Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (15 page)

Max took the items out, put them off to the side, and continued salvaging the vehicle.

After he finished pressing the Volkswagen, he took the items from the trunk inside his house. Then, with his wife nearby, Max took the same crowbar and opened the suitcase. Immediately Max and his wife, Elita, a registered nurse, discovered what they believed to be a fetus.

Without touching anything, Max phoned the NYSP. “I think I’ve found what appears to be a decomposed infant body.”

Trooper James Schultz took the call. After a few detailed questions, he said, “Thanks. We’ll send somebody right out.”

The first trooper to arrive on scene was Michael Hunter, who interviewed Max and his wife. After realizing how accurate they were in their description of the baby, Hunter then contacted the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) in Ferndale.

While Hunter waited for BCI to show up, he secured the scene.

It didn’t take long. A few hours after Max Shapiro’s call, a swarm of cops were scouring the junkyard as if they were looking for a bomb. What was interesting about the case from the get-go for cops was the fact that the woman who had discarded the Volkswagen hadn’t done anything to conceal her identity. In fact, the picture frame found next to the suitcase had the name Dianne Gail [Ingalls] printed on the front of the frame, Ingalls being Odell’s first married name. Furthermore, a quick check of the license plate Max had lifted from the car before pulverizing it proved that the last-known owner of the vehicle was a local woman named Dianne Odell.

Elita Shapiro, Max’s wife, indicated to one of the officers that she had known Odell at one time. “She once lived in Kauneonga Lake across the street from the telephone building,” Elita said, “but has since moved, I think, to Pennsylvania. I believe she has three girls.”

A day or so later, two investigators tracked down James Odell’s brother and sister. They said they hadn’t seen her for about eight years.

The one BCI investigator who seemed to take control of the investigation from the beginning was Roy Streever, a tall, good-looking cop who had a reputation on the job for having a “wild sense of humor.” Although many other BCI investigators participated in the investigation and certainly worked as hard as Streever, he took a personal interest from the start—not for any particular reason other than a child was involved. It made Streever’s stomach turn—like other BCI cops—to think that someone, a human being, could abandon or murder a child and toss it in a suitcase like an unwanted, deceased pet.

“We didn’t have a case against Dianne Odell,” Streever was quick to point out later, “until
she
made it for us.”

At six feet, 210 pounds, with brown hair and eyes to match, Streever was known as one of the more experienced investigators BCI had on the force. He had joined the NYSP in 1978 and worked in Sullivan County as a trooper for seven years before becoming part of the BCI in 1986, working out of Middletown, New York, about thirty miles west of Monticello.

Over the years, Streever developed a love for blue-grass music and playing the guitar. The music, he said, helped him forget about the horrors he witnessed every day. Already well into his career, he ended up as one of only a handful of polygraphists the NYSP used. Through that job, he mastered the art of questioning and interrogating suspects.

After interviewing several people who had either known Odell or had somehow been part of her bloodline, Streever finally found her in Hawley, Pennsylvania, where she was living with Mabel, Sauerstein, and her five children. Nobody knew it then, but Odell was four months pregnant, carrying yet another child. She wasn’t quite showing yet because she was so overweight.

Odell was upstairs when the BCI knocked at her door.

The house that Sauerstein had found in Hawley was spacious, certainly, but with eight of them—and Mabel, Odell said, insisting on having her own room—it might as well have been a shoe box.

The most bizarre behavior Dianne Odell displayed as she and her family moved around the country would have to been toting the dead babies with her, as if they were nothing more than boxes of old books. Not only because she would have to pick the boxes up and physically move them, knowing what was inside, but what about her living children? Alice was eleven years old; Maryann ten; Doris eight. One can only imagine the horror one of those kids might have faced when opening a box, thinking maybe there were Christmas presents or something else inside, and instead discovering three corpses. The other children, Adam, one, and Clarissa, three, were perhaps too young. But Maryann, Alice, and Doris were certainly old enough—and curious enough—to comprehend what was inside the boxes if they had stumbled upon them.

Odell later claimed she went through great pains to make sure the children or Sauerstein didn’t see what was inside the boxes. And, she added, none of them ever did. But the thought of just picking those boxes up so many times, knowing their contents, and moving them around, must have taken an emotional toll on Odell.

“When we moved,
I
moved those boxes,” she said. “They were the first things I always took, to be sure I always had them with me. Not for any devious or malicious purpose,” she added, “but to make sure when I got to where I was going to settle, and my mother had passed away, I was going to show proof of this and…tell my story.”

She further claimed she had every intention of going to the police and explaining what had happened. But she couldn’t, she insisted, until either Mabel became so incapacitated she couldn’t take care of herself, or she dropped dead.

Why?

“I was fearful my mother would harm my children if I ever told the truth about what happened to those dead children. It was always a fear. Always. Always. Always!”

Mabel would prove to Odell at times that she had control over the information in the boxes, and if Odell had ever considered going to police or telling Sauerstein, Mabel would harm her living children, according to Dianne. There was one time when Odell had to go out without the kids and Mabel hid the kids in the house before Odell returned. When Odell walked in and asked where the children were, Mabel said, “See how easily it can happen?” before beckoning the children to come out.

“I knew the real meaning of what was going on…. I knew it was directed at me. It was designed to let me know she still had control, still had power….”

In light of this, the questions some asked later were: Why not just leave the house with the children and Sauerstein and the boxes and do the right thing? Why stay? Why tote around Mabel, too, from home to home?

Odell claimed it wasn’t that simple. Mabel could have gone to the police herself and lied if she ever left her. She was trapped, in other words.

By the time they settled in Hawley, Odell explained, Mabel, hated Sauerstein.

“She wanted Robert gone. He was never supposed to be anything other than a ‘fill-in’ to get her over a hump and pay some bills. She knew she couldn’t do anything to manipulate Robert. And that tore at her. As a matter of fact, she told my children Robert was not their father, they did not have to listen to him, that he was nothing to them, that he was a bum, that he would never amount to anything, and that he didn’t love them and was basically there to see what he could get.”

But now there were two of Sauerstein’s children in the house and Odell was pregnant with a third.

“You know the Wicked Witch of the West?” Sauerstein said later. “That was Mabel.” She was a back-stabber. Very angry. With Odell, Mabel was “very domineering. She would only joke around with her and smile at her on payday.”

Sauerstein said he didn’t find it strange at the time, but later, after he thought about it, he realized it was odd how Odell “always took the children with her whenever she went out. She never wanted to leave them alone with Mabel.”

Moreover, it wasn’t until many years later that Sauerstein figured out that the three angel ornaments Odell would put on the Christmas tree every year represented the three dead babies.

“She loved those kids,” Sauerstein said, referring to Baby Number One, Baby Number Two, and Baby Number Three. “She loved them. She was a great mother.”

Odell was upstairs on March 14, 1989, pregnant, in bed resting, when a subtle knock at the door by the BCI was about to send her life into another tailspin. A fetus had been found in the trunk of a car she owned. The BCI needed an explanation.

1

AFTER GRADUATING FROM Brooklyn Law School in 1978, Steve Lungen started his career in law as an assistant district attorney (ADA) in Sullivan County. Four years later, in January 1982, he was elected district attorney for what would be the first of several times. He was born about fifteen hundred feet from the Sullivan County Courthouse, where he eventually would keep an office on the bottom floor. Despite a slight hunch in his walk, at six feet three inches, 185 pounds, weight lifting and running had kept Lungen in excellent physical shape. Lungen was a lifelong resident of Monticello, and his family ran a small garage in town from 1919 until it closed in 1969.

“I grew up in that business working on cars and pushing gas.”

After high school, Lungen went to the University of Miami for four years, but never considered law as a career path.

“I always thought I could come back home after college and work in the family business, but the economy, in the early to late 1960s, dropped greatly…and the business, because of the economy and the effect it had on Monticello and the Catskills, changed. Sullivan County went from a credible tourist county…to really economically depressed for a very long time.”

Indeed, the Catskills, during the ’50s and ’60s, became a Mecca for top entertainment. Known locally as the “Borscht Belt,” mainly because of its large Jewish population, the actual mountains are an extension of the Appalachians, and for anyone making the drive up Route 17, heading into Sullivan County, they rise toward the clouds on both sides of the interstate.

Northwest of New York City, the “Jewish Alps,” as the Catskills were once known, drew a plethora of A-list celebrities: Allen, Amsterdam, Berle, Bishop, Brooks, Bruce, Buttons, Burns, Caesar, Diller, Davis, Sinatra, Martin, King, among many others. They had all worked Catskill Mountain resorts to large crowds during its heyday in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. As it was, the charming allure and aesthetic brilliance of the mountains themselves brought in people from all over the world. For those who lived and worked in the region—like a young Steve Lungen—business was great. Restaurants, diners, motels and hotels, gas stations, and five-and-dimes thrived on the tourist money being pumped in.

Today, the Catskills suffer from the same economic effects much of America has learned to cope with. Popular entertainment acts stopped flocking to the region in the late ’70s and early ’80s as Atlantic City, in nearby New Jersey, and New York City, in the south, underwent infrastructure overhauls and began drawing the bulk of the crowds and big names. Some say a revival has hit the region recently, but one might be hard-pressed to see immediate results. Indian casinos are going up, but the windfall of cash and star power that once dominated the region is gone forever.

One of the only reasons Lungen decided to go to the University of Miami was because he had developed a severe case of mononucleosis during his senior year in high school and doctors suggested he head south, where the weather was generally warmer.

“Let’s say it like it was: I was a bad student in high school,” Lungen recalled. “I had relatives down in Florida, and when I got sick, it seemed like the place to go. I actually wasn’t a bad student in Florida, however. I realized when I got down there, and began studying, that, hey, I can do this.”

During Lungen’s senior year in college, 1966 to 1967, the war in Vietnam started heating up—and that’s when his life changed.

“Being a resident of Sullivan County,” Lungen said, “a rural county, the draft quotas were never met. I was really expecting to be drafted. Something came out where they said if anyone had gone to graduate school, anyone who graduated in ’67 and decided on graduate school, would get a one-year reprieve from the draft. So I applied to law school at the last minute, and to my own shock, I got in.”

But his intentions hadn’t included law school. It had never entered his mind until the skirmish in Vietnam broke out, and, like many kids throughout the country, he began looking for a way to avoid the hell of war.

At the time, Lungen began dating a woman he had known since he was a child. Near the end of his first year in law school, he and Eileen got married. Life seemed to be going well. But about a week after Lungen and Eileen returned from their honeymoon, he went to the mailbox and was shocked to learn that he hadn’t escaped the draft, after all. It was time to pack his bags and head off to boot camp…then on to Vietnam, a place that would change his entire outlook on life and law.

2

The BCI cops knocking on Dianne Odell’s door on March 14, 1989, had a few simple questions for her, the most important: Did you own a gold Volkswagen?

They knew she had, but her answer would tell them if it was going to be a productive interview, or a conversation with a liar.

With Odell in her bedroom resting, Sauerstein ran upstairs and calmly said, “The police are downstairs. They want to talk to you.”

Odell was advised, according to a police report detailing the interview, of her “constitutional rights and waived them….” Further, “Odell acknowledged her rights and
did not
want an attorney present while she talked.”

She later said the investigators asked her “to get dressed and come down to the police station to answer some questions.

“So I went back upstairs, got dressed, and went with them.”

When asked about the Volkswagen, Odell confirmed she was the last owner. She also admitted the picture frame found inside the blue suitcase was hers. The blue suitcase—inscribed with her initials, DGI, Dianne Gail Ingalls, her first married name—was hers, too, she said, but she had no idea how it ended up in the trunk of the Volkswagen.

“Do you recall placing the suitcase in the trunk of the car?” one of the BCI investigators asked.

“No,” Odell said. Then she denied having any knowledge of the fetus found inside the suitcase. “I have five children and they were all born at hospitals. If I ever have vaginal bleeding or discharge,” she then added for no apparent reason, “I immediately seek a doctor.”

“What about the blanket in the suitcase?”

“I have no recollection of the bedspread. The initials on the suitcase—DGI—are also unfamiliar to me.”

Further, she told the cops how she had moved from one apartment to the next while living at the lake and finally ended up in Pennsylvania after abandoning the Volkswagen.

With her voice cracking, Odell later recalled that day in vivid detail, and had no trouble admitting why she decided to lie to police.

“You have to understand one thing: my mother is alive and living in that house with me and my children at the time. Okay, so they come and they talk to me and they tell me what they find in the VW. And I then turn around and tell them I don’t know
anything
about it. I had to do that, because I had to go back and talk to my mother and ask her what she wanted me to tell them.
She
knew the truth and
I
knew the truth.

“I
wanted
to tell the truth,” she continued. “I wanted to tell
everything
that had happened—but she told me no.” Mabel, according to Odell, didn’t want to get involved. “It will involve me, and I don’t want to be involved,” Mabel said that day after Odell spoke to the police.

“And so, you tell them the truth,” Mabel further insisted, “but you just leave me out of it!”

3

First thing Monday morning, May 19, 2003, Sullivan County DA Steve Lungen, along with Thomas Scileppi, NYSP senior investigator for the BCI, Troop F, in Liberty, New York, and one of Lungen’s investigators, Paul Hans, a former cop himself, took off for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. On Sunday night, after he spoke to Rick Sauer a few more times and learned a bit more about the Odell case, Lungen set up a meeting with members of the PSP.

On hand for the meeting, which started at about 11:00
A.M
., were Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle, the two cops who probably knew more about the case at this point than anybody else.

The meeting in Wilkes-Barre lasted about two hours. By the end, one thing was clear: the case was Steve Lungen’s. It may have ended in a self-storage unit in Safford, Arizona, but it started in Monticello, New York, back some twenty years prior.

“When we left that meeting,” Lungen recalled, “we went outside and began strategizing about what we were going to do.”

How were Lungen and his investigators going to, as he put it, “pick this case up and run with it?” They were certain, after speaking with Weddle and Thomas, that Odell had had something to do with the demise of the children.

The PSP had allowed Odell to leave the barracks the previous day. She hadn’t been read her Miranda rights or arrested because nobody was all that certain a crime had been committed. Thus, how was Lungen and his team going to approach Odell? Would she continue talking? Had she retained a lawyer? Did he even have a case?

4

The one part of the puzzle the BCI had to complete before they could truly focus on Odell in 1989 as a possible suspect in the death of the fetus found inside her Volkswagen was finding out how the baby had died and how long it had been dead. On March 15, 1989, the fetus was transported from a morgue in Harris, New York, where it had been, to the Albany County Medical Center, in the state’s capital city. The county medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, would do his best to find out what had happened to Baby Doe, as law enforcement were now calling the child.

In years hence, Dr. Baden would become one of the most recognizable forensic pathologists in the world—the Jack Nicklaus of his field. With a hit television show,
Autopsy,
Baden was the coauthor of two reputable books on forensics. He appeared frequently on the Fox News Channel, commenting on everything from the Laci Peterson murder to the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba to just about anything having to do with high-profile murder and crime.

“In 1965,” Baden said later, “I finished my training at Bellevue Hospital [and] I became a full-time medical examiner for the city of New York, and have remained over the years in that one position or another as a full-time medical examiner/forensic pathologist.”

Pathology has always been Baden’s calling, from that first day he walked into an autopsy suite and tried to understand through the process of death how a person had lived and died.

Near the end of World War II, a system in medicine was developed so a physician could qualify himself as a “specialist” in any number of the twenty-four different fields that make up “medicine”: internal medicine, obstetrics, oncology, radiology, pathology, and so on. Meeting criteria designed for each field and having “successfully completed a residency,” Baden said, “in that specialty in a recognized hospital,” allowed doctors to become “board certified,” a term that, one could argue, has been thrown around rather loosely over the years by radio and television doctors.

At 2:30
P.M
., on March 15, 1989, Dr. Baden, along with pathology assistant Herman Thomas and criminalist Cathy Oakes, conducted the first autopsy on Baby Doe. The fetus had been sitting in a blue suitcase for sixteen years. Although it had mummified some, for the most part it was not in the condition a medical examiner might have preferred. As fragile and dry as a decades-old beehive, musty and leathery, Baby Doe looked more like a prop out of a science-fiction movie than a newborn child. To think a cause of death could be determined after so many years had passed, or even blood-typing or analyzing DNA (which hadn’t materialized into the dependable science it would later become) seemed nearly impossible. Too much time had elapsed. The environment the baby had been kept in, being moved from place to place, bounced around inside a suitcase for so long, would have an effect on any type of actual testing that would help Baden make his determinations.

Despite all that, however, one thing Baden could say for certain, as he concluded his autopsy at 4:30
P.M
. that same day, was that the baby “…was a full-term Caucasian female.”

Female
? Odell would later refer to the baby as “Matthew.”

“My belief? It was a male!” Odell said later when faced with the discrepancy. “How they came up with female, I don’t know. Somebody twisted it around and said that the last baby [Baby Number Three] was a little boy. I don’t know how that got twisted, but there is a lot of information that’s twisted.”

A forensic pathologist, though, would have a hard time “twisting” medical facts—and Baden was certain Baby Doe was female because he had scientific testing on the child to prove such. Furthermore, in those police reports taken in 1989, Odell herself even agreed.

“You know,” Odell said later, “I’m going to be very honest here. A lot of the stuff that I remember is in bits and pieces, because it’s not a full memory, umm, oh, a lot of it comes back in flashbacks. And, since my mother was such a
loving
woman,” she added sarcastically, “you know, it’s very possible that even
I
have it all backwards. There were two male children”—she paused for a moment to collect her thoughts—“and, I believe, two female children. It’s very easy to mix them up. The only difference in their births was the fact that my mother was there—and my mother took them first before I had the opportunity to be with them. If I could sit down and rattle off…this happened and that happened in chronological order, it would make me a pretty harsh person…. That would make me, even to myself, seem calculating.”

Baden concluded the baby “had been dead for years,” but couldn’t pin down exactly how long. “It could be upwards to thirty years,” he reported, “…before the legalized abortion era, since the birth cord was torn near the placenta instead of cut.” It was clear, too, that it was a “spontaneous birth, but I could not determine…if the baby was born alive or not.”

He said he would submit DNA samples to a local lab to see if it could come up with a death date.

By March 24, word had spread throughout the Kauneonga Lake region that a baby had been recovered from a blue suitcase inside the trunk of a Volkswagen. Hearing about it, one of James Odell’s sisters,
Madeline
, got hold of the state police with some rather interesting information.