Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (7 page)

After Odell recited her vitals—birthday, address, Social Security number—Thomas made something clear: “You are not under arrest. What we are doing here from Arizona is we are investigating a situation that has been discovered in the last week…and what’s happened is your name has come up as a possible lead in the case that we are working. Do you recall when and if you’ve ever lived in Arizona?”

“Yes…”

“Could you tell us about that?”

Odell said she had lived in Pima back in 1993 in a house with seven of her eight children: four daughters and three sons, ranging in age from four to twenty-three years old.

For the most part, Odell was “unemotional,” Thomas recalled. “In total denial of having any knowledge or involvement…. She appeared very calm and confident.”

“Was there a father or husband involved?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Odell said, “the father of my children, Robert Sauerstein.” Sauerstein had fathered five of Odell’s eight living children.

“The two of you are not married?”

“No.”

“Okay, are you still with Sauerstein?”

“Yes.”

“And may I ask how many children you still have at home?”

This was, of course, vitally important to Thomas and Weddle. Their entire investigation focused on children. There was a chance the mother of the three dead babies was somehow responsible for their demise.

Odell named her children, but she also mentioned a grandson who had been staying at the house.

Detective Weddle piped in, asking, “Who does that grandson belong to…?”

Odell said the child was her daughter’s.

“Does she live there also?” Thomas asked.

“No.”

“So, you just have custody of your grandson?”

“No,” Odell answered, “I don’t have custody. She just walked away from him. She left him with neighbors and they called me and asked me if they could bring him to me.”

The statement didn’t prove anything, but it did tell Weddle and Thomas there was some sort of friction in the home where the children and Odell were concerned. Even more important, the child had been with Odell for five years, not one or two weeks.

“She never came back for him?” Thomas asked, puzzled and, perhaps, a bit shocked.
How in the hell does a mother abandon her child?

“No.” Then Odell talked about the contact she’d had with her other daughters throughout the years. Beyond the one daughter whose child Odell was looking after, and her oldest daughter, it was clear, at least from her point of view, she hadn’t any real problems with her older children.

“My grandson and my youngest son,” Odell recalled later, “are almost inseparable; they’re like brothers. I had my grandson since he was eight months old. I’m the only mother he’s ever known. Although I’ve shown him pictures of his mother, he’d shake his head and say, ‘No, you’re my mommy.’”

Later in the interview, Thomas sat back and said, “Okay,” taking a deep breath, trying to digest what amounted to a large family tree involving many different children and grandchildren, “when you lived in Pima, were there any other children involved in the home, or that you gave birth to, or anything like that?”

It was the first time Thomas or Weddle had broached—even remotely—the subject of babies and what might have happened to the three dead children. After all, this was the main purpose of the interview: to find out what happened to the babies who hadn’t lived—as far as anyone could tell thus far—for more than a few hours. The medical examiner was still trying to figure out how the children had died, but it was clear from early tests the babies were newborns.

“No,” Odell said stoically.

Thomas didn’t pressure Odell immediately. Instead, she did what any experienced investigator might have done: she began to float the opportunity for Odell to come up with an explanation. It was clear from the energy in the room—the aura of the conversation and the demeanor between the detectives and Odell—that there was an awfully large white elephant hanging around, and sooner or later, it was going to have to be talked about. For Thomas and Weddle, however, they had traveled nearly twenty-five hundred miles. They had all day and night to talk to Odell. There was no need to push the subject now. Once Odell invoked her right to remain silent and asked for a lawyer, the conversation was over. Up to now, though, according to Thomas, Weddle, and Trooper McKee, she was calm and, as far as they could tell, somewhat cooperative, and at no point mentioned that she wanted a lawyer.

“When you moved to Arizona,” Thomas asked, “where did you come from?”

“Pennsylvania,” Odell shot back, adding, “No, excuse me, Utah.”

“How long did you live in Utah?”

“About a year.”

“Where have you lived most of your life?”

“New York.”

For the next few moments, Thomas and Odell traded dialogue about Odell’s children and where they were born. Most of her children were born in New York—all in hospitals. Odell said Sauerstein had fathered the youngest of the children, and James Odell, a man she had been married to at one time, fathered her three oldest daughters: twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four years old.

“When you moved to Arizona, did you bring a lot of property with you for your home?” Thomas asked.

“I had a truckful.”

“Did it all go into your home?”

Weddle, sitting patiently, studying Odell’s body language, knew where Thomas was heading.

“No, no,” Odell said.

“Do you recall what you did with that property?”

“Had to put some of it into storage.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,
Weddle told himself.

“Where at?”

“I don’t remember his name,” Odell said, sipping from a cup of water. “He was the mayor of the town where we lived.”

“So, there was a storage shed there in Pima?”

“No, I think it was in Safford,” Odell said.

Indeed.

Thomas and Weddle did everything they could not to look at each other at that moment. All of their previous questions seemingly didn’t matter when compared to what was transpiring now. Getting Odell to admit she had rented a storage shed in Safford was important. She was offering significant, relevant information pertaining to the dead children.

“When was the last time you’ve been to the storage shed?” Thomas asked.

“Maybe…I think it was April ’93.”

“And you only took some of the things out?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what happened to the rest of your things?”

“No.”

Thomas then changed the subject and asked if Odell was still legally married to James Odell. Odell said she hadn’t been married to James for over twenty years. She met Sauerstein in 1985 in New York and had been with him ever since.

“And since you’ve been with Mr. Sauerstein, you’ve had several children?”

“Yes.”

“Okay…no other children?”

“No.”

“Did you ever have any miscarriages or abortions?”

Odell thought about it for a minute. “I had miscarriages in New York.”

“Do you recall, one, two…?”

“I think it was three.”

Weddle and Thomas looked at each other.
How convenient: three dead babies, three miscarriages.

1

DIANNE AND MABEL adjusted comfortably to their new surroundings. Their apartment was on the second floor of Mrs. Hess’s main house. Scattered around the grounds, along the banks of the lake, were several bungalows Mrs. Hess rented, generally to summer vacationers or folks just passing through town. During colder months, the Hesses closed the nonwinterized bungalows for the season.

Mabel hadn’t worked since the pistol-whipping incident back in Kew Gardens. As she and Dianne got settled into their new digs at Kauneonga Lake, Dianne began wondering what they were going to do for money. Here they were starting a new life and neither one of them had an income. Had Mabel saved any money from Dianne’s days as a prostitute? Was the mattress stuffed with hundreds and fifties?

According to Dianne, when she asked Mabel how they were going to live, Mabel looked at her and, as serious as she had ever been, said, “Now it’s
your
turn to take care of
me
!”

Dianne said she felt as if she owed her mother for raising her, like there was some sort of debt to be paid for her upbringing. Taking on a job at this point, however, wasn’t something Dianne could physically do, even if she wanted. It wasn’t that she was lazy, or didn’t want to work. No, Dianne had a secret. There was a baby on the way, which she later said she was happy about when she found out. What ate at her—more than Mabel demanding she go to work and take care of them—as she tried to figure out how to tell her mom she was pregnant, was who the father of the child was.

2

The startling fact that Odell—sitting, sipping water, openly giving Thomas and Weddle information about her life so they could try to wrap up the case of the three dead babies found in boxes—would admit to having three miscarriages was a significant breakthrough during the interview. By this point, neither Thomas nor Weddle had mentioned they were investigating the deaths of three babies, or that the remains of three babies had been found. Yet here was Odell admitting to renting a self-storage unit in Safford and having three miscarriages.

Two plus two equals four.

Thomas asked Odell, after she admitted to the three miscarriages, to explain the circumstances.

“I started hemorrhaging,” Odell offered. Again, unemotional. All business.

“Do you know what caused that? Did
they
—your doctors—know?”

“No,” Odell said. “I was bouncing and I felt like a tear…like a pull, and I just started bleeding.” She paused for a moment. Looked down at the table. Took a deep breath. “I mean
uncontrollable
bleeding.”

“Now, was that three times in a row, or was that in between your other children that it happened?”

“For a long period there after my son was born, I had miscarriages. One was in Arizona after [my son in 1991] was born and I went to the emergency room there and they did an emergency [procedure] on me, and there were two in New York when we came back here.”

None of it added up to what Thomas and Weddle knew by that point. It was clear the babies in the boxes were much older. Odell was talking about 1991 and beyond.

“Do you know…how far along you were in your pregnancy when this happened?”

“I would say not even two months.”

It didn’t make sense with the approximate ages of the babies in the boxes. The thought was, someone had delivered the children at home and, perhaps embarrassed or scared, discarded the babies without alerting anyone.

Weddle and Thomas wanted to pinpoint dates and perhaps tie the dates of Odell’s miscarriages to her having rented the self-storage unit. Maybe the children hadn’t met with ill harm, after all? Perhaps Odell, if she was indeed responsible for leaving the children in the boxes, had delivered and wanted to hide the births for some reason? Maybe she had misjudged how long she was pregnant?

“And you said,” Thomas asked, “the last time you were in your storage shed in Safford would be approximately April of ’93? Do you know what happened with the rest of the property there?”

“No, I don’t have a clue.”

“Well, let me tell you what we found—”

Before Thomas could finish, Odell said, “Okay,” and looked at Thomas and Weddle with a confused, serious stare, as if to say, “What is going on here?”

Thomas explained how the contents of Odell’s storage unit had been auctioned off about a week ago. “What was found,” she added, “is why we are here.”

Odell sat up in her chair.

“Do you have any idea what would be in that storage shed that would cause law enforcement to be involved?” Thomas paused for a moment. Then, “Any idea whatsoever, ma’am?”

“None.”

“Has anyone else ever had access to that storage shed?” Thomas still hadn’t come out with it. She was still giving Odell the benefit of the doubt to come up with some sort of explanation.

“There was,” Odell started to say, then stumbled a bit with her words, “there was…another key, yeah.”

“And who had that key?”

“It wasn’t my neighbor across the street…I’m trying to think of her name.”

“Do you recall what type of things you might have left behind?”

“Mostly bed frames, fishing poles, crib stuff…I don’t think so.”

Detective Weddle leaned toward Odell: “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Good cop, bad cop,” Odell said later. Thomas acted sympathetic while Weddle presented himself as passive, but then changed his tone, projecting a more abrasive approach.

“Mabel,” Odell said.

“Do you remember having boxes,” Weddle asked, “I mean, boxes of photographs that were left in there?”

“Some of them were left there, yeah.”

“We found that strange,” Weddle said. “You know, Miss Odell, that somebody would go off and leave photographs, family photographs that had been collected for years, and especially photographs of your mother. Is your mother still alive?”

“No,” Odell said, “she’s not….”

Weddle, a large man in stature, Western all the way around the edges (cowboy boots, plaid shirt, big belt buckle), hardened by what he’d seen as a cop throughout the years, got up from his seat and walked around the room for a moment. After running his hand across his chin, sighing a bit, he looked at Odell. “I got another question for ya,” he said, raising his finger in the air as if he were thinking. “You said that you removed stuff one other time.” He paused. Turned around. “Was that
after
you had moved that you came back and removed some of the items, the last time you moved the items out of there? Had you moved at that point and came back and removed items?”

By itself, the question alone seemed confusing. A mixed bag of winding words.

“No, no,” Odell said immediately. She was getting a bit panicked now, as if she were being accused of something.

“Or was that
before
you moved?”

“That was before I had moved, yeah.”

“So after you moved, you
never
returned and removed anything out of that storage shed?”

“No, no. I had lost [
sic
] the key…umm…umm…with one of my daughters’ friends, just in case I had lost the keys when I came back I could get in and get stuff, you know if I had decided.”

Thomas had been studying Odell as Weddle took control of the questioning, watching her mannerisms and movements. Although Odell was shifting a bit in her seat and answering questions with more enthusiasm, she still seemed confident. It was clear in the way she thought about her answers. Thomas and Weddle knew that a suspect who thought about what she said was a suspect hiding something. Nerves fray. Lies build on top of lies and become hard to keep track of. Thus, the suspect had to think about what she had said previously so she could mold responses to those particular questions and answers.

Odell was definitely hiding something. Weddle and Thomas were sure of it.

3

Dianne was in a remarkable predicament during the first few weeks of her pregnancy in early 1972: what was she going to do about the baby she was carrying as she and her mother settled into their new home? She had broken down and told Mabel about the baby, whereby Mabel acted as if she had known all along. That wasn’t the problem. Instead, according to Dianne, it was who the father of the child was: John Molina, who, Dianne claimed later, had allegedly fathered the child while raping her one last time before she moved north.

As would be the case with many of the stories Dianne later told, there was no way to prove John had fathered the 1972 child. Nevertheless, Dianne insisted her father was responsible for both the life
and
death of the child she would later call Matthew.

“When we moved up to the lake,” Dianne said later, “I was already pregnant with Matthew…. [My mother]didn’t want me to have the child. We kept arguing about what I wanted and what she wanted.”

During a brief argument one day, Mabel ended up “slapping” Dianne around.

“That was when I said I’d had enough.”

She couldn’t recall how, but after Mabel hit her, Dianne “managed to get down to [her] father’s house” in Jamaica, Queens. When she arrived, she asked him, “Can I stay long enough to have the child?”

John looked at her for a moment. He was amazed, shocked by the mere sight of her. While he stood there contemplating what to do, Dianne said, she “thought he would say no.”

So, what do I do then?
she asked herself while standing in the archway, waiting for a response.

“My mother’s words kept echoing in my head.” Mabel had laughed when Dianne told her where she was going, telling Dianne her father would never let her stay. “He doesn’t want you there,” Mabel said as Dianne left. “You’re a constant reminder.”

After John thought things through for a moment, he told Dianne to “go into the other room,” where, she remembered, the television was on. John headed for the kitchen, his favorite area of the house. Apparently, he was going to sit and contemplate the situation and then let Dianne know. Until then, he expected her to sit, watch television, and be quiet.

Whenever John had to make any major decision, he began drinking, according to Dianne, to help him through it. There he sat, “for hours,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking and thinking.

At some point, he finally spoke. “Come in here, Dianne!”

“I heard the anger and slur in his voice. I was scared.”

Dianne sat at the table across from him and they just stared at each other for a brief period.

“How could you do this?” she said John asked at one point. “Why did you bring this to
my
door? People will see you.” He paused, and as he began to say, “You should be ashamed of yourself for coming back and asking for my help,” he raised his hand.

“With all of his might,” Dianne recalled, “he came up and punched me in the head.”

With the force of the blow, Dianne fell off the chair.

As she lay on the floor, John grabbed his cat-o’-nine-tails and, like an Egyptian guard whipping a slave, began mauling her “across” her “back, legs, and head.” As he did that, Dianne said, she “curled into a ball” on the floor.

Then he starting “kicking” her violently.

“I felt like I was being hit everywhere, all at once.”

When her father ran out of energy and stopped, Dianne said, she crawled on all fours into the living room to “try to recoup some energy.”

With his whip, her dad had spoken; he obviously didn’t want Dianne around. So, after “resting until early morning,” she said, she went back up to the lake.

The subject of who the father of the 1972 child was would come under considerable scrutiny later. Dianne changed her story several times throughout the years. In April 1989, for example, she was interviewed by the New York State Police (NYSP), where she signed a two-page statement in which she had given the police a detailed description of those months she spent at the lake with Mabel while carrying that first child.

“…[In] the early part of 1972 I became pregnant by a person in New York City,” Dianne told police when they asked her who the father of the child was.

Now, if she would have left her statement at that, there would have been no controversy later on. A “person in New York City” could have certainly meant her dad.

But she didn’t stop there.

“I only had met this person,” she continued, “once, and don’t remember his name.”

This second part of the statement lent itself more to the obvious conclusion—that she became pregnant by one of the johns her mother had set her up with, or some random sexual encounter.

In 1972, Dianne weighed approximately two hundred pounds. Later, however, she described herself during that same period as “skinny” and “average.” Was Dianne manipulating the police in 1989? Was she trying to save herself? What was her motive? John Molina was dead at that point. There was no reason for her to lie if, in fact, her dad had fathered the child. Furthermore, she had every opportunity to tell the truth. There was no reason to hide anything by then.

Her motive would become clear much later when authorities found out what happened to Matthew, as she called the child, and what she had done with it—a fourth dead child, incidentally, who was not among the three dead babies found in Arizona.

4

Odell traded jabs with Thomas and Weddle regarding who else could have had a key to her self-storage unit. For about five minutes, they went back and forth: Odell swore it was a friend of her daughter’s, but wasn’t sure; while Thomas and Weddle tried to allow her to come up with another explanation, which she couldn’t.

Finally Weddle asked Odell if she ever went back to the storage unit after abandoning it. Odell said she and her “common-law husband,” Sauerstein, had moved to Texas with the kids at one point, and “on my way back [to Safford], the car I was driving died. So I pretty much had to stay there and try to work to get another car and to put the kids in school….”

“Was Mr. Sauerstein with you at that point?” Weddle asked.

“Yeah.”

“So when you left Pima, Arizona, that’s when you moved to Texas?”