Pierce sold her coat to fund the rifle purchase in Altoona shortly before the deaths.

The discovery of the unidentified girls' bodies triggered a nationwide media sensation, with photographs published across the country and thousands of visitors coming to view the remains in hopes of identification. Death masks were made, and identification was ultimately achieved through the description of the abandoned car, physical characteristics of the girls, and Elmo Noakes's fingerprints on file with military records.

Multiple competing theories about the deaths circulated in the press and among investigators, including speculation of a cult killing, accidental suffocation followed by panicked suicide, a murder-suicide pact between Noakes and Pierce amid rumors of a romantic relationship, and the possibility that Noakes was mentally ill and believed he was protecting the children from an imagined threat. Family members offered conflicting accounts of tension within the Noakes family; two of Elmo's sisters received suspended sentences for disturbing the peace after confrontations with Winifred Pierce's mother following the identification of the bodies.

Funeral services for the three girls drew thousands of attendees, with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts serving as pallbearers. Noakes and Pierce were buried in the same cemetery as the girls, and Noakes received full military honors from the American Legion in recognition of his Marine Corps service. In 1968, Pennsylvania authorities installed a roadside historical marker at the discovery site. Case materials are held at the Pennsylvania State Police Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania.