Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (32 page)

Williams next explained that he had told Odell she was free to leave the barracks on that day. She was not going to be held over. She would have time to get her house in order, as she had insisted she wanted.

From there, Williams gave the jury a picture of Odell’s demeanor. Important to Lungen’s argument, Williams said that after Odell admitted the babies were hers, “…it looked as if she was relieved of a burden off her shoulders.”

Ending his direct testimony, Williams made a point to say Odell was not under arrest. At least not on that day.

“At some point,” Schick said a few questions into his cross-examination, “before she blurted out anything, she indicated to you she wanted to speak to an attorney, is that correct?”

“Yes, to get her affairs in order, her house in order.”

“Well,” Schick began to say with a bit of sarcasm, “you were concerned because she wanted to speak to an attorney, would that be fair to say?”

“I don’t know that would be fair. I asked her what she meant by that.”

“Mmm…so, you asked her to explain to you, a police officer in a criminal investigation,” he added, raising his voice, “what she meant by she ‘wanted to speak to an attorney,’ you
wanted
to delve into that, is that correct?”

“No, I think I…I delved into the part about she wanted to get her house in order and what she meant and she kind of just explained from there what she meant.”

“Well,” Schick said, again raising his voice, “you were there to protect her rights,
weren’t
you?”

“I was there to conduct an investigation!”

“So you weren’t there to protect her rights?”

“If she would have asked for an attorney, if that’s what you’re asking, she would have been offered one.”

The problem for Schick—or, for that matter, Odell—was that she hadn’t been forthright and direct enough, obviously, in making her demand for an attorney outwardly known. It appeared, from testimony thus far, that she wanted an attorney, yes, but it wasn’t a criminal issue and there was no immediacy in her request.

“So, when she said, ‘I want to speak to an attorney to get my house in order,’ you said, ‘Well, no matter what you say today, you can leave the barracks tonight and you’re not going to be arrested,’ is that correct?”

“Yeah, that’s basically—” Williams began to say, but Schick cut him off.

“So if she said to you, ‘Listen, I murdered those kids, you know, I wanted to strangle them when they were born,’ you would have said, ‘Okay’? You wouldn’t have been arresting her and she would have been able to leave the barracks that night, is
that
correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“If she said, ‘By the way, I murdered some other kids here in Pennsylvania,’ she would have been able to leave the barracks and go home, is that correct?”

“That’s hypothetical. I can’t answer that question. I really don’t know what would have happened then.”

Schick argued whether everything said should have been considered hypothetical. Williams said what Odell had told them was pretty “black and white.” There was nothing hypothetical about it.

Schick asked a few more questions regarding the tape-recorded conversation between Thomas and Odell and then released Williams back to Lungen.

For another half hour or so, Lungen poked holes in the points Schick had made and then Schick went back and tried to fill in those gaps on recross. It was a legal battle over whether Odell had asked for an attorney and what type of attorney she was talking about. But the bottom line remained: Odell left the barracks that night, the same as she had the previous night, and never consulted with a lawyer. Those cops might have persuaded her into thinking she didn’t need a lawyer, which was certainly a possibility. But the fact was that although Odell had plenty of opportunity to do so, she never consulted with an attorney, even after she had left the barracks.

1

THE ISSUE OF whether Odell had been denied her right to an attorney, after telling Diane Thomas she wanted to speak with one, not only wore on Odell, but her lawyers, Stephan Schick and Tim Havas. How could Schick convince the jury that Odell was not allowed an attorney because, he believed, law enforcement didn’t want her to have one? In his view, each witness Steve Lungen had presented thus far had made it perfectly clear that Odell had been treated fairly in the eyes of the law. She had voluntarily gone (driven herself) to the police station each time. She could have taken an attorney with her any one of those times, Lungen said later, or not gone at all.

On the other hand, Odell was sitting in jail awaiting proceedings to begin on the second day of trial. To her, she saw nothing short of a conspiracy taking place—an ambush by Lungen and his goons to secure a conviction.

The buzz around the courthouse was that Dr. Michael Baden was coming into town to present hard evidence the babies had been murdered. Wherever Baden went to testify, there was always some sort of stir in the air, particularly because he was so well-known. On any given night, one could turn on Fox News Channel and see Baden sitting across from Greta Van Susteren, talking about whichever high-profile crime was news at that moment. Baden had a knack for explaining things in lay terms. There was no doubt his testimony would add a certain amount of credibility to Lungen’s case; suffice it to say, Baden had testified in some of the more high-profile trials of the past thirty years, most notably, the O. J. Simpson fiasco in the mid-1990s.

Sitting in the back pew of the courtroom as proceedings began on Tuesday morning, December 9, was a little old man who himself had many of Baden’s same credentials. Dr.
Conrad Thurston
was in the courtroom, rumor had it, to listen to Baden and possibly offer rebuttal testimony for Odell’s camp, spanking any theories Baden might be bringing up to support the prosecution’s case.

More than one person later claimed Dr. Thurston was merely a befuddled old man who would show up at trials where Baden testified to try to besmirch Baden’s stellar reputation. Some even went as far as to say Thurston held a vendetta against Baden because Baden had been responsible for getting Thurston thrown out of the medical examiner’s office in New York (which was untrue). There was a hearing, Baden admitted later, regarding Thurston, and Baden testified and Thurston was expelled from office, but Baden wouldn’t go as far as to say Thurston had been following him around. In fact, Baden spoke highly of Thurston, saying he was a competent, intelligent doctor who had written several articles on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and could have possibly even helped Odell.

“He’s always very deferential and polite to me,” Baden recalled. “I see him rarely. I don’t think he’s crazy. He’s a smart guy.”

Thurston was a doctor of osteopathic medicine. More commonly known as DOs, osteopathic physicians are “licensed to perform surgery and prescribe medication.” Like a medical doctor, an osteopath completes four years of medical school, but also receives “an additional three hundred to five hundred hours in the study of hands-on manual medicine and the body’s musculoskeletal system”—which could be important to Odell’s case, at least from a medical, scientific basis. Odell’s attorneys needed an expert of their own to counter Baden’s testimony. Many were assuming Thurston was that witness.

Schick, however, later denied having anything to do with Thurston’s presence at trial. “No, no, no,” Schick said, “we never planned on calling him to the stand.”

With good reason.

In 1976, Thurston found himself involved in a trial that involved his boss at the time, a man who had been brought up on charges ranging from “taking body parts without permission of next of kin” to “conducting experiments” on those same body parts. During the investigation, Thurston’s boss charged him with warehousing body parts of his own. Investigators later uncovered “a large cache of human bones and tissue hidden in several…storage rooms” Thurston was renting. Thurston was then charged, according to an article written about the case some years later, with illegally “beheading eleven bodies and stripping the flesh from fourteen others.”

The charges against Thurston were later dropped. The judge in the case ruled that Thurston had been “carrying on legitimate research.” In turn, Thurston sued his former employer and won a settlement reportedly in the neighborhood of $2 million. But one could argue that his reputation had been destroyed, regardless of the outcome of the case. More important, Baden had testified against Thurston during the civil lawsuit.

Odell later saw great potential in calling Thurston to the stand—and she was overwhelmed by the fact that Schick didn’t want to do it.

“The man had offered his services to Schick to refute everything Dr. Baden was going to say,” Odell claimed later. “Evidently, this guy had some information….”

Schick never consulted with Thurston, he said, and never considered using him to testify. It was just one more piece of the puzzle Odell didn’t quite understand, or want to see at face value.

Before the jury was brought in at 10:05
A.M
. on December 9, Schick stood up before the court and said, “I have an application before the jury comes in.”

“Okay,” the judge said.

“Judge, it is my application, my request, that the court reopen the issue of the Huntley hearing based upon the testimony of Detective Thomas not available at the Huntley hearing. That being that Miss Odell, after being telephoned on Sunday, informed Detective Thomas when requested to come in for purpose of giving fingerprints, which would not be permitted absent a warrant unless it was voluntary compliance, and, at that point, when told the purpose was for the legal issue of the fingerprints, [Odell said], ‘I don’t want to come in. I don’t want to say anything any further. I want to consult an attorney.’”

The bottom line, Schick argued, was that if Odell’s rights had been violated—after all, Thomas had admitted on the stand that Odell requested an attorney—then the tape-recorded interview and statements she made afterward should be suppressed.

“Mr. Schick,” the judge said, “if I were to grant your relief and require, now based upon testimony that was unavailable at the Huntley hearing, suppression, wouldn’t that cause a mistrial?”

“Well…,” Schick said, “it would require a dismissal of the indictment, not a mistrial.” Without the statement by Odell, the state had “insufficient evidence as a matter of law of homicide.”

“Okay,” the judge said.

“And of asphyxiation!” Schick added.

“What I am going to do now,” the judge said calmly, “is we are going to proceed with the trial.”

2

Times Herald-Record
reporter Heather Yakin had been in court since the start of the trial. She never got that “exclusive” story she was digging for, but she ended up making friends with Sauerstein and potentially could convince him to talk after the trial was over.

“During the trial, I said hello to Bob Sauerstein, but he seemed to need his space during the testimony, especially with some of [his and Dianne’s] kids there. He seemed pretty stressed.”

On day one of the trial, Yakin filled two steno notebooks. She was busy all day writing, taking down testimony, working up a story. But she was, like nearly everyone else in town, looking forward to Dr. Baden’s arrival. Not so much because of the star power Baden’s appearance carried, but more for the weight of his testimony. Many assumed Baden was going to present hard evidence that Odell had murdered the children. If he couldn’t do that, some suggested, Lungen was in big trouble. It was fine to argue a woman had murdered her babies, but when it came down to it, a jury wanted evidence.

Along with everyone else, Yakin would have to wait for Dr. Baden. Lungen was calling Investigator Bill Maloney first, then Stephen Swinton, the DNA supervisor at the Forensic Investigation Center in Albany, New York.

After Bill Maloney raised his hand and got comfortable in the witness chair, he explained how he had traveled to Arizona with a few investigators to collect the childrens’ remains, along with several other key pieces of evidence. Maloney’s testimony was chiefly designed to lay the groundwork for Lungen’s big gun, Dr. Baden. The jury would want to know how the babies had made it to New York. Maloney was that connection.

Interestingly, when the judge asked Schick if he had any questions for Maloney, Schick said, “No, I do not.”

After a short break, Swinton took the stand and talked about his DNA work at the lab, his experience, and how he became acquainted with the Odell case. He said he had attended the autopsies of the babies to collect “biological material from each of the remains for future DNA analysis.”

Swinton then clarified, by definition, how the DNA process worked. “You receive half of your DNA from your mother and half from your father,” he said at one point. DNA is contained in “every nucleated cell of the body.”

The main purpose for DNA analysis was to try to figure out who the fathers of the babies were. Lungen put up a graph on the overhead projector screen reminiscent of those mind-numbing science charts found in any high-school classroom, and had Swinton explain how there wasn’t enough DNA available in Baby Number One’s body to develop a profile. As for Baby Number Two, Swinton could only manage to get a partial profile, he said. But Baby Number Three, he explained, was a clear match to Odell. Furthermore, there was no doubt in Swinton’s mind that David Dandignac had fathered the child.

For the next hour, Swinton talked about the complexity of DNA as a science, along with how it had been applied in Odell’s case.

When Lungen finished, the judge asked Schick if he had any questions.

“No questions.”

3

A large man, Dr. Michael Baden, with wiry wisps of whitish gray hair, stood tall at about six feet four inches. He carried an enormous amount of grandeur and authority when he entered a courtroom. If anyone hadn’t recognized Baden from his appearances on television, they certainly had heard by the time he arrived who he was and how important his testimony was going to be for Lungen.

“Dr. Baden’s testimony was key for me,” Heather Yakin recalled, “because I wanted to know how [the prosecution would prove] homicide by smothering mummified newborns. Hey, you’ve got to know what the evidence really is. And I knew there was definitely a strong emotional component to the case for Lungen, for Baden, and for some of the investigators who’d also been involved in the 1989 case. Baden’s argument, I thought, [would] essentially come down to the weight of all the combined facts: three dead babies, hidden for twenty years, moved around before finally being abandoned, left in boxes wrapped in old blankets, sheets, and towels. Plus, Odell’s eventual admission to cops that she’d heard a cry.”

Yakin was accurate in her assessment. In theory, she spoke for the community. For Lungen, Baden was going to wrap the case up and present the jury with a clear picture of what had happened, how, and why Odell was guilty.

For the first half hour, Baden went through his long list of credentials, beginning with where he had started as a pathologist and where he now worked. In between, Lungen had him talk about his work and why it was important not only to rely on the forensic evidence but
all
the evidence, which, of course, would be imperative to Lungen’s case.

Baden was the chief medical examiner for New York City at one time, he explained. In 1985, he was transferred to the NYSP, “to a new division that was being set up, the Forensic Science Unit, where I am still employed as codirector of the Medical-Legal Investigation Unit.”

Not only was Baden one of the nation’s most respected and esteemed medical examiners, but he had just returned from Singapore, he said, where, at the request of the Singaporean government, he had helped evaluate the medical examiner system of the entire country. He had also been to Bosnia to examine the remains of mass graves.

“When you work on a case that involves police,” Lungen asked, getting more into the reason why Baden was there, “particularly when doing work for the state police, you try to review everything the state police have recovered in their cases?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And do you try to make yourself acquainted with what they have learned and what their investigation shows…to factor that in, or in your own mind exclude it, however it plays in your ultimate opinion and conclusion?”

“Yes.”

“And in this particular case, you were provided, were you not, with various information from the state police that included statements made by the defendant, particularly written statements?”

“Yes.”

“And oral statements?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Prior to your doing anything on my case, prior to your doing an autopsy, do you have to make some gross observations? Do you not have to sit and take a look at what you have?”

“Yes. Before doing any autopsy, I try to gather as much information as I can, so I can do an intelligent autopsy.”

“And in this case, this information
included
the police investigation?”

“Yes.”

“Did you also have the benefit of X rays? And you could take your own X rays concerning this?”

Baden said he had examined X rays that already had been taken by doctors in Arizona and also at the Albany Medical Center. He said he had even spoken to the pathologist in Arizona who had originally examined the remains of the babies. After that, he broke down the technicalities involved in looking at the results of the X rays of the three babies. It was monotonous testimony at times, perhaps too clinical in nature, yet necessary in order to bring into the record a more medical explanation of the evidence. Juries bored easily. Prosecutors and defense attorneys are always aware of that. But juries are not made up of uneducated, uninformed people; they need certain technical and scientific information in order to grasp the larger picture of the evidence they will be looking at and studying during deliberations.