Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (3 page)

“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, months, 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.

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 wait 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.”

When he saw the skull, Bright said, he knew what it was.

Oh Christ,
he thought.

The skull was in bad shape. It looked like an artifact that an a archaeologist conducting a dig somewhere in the Middle East might uncover.

After Bright pulled the bag open a bit more, he confirmed his worst fear: staring back at him were tiny eye sockets and the deteriorated nose of what he believed was a baby. Yet, for a brief instant, it was a surreal moment, so far removed from Bright’s perception of reality he thought he might be looking at a child’s toy, an old doll or something.

“Hey,” he yelled into the room where his grandson was, “call the sheriff’s department. Tell ’em to send a deputy out.”

4

“When he was drunk,” Dianne later said of her father’s rage, “it was a thousand times worse.”

Oddly enough, John Molina never hit his wife, though.

“Something occurred at some point during their relationship that, I think, led my father to believe that if he hit my mother, she would probably kill him.”

In February 1969, five months before Americans would sit glued in front of their television sets and watch the landing of
Apollo 11
on the moon, Dianne Molina, at fifteen, had thought she’d seen it all in her Jamaica, Queens, home. But the horrors she said she had endured up until that point were merely stepping-stones.

One day, “My brother came to the house to see my father, who was already partially drunk,” Dianne recalled, “and sitting at the dining-room table.”

From there, she said, Jim walked in and asked her father how he was doing. Jim and John Molina had been at odds for years. From what, exactly, Dianne couldn’t remember.

“You can forget about the fucking car,” John told his son, “you’re not getting the fucking car!”

For no reason, John then picked up a drinking glass and cracked it over Jim’s head, shattering the glass and breaking Jim’s glasses. Jim ended up with a gash on his forehead and nose and started bleeding profusely from the top of his head down.

Dianne, standing in the room speechless, didn’t know what to do.

Mabel jumped up from the chair she was sitting in and “threw my father off the chair he was sitting in,” and then rushed to Jim’s aid.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” John Molina screamed.

“Come on,” Jim said, “let’s go!”

Jim, Mabel, and Dianne piled into Jim’s car and left the house.

Pulling out of the driveway, Dianne said she had a moment of contentment. She thought it was going to be the last time she ever saw her father again.

5

After calling the Graham County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO), Thomas Bright’s grandson walked over to where Bright was standing near the box.

“Did you really find a baby?”

“Take a look for yourself,” Bright said, pointing to the bag.

Staring down into the bag, which was now ripped open even wider, Bright’s grandson responded, “Yup, that’s a baby all right. Jesus.”

In the meantime, a call went out to all the available sheriff’s deputies in the area. The first deputy to respond, Abner Upshaw, showed up at 4:30
P.M
. Minutes later, Mark Smith, a second deputy, arrived.

Upshaw approached Bright immediately. “‘Sometimes,’” Bright recalled Upshaw saying, “‘people report things they
think
they see.’”

It was a sober calculation by an experienced cop. Upshaw undoubtedly had been called out numerous times for all sorts of crimes that had never materialized. What Bright and his grandson saw as a baby could—in reality—turn out to be nothing more than a dead animal or some sort of old, weathered doll, as Bright had thought.

Bright shrugged after Upshaw explained the situation. Then, “Go ahead…see for yourself then.”

Back a few moments later, after looking inside the bag, Upshaw looked at Bright and said, “Yup, that looks like a baby all right.”

Confident it was a baby, Upshaw put in a call to have a detective and the county coroner come out.

While they waited, Bright told Upshaw what had happened the past few days: the auction, the boxes, the baby.

At about 4:35
P.M
., Bright handed Upshaw a large brown envelope that contained several documents. “I found this in another box.”

There was a name on the envelope: Dianne Odell, a forty-nine-year-old female from Pima, Arizona. The document was dated 2002. Bright’s earlier estimation that the unit hadn’t been accessed in eight years had been wrong. Someone had apparently been inside the unit within the past year.

“This is helpful,” Upshaw said. “Thanks.”

As Bright, his grandson, and the two deputies stood in the mobile home staring at all the boxes, waiting for the coroner and a detective to arrive and begin an investigation, they had no idea that the one baby Bright had found was only the beginning. By the end of the evening, there would be more.