Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 5

  On Friday, May 16, 2003, Thomas found out she and Weddle could book a flight that night. All they had to do was steer clear of the media until then.

  By Saturday morning, May 17, after an all-night flight, Weddle and Thomas touched down safely in Waverly, New York, and immediately drove to Towanda, Pennsylvania, where Trooper Robert McKee, a ten-year veteran of the force, was waiting to greet them.

  As one might suspect, Thomas and Weddle were exhausted from their red-eye flight out of Arizona. Neither had slept much on the plane. Before they could focus on how to approach Dianne Odell, they needed rest.

  Hours later, after a brief respite at the hotel, they met with McKee for lunch. McKee informed them how he had found out that Odell had been working at a local Rite Aid near Rome, but he couldn’t confirm exactly which store. He did find out that Odell had been living with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, for many years, a name also found on several pieces of documentation in storage unit number six.

  Further, McKee explained, Odell was the mother of eight children. If those babies in the boxes were hers, that would make her the mother of eleven. She was nearly fifty years old, her youngest child just four. The woman had been pregnant just about every other year for the past twenty years. Some of her children had children, which made her a grandmother. Was it possible, Thomas and Weddle wondered as they listened to McKee, that the babies were born to one of her daughters?

  After lunch, as Thomas, Weddle, and McKee worked their way toward the Towanda barracks to set up some type of mini task force, they passed a local pharmacy.

  “Let’s check it out,” Thomas suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  After a quick look inside and a brief talk with the manager, Thomas found out Odell had never worked there. Thomas was using a photograph of Odell that she had taken from one of the photo albums in the boxes.

  Minutes later, they came up on a Rite Aid.

  “Stop there,” Thomas said. “Let’s try it again.”

  “When we first walked in,” Thomas recalled, “Miss Odell happened to be the first person I saw behind the cash register, and I recognized her from the photograph.”

  Thomas approached Odell. “Can we talk to the manager?”

  “Sure,” Odell said, then picked up the phone and dialed the back room.

  Taking the manager aside moments later, Thomas asked if she employed a person by the name of Dianne Odell.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Can we have permission to speak with her?”

  “Sure.”

  Thomas, Weddle, and McKee then walked back toward Odell, and after identifying themselves, they asked her if she would answer a few questions.

  “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

  Later, Odell said she knew from the moment they entered the building who they were and why they were there. “As soon as I saw them,” Odell recalled, “I knew they were from Arizona and when they came up to me and introduced themselves as detectives, I knew immediately what it was for.”

  Odell had gained a considerable amount of weight throughout the years. She was heavier now than she had been in quite some time. At about five feet six inches, 160 pounds, she had charcoal black hair with prominent streaks of gray and white running through in dramatic, checkerboardlike contrast. A mother of a four-year-old, with four teenagers at home, it was clear sleep wasn’t something Odell had been getting a lot of: the pronounced bags under her eyes, the sagging, yellowed skin on her face, along with her tired walk, spoke of an exhausted woman, working hard in a dead-end job to support what was a rather large family.

  “Is it possible,” Thomas asked the manager as Odell began walking out from behind the counter, “for Miss Odell to leave for a time?”

  “Can I get my purse and coat?” Odell asked.

  “Yes, of course. Go ahead. Do you have a vehicle here, a car of your own?” Thomas wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Odell said minutes later, slipping on her coat.

  “Do you want to drive your own vehicle, you know, follow us? Or ride with us to the barracks?”

  “I’ll drive with you,” Odell said, staring at Thomas.

  Odell, Thomas was quick to point out later, wasn’t “under arrest for anything.” They just wanted to speak to her and, hopefully, get some answers. Odell was extremely cooperative and willing to help in any way she could.

  The Towanda barracks was a ten-minute ride from Rite Aid. Odell didn’t say much. But she was certainly thinking about what was going to happen once she got inside the barracks and began talking. She would have some explaining to do, to say the least, regarding three dead babies found inside a self-storage unit she had rented.

  “We did have some small talk during the ride to Towanda,” Thomas remembered later. “‘How long have you been working there? How long have you been here?’ Nothing about the case was discussed. In fact, Miss Odell never once asked what we needed to talk to her about—which seemed odd to me.”

  Odell later said she asked Thomas and Weddle several times what they wanted to talk to her about, but they kept saying, “Let’s wait until we get to the barracks.”

  Thomas, Weddle, and Trooper McKee denied Odell ever asked any questions about the case.

  3

  Concentrating on schoolwork became almost impossible for Dianne as the 1970 school year drew to a close. Likewise, homework and studying became a nuisance. Dianne said she couldn’t focus on any of it when she spent much of her time wondering how to get out from underneath the grasp of her madam mother—especially now, since loan sharks and their goons were stopping by the apartment making threats. Life was a matter of survival, waiting and wondering what would happen next.

  “For the most part, I left school because I was embarrassed to go. That was okay with Mom because she was home [most of] the day. So, she could keep me pretty much under her thumb and make sure I didn’t do or say anything I wasn’t supposed to.”

  Dianne said her father generally stayed away after they moved to Kew Gardens, but would visit occasionally. One of the times he did show up, she said, she happened to be home alone.

  “He wasn’t drunk, so he didn’t bother to do anything to me. But he was really quite nasty to me about why my mother wasn’t there. So I said to him, ‘I don’t know where she went….’ I then asked him if he wanted coffee. He said no and left.”

  As the chilly air rolled into New York during the fall of 1970, Mabel made a decision to move after being mugged in front of the apartment. It was the latest in a string of robberies she had endured since moving to Kew Gardens. The final incident happened at a bus stop up the street from the apartment. Mabel had gotten out of work at 4:00, which would generally put her in the apartment by about 5:00 A.M. On this morning, someone who had been apparently waiting for her at the bus stop sneaked up from behind as she walked home and pistol-whipped her in the back of the head. With blood running down her forehead, she had to go back and get stitches at the same hospital she had just come from. When she finally made it home later that morning, she told Dianne they were moving.

  “My life,” Mabel said, “is worth more than a lousy paycheck.”

  And my life is worth more than turning tricks for you! Dianne thought, but she didn’t say anything.

  With no way physically to move—neither Mabel nor Dianne had a driver’s license or car—Mabel said she’d pay for Dianne to get a driver’s license and ask her father to buy her a car, an El Camino, so they could pack up everything when they were ready and go.

  “But don’t you tell him we’re moving,” Mabel warned.

  Mabel had a location picked out upstate. It was on a lake in the Catskill Mountains. Comfortable. Relaxing. No big-city problems. No pollution. No muggings. Just fresh air and the pungent smell of pine needles, dry leaves, and fresh water.

  John Molina agreed to buy the car, but once word got back to him they were going to use it to move, he laughed and told them to forget it.

  “He ended up showing up on our doorstep one da
y,” Dianne recalled, “and he was almost three sheets to the wind at the time. Right about then, I went into my own protective mode. My mother was there and they started getting into it.”

  As they argued, Dianne stepped away, trying to remain, she said, “invisible.” But her father, at one point during the argument, said, “Dianne, I want you to come down to the house with me.”

  Dianne knew what that meant.

  “Whenever he was angry, he would never take his anger out on the person he was angry with. It was always me.”

  “No, no, no,” Dianne said. “I have to do something else. I can’t go.”

  I can’t go…. I can’t go…. I can’t go. This was what Dianne thought as she stared at her father. I know you’re going to rape me again.

  Mabel stepped up and said, “No! She’s got something to do for me. She has to go somewhere for me.” While talking, Mabel took out her address book and pointed to an address. “You have to go here, Dianne,” she said.

  John looked at the both of them—What the hell is going on?—and asked, “Where is she going? What’s this about, Mabel?” He seemed confused.

  “She has to go to Flushing and take care of an errand for me.”

  With that, John left.

  “You get your ass upstairs,” Mabel told Dianne after John left, “get dressed in those clothes I bought you and go now.”

  Since Dianne had started turning tricks, Mabel had purchased her an entire new wardrobe of provocative clothing, which went along with the job. But Dianne had a hard time wearing any of it.

  “Let’s put it this way,” she said later, “even if I had Marilyn Monroe’s body, I would not have been caught dead in those clothes!”

  The obvious questions one might ask looking back on all this would be: Why didn’t Dianne go to her father—or anyone else, for that matter—and explain what was happening? Why keep it all secret? Why not tell her brother? The police? Anyone who could possibly put an end to it.

  “I tried always to be invisible…,” Dianne said. “You have to look at it from my point of view: there were other situations that occurred in the house…my father would not have believed me if I told him what my mother was doing.”

  Experts claim this type of severe emotional and sexual abuse would have prevented most people in Dianne’s situation from believing she could report the abuse without suffering repercussions. Psychologists claim some of the main reasons why kids don’t report such savage sexual abuse are that they “may have been threatened by the offender regarding telling,” or “may not know it is wrong.” Some may even “assume responsibility.”

  In Dianne’s case, she later said, she felt a bit of each. She felt, for example, if she ever went to someone and explained what was happening, she wouldn’t be believed.

  One story Dianne later told that led her to believe her father, especially, would have written off her allegations against her mom as preposterous involved her dog. When she lived in Jamaica, her father used to make Dianne keep the hallway area of the house free from any dog hair. Dianne would sweep it often, but the dog would shed throughout the day. By the time her dad got home, the hallway was generally full of hair. If he found as much as one hair in the hallway, she claimed, he would beat her, accusing her of not having swept the hallway at all. How, she asked, could she have gone to that same man and reported what her mother was making her do? On top of that, she said her father was raping her. Would he want to get the authorities involved at the expense of perhaps exposing his own behavior?

  “He used to bash my head up against the wall whenever he saw hair in that hallway. He’d grab me by the back of my hair—which was down to my knees then—and bash me against the wall, calling me all kinds of names: ‘slut, whore, bitch.’ I wasn’t going to talk to him about anything, even if I was dying.”

  If all of what Dianne said was true, it was a situation where there was no end and no beginning for her. She was caught in the middle, just trying to survive as best she could. The move upstate, at least at first, seemed like a new beginning. Dianne was getting older. In a year or two, she could think about leaving home. The move up north would be the start of something different. Maybe things would change. Dianne didn’t see Mabel sending her 100 miles south to turn tricks with johns in the city. At the least, the prostitution would end.

  Mabel had a friend, Marie Hess, a woman who had lived near them in Jamaica, but she had moved up north many years ago. When Mabel found herself without a vehicle and no one to help her move, she called Hess and asked for help.

  “Mrs. Hess,” Dianne recalled later, “sent her husband down to Kew Gardens in his truck to help us.”

  The move didn’t happen as quickly as Dianne might have hoped. In fact, it would be a few years before Dianne and Mabel relocated. Dianne was almost eighteen years old, she said, when they finally moved.

  It was the summer of 1972. Tucked deep in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, Kauneonga Lake, Sullivan County, New York, seemed like a tranquil, quiet place for Dianne and Mabel to begin a new chapter. Arriving there, it was everything Dianne had pictured it would be: peaceful, serene, colorful, secluded. Dad couldn’t just pop over anymore and give her any problems; he would have to drive for hours. Mom couldn’t pull an address out of her smock and say, “Go here, Dianne, and do what he says.” In a way, her life of emotional imprisonment with her mom would continue, but it might be tolerable now that they had moved. Yet, inside the first few months of living next to Mrs. Hess on Kauneonga Lake, Dianne made an announcement that ultimately changed the entire dynamic of her and her mom’s relationship—and sparked a debate between them that would soon turn deadly.

  4

  When Odell, Thomas, Weddle, and McKee arrived at the Towanda state police barracks, Odell began thinking about how she was going to explain to her children and common-law husband, Robert Sauerstein, what she had left behind in Safford.

  “What was going through my mind,” Odell recalled, “was I now have to brace my family for what is to come. I need to get back to my family, sit down, talk to my husband, and tell my children what occurred. I was going to tell them what had actually happened.”

  Odell had never, in the nearly two decades she had been with Sauerstein, told him about the babies. “I wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until I had a chance to inform my family.”

  The last thing Odell wanted to do was to sucker punch everyone. They were all at home, going about their day—school, work, television, bedtime—and now this ugly secret from decades ago was going to unearth itself. What if they turned on the nightly news and there was Odell being branded a baby killer?

  “I wasn’t trying to protect my family,” Odell later insisted. “I was trying to prepare them. I knew what was going to come about—but I also knew the truth at that time of what had taken place. And I figured, as long as I tell the truth in this, I am going to be okay.”

  Regardless of how Odell felt, Thomas and Weddle wanted answers. They had three dead babies found in boxes, wrapped in plastic garbage bags, and, obviously, packaged in a way that led them to believe that the person(s) who had stored them away didn’t want them to be found. They needed to know what happened. Their job, in effect, was to find that truth Odell was referring to—whatever it was. No one in law enforcement was pointing a finger at Odell; at this point, she was merely the likely person to begin questioning.

  Thus far, Odell hadn’t been read her Miranda rights. There was no mention of the babies, or why, in fact, Thomas and Weddle wanted to talk to her. As far as Odell could determine, she was there to talk about “seized items discovered in a storage shed in Arizona.”

  Weddle looked on as Thomas took out an audiotape recorder and set it in front of Odell on the table. Trooper McKee was there to observe.

  It was around 3:00 P.M. when Thomas turned on the audio recorder and stated her name, credentials, and the person she and Weddle were preparing to interview.

  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?”