Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (10 page)

Was it a matter of perhaps not knowing each other well enough before jumping into marriage? Odell said no. “I knew him. It was James who changed.”

Around this same time, Odell said, Mabel began to “meddle” even more in her and James’s life, causing problems and coming in between them. It wasn’t anything specific. Mabel was just always there, always in their face, always saying something to make them feel uncomfortable. Whereas James liked Mabel when he didn’t have to see her all that much, being home all the time began to wear on him.

“It was at that time that he decided he didn’t like being around the house, so he started hanging out with his brother, Hubert. Drinking [and doing other things], shall we say, fool around.”

With an eggshell-type atmosphere inside her home, Odell decided it was not time to announce she was pregnant again. It was the summer of 1979. They had not been in the house quite a year and yet everything seemed to be falling apart. But after several attempts to try to get along better, Odell and James agreed to split.

“He went his way and I went mine.”

With nowhere left to go, Odell moved back up to the lake, a small bungalow on Horseshoe Lake Road. Kauneonga Lake had become a sort of safe haven for her by this point—somewhere to return to always. She had spent many years living at (or near) the lake. She was twenty-five years old, had one young child, another on the way, and had given birth to a child out of wedlock (Matthew), who was dead and locked inside a suitcase.

Now she was on her own again.

The bungalow was part of a larger house. With Odell pregnant, living with a child in a one-room apartment, Mabel decided to move in.

Then, on November 12, 1979, after being in the new home just a few months,
Maryann Odell
was born at Community General Hospital in Harris, New York, the same facility where Odell’s now one-year-old daughter, Alice, had been born the previous year.

As Dianne once again began what was a new life, James started stopping by the bungalow to see how she was doing. They had been married for a little over two years. They had two children. Life was about second chances. It was worth giving it a shot.

“I’d like to try and keep our marriage together,” Odell remembered James asking her one day.

She believed in love. Better yet, she believed the children deserved to have a father. “Okay,” she said.

James had one stipulation, however, regarding the reinvention of their marriage. “I want us to get out of here—and away from your mother!”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Florida. My sister will put us up until we find a place.”

It was February 1980, and deathly cold in upstate New York. Florida not only offered Odell a break from her mom, but the climate would certainly be a welcome change. James had gone down in December to look for a place. He promised he’d be back in February to get her.

Little did Odell know as she, James, and their two daughters made the twenty-four-hour trip down to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, to move in with James’s sister, that she wouldn’t be there long. Nor did she foresee that the problems they were essentially running from in New York would only get worse as, she claimed, she got to know the “real” James Odell while in Florida.

3

The main purpose of talking to Robert Sauerstein before Odell got a chance to speak with him was, for Weddle and Thomas, to get a reading on his initial reaction to the situation. The first few days of any investigation were crucial. Cops will tell you: homicide investigation is a “specialized undertaking,” a craft that takes an experienced investigator not afraid to learn new techniques as he or she goes along. Practical thinking—that’s what many cops claim is one of their biggest assets going into a homicide investigation. With three dead babies, whose parched, leathery remains had been mummified and decomposed to the point of fossils, and no forensics or eyewitness testimony to deconstruct, it was a case of narrowing down the most likely scenario and following it. For Weddle and Thomas, their investigation consisted of going from person to person, collecting stories, and then sitting down and putting the information together. As a cop, when you have several different people who could potentially be involved, you have to get to them as soon as you can so their memories don’t get clouded with pressure from outside sources—and, most important, they don’t have a chance to get together and collaborate on stories. From everything Weddle and Thomas could discern thus far, Odell hadn’t spoken to Sauerstein.

Still, Weddle later said, it might have been a mistake to interview Odell when they did.

“On that particular day, it may have been a mistake on our part…but the media was going to find her before we did. And that was our main reason for leaving [so quickly]. But on the day [May 17] we first interviewed her, I had been up all the previous day; then we flew that night, and drove right to our hotel and found Odell. We were both exhausted. We look back on it now and think, ‘If we would have been fresh, we would have waited until the following day, we would have probably ended the whole deal with one interview.’”

Instead, Weddle and Thomas now found themselves at Odell’s house, interviewing a man they knew little about, and not having much information from Odell to draw on.

After mentioning the fact that three dead babies had been found in the self-storage unit Odell had rented, Weddle and Thomas were confident that Sauerstein hadn’t a clue as to what was going on.

As the interview progressed, he spoke of the many children he’d had with Odell.

“All your kids are accounted for, as far as you know?” Weddle asked. It seemed like an odd question, but in the scheme of Weddle and Thomas’s investigation, it was something they needed to know.

A cop never
assumed
anything.

“Yup,” Sauerstein said. As he said it, one of the children walked onto the porch. “As a matter of fact, there’s one of my little guys right now,” Sauerstein, a proud father, said.

Weddle then asked Sauerstein if he was willing to give them a DNA sample.

“Yes, I would.”

The interview then took on a rather chronological scope as Sauerstein and Weddle discussed the self-storage unit, who had visited it, how often, and when. Then Weddle got into Odell’s children from her marriage to James Odell. He wanted to know if, perhaps, any of her older girls could have had a miscarriage.

“Oh, no, they were kids then,” Sauerstein said.

“The one wasn’t fourteen, fifteen years old, which is…?” Weddle started to say.

“That was Alice,” Sauerstein said, “she was a real troublemaker.”

A rebellious teenager was one thing. It was in a teen’s nature to be antieverything. What Weddle wanted to know, however, was “Did she have any miscarriages?”

“She had it against me….”

Weddle and Thomas looked at each other.
What the hell is he talking about?
Maybe he didn’t understand the question.

“Did she
have
any miscarriages, or anything of that nature, that you know of?”

“I know that she had, according to her, she was raped up in Oregon,” Sauerstein said. “That was one of the main reasons we left. They were investigating, they were looking at his [
sic
] uncle, who supposedly was a child molester or whatever. And they knew we were leaving. But nothing ever panned out. I don’t think she was ever pregnant….”

Standing quietly throughout most of the interview, Thomas spoke up again. She could feel Weddle getting somewhere. Sauerstein, if he didn’t know what had happened to the babies, certainly could be helpful in a number of ways. It was more than likely he knew things about the case without even realizing it.

“You don’t have any idea where these babies came from?” Thomas asked.

Turning quickly, perhaps surprised by the tone Thomas used, Sauerstein said, “Hell no.” He was a bit incensed, and began pacing back and forth on the porch. “We were there [in Utah] maybe three or four months. Can’t have three babies in three or four months—not unless you’re a cat!”

“These babies,” Thomas continued, “were wrapped inside and packaged up in boxes that had all your other stuff in them. It could have been moved from—”

“All right, all right,” Sauerstein said, throwing up his hands.

“It doesn’t mean she”—Thomas stopped herself from pointing a finger at Odell—“I mean, anybody had them there in Arizona. They could have been moved from somewhere else. We just don’t know. So—”

“We don’t know how long they’ve been there,” Weddle added. “That’s what we’re saying.”

“What are your thoughts on that?” Thomas asked.

“You got to be a sick son of a bitch to be traveling around with three dead babies,” Sauerstein said.

“A person might have a rational reason,” Weddle added, “why they ought to do it. I don’t know, but I can’t think of one offhand, but—”

Sauerstein interrupted. He wanted his point to be understood clearly. “No! Hell no! I don’t think anybody would do that kind of thing that was rational…. Ah…you said something and I lost my train of thought.”

There was a quick exchange regarding whether Sauerstein had been back to Arizona since he and Odell left.

He said no.

Then, “Let me ask you this,” Weddle posed, “we’ve requested that your wife submit to a polygraph test tomorrow. She said she would. Are you going to have a problem with that?”

“Me doing it?” Sauerstein pointed to himself.

“No, for
her
doing it.”

“No, no, I mean, Dianne’s the type of person where you go into the supermarket and you hand the woman twenty dollars, right, and the woman gives you back twenty dollars…and me, I’m like shut up.” He laughed at the situation. There was no way, he said, he would give the money back in the same position. But Odell, he insisted, was such an honest person that she would speak up.

“That’s a good person,” Weddle said.

“You know, I mean, she does good with the kids.”

“How ’bout you,” Thomas asked, “would you take a polygraph?”

“Yeah,” Sauerstein said, “but I don’t think it would work on me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I have a nervous condition.”

“Would you be willing to try, see how?”

“All right.”

After getting dropped off by Gerald Williams, a PSP trooper, Odell left Rite Aid and drove straight home. She was flustered, worried about what she was going to do next. What would she tell everyone? How does one explain three dead babies left in boxes? How does one tell family members about a secret she’s been harboring for decades? The following days were going to be filled with explanations, interviews, polygraph tests, fingerprints, and DNA results, Odell knew as she made her way down the interstate. The media was going to be calling, knocking on the front door, hovering around the neighborhood, asking questions of neighbors and coworkers. How would she explain it all? What options did she have, really, when it came down to it? Her only course of emotional stability at this point was the comfort in knowing she would be able to tell Sauerstein and her children before Weddle and Thomas (or the media) got a crack at them.

After all, in Odell’s mind, Thomas had promised her that she and Weddle wouldn’t speak to Sauerstein before she had a chance to.

She was nervous as she drove. When she arrived home, as soon as she walked in, Sauerstein said, “They’ve already been here!”

Odell dropped her head. “Robert was already frothing at the mouth. He was pissed,” she recalled later. All she wanted to do was cook dinner, calm Sauerstein down, and figure out a way to break the news to everyone. She wanted to talk to Sauerstein “rationally,” she said. “Because…I knew if I tried to sit down and explain it to him right away, we were going to get into a major fight.”

“I’ll cook dinner,” she told Sauerstein, “and we’ll talk later.”

That comment seemed to appease Sauerstein for the moment. However, as Odell began taking out pots and pans, getting dinner started, he wouldn’t let it go.

“He never gave me the opportunity to sit down and really talk to him….”

Odell kept thinking,
How am I going to deal with all of this?
Her main objective was to keep the cops off her back while she explained the situation to her family. She wanted to tell them everything: about her mom, her dad, the rapes, and the babies. Everything that had brought her to this point in her life. She believed they would understand why she had packaged and toted the babies around. After that, she planned on talking to a lawyer—she claimed later—and then going back in to talk to Weddle and Thomas. Once everyone had a clear understanding of the circumstances, she was convinced the matter would resolve itself without any major legal problems.

On that night, Odell said she couldn’t bring herself to sit down and eat while everything was going on.
My God,
she kept telling herself,
the media, the kids. This is going to hit the news. My kids still have to go to school, still have to take the bus, still have to come home and live in this neighborhood.

In retrospect, the situation, as Odell later explained it, was quite remarkable: here was a woman whose main objective, she insisted later, was to protect her children. Noted essayist and author Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, has dedicated his life to researching language and cognition. Among his many books, including
The Language Instinct, Words and Rules,
and
The Blank Slate,
Pinker is probably best-known for his book
How the Mind Works.
In 1997, Pinker wrote an essay for the
New York Times
titled “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” a probative analysis of mothers who kill their children.

“For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb,” Pinker wrote, “would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order…. Most [of these deaths] remain undiscovered, but every once in a while a janitor follows a trail of blood to a tiny body in a trash bin, or a woman faints and doctors find the remains of a placenta inside her.”