Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 2

“Do you want to live, little girl?” she claimed the man said, staring at her through the mesh of the black stocking covering his face.

  Then he took a switchblade knife out of his pocket and snapped it open. As soon as she saw the stainless steel of the blade glaring in the light, Dianne held her hands over her face and once again started to scream as loud as she could.

  As he twisted the blade in front of her face…“Daddy?”

  No answer.

  “Daddy?”

  Nothing.

  As far as she could tell, John was still sitting at the dining-room table.

  She was sure he could hear her.

  4

  One of Thomas Bright’s favorite after-work and weekend activities was sitting on his front porch, or walking the lot near the Thunderbird Mobile Home Park, where he lived, watching the birds. It was meditative for Bright to sit and gawk at what amounted to over three hundred species of birds inhabiting Graham County and much of Arizona. With the Mexican border one hundred miles south, “many migratory birds from Central and South America,” the Graham County Chamber of Commerce says, swoop into the region and offer residents like Bright a wide spectrum of species to observe.

  With his binoculars, Bright would sit for hours waiting, watching.

  A cement- and dump-truck-driver, Bright was living happily during May 2003 at the Thunderbird Mobile Home Park, going to work every day and returning home to spend time with his wife and watch the birds—this calming ebb and flow of life seemed to fit Bright well at this stage in his life. He had quit drinking alcohol some time ago because, he said, “it’s done taught me a lesson after I got busted a second time.” He added, “Safford itself is made up of about [thirty-five thousand] people. Compared to towns back east, it’s not very big.”

  Bright speaks with a patent Western drawl. His voice is low-pitched, relaxed, composed. He wears a tightly cropped beard, neatly trimmed. The directness he exudes is admirable. Thomas Bright doesn’t mince words. He tells it like it is and, for the most part, speaks confidently.

  Molly, Bright’s wife, had suggested he go to an auction that a local self-storage facility was having.

  “Molly’s boy got in trouble…and he lived in the same trailer park we are,” Bright recalled. “We helped him get a trailer and he was livin’ down on a lot in the same park.”

  That trailer, Bright said, needed to be furnished. Around the same time, Smith Storage, a self-storage facility near the center of town, had announced it was going to auction off the contents of about fifty units whose renters had been delinquent on payments. Some people had rented units, stocked them with personal items, but for whatever reason failed to keep current on payments. Part of the contract renters signed read that should the bill not be paid, the contents would become the storage-facility owner’s property. Auctions were held at various times to make restitution for delinquent payments. Collectors, mostly, flocked to the auctions with the hope of buying relics and antiques people had forgotten about.

  One man’s junk is another man’s…

  Bright had never been to an auction. It just wasn’t something he had ever put any thought into, he said, and didn’t much interest him.

  Early Saturday morning, May 10, 2003, Bright got into his truck and drove to his good friend Tom Summers’ house. When he got there, he asked Tom if he was interested in going to Smith Storage to attend the auction with him. It would be fun, Bright said. Two friends hanging around on a beautiful spring Saturday morning.

  “Sure,” Tom Summers said, “but I don’t have any money.”

  The bidding was supposed to start somewhere around 9:00 A.M. It was pushing 8:45 now.

  “Let’s get it goin,’ then,” Bright said. “We runnin’ late.”

  Bright and Summers arrived shortly after nine o’clock, but got lucky; the bidding hadn’t started. There were about one hundred people anxiously waiting, scurrying around the site, Bright remembered. There were about one hundred units, many of which were small, five feet by eight feet. Bright was hoping to purchase some items for his stepson’s trailer and maybe—just maybe—hit a cache of collectibles or antiques for himself.

  The first thing Bright had to do was find the auctioneer’s table and register. By that time, the auctioneer was in the middle of explaining how the bidding was going to work.

  As potential bidders walked in front of each unit, sizing up the contents, Bright and Summers speculated about what Bright might end up with at the end of the day. Laughing, Bright said, “Maybe we’ll hit a treasure, Tom…somethin’ somebody dun forgotten about.”

  Tom Summers shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Yeah, sure!” he said in jest.

  As the bidding go under way, Bright was outbid on a unit he’d decided earlier might be worth his money. He had noticed a bed, refrigerator, and some other items that could potentially help out his stepson. With Bright, most of what he did in life centered on other people. Sure, he might end up with an old lamp or box of baseball cards worth a few bucks, but his main objective was to help out his stepson.

  Being outbid wasn’t the end of the world. There were plenty of units available. When the auctioneer got to unit number six, Bright recalled, “That unit looked like there had been parts of a bed in it.”

  An old friend of Bright’s, who also happened to be at the auction, apparently had the same idea, because he started bidding against Bright as soon as the unit went up for sale. For a while, the bidding went back and forth. When it got to $75, however, Bright won.

  “And there I was,” he recalled, a chuckle in his voice, “with a seventy-five-dollar bid. And I really didn’t think I wanted it.”

  Regardless of Bright’s ambivalence, it was a purchase, he was about to learn, he would never forget—and a purchase that would have nearly every news organization in Arizona looking to talk to him about.

  5

  When her father didn’t rush into the room to save her from the man with the stocking over his face, holding a switchblade knife in front of her, little Dianne screamed again.

  “Daddy…?”

  The man was waving the switchblade back and forth, Dianne recalled, like he was going to do something with it. She was terrified.

  “I had been raped by my half brother,” Dianne claimed later, “when I was six.” It was a safe bet the thought of the man in the black stocking violating her had crossed Dianne’s mind as she sat crouched into the corner of her living room in a fetal position wondering where the hell her father was.

  After Dianne screamed again, the man, who was holding her down now, said, “Looks like you’re on your own, little girl.”

  Dianne started struggling to break free. But she couldn’t move; he had placed his hand around her throat. He was laughing.

  She recognized that laugh: the voice, its affect and inflections.

  She begged, “Don’t, please, don’t…”

  He let go. Backed away. Stood up. Then took off the stocking and started laughing louder as Dianne sat trying to figure out what was going on.

  As the man walked away, Dianne could see her father, who had poked his head around the corner of the opposite room. He had stood there and watched it all. Her father and the man, Dianne said, were now both laughing at her.

  When the man turned to show his face, Dianne couldn’t believe it was her older half brother. He had since walked over to their father, who then patted his son on the back as if he had just hit a home run.

  “Good job, son!”

  Years later, after telling the story, Dianne said, “I realized that day I had always been invisible, but after that I would always have to be invisible…or I’d be dead.”

  She cried herself to sleep that night, and every night she had to spend in the Molina house afterward. Maybe tomorrow will be better, she’d tell herself under covers, as if it were some sort of prayer.

  “Little did I know that tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that would never be all right.”

  Indeed, in the coming weeks, mon
ths, and years, Dianne’s life at home, according to her, would become a litany of incredible, almost unbelievable episodes of abuse and emotional torture.

  6

  After the bidding concluded, those who had purchased units at the Smith Storage auction had to pay off their debts and, with locks, secure the units they had purchased. Bright had purchased another unit to go along with number six, but he didn’t have any locks. So he ended up driving to his brother’s house in town, picking him up, and then heading home to get a few locks.

  Within a few hours, Bright was back at home with the contents of the two units he had purchased, scurrying through the boxes to see what he had. Yet, inside the next forty-eight hours, Thomas Bright’s simple life of driving a cement truck and bird-watching would take an inconceivable, horrific turn.

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  THOMAS BRIGHT LET the boxes he had purchased at auction sit in his stepson’s trailer at Thunderbird Mobile Home Park in Safford for a few days while he decided what to do with everything. There were dozens of boxes. Upon a quick look, Bright didn’t see a treasure trove, or cache of antiques, as he might have hoped. What much of it amounted to was nothing but papers and film and old pairs of panties and letters: some unknown person’s life packed away in boxes and sold to the highest bidder.

  “The unit I took the boxes from,” Bright recalled, “was pretty dusty. It turned out, I thought, ain’t nobody had been in it for years.”

  Bright’s stepson’s trailer had a rather large carport protruding over a good portion of the front of the trailer. Bright figured it was as good a place as any to store half the boxes, while “a dozen or so,” he added, “we put in the livin’ room” inside the trailer.

  On Sunday evening, May 11, Bright returned to the trailer to begin digging through the boxes. Immediately he uncovered a keyboard for what appeared to be an old computer, and hoped to find the hard drive and perhaps even a printer. It wasn’t a bag of gold coins, but better than nothing.

  After a night of searching, all Bright could come up with was an out-of-date Nintendo game set.

  As usual, he went to work Monday morning, May 12, and didn’t think twice about the boxes. While talking to a friend, however, the boxes came up.

  “If you got anythin’ good,” Bright’s friend said, “I’ll buy it from ya.”

  “All right. I’ll go home today and check it out and bring whatever I have with me to work in the mornin.’”

  On Monday night, after dinner, Bright and his grandson walked over to the trailer where the boxes were and began searching through them one last time to see if there was anything of value.

  “That monitor and that other thang,” Bright told his grandson, “is in the livin’ room. Why don’t you go and look at it. I’ll go through some of the boxes on the porch.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Bright walked onto the porch and picked a box at random. “It was about two foot by two foot.”

  Bright could tell the rather nondescript box was old. Inside, he found a few wrinkled, worn, and musty blankets. One was yellow, one red. Surprisingly, underneath the blankets, there was another box. Smaller in size.

  Ah…, Bright thought. This must be my treasure.

  He laughed.

  Pulling the tiny box out of the larger box, Bright noticed a white plastic bag inside the smaller box.

  What the hell is going on here?

  “As I opened it,” Bright recalled, “I smelled an old musty odor. There was some brown, dried stuff in thar, too.”

  I hope this ain’t what I think it is, Bright thought.

  With that, Bright immediately considered the notion that an animal had somehow crawled inside the box and, like a lobster caught in a wire trap, couldn’t get out.

  “I had already gone through some boxes that had some old groceries in them and some of the cans of food had broken open.”

  Still, this little white bag, Bright insisted, didn’t have the same odor.

  “It was more of an earthy, musty smell.”

  Bright put the bag down for a moment and noticed a second white bag, same size. When he opened it, the smell overtook him. It was stronger. Much more potent.

  What the hell?

  Looking farther down into the main box, Bright spied a third bag. After opening it and looking inside—there it was again: that same raunchy, earthy odor—Bright realized his simple life was about to change.

  2

  For Dianne Molina, living at home with her mother and father and brothers became a test of her emotional and physical will, she later said. Since the episode with her brother wielding a knife and threatening her under the orders of her dad, life inside the home became a constant state of fear and submission.

  Dianne’s mother, born Mabel Myrtle Smith in Brooklyn, 1915, was a peanut of a woman at four feet eleven inches. Mabel had wavy, curly gray-and-black hair, frayed at the ends like rope. Her nose was stubby, as if someone had pushed it in and it never recovered. Mabel’s own birth, she would tell Dianne, had been unusual and strange. According to Mabel, she was born in a funeral parlor. Mabel had been brought into this world where human life normally ended.

  Mabel’s life with John Molina, after they married in the ’30s and set up a home in Jamaica, Queens, centered around Mabel currying favor and never questioning John’s strong-arm tactics with the kids. “My mother,” Dianne said later, “no matter what my father did, my mother was right there on his side.”

  Mabel would wear what Dianne later called “house-dresses” and slippers around the home and keep herself rather dumpy and plain-Jane. The only time she’d ever get dressed up, where she “put things around her neck and hung things from her ears,” was when she went out on a job interview or over to see her sister.

  While Mabel cooked his meals and made sure he had plenty of booze hanging around, John spent his days working on cars.

  “He had handshake deals,” Dianne said, “with car dealerships in the area. And when they got a car that needed to be repaired, so they could resell it, they called my father and my father fixed it.”

  Dianne was rail thin as a young girl, she claimed. So skinny, she said, her bones were visible through her skin—rather noticeably, like a concentration camp prisoner. It wasn’t that she had been starved, but as a girl heading into her teens she developed tonsillitis that hadn’t been taken care of and it made her severely ill, which led to drastic weight loss. Doctors insisted she be hospitalized, but, she said, her parents “refused to let the doctor do anything medical.” It wasn’t until a neighbor, a year or so after she became ill, gave her “some sort of vitamin” that she started to gain weight and feel better.

  Yet, similarly, she said dealing with a medical condition, which was certainly treatable but wasn’t being taken care of, was a blessing compared to the abuse her dad was perpetrating against her.

  “My life kind of went like that on a weekly basis,” Dianne said. “My father would think it was funny to lock me down in the basement and shut off all of the lights and then run around the outside of the house and shake the sides of the house and door to the cellar. He used to laugh at things like that.”

  Before she had put on any weight, when Dianne was, she liked to say, a “bag of bones,” her dad would never hit her. But soon after she began to gain weight, “I guess my father,” she added, “felt he could finally start hitting me and not worry about breaking my bones.”

  It was right around this same time that her dad broke out the cat-o’-nine-tails, a long leather whip consisting of nine knotted fingers generally used by slave masters centuries ago to flog slaves as they worked. When he began to use it on her, she was about eleven or twelve years old, she recalled.

  “I remember my mother was giving a party for somebody. There were balloons in the house.”

  Dianne claimed she climbed up onto her father’s bed to reach for the balloons, which were rubbing up on top of the ceiling. Like any child might, she wanted one—and she didn’t want to wa
it until someone told her it was okay.

  The impatience of a child. It’s part of their purity, part of their penchant for wanting to, quite fearlessly, take in everything life and their environment offers.

  As she was jumping up on the bed, trying to reach the tails of the balloons, her dad walked in.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

  Dianne turned around quickly.

  Just then, John Molina reached into the closet and pulled out his cat-o’-nine-tails and began whipping her back and legs.

  When he finished, he said, “If I ever catch you doing anything like that again, I’ll hit you again…and this time it’ll be harder!”

  Looking at her legs, Dianne wondered how much worse it could get.

  “I had welts about six inches long…. Lucky for me, I had a shirt on, which kind of stopped the welts from being too bad on my back.”

  The memory of that day was so deeply etched in Dianne’s mind years later, she recalled in vivid detail how her legs looked after the beating. It was summertime, so she’d had shorts on. “My legs looked like an old barber’s pole.” There were red welts from the fingers of the cat-o’-nine-tails in circles—elongated like a candy cane—surrounding her legs.

  Later, many would question whether Dianne was telling the truth. Was that beating and all the others, including a knife-wielding brother with a stocking over his head, mere figments of an active, clouded imagination? Were these events the product of hindsight?

  Some would say yes. The real Dianne Molina was manipulative, callous, cruel, and selfish. According to others, above all else, a pathological liar who made up stories to support her own agenda.

  3

  Unraveling the third white bag, Thomas Bright took one look inside and knew exactly what it was that had caused such a foul odor.

  “There was a third bag in thar,” Bright recalled, “and I opened it up and I could see the side of a skull…a little baby skull.”